He took a deep pull of his wine. He was beginning to feel a little better now. The wind seemed to be dying down.
“Dear Thu-Kimnibol,” he said again, after a time.
There was a sound like the slap of a giant hand against the palace wall. The wind’s brief lull was over. The gale was back with twice the fervor of before. And with its return, Salaman’s little moment of good feelings was gone. Suddenly there was a pounding in his head, a constriction in his breast.
“What a terrible night it is,” Thaloin whispered to Vladirilka. “It’ll drive the king mad.” It was only the barest thread of a whisper. But Salaman’s hearing was unnaturally keen when the black winds were blowing. Her words reached him with the force of a shout.
“What’s that? What. You think I’ll go mad, is that what you say?” he cried, springing up. Thaloin shrank back, one arm across her face to protect herself. The room grew very still. Salaman loomed over her. “A terrible night. This terrible season. A terrible night. This terrible season. The Long Winter come again, you say. You complain all the time, woman. Can’t you ever be content with what you have? I ought to turn you out into the cold so you can see what it’s really like!” Thu-Kimnibol was staring at him. The king gripped the edge of the table to steady himself. Rage is coursing like lava through his brain. In another moment he’ll be roaring. It’s all he can do to keep from knocking Thaloin across the room. His own mate, whom he cherishes. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps he’s mad already. This damnable wind, this accursed season.
I’m ruining the feast, he thinks. I’m shaming myself and my whole family before Thu-Kimnibol.
“You must excuse me,” he says to his guest in a hoarse, ragged fragment of a voice. “This wind—I’m not well—”
He looks around the room, half glaring, half apologetic. Dares them all to speak. No one does. His three mates are terrified. Thaloin is ready to fling herself down under the table. Vladirilka looks appalled. Only Sinithista, the calmest and sturdiest of them, seems in any way composed. “You,” he says, beckoning her to his side out of his group of women, and goes sweeping off with her to his bedchamber amidst the screaming of the wind.
In the depths of the night a terrible fantasy overcomes the king. Salaman imagines that he is lying not with his familiar mate Sinithista but with a female of the hjjks, whose hard scaly body is pressed close against him.
Her black-bristled fore-claws caress his cheeks. Her powerful multiple-jointed hind legs are clasped about his thighs, and her mid-limbs hold him by the waist. Her huge gleaming many-faceted eyes, bulging like toadstools, stare passionately into his. She makes harsh rasping sounds of delight. Worst of all, he is pressing himself to her with equal fervor, his fingers running tenderly over the orange breathing-tubes that dangle beside her head, his lips seeking out her fierce sharp beak. And his mating-rod, stiff and immense with lust, is plunged deep into some mysterious orifice of her long rigid thorax.
He cries in horror, a dreadful wailing bellow of pain and rage that might almost have toppled the city wall itself, and pulls himself free. In a wild bound he springs from the bed, and goes searching madly about the room for a glowberry candle.
“My lord?” Sinithista called, in a small, plaintive voice.
Salaman, standing naked and trembling convulsively beside the window, managed to find the light and uncover it. No hjjk, no. Only Sinithista, sitting up in bed and staring at him in astonishment. She was shivering. Her breasts were heaving, her sexual parts were swollen in arousal. He looked down at his mating-rod, throbbing painfully, still rigid. All a dream, then. He had been coupling with Sinithista in his drunken sleep, and had taken her for—for—
“My lord, what is it that troubles you?” Sinithista asked.
“Nothing. Nothing. An ugly dream.”
“Come back to bed, then!”
“No,” he told her sternly. If he lets himself sleep again this night the dream will seize him anew. Perhaps if he banishes Sinithista from the chamber, no, no, that would be worse, being alone. He does not dare to close his eyes a moment. Behind his eyelids the dreadful image of that monster would burst forth again.
“My lord.” The woman was sobbing now.
He pitied her. He had abandoned her in mid-coupling, after all. He had not been with her in many weeks, not since his fascination with Vladirilka had overwhelmed him, and now he appeared to be spurning her.
But he wasn’t going to return to bed.
Salaman went to her and touched her lightly on the shoulder, and whispered, “This dream has so disturbed me that I must have some air. I’ll come to you again later, when my mind is clear. Go back to sleep.”
“My lord, your outcry was so frightening—”
“Yes,” he said. He found a robe and threw it on, and went from the room.
