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The Fish Speakers were an army created during the rule of God Emperor Leto Atreides II. The Fish Speaker army was entirely composed of women, with men having no roles in the Fish Speakers' lives other than that of husband. Men were totally shut out of the Fish Speaker combat forces, with the exception of the Duncan Idaho gholas. They were trained to be fanatical, disciplined, and extremely effective soldiers and police. The Fish Speakers were also used in Leto's breeding program, taking advantage of their speed and strength.
Origins[]
The existence of the Fish Speakers, and especially of their religious and military devotion, can be best explained by the significance offish: a divine life symbol from antiquity. Which species became the dominant symbol is disputed. According to Fish Speaker legend, the sandtrout so important in Dune history is a relict form of a now-extinct lungfish, but trout are very similar to salmon, and the Legend of the Silver Salmon — a large fish with oracular powers and a reputation for escaping all nets and lures — persisted in Fremen culture despite the absence of water. Some investigators believe that the legend may have been imported from Caladan, where the appearance of the Golden Carp was said to predict a time when the planet would be destroyed by a vast flood, and only those who believed in the Golden Carp would survive. Yet, as a divine life symbol in many cultures, the Vesica Piscis was an oval figure pointed at both ends and representing the air bladder of the fish. This, of course, throws all speculation in another direction, for sandtrout and lungfish are both too elongated to authenticate this symbol. The butterfly fish, Pisces Omatissimus, fits the rounded appearance that the symbol demands; moreover, its distinctive markings assure that no two tike fishes can be found. Its brilliant colors of gold and orange with silver horizontal stripes make it an entertaining spectacle; and, though it is not predatory, its armor gives it a militaristic appearance. It feeds on a legumous water plant called Arakis.
A silver fish was once worn by members of a secret society called Aram-el, but was abandoned in order to conciliate a powerful rival organization that was jealous of the fish's use as an emblem. Aram-el's need to defend itself gave rise to a military faction which gradually absorbed other groups and grew to become the Fish Speakers. The first leader of this group had a series of dreams in which one such silver emblem grew large and life-like and began to speak, warning of future trials and cautioning the leadership to develop military prowess for religious purposes, although these were at first obscure. It was the second-generation leader to whom was revealed that the purpose of Aram-el was to defend a god-king. Thereafter members being initiated into Aram-el took their vows by placing their hands upon a large silver fish, and the most religious of the group secretly reverenced the same object as a fetish. No wonder that this fish spoke to them in dreams, and the more devout could verify their sincerity by reports of those dreams. As time-passed, other rituals and more precise vows replaced these early forms, but the military women who protect and defend the God-king were thereafter known as Fish Speakers and became Brides of the God-King, in preparation of that day when such a visitation would occur.
The above material, taken almost verbatim from the Official History, represents the received version of the origins of the Fish Speakers, and is as noteworthy for its omissions as for its inclusions. Primarily, it does not address the questions of why such an organization was necessary in the first place, and of what happened to those organizations it replaced. Answers to such questions are nowhere to be found in the Official History, and what follows has been pieced together from fragmentary evidence in those parts of the Rakis Hoard that have thus far been uncovered and translated.
The Fish Speakers were formed in response to a military necessity, not as the result of an upwelling of religious fervor. Their foundation was preceded by events covering almost a hundred years, events that fall into three phases: the disbanding of the Fedaykin, the decline of the Fremen soldiery, and the revolt of the Fremen.
Disbanding of the Fedaykin[]
The first step leading to the establishment of the Fish Speakers as a military force came in the regency of Alia Atreides. In 10210, Alia brought about the dissolution of the Fedaykin by various legal strategems, and within a year or two afterwards, Paul's elite force no longer existed as a military organization. The Fedaykin were never a very large group, consisting of perhaps 50,000 men at its maximum, but their effectiveness was all out of proportion to their numbers. They provided the spearhead of many campaigns and furnished an experienced cadre around which later battle groups were formed. By disbanding them, Alia sought to forestall the possibility of a military hero's winning popular support and challenging the rule she exercised through her priesthood and civil bureaucracy. The harvest of her labor was reaped by Leto II.
