Ramallo: the old Reverend Mother of Sietch Tabr

Ramallo was the aged Reverend Mother of the Fremen of Sietch Tabr on Arrakis, a Sayyadina who had changed the Water of Life and carried within her the awakened lives of Other Memory. She lived into the year 10191 AG, when House Atreides came to govern Arrakis under Imperial decree, and she died in that same year at Sietch Tabr, passing everything she held to the Bene Gesserit adept who succeeded her, the Lady Jessica.

The rogue Reverend Mother of the desert#

Ramallo held a station that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood reserved, in its own ordered universe, for women shaped by decades of training under its discipline. She was a Reverend Mother, yet she owed nothing to the Sisterhood. She was a Fremen woman of Sietch Tabr who had taken the Water of Life and changed it successfully within her own body, and by that survival she had unlocked her Other Memory, the crowding lives of the women who had gone before her. To the Sisterhood such a woman was a rogue Reverend Mother, made outside its schools and beyond its control. To the Fremen she was simply the Reverend Mother of the tribe.

Among her own people her authority was not a matter of rank alone. Ramallo was a mother figure for the Fremen of Sietch Tabr and a woman of wisdom, the keeper of the tribe's inner life through the years in which Stilgar led its warriors. She bore the marks of a long life in the deep desert, the blue within blue eyes of a spice saturated people and hair gone gray with age, and by the time House Atreides took its fief on Arrakis she was already near the end of her strength.

Sayyadina and the Fremen way of the Water#

The word Sayyadina, in the ancient tongue of the Fremen, meant friend of God, and it named the priestesses of the tribes who had not yet changed the Water of Life and risen to the station of Reverend Mother. The Water itself came from the deep desert. It began as the bile of a young sandworm drowned in water, a liquid exhalation given up in the moment before the creature's death, and in its raw state it was a poison that killed the untrained in agony. Only a woman who could alter the poison within her own flesh survived it, and the survival transformed her, amplifying her awareness until her genetic memory opened.

In Fremen practice the taking of the Water carried an urgency the Sisterhood's ceremonies did not know. It was performed when a Reverend Mother was dying, so that a successor could receive her memories before her demise, for everything the old woman carried, every life stored within her, would otherwise be lost to the tribe. A woman was chosen from within the tribe for the ordeal, and it was the custom that another be consecrated as Sayyadina at the same hour, so that all would not be lost if the chosen one failed and died. When the conversion succeeded, the changed Water passed to the assembled sietch, and its narcotic force carried the tribe into the shared abandon of the spice orgy. This was the office Ramallo had held and the rite over which she presided at the end of her life.

The coming of the Lady Jessica#

In 10191 AG the Harkonnens destroyed House Atreides in its first year on Arrakis, and the Lady Jessica fled into the desert with her son Paul. The fugitives were taken in by Stilgar's troop and brought at last to Sietch Tabr, where the old Reverend Mother received them. Ramallo accepted Jessica, a Bene Gesserit adept, and the boy who accompanied her, and she offered them both cryptic advice about the future.

The Fremen were encouraged by Jessica's arrival, for the tribe's need was pressing. Stilgar, moved by her considerable abilities and by the apparent fulfillment of an ancient prophecy involving her messianic son, told her plainly of Reverend Mother Ramallo's old age and of the need for a successor. Jessica was made Sayyadina of the tribe, a rank that secured her place among the Fremen while binding her toward the ordeal that awaited. For Jessica the calculation was survival, to establish her own place and Paul's in the Fremen hierarchy and to guide Sietch Tabr toward continued endurance. For Ramallo the calculation was time, and time was running out.

The spice agony and the passing of memory#

The end came when the Fremen of Sietch Tabr were forced to move deeper into the desert in response to increasing Harkonnen aggression. Ramallo declared that she was too old to survive the journey. The tribe could not carry a dying Reverend Mother across the open sand, and it could not abandon the lives she held. The rite of succession was called.

Ramallo, moments from death, supervised the spice agony of the Lady Jessica. Because the outcome could not be assured, Chani, daughter of Liet, was consecrated as Sayyadina in the event that Jessica did not survive. Jessica took the poison Water within herself and began the conversion, and only partway through the ordeal did she understand the mistake she had made, for she was pregnant, and the changed Water reached the daughter in her womb. Jessica transmuted the worm's poison and absorbed Ramallo's memories, the whole chain of lives the old woman had guarded, and the act elevated her to the station of Reverend Mother of the tribe. Ramallo died at Sietch Tabr just as Jessica successfully changed the Water of Life, her death and the succession accomplished in a single moment.

What passed onward#

Ramallo's lives did not end with her body. They flowed into Jessica, who stood thereafter as Reverend Mother to the Fremen and carried the old woman's memories through all the years of the desert war and the empire that followed. The transfer had a second consequence that no one at the rite had intended. The fetus Jessica carried was fundamentally changed by the conversion, and her daughter Alia was born with full ancestral knowledge, preborn, awake in the womb to the crowding multitude of her ancestors. The Bene Gesserit named such a child Abomination, and Alia's long struggle against the personalities within her began in the hour of Ramallo's death.

The old Reverend Mother herself passed out of the tribe's daily memory as the sietch moved on and the war against the Harkonnens consumed the desert. Yet the office she had filled, the rite she had supervised, and the lives she had handed onward shaped everything that came after her, for the woman who received them was the mother of Muad'Dib, and the daughter changed in the receiving would one day rule the Imperium as Regent.