I must obey. It is a test.

She saw Moneo lift his gaze from the roadway and, not changing stride, turn to shout something at the cart or the ones behind it. Nayla could not make out the words. Moneo faced front once more. Nayla steadied herself, a part of the rock pillar which concealed most of her body.

A test.

Moneo had seen the people on the bridge and at the far end. He identified Fish Speaker uniforms and his first thought was to wonder who had ordered these greeters. He turned and shouted a question at Leto, but the God Emperor’s cart cover remained opaque, hiding Hwi and Leto within it.

He was well on to the bridge, the cart rasping in blown sand behind him, before he recognized Siona and Idaho standing well back from the far end. He identified four Museum Fremen seated on the roadway. Doubts began squirming through Moneo’s mind, but he could not change the pattern. He ventured a glance down at the river—a platinum world there caught in the noonday light. The sound of the cart was loud behind him. The flow of the river, the flow of the cortège, the sweeping importance of these things in which he played a role—all of it caught up his mind in a dizzying sensation of the inevitable.

We are not people passing this way, he thought. We are primal elements linking one piece of Time to another. And when we have passed, everything behind us will drop off into no-sound, a place like the no-room of the Ixians, yet never again the same as it was before we came.

A bit from one of the lute-player’s songs wafted through Moneo’s memory and his eyes went out of focus in the remembrance. He knew that song for its wishfulness, a wish that all of this were ended, all past, all doubts banished, tranquillity returned. The plaintive song drifted through his awareness like smoke, twisting and compelling:

“Insect cries in roots of pampas grass.”

Moneo hummed the song to himself:

“Insect cries mark the end.

Autumn and my song are the colour

Of the last leaves

In roots of pampas grass.”

Moneo nodded his head to the refrain:

“Day is ended,

Visitors gone.

Day is ended.

In our sietch,

Day is ended.

Storm wind sounds.

Day is ended.

Visitors gone.”

Moneo decided that the lute-player’s song had to be a really old one, an old Fremen song, no doubt of it. And it told him something about himself. He wished the visitors truly gone, the excitements ended, peace once more. Peace was so near… yet he could not leave his duties. He thought of all that impedimenta piled out there on the sand just beyond visibility range from Tuono. They would see it all soon—tents, food, tables, golden plates and jewelled knives, glowglobes fashioned in the arabesque shapes of ancient lamps… everything rich and full of expectations from completely different lives.

They will never be the same in Tuono.