Gunseng Harkonnen: Siridar Baron of Giedi Prime

Gunseng Harkonnen (10079 AG to 10130 AG) was the Siridar Baron of Giedi Prime and ruler of House Harkonnen for nearly three decades. The only son of Baron Granuk Harkonnen to survive his father's purges, he came to power at twenty-three amid open doubts that so slight and unwarlike a figure could hold the rowdiest House in the Landsraad. He answered those doubts with a reign of patient economic warfare and cold political calculation, and he passed both qualities intact to his youngest son, the future Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

Sole surviving son of Granuk#

Gunseng was born in 10079 AG to Baron Granuk Harkonnen, a ruler so consumed by fear of assassination that he had every one of his other sons killed to better his chances of dying quietly in bed. Gunseng alone was left as heir, and he grew up inside a court whose corruption was infamous even beyond Giedi Prime. The wandering poet Reeve Benin, who recorded his first visit to the planet in his volume "Pearls Before Swine", called Granuk an "old swine" who "had vices in number to match his jowls" and wrote that he "never smelled so foul a moral stench as that of his castle".

The young heir did not resemble the bloodline that produced him. The wanderer poet and diarist Sil, Reeve Perrin, a key source on Gunseng's life who visited the Harkonnen court many times from the early years of his reign, described him as atypical for the Harkonnen line, slight and fair in appearance. Amid the chaos of Granuk's household affairs the boy acquired musical proficiency in the baliset and the corpedal, accomplishments that did nothing to reassure those who measured a Harkonnen ruler by his capacity for violence.

The succession of 10102#

In his final years Granuk succumbed to a nervous disease that reduced him to a skeleton, and he barricaded himself in chambers behind protection only a tyrant would find inadequate. Gunseng, then twenty-three, seemed incapable of controlling the rowdy House, and he knew that his survival was in jeopardy the moment his father died. Rivals and claimants were waiting, and they saw only a weak young man with a baliset.

Gunseng's answer showed the political instinct that would define his rule. Taking advantage of the paranoia that gripped the palace, he reached his father's ear on his deathbed and coaxed from the old Baron an order for the execution of certain military officers and commanders of the elite guard, precisely the men who threatened his succession. Granuk died within days. The transition was smooth and without carnage, for Gunseng had placed his own men in every vacated position, and in 10102 AG he assumed the barony of Giedi Prime unopposed.

Marriage to the Black Widow#

To secure his position among the Great Houses, Gunseng married Baroness Muertana Sarobella, daughter of Duke Fernandez Sarobella and a dark beauty with the disposition of a scorpion, who would later be known as the "Black Widow". The match was an alliance of convenience with House Sarobella, then a powerful family, and it produced no affection on either side.

The marriage produced three sons. The first died in infancy. The second, Araskin, born in 10105 AG, was a clubfooted, simple-minded giant who stood two meters tall and weighed close to 110 kilograms in his prime. Imposing and ferocious, Araskin fought in many gladiatorial matches on Giedi Prime, gutting his foes while his mother egged him on and encouraged him to decapitate his opponents, though many of the contests were rigged, as was tradition on Giedi Prime. The third and last son was Vladimir. Gunseng also fathered several children by concubines, of whom only Abulurd, borne by Gunella Sorvag, survived the deadly political climate of the royal palace of Harko.

Gunseng never acknowledged Araskin as his natural son, though he never denied it publicly. Muertana, who loathed her husband, told Araskin that his condition was the fault of Gunseng's genetic shortcomings, and she reared the ostensible na-Baron herself, poisoning his mind against his father year after year. Araskin came to believe himself a rightful heir held back only by his birth, a delusion his mother carefully fed.

The kanly against House Sarobella#

From around 10128 AG, at the age of forty-nine, Gunseng turned on the House he had married into, initiating an unofficial kanly against House Sarobella. His method was characteristic: rather than provoke open war, he used market manipulations to acquire CHOAM gains that rivaled House Sarobella's economic sectors, strangling his in-laws' fortunes while giving them no formal grievance.

The killing stroke was legal. Gunseng's Mentat, Chardin Klees, who had guided the Baron's financial decisions and political alliances throughout his reign, created a formal document, a procès verbal, charging that Duke Fernandez Sarobella had conspired to increase his CHOAM holdings at the expense of House Corrino. The charge succeeded. Fernandez was assassinated, and the Sarobella homeworld was occupied by the Sardaukar. With her father dead and her House broken on her husband's orders, Muertana's indifference toward Gunseng curdled into vengeful hatred.

Death at the victory banquet#

In 10130 AG Gunseng arranged a formal dinner to celebrate the spoils of his victory over House Sarobella. Following a toast to the prosperity of House Harkonnen, Araskin, drunk and furious, turned his goblet upon his father's head, beating it in until Gunseng was dead. The murder came, in all likelihood, at Muertana's urging.

Araskin then turned on his brother Vladimir, his father's favorite, and began to strangle him. Chardin Klees drove a poison needle into Araskin's neck, killing him instantly. Vladimir refused to permit Klees to kill Muertana as well, but that night he visited his mother in her chambers and strangled her under suspicious circumstances, leaving her body to be discovered in her bed the next morning. In a single day the Black Widow's revenge had consumed Gunseng, Araskin, and Muertana herself, and left Vladimir master of House Harkonnen's future.

Legacy#

Gunseng possessed a keen understanding of political realities and the ruthlessness necessary to manipulate them, and each of these qualities passed to Vladimir, who seemed the answer to his father's dream of improving their House. For his part, Gunseng saw that the boy received training in the martial arts, music, and politics from the best tutors he could afford. It was said of Vladimir that in his youth he had been "the picture of his grandfather Granuk", and the grandson would prove it in ways Gunseng never lived to see.

Gunseng's servants outlasted him. Chardin Klees remained in Vladimir's service until his death in 10162 AG, and no Mentat who followed was ever able to replace Klees in the Baron's eyes; Vladimir employed a succession of them and had each killed when he had outlived his usefulness. Through the concubine's son Abulurd, who renounced the Harkonnen name once Vladimir was pronounced na-Baron and took the name Rabban, Gunseng was grandfather to Glossu Rabban, whose cruelty on Arrakis would earn him the epithet "Beast". The slight, fair musician of Giedi Prime thus stood at the head of the line that carried Harkonnen brutality to its height.