Sietch Jacurutu: the water thieves the Fremen erased

Sietch Jacurutu, later known as Fondak, was a legendary sietch hidden in the deep desert of Arrakis and associated with the neighbouring refuge of Shuloch. For generations the Fremen held that it was a myth, and almost nothing of its origin was remembered beyond a rumour that its people had been cast out of Fremen society for stealing water. The rumour was true, and the crime was worse than theft. Jacurutu became the object of an obsession for Leto Atreides II, who walked into the deep desert to find it during the regency of his aunt Alia, and what he took from that place laid the foundations of the Golden Path.

The name no Fremen could speak#

On Arrakis a person's water was reclaimed by the tribe at death and held in the sietch reserves, so a Fremen who took water from another Fremen struck at the one thing that held desert society together. That is what the people of Jacurutu did.

Long before House Atreides came to Arrakis, in the days of Stilgar's great-great-grandfather, a band of renegade Fremen based at Jacurutu began killing other Fremen for the water contained in their bodies. They wrought havoc across the dry world for as long as they were tolerated. The other tribes gave them a name, Iduali, which meant water insects, and then did what the offence demanded. They banded together and destroyed Sietch Jacurutu.

What followed the massacre was more unusual than the massacre itself. The name Jacurutu became taboo. No Fremen was permitted to search for the place, and over the generations the prohibition did its work so thoroughly that little of the sietch's origin was remembered at all. By the time of the Atreides arrival most Fremen believed Jacurutu had never existed outside legend. A crime severe enough to unite the tribes had been buried by the same means that had punished it.

Fondak and the poison cistern#

The destruction was not complete. Iduali survivors returned to the ruin, rebuilt it, and gave it a second name, Fondak, under which it continued to exist for centuries in plain defiance of the taboo that was supposed to have ended it.

Fondak became a smuggler camp. Its trade was extraction, and its clients were the people at the top of the planet's political order: the rulers of Arrakis could be taken off-world by way of Fondak should they ever need to leave in a hurry, provided the fee was met. Discretion of that kind demands that the base itself never be found, and the Cast-Out, as the Fremen also called them, solved that problem with a piece of engineering as ruthless as anything in their history. They built a poison cistern. It killed the animal life in the surrounding desert, and with no birds or beasts drawn to drink there, the Fremen lost the sign they relied on to detect water in the deep desert. A sietch could not be found where nothing living pointed to it.

The obsession of Leto Atreides II#

Nine years after the disappearance of Paul Atreides into the desert, his son Leto came into his own prescient sight. The visions that arrived carried two persistent images: the long-lost sietch of Jacurutu, and a skin that was not his own. Through them Leto found the Golden Path his father had seen and turned away from, and he understood, as Paul had not, what it would cost and why the cost had to be paid.

After he and his twin sister Ghanima survived an attack by Laza tigers set on them by Wensicia Corrino, the twins separated. Ghanima conditioned herself to believe her brother was dead so that no Truthsayer could pull his whereabouts out of her, and Leto went into the deep desert in complete anonymity. Suspicions about his survival persisted regardless, and Lady Jessica knew of her grandson's fixation on Jacurutu. The forbidden sietch was somehow the key, and the people who wanted Leto controlled understood that as well as he did.

Captivity, spice and escape#

Leto found the sietch, and the sietch was waiting. He was taken by Namri, the Iduali who was then Naib of Jacurutu, and by Gurney Halleck, the Atreides Warmaster. The orders under which they acted came from the Regent Alia Atreides, though Halleck believed they had come from Jessica, and their purpose was to subject the pre-born child to an overdosed spice trance and see whether he could resist possession by his own ancestral memories. Halleck thought he was testing for Abomination. What the orders were truly meant to achieve has never been settled.

Namri's niece Sabiha was set to watch over the boy and nursed him through the trance. Inside it Leto saw a future in which the two of them became lovers, and he refused that path because his own destiny would not accommodate it. He told her what he had seen, which left her in confusion, then put her to sleep. Taking a frempack, he went out into a rising sandstorm. He did not know that his stillsuit's heel pumps had been cut, which meant the desert would kill him within days whatever else he did.

He survived the storm by mounting a worm blind and riding it out. When he understood the state of his suit and knew he needed shelter, he made for a distant butte of rock, which turned out to be Shuloch, the cliff-ringed prison colony that Jacurutu maintained. There he let himself be taken by the Iduali smuggler Muriz. That night he left the hut assigned to him and found the labour camp's sandtrout farm. Using his spice-saturated blood, his ancestral experience and prana-bindu control of his own biochemistry, he persuaded the creatures that he was a rich pocket of water. They bonded to his flesh and began the conversion he had been shown in vision, the skin that was not his own.

What Jacurutu made possible#

The membrane made Leto invisible to the captive worms that guarded Shuloch's perimeter and multiplied his strength, speed, reflexes, endurance and water discipline beyond anything human. He went over the rock walls and crossed vast stretches of open desert on foot. Behind him, Namri refused to tell Halleck where the boy had gone and turned on the Warmaster instead; Halleck killed him, and the last Naib of Jacurutu died in 10,219 AG.

Having escaped both Jacurutu and Shuloch, Leto used the resources of the Cast-Out to lay the foundations of the Golden Path. The sietch the Fremen had erased from their own memory, and the smugglers' colony it had spawned, supplied the means by which an Atreides became something other than a man. In the millennia of his reign the desert of Shuloch was watered into hilly green farmland renamed Goygoa, terraced orchards above a village of black stone, and nothing remained there of the water thieves at all.