The landscape beyond the city, fitfully illuminated by such moonlight as could break through the storm’s burden of snow, was white as death. A knife-blade wind scooped up the fallen crystals, swept them onward, whirled them into sinister patterns. The king was unable to get the taste of the hjjk-woman’s beak from his mouth. His mating-rod had subsided now, but it still ached with the pain of unfulfilled desire and it seemed to him that a cool fire burned along its entire shaft, the sign of some corrosive hjjk fluid that he must have come in contact with during that ghastly coupling.
Perhaps I should go out there, Salaman thought, and strip off my robe and roll naked in the snow until I’m clean—
“Father?”
He whirled. “Who’s there?”
“Biterulve, father.” The boy peered in uneasily from the vestibule of the pavilion. His eyes were very wide. “Father, you frighten us. When my mother said you’d arisen and gone rushing madly from your bedchamber — and then you were seen leaving the palace itself—”
“You followed me?” Salaman cried. “You spied on me?”
He lurched forward, seizing the slender boy, pulling him roughly into the pavilion, and slapped him three times with all his strength. Biterulve cried out, as much perhaps in surprise as pain, after the first blow, but was silent thereafter. The king saw his son’s astounded eyes gleaming into his by the light of the Moon and the reflection of that light on the whirling flakes of snow. He released the boy and staggered back toward the window.
“Father,” Biterulve said softly, went to him as though heedless of all risk, holding his arms outstretched.
A great convulsive shiver passed through the king, and Salaman gathered Biterulve in and held the boy in a hug so tight it forced a gust of breath from him. Then he let him go, and said very quietly, “I should not have struck you. But you shouldn’t have followed me here. You know that no one is permitted to come upon me in the night in my pavilion.”
“We were so frightened, father. My mother said you were not in your right mind.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t.”
“Can we help you, my lord?”
“I doubt that very much. Very much indeed.” Salaman reached for the young prince again, collecting him in the curve of his arm and pulling him tight against him. Hollowly he said, “I had a dream tonight, boy, such a dream as I won’t disclose in any way, not to you, not to anyone, except to say that it was a dream that could peel a man’s sanity from him like the skin from a fruit. That dream still afflicts me. I may never wash myself clean of it.”
“Oh, father, father—”
“It’s this beastly season. The black wind beats on my skull. It drives me crazier every year.”
“Shall I leave you by yourself?” Biterulve asked.
“Yes. No. No, stay.” Brooding, the king spun around and stared into the darkness beyond the wall again. He kept the boy at his side. “You know how much I love you, Biterulve.”
“Of course I do.”
“And that when I struck you just now — it was the madness in me that was striking, it wasn’t I myself—”
Biterulve nodded, although he said nothing.
Salaman hugged him to him. Gradually the fury in his soul subsided.
Then, peering into the night, he said, “Am I mad again, or do you see a figure out there? Someone riding on a xlendi, coming up from the Southern Highway?”
“You’re right, father! I see him too.”
“But who’d come here in the middle of the night, in weather like this?”
“Whoever he is, we have to open the gate for him.”
“Wait,” Salaman said. He cupped his hand to his mouth and cried, in a voice like a trumpet, “Hoy! You out there! You, can you hear me?”
It was all he could do to make his voice carry above the storm.
The xlendi, stumbling in the snow, seemed near the end of its strength. The rider looked little better. He rode with his head down, clinging desperately to his saddle.
“Who are you?” Salaman called. “Identify yourself, man!”
The stranger looked up. He made a faint croaking sound, inaudible in the wind.
“What? Who?” Salaman shouted.
The man made the sound again, less vigorously even than the last time.
“Father, he’s dying!” Biterulve said. “Let him in. What harm can he do?”
“A stranger — in the night, in the storm—”
“He’s just one man, and half dead, and there are two of us.”
“And if there are others out there, waiting for us to open the gate?”
“Father!”
Something in the boy’s tone cut through Salaman’s madness, and he nodded and called to the rider again, telling him to head for the gate. Then the king and his son went below to throw it open for him. But it was with the greatest difficulty that the stranger managed to guide his mount inside the wall. The beast wobbled a zigzag path through the snow. Twice the man nearly fell from the staggering xlendi, and when he was finally within he let go of the reins and simply toppled over the animal’s side, landing trembling on his knees and elbows. The king signaled to Biterulve to help him up.
He was a helmeted Beng. Though swaddled in skins and pelts tied tightly about him with yellow rope, he looked nearly frozen. His eyes were glazed, and a glossy coating of ice clung to his fur, which was of an odd pale pinkish-yellow cast, very strange for a Beng.
“Nakhaba!” he cried suddenly, and a shiver ran through him so fierce that it seemed likely to hurl his head free of his shoulders. “What weather! The cold is like fire! Is this the Long Winter come again?”
“Who are you, man?” Salaman asked sternly.
“Take me — inside—”
“Who are you, first?”
“Courier. From the chieftain Taniane. Bearing a message to the lord Thu-Kimnibol.” The stranger swayed and nearly fell. Then he pulled himself erect with some immense effort and said, in a deeper, stronger voice, “I am Tembi Somdech, guardsman of the City of Dawinno. In Nakhaba’s name, take me to the lord Thu-Kimnibol at once.”
And he fell face forward into the snow.
Salaman, scowling, gathered him up into his arms as easily as if the man were made of feathers. He gestured to Biterulve to collect all three xlendis, his own and his father’s and the stranger’s, and tie their reins together so that they could be led. On foot they proceeded inward to the core of the city. There was a guardhouse a few hundred paces away.
As they approached it, Salaman saw something so strange that he began to wonder whether he had never left his bed this night, but still lay dreaming by Sinithista’s side. There was a plaza yet another few hundred paces deeper still into the city, and Salaman, standing outside the guardhouse with the unconscious stranger in his arms, was able to see down the street into it. Within the plaza some twenty or thirty capering figures were dancing round and round by torchlight. They were men and women both, and a few children, all naked, or nearly so, wearing no more than sashes and scarves, and moving in wild jubilant prancing steps, flinging their arms about, violently throwing their heads back, kicking their knees high.
As Salaman watched, astounded, they completed the circuit of the plaza and disappeared down the Street of Sweetsellers at its farther end.
“Biterulve?” he said, wonderingly. “Did you see them too, those people in the Plaza of the Sun?”
“The dancers? Yes.”
“Has the whole city gone mad tonight, or is it only me?”
“They are Acknowledgers, I think.”
“Acknowledgers? What are they?”
“A sort of people — people who—” Biterulve faltered. He made a sign of confusion, turning his palms outward. “I’m not sure, father. You’d have to ask Athimin. He knows something about them. Father, we have to get this man indoors, or he’ll die.”
“Yes. Yes.” Salaman stared toward the plaza. It was empty now. If I go down there, he wondered, will I see their footprints in the snow, or are Biterulve’s words part of my dream also?