Knowing that this would happen Tamalane had been prepared and a secret recording of the incident had been brought to her, the words audible, every expression visible, the thoughts quite apparent to a Reverend Mother's trained eye.
'We were sacrificing to Shai-hulud!' Stiros protested.
'Tuek told you not to argue with me about that,' Sheeana said.
How the priestesses smiled at the discomfiture of Stiros and the other priests!
'But Shai-hulud -' Stiros began.
'Shaitan!' Sheeana corrected him and her expression was easily read: Did these stupid priests know nothing?
'But we have always thought -'
'You were wrong!' Sheeana stamped a foot.
Stiros feigned the need for instruction. 'Are we to believe that Shai-hulud, the Divided God, is also Shaitan?'
What a complete fool he was, Tamalane thought. Even a pubescent girl could confound him, as Sheeana proceeded to do.
'Any child of the streets knows this almost as soon as she can walk!' Sheeana ranted.
Stiros spoke slyly: 'How do you know what is in the minds of street children?'
'You are evil to doubt me!' Sheeana accused. It was an answer she had learned to use often, knowing it would get back to Tuek and cause trouble.
Stiros knew this only too well. He waited with downcast eyes while Sheeana, speaking with heavy patience as one telling an old fable to a child, explained to him that either god or devil or both could inhabit the worm of the desert. Humans had only to accept this. It was not left to humans to decide such things.
Stiros had sent people into the desert for speaking such heresy. His expression (so carefully recorded for Bene Gesserit analysis) said such wild concepts were always springing up from the muck at the bottom of the Rakian heap. But now! He had to contend with Tuek's insistence that Sheeana spoke gospel truth!
As she looked at the recording, Tamalane thought the pot was boiling nicely. This she reported to Chapter House. Doubts flogged Stiros; doubts everywhere except among the populace in their devotion to Sheeana. Spies close to Tuek said he was even beginning to doubt the wisdom of his decision to translate the historian-locutor, Dromind.
'Was Dromind right to doubt her?' Tuek demanded of those around him.
'Impossible!' the sycophants said.
What else could they say? The High Priest could make no mistake in such decisions. God would not allow it. Sheeana clearly confounded him, though. She put the decisions of many previous High Priests into a terrible limbo. Reinterpretation was being demanded on all sides.
Stiros kept pounding at Tuek: 'What do we really know about her?'
Tamalane had a full account of the most recent such confrontation. Stiros and Tuek alone, debating far into the night, just the two of them (they thought) in Tuek's quarters, comfortably ensconced in rare blue chairdogs, melange-laced confits close at hand. Tamalane's holophoto record of the meeting showed a single yellow glowglobe drifting on its suspensors close above the pair, the light dimmed to ease the strain on tired eyes.
'Perhaps that first time, leaving her in the desert with a thumper, was not a good test,' Stiros said.
It was a sly statement. Tuek was noted for not having an excessively complicated mind. 'Not a good test? Whatever do you mean?'
'God might wish us to perform other tests.'
'You have seen her yourself! Many times in the desert talking to God!'
'Yes!' Stiros almost pounced. Clearly, it was the response he wanted. 'If she can stand unharmed in the presence of God, perhaps she can teach others how this is accomplished.'
'You know this angers her when we suggest it.'
'Perhaps we have not approached the problem in quite the right way.'
'Stiros! What if the child is right? We serve the Divided God. I have been thinking long and earnestly upon this. Why would God divide? Is this not God's ultimate test?'
The expression on Stiros' face said this was exactly the kind of mental gymnastics his faction feared. He tried to divert the High Priest but Tuek was not to be shifted from a single-track plunge into metaphysics.
'The ultimate test,' Tuek insisted. 'To see the good in evil and the evil in good.'
Stiros' expression could only be described as consternation. Tuek was God's Supreme Anointed. No priest was allowed to doubt that! The thing that might now arise if Tuek went public with such a concept would shake the foundations of priestly authority! Clearly, Stiros was asking himself if the time had not come to translate his High Priest.
'I would never suggest that I might debate such profound ideas with my High Priest,' Stiros said. 'But perhaps I can offer a proposal that might resolve many doubts.'
'Propose then,' Tuek said.
'Subtle instruments could be introduced in her clothing. We might listen when she talks to -'
'Do you think God would not know what we did?'
'Such a thought never crossed my mind!'
'I will not order her taken into the desert,' Tuek said.
'But if it is her own idea to go?' Stiros assumed his most ingratiating expression. 'She has done this many times.'
'But not recently. She appears to have lost her need to consult with God.'
'Could we not offer suggestions to her?' Stiros asked.
'Such as?'
'Sheeana, when will you speak again with your Father? Do you not long to stand once more in His presence?'
'That has more the sound of prodding than suggestion.'
'I am only proposing that -'
'This Holy Child is no simpleton! She talks to God, Stiros. God might punish us sorely for such presumption.'
'Did God not put her here for us to study?' Stiros asked.
This was too close to the Dromind heresy for Tuek's liking. He sent a baleful stare at Stiros.
'What I mean,' Stiros said, 'is that surely God means us to learn from her.'
Tuek himself had said this many times, never hearing in his own words a curious echo of Dromind's words.
'She is not to be prodded and tested,' Tuek said.
'Heaven forbid!' Stiros said. 'I will be the soul of holy caution. And everything I learn from the Holy Child will be reported to you immediately.'
Tuek merely nodded. He had his own ways to be sure Stiros spoke the truth.
The subsequent sly proddings and testings were reported immediately to Chapter House by Tamalane and her subordinates.
'Sheeana has a thoughtful look,' Tamalane reported.
Among the Reverend Mothers on Rakis and those to whom they reported, this thoughtful look had an obvious interpretation. Sheeana's antecedents had been deduced long ago. Stiros' intrusions were making the child homesick. Sheeana kept a wise silence but she clearly thought much about her life in a pioneer village. Despite all of the fears and perils, those obviously had been happy times for her. She would remember the laughter, poling the sand for its weather, hunting scorpions in the crannies of the village hovels, smelling out spice fragments in the dunes. From Sheeana's repeated trips to the area, the Sisterhood had made a reasonably accurate guess as to the location of the lost village and what had happened to it. Sheeana often stared at one of Tuek's old maps on the wall of her quarters.
As Tamalane expected, one morning Sheeana stabbed a finger at the place on the wall map where she had gone many times. 'Take me there,' Sheeana commanded her attendants.
A 'thopter was summoned.
While priests listened avidly in a 'thopter hovering far overhead, Sheeana once more confronted her nemesis in
