ooc: primary text excerpt: Siaynoq . A mob of scary women!
[I didn't write this. It's an excerpt from God Emperor of Dune:]
Idaho returned his attention to the enraptured faces of the Fish Speakers.
“Who is Shai-Hulud?” Leto asked.
Again, that deep murmur: “You, Lord.”
Idaho nodded to himself. Here was undeniable evidence that Leto had tapped into a monstrous reservoir of power never before unleashed in quite this way. Leto had said it but the words were a meaningless noise compared to the thing seen and felt in this great hall. Leto’s words came back to Idaho, though, as if they had waited for this moment to cloak themselves in their true meaning. Idaho recalled that they had been in the crypt, that dank and shadowy place which Leto seemed to find so attractive but which Idaho found so repellent-the dust of centuries there and the odors of ancient decay.
“I have been forming this human society, shaping it for more than three thousand years, opening a door out of adolescence for the entire species,” Leto had said.
“Nothing you say explains a female army!” Idaho had protested.
“Rape is foreign to women, Duncan. You ask for a sex-rooted behavioral difference? There’s one.”
“Stop changing the subject!”
“I do not change it. Rape was always the pay-off in male military conquest. Males did not have to abandon any of their adolescent fantasies while engaging in rape.”
Idaho recalled the glowering anger which had come over him at this thrust.
“My houris tame the males,” Leto said. “It is domestication, a thing that females know from eons of necessity.”
Idaho stared wordlessly at Leto’s cowled face.
“To tame,” Leto said. “To fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men; now men learn it at the hands of women.”
“But you said . . .”
“My houris often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence.”
“Dammit! You’re . . .”
“Binding, Duncan! Binding.”
“I don’t feel bound to . . .”
“Education takes time. You are the ancient norm against which the new can be measured.”
Leto’s words momentarily flushed Idaho of all emotion except a deep sense of loss.
“My houris teach maturation,” Leto said. “They know that they must supervise the maturation of males. Through this they find their own maturation. Eventually, houris merge into wives and mothers and we wean the violent drives away from their adolescent fixations.”
“I’ll have to see it to believe it!”
“You will see it at the Great Sharing.”
As he stood beside Leto in the hall of Siaynoq, Idaho admitted to himself that he had seen something of enormous power, something which might create the kind of human universe Leto’s words projected.
Leto was restoring the crysknife to its box, returning the box to its compartment in the bed of the Royal Cart. The women watched in silence, even the small children quiet-everyone subdued by the force which could be felt in this great hall.
Idaho looked down at the children, knowing from Leto’s explanation that these children would be rewarded with positions of power-male or female, each in a puissant niche. The male children would be female-dominated throughout their lives, making (in Leto’s words) “an easy transition from adolescence into breeding males.”
Fish Speakers and their progeny lived lives “possessed of a certain excitement not available to most others.”
What will happen to Irti’s children? Idaho wondered. Did my predecessor stand here and watch his whiteclad wife share in Leto’s ritual?
What does Leto offer me here?
With that female army, an ambitious commander could take over Leto’s Empire. Or could he? No . . . not while Leto lived. Leto said the women were not militarily aggressive “by nature.”
He said: “I do not foster that in them. They know a cyclical pattern with a Royal Festival every ten years, a changing of the Guard, a blessing for the new generation, a silent thought for fallen sisters and loved ones gone forever. Siaynoq after Siaynoq marches onward in predictable measure. The change itself becomes non-change.”
Idaho lifted his gaze from the women in white and their children. He looked across the mass of silent faces, telling himself that this was only a small core of that enormous female force which spread its feminine web across the Empire. He could believe Leto’s words:
“The power does not weaken. It grows stronger every decade.”
To what end? Idaho asked himself.
He glanced at Leto who was lifting his hands in benediction over the hall of his houris.
“We will move among you now,” Leto said.
The women below the ledge opened a path, pressing backward. The path opened deeper into the throng like a fissure spreading through the earth after some tremendous natural upheaval.
“Duncan, you will precede me,” Leto said.
Idaho swallowed in a dry throat. He put a palm on the lip of the ledge and dropped down into the open space, moving out into the fissure because he knew only that could end this trial.
A quick glance backward showed him Leto’s cart drifting majestically down on its suspensors.
Idaho turned and quickened his pace.
The women narrowed the path through their ranks. It was done in an odd stillness, with fixity of attention-first on Idaho and then on that gross pre-worm body riding behind Idaho on the Ixian cart.
As Idaho marched stoically ahead, women reached from all sides to touch him, to touch Leto, or merely to touch the Royal Cart. Idaho felt the restrained passion in their touch and knew the deepest fear in his experience.