Decline of the Fremen[]
The decline of the military might of the Fremen army took a much longer time, was marked by no notorious single incident, and was hidden from view by official decision. Hence its story has only recently come to light, and has been pieced together by the patient researchers of the military section, of the Library Confraternity, to whose efforts we owe these startling revelations about the true reasons for the formation of the Fish Speakers.
The first bit of information to move speculation in this area came not from the Rakis Hoard, but from the Bureau of Personnel of the Padishah Empire, housed on Kaitain. In its administration of personnel rotation, the Sardaukar Imperial Staff employed a system of flagging personnel records with differently colored tabs, according to the reason for the transfer: a red tab marked the record of one who had died in combat off-world, and whose remains were being returned; black indicated an off-world non-combat death from disease or accident; yellow marked the record of one transferred home for medical recuperation; green marked transfers for administrative and general reasons.
Fremen combat deaths and transfers through the end of Paul's Jihad. From The Dune Encyclopedia.
When the Fremen were organized under the Atreides, the system of the Sardaukar was borrowed. With this knowledge, the summaries of military personnel transfers found on Rakis became clear. The table to the right shows percentages of transfers for different reasons through the hundred-year period following the end of Paul's Jihad.
The changes on the table are instructive: the 4% combat deaths in the years 10211 to 10220 shows, no doubt, the mopping up of outlying pockets of resistance where the battle continued in diminished form. But after forty years during which combat deaths comprised less than one percent of the record transfers, the percentage begins to inch upward, to 2% and 3% of the total from 10271 to 10310. Two possible reasons have been suggested for this increase, neither of them flattering to Fremen honor: either resistance cells were being formed and operating, the suppression of which was producing Fremen battle casualties, or, perhaps more likely, accidental deaths were being falsified as military deaths to lend a spurious luster to the reputations of the deceased.
The percentage of black-tabbed records, showing death from accident or disease, is higher than any commander would wish, but not surprising in view of the high degree of adaptation to the conditions of Arrakis which the Fremen had achieved. When sent to planets with grossly divergent climatic and social environments, many of the Fremen simply did not adjust well. These records have not been examined in any detail, but spot checks over the century have shown that many of these deaths, in the early decades at least, were attributable to drowning, general edemas, and surprisingly, heat exhaustion. (The Fremen metabolism sometimes reacted in unexpected ways to conditions of high humidity).
As the foregoing implies, disease was taking a heavy toll. The yellow tabs, marking transfers for recuperation, increased enormously in percentage over the period — from 8% of the total in 10220 to 28% of the total in 10310. And it must be kept in mind that these figures show only those sick enough to warrant transfer home: those with lesser degrees of incapacity would be treated on the garrisoned planet. An astonishing picture appears then in the first decade of the 103rd century: many of the Fremen garrisons must have had sick calls amounting to nearly a third of their total force! Such units could not have fielded an effective force. But this decline in the vigor of the Fremen (and such indeed is what it seems) dovetails well with what we know was happening back on Arrakis, as the planetary conditions changed and the Fremen approached the degenerate state of the later Museum Fremen.
Various other arguments support this conclusion: we know, for example, that Fremen tribal membership was extended to children born off-world who were acknowledged by Fremen soldiers. The first such recognition on the planet Zimaona occurred in 10214 (only the rolls for Zimaona have yet been located among the ridulian crystals). The number of acknowledgments and children born of legal marriages to Zimaonian natives increases steadily over the next twenty years, and it is among the transfer records from Zimaona that we see for the first time, beginning in 10233, folders with a beige tab, showing that the soldier in question refused return to Arrakis and was mustered out on the planet. The use of the beige tab was an innovation restricted to Zimaona and suppressed even there after just two years. It may be that the beige tabs were having a destructive effect on morale — 6,000 soldiers refused return in those two years — and the folders of those who ended their enlistments on Zimaona returned to the use of the green tab specified for general purposes elsewhere throughout the empire. The total number of Fremen who refused return to Arrakis, therefore, is buried in the mass of general transfer records, but their numbers are hinted at in the two-year innovation of Zimaona.
