Tagir Mohandis: the bold troubadour of Kadesh

Tagir Mohandis was a troubadour of the planet Kadesh, descended from ancient merchant engineers and proud of both his ancestry and himself. He entered recorded history during the Regency of Alia Atreides, when he arrived in Arrakeen on Hajj, was robbed of everything he carried, and stood before the Regent's court to ask for nothing more than passage money to the court of Farad'n Corrino on Salusa Secundus. What he did with that moment, offending the most dangerous woman in the Imperium to her face and walking away alive, made his name.

Origins on Kadesh#

Kadesh was a planet of the Known Universe with its own settled customs, among them the style of wearing one's hair down to the shoulders in a particular manner. Mohandis carried that fashion with him wherever he traveled, his golden hair worn long to the shoulders after the manner of his world, so that his origin could be read at a glance even in a crowd of pilgrims.

He was descended from merchant engineers of old, and he made no secret of it. Pride in that ancestry, and in himself, was the trait most often remarked upon in him. It was not the pride of rank, for he held no title and belonged to no Great House, but the confidence of a man who considered his own line and his own judgment sufficient credentials in any company. That confidence would be tested in the audience hall of the Atreides.

The pilgrimage to Arrakeen#

Mohandis came to Arrakis on Hajj, one pilgrim among the multitudes who poured through Arrakeen in the years after Muad'Dib. The city was not kind to him. Mercenaries emptied his pockets, leaving the troubadour stranded at the center of the Imperium with little more than his clothes and his instrument.

His recourse was the Regent's court. Alia Atreides, sister of Paul Atreides and Regent of the Atreides Empire, heard petitions in Arrakeen, and Mohandis professed himself willing to play before her in exchange for a gift of transport money. His stated destination was the court of Farad'n Corrino on Salusa Secundus. Farad'n, heir of the dethroned House Corrino, was then seeking out troubadours and minstrels, supporting the arts and building around himself a great renaissance of cultivated life, and a performer of Mohandis's gifts could expect a welcome there that Arrakeen no longer offered.

Boldness before the Regent#

Whatever he had professed, Mohandis did not come to flatter. Given his moment before the Regent, he deliberately offended Alia in public with his verses. It was no accident of an unpolished tongue. The people of Ziarenko Javid, who controlled access to the Regent's audiences, had passed the Kadeshian through precisely for the quality he then displayed, his boldness.

The Lady Jessica, witnessing the performance, took the man's measure in terms that revealed as much about the Atreides as about the troubadour. In her judgment Mohandis was exactly the kind of man her Duke, Leto Atreides I, would have chosen to keep at his side in troubled times, one who acted on the confidence of his own judgment yet accepted whatever befell him, even death, without berating his fate. He was, in bearing as in conduct, hard to overlook, a tall man, easily two meters, with a sense of virile strength in the broad chest and neatly tapering body that a grey Hajj robe could not conceal.

Refuge among the rebels#

A man who mocked the Regent to her face in her own hall could not expect to walk Arrakeen openly afterward. Mohandis was taken in by the rebels against the Atreides Empire, who hid him in the suks of the city until the danger passed.

His survival turned on a password. In the suk outside the city, a man who later died in the dungeons of Arrakeen gave Mohandis the words that the rebels used among themselves. The password was "Persistence" and the countersign was "Tortoise", and those two words carried the troubadour out of the city alive. When it was over, he did not choose to forget the debt. He bought a ring worked in the shape of a tortoise and kept it thereafter as a reminder of the man and the words that had saved him. In the end the Kadeshian made good on his stated purpose, leaving Arrakis for Salusa Secundus and the cultivated court that Farad'n Corrino was assembling there.

The baliset and the tortoise ring#

Two possessions defined Mohandis in the accounts that survived him. The first was his nine string baliset, the instrument of his trade, on which he performed his songs. He claimed to play it as well as the great Gurney Halleck himself, a boast that set him against the most celebrated baliset player of the Atreides age, and one entirely in keeping with the pride he took in his own worth.

The second was the tortoise ring, which he wore not as ornament but as memory. It stood for the suk outside Arrakeen, for the rebels who had hidden him, for a password spoken by a man who did not live to leave the Regent's dungeons, and for the narrow margin by which a bold tongue had escaped the consequences of its own daring.