Hunters of Dune - Entry #13

Chapter starter:

     Even a great tower has its weak point. The accomplished warrior finds and exploits the smallest flaws to bring about complete ruin.

-- MATRE SUPERIOR HELLICA,

Internal Directive 67B-1138

(Hunters of Dune, p. 400)

     Murbella's need to delve in to her past to understand the Honored Matres as she prepares to go in to battle against them finally leads to full disclosure in a spice trance.  It is worth including some lengthy passages here so I can look back at this in the blog to recall the details.

     Yes, during the Famine Times, a splinter group of rogue Bene Gesserits, a few untrained wild Reverend Mothers, and fugitive Fish Speakers had indeed escaped in the turmoil after the Tyrant's death.  Yet that was only a small part of the answer. 

     In their flight, those women had also encountered isolated and insular Tleilaxu worlds.  For more than ten thousand years, the fanatical Bene Tleilax had used their females only as breeding machines and axlotl tanks.  In a closely guarded secret, they kept their women immobilized, comatose, and uneducated, no more than wombs on tables.  No Bene Gesserit, no outsider, had ever seen a Tleilaxu female. 

     When those rogue Bene Gesserits and militant Fish Speakers discovered the horrific truth, their reaction was swift and unforgiving: they left not a single Tleilaxu male alive on those outlying worlds.  Liberating the breeding tanks, they took the Tleilaxu females with them on their journey, tending them, trying to bring them back. 

     ... 

     The renegade Reverend Mothers, militaristic Fish Speakers, and recovered Tleilaxu females had united to form the Honored Matres.  Lost out in the Scattering for more than a dozen centuries, they had no access to melange, could no longer undergo the Spice Agony, and were unable to find an alternative that would allow them access to Other Memories.  Over time, interbreeding with males from populations they encountered, then dominated on other worlds, those women had become something else entirely. 

     And now Murbella knew why her chain of predecessors ended in dark emptiness.  She traveled back, generation to generation, all the way to a Tleilaxu female who had been a comatose breeding tank, a mindless womb.  

     Gathering her courage and focusing her rage, Murbella pushed harder and became the paralyzed tank that Tleilaxu female had once been.  She shuddered as the dim and helpless sensations and memories seeped into her.  She had been that young girl raised in captivity, understanding little of the world beyond her pitiful confinement, unable to read, barely able to speak.  In the month of her first menstruation, she had been dragged away, strapped to a table, and turned into a flesh vat.  No longer conscious, the nameless woman had no idea how many offspring her body produced. Then she had been awakened and liberated. 

(Hunters of Dune, pp. 438 - 439)

     Pretty easy to see why they behave so fiercely, why they demand respect of all and show no respect to men.