Ghadhean al-Fali: the desert Naib who defied the Regency

Ghadhean al-Fali was a desert Fremen of Arrakis, one of the Fedaykin death commandos who fought for Paul Muad'Dib during the Arrakis Revolt and who afterward rose to the rank of Naib among his people. In the years after the Emperor Muad'Dib walked into the deep desert, al-Fali joined the Naibs who demanded that the Regent Alia Atreides restore her mother, the Lady Jessica, to the Regency Council. When he carried the grievance of the deep desert into the morning audience at Arrakeen, his appeal set off an attempt on Jessica's life, and the violence that followed exposed to Jessica the truth about what her daughter had become.

An old man of the desert#

Al-Fali was not a tall man, but his wiry body and the long dishdasha he wore over his stillsuit gave him a stately appearance. He had a narrow face and a beaked nose, and his glaring eyes showed the blue on blue of the Eyes of Ibad, the mark of a lifetime saturated in the spice of the open sand. By the time he came before the Regency court he was an old man, and Jessica herself thought of him as the old Naib when he stood waiting to address her.

His loyalties ran in three strands that, for a Fremen of his generation, formed a single cord. He belonged first to the Fremen and their desert ways. He had bound himself to Muad'Dib as one of his Fedaykin, and through Muad'Dib he held to House Atreides, a bond he honoured in the person of the Lady Jessica when she returned to Arrakis. It was to Jessica, not to the Regent, that he addressed the words that summed up his whole complaint against the government at Arrakeen: "We have abandoned our friend, the desert!"

Fedaykin of Muad'Dib#

During the Arrakis Revolt, al-Fali served among the Fedaykin, the death commandos who fought for Paul Muad'Dib in the war that broke Harkonnen and Imperial power on Arrakis. He was counted among the known men of that brotherhood alongside fighters such as Farok, Korba, Otheym and Chatt the Leaper, whose commandos guarded Muad'Dib himself.

The order he had served did not long survive its Emperor's departure. After Muad'Dib walked into the deep desert and Alia assumed the Regency for his infant children, she dissolved the Fedaykin in 10210 AG, and the word reverted to its older Fremen meaning. By 10219 AG fewer than two hundred of the old commandos remained on Arrakis. Al-Fali was one of the survivors of that dwindling company, and by then he had become a Naib, one of the leaders of the sietch communities, the men who wore the traditional headdress of knotted keffiya and spoke for their tribes.

It was as both Fedaykin and Naib that he took his place in the movement of tribal leaders who pressed the Regent Alia to reinstate the Lady Jessica in the Regency Council. To the men of the deep desert, the government at Arrakeen had turned away from the sand that had made Muad'Dib's victory possible, and the ecological transformation of Arrakis, the slow greening that Muad'Dib's rule had set in motion, had become in their eyes an abandonment of the desert itself.

The audience at Arrakeen#

Al-Fali could not have expected to reach the Regent's ear openly, so his petition entered the audience rolls under false pretenses. His access was arranged through the Qizarate, the priesthood bureaucracy administered under Javid, and when his moment came during one of the morning audiences he stood before both Alia and Jessica and made his true purpose plain. He had come to protest the ecological transformation of Arrakis on behalf of the desert Fremen.

The audience never reached a ruling, because it became the scene of an attempted murder. An assassination attempt on Jessica was made there, an attack arranged by Alia against her own mother. Jessica sided with al-Fali in the uproar, while Alia dismissed the old Naib's warnings as superstition. Al-Fali himself first read the attack another way. He believed the attempt had been aimed at his own life, a move to silence his protest before the court could hear it.

His answer was the answer of a Fedaykin. He struck down the priest who had served as Alia's agent in the deed. The wounded man might yet have been kept alive long enough to confess and name those who had set him on, but a city Fremen finished him at Alia's command, and whatever testimony the priest carried died with him.

Flight to Red Chasm Sietch#

The failed assassination forced mother and daughter into open confrontation. In the clash that followed, Jessica understood at last what the Bene Gesserit had long feared in the pre-born. Her daughter was possessed, ruled from within by the ego-memory of the dead Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the ancient enemy of the Atreides line. The Regency of Alia was, in truth, the Baron's instrument.

Jessica could not remain within reach of Arrakeen after that. She fled the capital in the company of the Naibs who had demanded her restoration, and al-Fali escorted her on that flight into the desert, bringing her to Red Chasm Sietch, one of the sietch strongholds of the Fremen. Along that road the old Naib made the meaning of the day's events clear. The tribes would hear of Alia's attempt at matricide.

In this way a single petition from an old desert fighter did what years of court manoeuvring had not. It drew the Regent into an act her enemies could name, it placed the Lady Jessica beyond Alia's grasp among the tribes, and it carried the truth of the Regency's corruption out of the audience chamber and into the deep desert. Of al-Fali's own end the records of the time preserved nothing, and his later fate went unrecorded.