Hoh Vitt: Atreides sergeant and Master Jongleur

Hoh Vitt was a long-standing sergeant and soldier of House Atreides during the years in which Duke Leto Atreides I guided the noble family. A man of Caladan by association with the House he served, Vitt passed most of his career in the anonymity common to household troops, remembered first as the sergeant who admitted the Swordmaster Duncan Idaho to a grieving castle, and last as the storyteller of a buried platoon. When the forces of House Harkonnen fell upon Arrakis and his men were sealed alive inside the Shield Wall, Vitt turned the hypnotic craft of the Master Jongleurs upon his own soldiers, and the manner of their deaths became one of the strangest records ever recovered from the wars for the desert planet.

A sergeant of House Atreides#

Hoh Vitt belonged to the great body of armed retainers that House Atreides maintained beneath its named lieutenants, and his length of service earned him the standing of a veteran within it. The histories of the House preserved one scene from his years on Caladan. When Duncan Idaho returned from the training world of Ginaz as a newly initiated Swordmaster, it was Sergeant Vitt who met him. The homecoming fell at a terrible hour. The entire Atreides household was in turmoil and uproar, for the Duke's first son, Victor Atreides, had just been killed in a skyclipper incident, and the House was reeling under the loss. Vitt let Idaho pass so that the Swordmaster could go to the Duke and comfort him.

The moment was small, but it fixed the sergeant's character in the record: a man trusted to stand at the threshold of the household in its worst grief, and one who understood when duty was better served by stepping aside than by barring the way. Nothing else of his decades of soldiering was set down until the House left Caladan altogether.

Entombed beneath the Shield Wall#

Sixteen years after Idaho's return from Ginaz, the Atreides family moved to Arrakis, and Vitt's long service ended there in a single engagement. When House Harkonnen struck at the Atreides on the desert planet, his group of soldiers was caught near the compound at Arrakeen. Gurney Halleck had ordered the sergeant to guard the Atreides supplies stored in the Shield Wall, the great rock barrier that sheltered Arrakeen from the deep desert, and Vitt's platoon was doing exactly that when the attack reached them. The men were returning artillery fire when the bombardment against the Wall collapsed the ceiling of rock above them. The entire group was buried alive, sealed into the cave by an avalanche.

Among the entombed was Vitt's own nephew, Elto Vitt, who had suffered massive injuries during the battle. The sergeant did not tell the young man how extensive and severe his condition actually was. Elto's position in the platoon had never been easy; the men considered him a novice who had received favoritism because of his battle-hardened uncle, and now uncle and nephew lay trapped together with the rest under the crushed stone of the Wall.

The soldiers soon understood that they were sealed in permanently. In a last attempt to reach the outside, they tried to release distrans bats from the cave into the Arrakis sky, so that the creatures might carry the message that the platoon lay entombed underground. The bats could not make it out of the rock formation. With that failure, the men knew their fate was closed.

The last story of Caladan#

When the doomed troops accepted that no rescue would come, Elto begged his uncle to tell them all stories of Caladan, the homeworld of most of the men, in the ways of a Master Jongleur, a master storyteller. Vitt could grant the request in full. He had been raised on Jongleur, and he commanded the craft of the Master Jongleurs, whose telling was no mere recitation but a form of hypnosis.

The sergeant told the stories of the fishermen of Caladan, and under the Jongleur hypnosis each of the men remembered the water world in his own fashion. Avram Fultz, one of the soldiers, reminisced about eating a paradan melon fresh from the sea. Another soldier, Deegan, recollected the time he had once seen an elecran, and was glad that he had never had contact with the fearsome monsters. Elto himself remembered diving deep off the coast of the Southern Continent of Caladan.

Still trapped within the avalanche of the Shield Wall, Vitt continued spinning his Master story and never let the hypnotic trance lapse, allowing the young men to believe they were back on the Atreides home planet while the air of the sealed cave gave out around them. He held the telling to the end. Hoh Vitt eventually died, as did the rest of the men.

The drowned of the desert#

The cave did not keep its secret forever. Fremen natives, realizing that an entire troop of soldiers must lie in the buried cave, excavated the site, and what they uncovered had no parallel in the records of Arrakis. All of the men were found dead, but through the storytelling of Hoh Vitt each soldier lay lined up with a joyous expression on his face. Each had died believing he had drowned on Caladan, in the midst of the very deed he had been reminiscing about, the melon eaten fresh from the sea, the dive off the Southern Continent, the remembered water of home.

The final detail confounded any ordinary explanation. The lungs of each of the soldiers, including Vitt's own, held sea water. On a world where water was the rarest of treasures, deep inside a tomb of dry rock, a platoon of Atreides soldiers had drowned in an ocean that lay uncounted light years away, conjured for them by a dying sergeant who would not release his story while any of his men still needed it. In the annals of House Atreides, where loyalty was the currency of the House, Hoh Vitt's last act of service was a mercy performed with nothing but a voice.