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?

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 in 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 resealed 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.”