Rakis Reference Catalog 3-M530 provides another revealing insight into the decline of the Fremen soldiery. The conquest of Carillon during Paul Muad'Dib's Jihad was one of the more protracted and difficult ones, taking eighteen months before the main resistance was crushed. The Rakis Finds crystal numbered 3-M530 includes the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) for the Fremen forces at the close of the first year of the campaign, when they had reached their maximum of about 250,000 men. According to the TOE, roughly 25,000 of these were support personnel: supply, medical, military government, and the like. This ratio of support troops to combat troops — 1 to 9 — was unbelievable to their enemies and unprecedented in military history. The Sardaukar at their most efficient, say at the end of the 7000s, with millennia of experience behind them and no challenge to their supremacy, never achieved a better ratio of support to combatants than 3 to 1.
Forty years later there was not the ghost of a resistance on Carillon, nor had there been for 35 years. Problems of law enforcement were handled by local and regional constabularies, and the Fremen garrison was the only military force on the planet. It consisted of one reinforced regiment, about 3,200 men. Yet this regiment was backed by a supply and administrative structure numbering over 20,000. The support-to-combatant ratio was over 6 to 1 in a peaceful world where the noise of battle had not been heard for over a generation. Moreover, the examination of the names on the rosters of the support personnel — and this is admittedly an imperfect measure — shows only about one in ten to be Fremen. While the troops under arms continued to be drawn from Arrakis, the maintenance of planetary supply, provisioning, quartering, and medical service was almost entirely in the hands of Carillonians.[1]
One last and striking piece of evidence will illustrate the decline which all these records show. In 10221, an interesting legal document makes its first appearance: On the planet of Finally in that year, a Fremen soldier sued a native in the local courts for assault. The outcome of the trial is of no consequence; what is significant is that the suit was brought at all. A decade earlier, the attacker would not have survived the assault, or if he had, would not have lived to go to court. The next several decades see an increase in the number of civil and criminal cases involving Fremen in the courts of Finally, showing that the Fremen were changing. They were adapting to local society and accepting the local law. There is no reason to believe that finally was different in this respect from the other garrisoned planets.
The evidence of the century points to just one conclusion: The Fremen army that swept through the empire during Paul's Jihad was, a hundred years later, a broken reed, top-heavy with bureaucrats, dependent on local support, and often manned by sick and unwilling conscripts. It may well be that its total strength declined, too, for Leto never allowed a census on Arrakis, and the strength of his military arm was the most closely guarded of secrets. Had it not been for Leto's spice-based stranglehold on the Spacing Guild and his consequent absolute monopoly on transportation and communication, the Fremen army could not have secured a single planet against a determined resistance after about 10260, let alone have held the Empire together.
Revolt of the Fremen[]
The revolt of certain units of the Sardaukar, led by Duncan Idaho (11099), must have been the major motivation for the foundation of the Fish Speakers. Leto must have realized that in the Fremen army he had a tool of doubtful effectiveness whose political reliability was shaky. The rise of a charismatic figure (such as Duncan Idaho in any of his incarnations) was a potential danger since Idaho was a direct tie to the days of glory — someone who could invoke the name of Paul Atreides with a conviction and claim equal to that of Leto. It is shortly after the revolt that the formation of the Fish Speakers is first mentioned, and it can be appreciated that the Fish Speakers were the effect of a clear sequence of causes.
Notes[]
Some or all of this article was copied from the following external source:
The Dune Encyclopedia
See also[]
Further references[]
- Yauzheen Pursewarden, History of the Fish Speakers (Centralia: Johun Univ. Press).
- ↑ At present, the most avidly sought-after documents in the military section are those which would establish whether Leto, in this first century of his rule, employed auxiliary units of native troops on the planets of his empire.