Queen of Springtime (40 page)

“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 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.”

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.

Acknowledgers, he thought. Acknowledgers.

I have to speak with Athimin about them in the morning.

He ascended the wall and stood for a long while at the window of his pavilion, staring out into the bleakness of the southern plains, until his mind was utterly void of thought and his aching body had yielded up some of the tautness of its tense muscles. Eventually a pink light began to appear in the east. This whole night has been a dream, Salaman told himself. Feeling strangely unweary, as though he had passed into some state beyond even the possibility of fatigue—or as though, perhaps, he had died without noticing it, somewhere during the night—he went slowly down the stairs and rode back through the awakening city to the palace.

Athimin was the first to come to him that morning as he sat enthroned, waiting in eerie tranquility, in the Hall of State. There was something odd about the prince’s movements as he approached the throne, something hesitant, that Salaman didn’t like. Ordinarily Athimin carried himself in a burly, decisive way, as befitted the next-to-oldest of the king’s eight sons. But now he seemed not so much to stride as to skulk toward the throne, giving his father wary glances as though peeping at him over the top of an arm that was flung defensively across his face.

“The gods grant you a good morning, father,” he said, sounding oddly tentative. “They tell me you didn’t sleep well. The lady Sinithista—”

“You’ve talked to her already, have you?”

“Chham and I breakfasted with her, and she seemed troubled. She told us you’d had a profound dark dream, and had gone rushing out in the night like one who’s possessed—”

“The lady Sinithista,” Salaman said, “should keep her royal mouth shut, or I’ll shut it for her. But I didn’t ask you here to discuss the nature of my dreams.” He gave the prince a sharp look. “What are Acknowledgers, Athimin?”

“Acknowledgers, sir?”

“Acknowledgers, yes. You’ve heard the term before, have you?”

“Why, yes, father. But it surprises me that you have.”

“It was in the night just past, also, one of my many adventures this night. I was outside the guardhouse near the Plaza of the Sun, and I looked down the street and saw lunatics dancing naked in the snow. Biterulve was with me, and I said, What are those, and he said, They are Acknowledgers, father. And he could say nothing more about them than that. You’d be able to give me better information, he told me.

Athimin shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. Salaman had never seen him like this before, so uncertain, so restive. The king began to smell the smell of treachery.

“Acknowledgers, sir—these dancers you saw—these people you rightly call madmen—”

“Lunatics is the word I used. Those who are driven mad by the moon. Though there was precious little moonlight visible through the driving snow while they were dancing. Who are these people, Athimin?”

“Unfortunate strange folk is what they are, whose minds have been turned by drivel and nonsense. They are just such folk as would dance when the black wind blows, or frolic naked in the snow. Or do many another strange things. Nothing fazes them. They hold the conviction that death isn’t important, that you should never at any time care about risk, but just do whatever seems right to you, without fear, without hindrance.”

Salaman leaned forward, gripping the arm-rests of the Throne of Harruel.

“So this is some new philosophy, then, you say?”

“More like a religion, sir. Or so we think. There’s a system of belief that they teach one another—they have a book, a scripture—and they hold secret meetings, which we have yet to infiltrate. We’ve only begun to understand them, you see. The sapphire-eyes folk seem to be what they most admire, because they stayed calm when the Long Winter was coming on, and were indifferent to death. The Acknowledgers say that this is the great thing taught by Dawinno the Destroyer, that we need to show indifference to dying, that death is simply an aspect of change and is therefore holy.”

“Indifference to dying,” said Salaman, musing. “Acceptance of death as an aspect of change.”

“That’s why they call themselves Acknowledgers,” Athimin said. “The thing that they acknowledge is that death can’t be avoided, that it is in fact the design of the gods. And so they do whatever comes into their heads to do, father, regardless of risk or discomfort.”

Salaman clenched his fists. He felt fury rising in him again after these hours of early morning calmness.

So the City of Dawinno wasn’t the only place plagued by an absurd new creed? Gods! It sickened him to hear that such madness was loose virtually under his very nose. This could lead to anarchy, this cult of martyrdom. People who fear nothing will do anything. And worship of death wasn’t what his city needed. What was needed here was life, nothing but life, new flowering, new growth, new strength!

He rose angrily to his feet.

“Insanity!” he cried. “How many such lunatics do we have in this city?”

“We’ve counted a hundred ninety of them, father. There may be more.”

“You seem to know a great deal about these Acknowledgers.”

“I’ve been investigating them all this month past, sir.”

“You have? And said not a word to me?”

“Our findings were only preliminary. We needed to know more before—”

“More?” Salaman bellowed. “Madness is spreading like a pestilence in the city, and you needed to know more before you could tell me even that such a thing exists here? I was to be kept in the dark about it all? Why? And for how long? How long?”

“Father, the black winds were blowing, and we felt—”

“Ah. Ah, I understand now.” He stepped forward and brought his arm up in the same instant, and struck Athimin ferociously across the cheek. The prince’s head rocked back. Sturdy as he was, he nearly lost his balance at the force of the blow. For an instant there was fiery rage in the younger man’s eyes; then he recovered, and took a step away from the throne, breathing heavily and rubbing the place where he had been struck. He stared at his father with a look of utter disbelief on his face.

“So this is how it begins,” said Salaman very calmly, after some moments. “The old man is considered so unstable, so easily deranged, that during the troublesome season he has to be kept from learning of significant developments that have occurred in the city, so that he won’t become so upset by them, that he’ll take unpredictable action. That’s the start of it, shielding the old man from difficult knowledge at a time of the year when he’s known to behave rashly. The next step is to shield him even from the mildly disturbing things, so that he’ll never feel any distress at all, for who knows? He might be dangerous when he’s troubled in any way, even the slightest. And a little while after that, the princes gather and conclude among themselves that he’s become so capricious and volatile that he can’t be trusted even in the times of calm weather, and so he’s gently removed from the throne, with the softest of apologies, and sent to live under guard in some smaller palace, while his eldest son takes his place on the Throne of Harruel, and—”

“Father!” Athimin cried in a strangled voice. “None of this is true! By all the gods, I swear that no such thoughts have entered the minds of any of—”

“Keep quiet!” Salaman thundered, raising his hand as though to strike him again. He gestured furiously to the throne-room guards. “You—you—convey Lord Athimin to the North Prison immediately, and have him kept in custody there until I send further word concerning his disposal.”

“
Father
!”

“You’ll have plenty of time to reflect on your errors while you’re sitting in your cell,” the king said. “And I’ll have writing materials sent to you, so you can prepare a full report on these deranged Acknowledgers of yours, telling me everything that you were too cowardly or too perfidious to tell me until I pulled some of it from you this morning. For there’s more: I’m certain there’s more. And you’ll tell me all of it. Do you understand me?” He made a sweeping gesture. “Take him out of here.”

Athimin threw him a stunned, bewildered look. But he said not a word, nor did he resist in any way while the guards, looking no less astonished than he, led him from the great hall.