There was nothing but darkness in the palace. The air was frigid. A ghastly wind was ripping down out of the east, and white swirls of snow rode on it like angry ghosts. But he couldn’t stay here. The entire building seemed polluted by his monstrous nightmare. He went down and down, and out to the stables. Two grooms looked up sleepily at him as he entered, saw it was the king, and rolled over again. They were accustomed to his moods. If he wanted a xlendi in the depths of the night, well, that was nothing new to them.
He selected a mount and rode out, toward the city wall, to his private pavilion.
The storm raged above him, so strong a wind that it was a wonder it didn’t blow the moon itself out of the sky. There was more snow with it than he could remember, already enough to encrust the ground with white to a depth of a fingertip or so, and coming down more swiftly all the time. He looked back and by the blurred moonlight he saw that the xlendi’s hooves were leaving a sharply pronounced track in the whiteness.
Tethering his mount below the pavilion, Salaman raced up the staircase to the top. His heart was hammering in his ribs. In the pavilion the king grasped the windowledge and hung his head outside, heedless of the icy gusts. He needed to cleanse it of every vestige of the dream that had coursed through his sleeping wine-sotted mind.
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 animals 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 glassy 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 then he fell 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?
Acknowledgers, he thought. Acknowledgers. What is it that they acknowledge? Or whom?
He carried the man inside the guardhouse.
Three blurry-eyed guardsmen, all too obviously caught sleeping, came lurching out. When they saw it was the king, they coughed and cringed in horror, and made obeisance; but he had no time to give attention to such creatures now. “Get a bed for this man, and some warm broth, and put dry clothing on him,” he ordered. To Biterulve he said more quietly, “Check the saddlebags of his xlendi. I want to see that message before Thu-Kimnibol does.”
He waited, staring at his fingertips, until the boy returned.
Biterulve came in, some minutes later, with a packet in his hand. “This is it, I think.”
“Read it to me. My eyes are weak tonight.”
“It’s sealed, father.”
“Break the seal. Do it carefully.”
“Is this wise, father?”
“Give it to me!” Salaman snapped, seizing the packet from him. Indeed it bore the red seal of Taniane, with the chieftain’s imprint on it. A secret message, for Thu-Kimnibol. Well, there were ways of dealing with seals. He shouted to the guardsmen to bring him a knife and a torch, and heated the seal until it was soft, and pried it up. The packet, when unfastened, opened into a broad vellum sheet.
“Read it to me now,” the king said.
Biterulve put his fingers to the sheet and the words sprang to life on it. At first he seemed puzzled, not having been trained in the Beng-influenced writing now in favor in the City of Dawinno; but it took him only a moment to adjust his mind to it. “It’s very short. Come home at once, regardless of whatever you’re doing, is what Taniane says. And she says, Things here are very bad. We need you.”
“That’s all?”
“Nothing else, father.”
Salaman took the sheet from him, folded it again, carefully res
ealed it. “Put it in the saddlebags where you found it,” he told the boy.
One of the guardsmen appeared. “He refuses the broth, sire. He’s too weak for it. He seems starved and frozen. He’s dying, is what I think.”
“Force the broth into him,” the king said. “I won’t have him die on my hands. Well, man, don’t just stand there!”
“No use,” the second guardsman said. “He’s gone, sire.”
“Gone? Are you sure?”
“He sat up, and cried out something in Beng, and his whole body shook in a way that was fearful to watch. Then he fell down on the bed and didn’t move again.”
These southerners, Salaman thought. A few weeks of riding through the cold and they fall down dead.
But for the guardsmen’s benefit he made a few quick holy signs, and intoned a Yissou-have-mercy, and told them to summon a healer just in case there was still some life in the man after all. But also make arrangements for his burial, he ordered. To Biterulve he said, “Take that xlendi to the palace stables and bring the saddlebags to my private chamber, and put them under lock and key. Then go to the hostelry and wake up Thu-Kimnibol. Let him know what’s happened. Tell him he can collect his message when he comes to the palace in the morning.”
“And you, father?”
“To the pavilion for a little while, I think. I need to clear my mind.”
He went outside. Glancing down the street to the left, he stared into the Plaza of the Sun, to see if the Acknowledgers had come back to it to dance again. No, the plaza was deserted. He touched his hand to his throbbing forehead, bent, scooped up a few fingers’ worth of snow, and rubbed it against his brow. That was a little better.
It was almost dawn. The wind howled unabated. But the snow was ceasing, now. It mantled the ground to a surprising depth. He couldn’t recall a snowfall this heavy in thirty years. Was that why those people had come out? To dance in it, to rejoice over the strangeness of it.
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