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"Don't, don't. "
I was heavy all over, my body had come back to me with its ache
s and its pains and my own choking cries, and I was being lifted, thrown upwards, until I fell over the creature's shoulder and I felt its arm around my knees.
I wanted to say God protect me, I wanted to say it with every particle of me but I couldn't say it, and there was the alleyway below me again, that drop of hundreds of feet, and the whole of Paris tilted at an appalling angle, and there was the snow and the searing wind.
Chapter 2
2
I was awake and I was very thirsty.
I wanted a great deal of very cold white wine, the way it is when you bring it up out of the cellar in autumn. I wanted something fresh and sweet to eat, like a ripe apple.
It did occur to me that I had lost my reason, though I couldn't have said why.
I opened my eyes and knew it was early evening. The light might have been morning light, but too much time had passed for that. It was evening.
And through a wide, heavily barred stone window I saw hills and woods, blanketed with snow, and the vast tiny collection of rooftops and towers that made up the city far away. I hadn't seen it like this since the day I came in the post carriage. I closed my eyes and the vision of it remained as if I'd never opened my eyes at all.
But it was no vision. It was there. And the room was warm in spite of the window. There had been a fire in the room, I could smell it, but the fire had gone out.
I tried to reason. But I couldn't stop thinking about cold white wine, and apples in the basket. I could see the apples. I felt myself drop down out of the branches of the tree, and I smelled all around me the freshly cut grass.
The sunlight was blinding on the green fields. It shone on Nicolas's brown hair, and on the deep lacquer of the violin. The music climbed up to the soft, rolling clouds. And against the sky I saw the battlements of my father's house.
Battlements.
I opened my eyes again.
And I knew I was lying in a high tower room several miles from Paris.
And just in front of me, on a crude little wooden table, was a bottle of cold white wine, precisely as I had dreamed it.
For a long time I looked at it, looked at the frost of droplets covering it, and I could not believe it possible to reach for it and drink.
Never had I known the thirst I was suffering now. My whole body thirsted. And I was so weak. And I was getting a little cold.
The room moved when I moved. The sky gleamed in the window.
And when at last I did reach for the bottle and pull the cork from it and smell the tart, delicious aroma, I drank and drank without stopping, not caring what would happen to me, or where I was, or why the bottle had been set here.
My head swung forward. The bottle was almost empty and the faraway city was vanishing in the black sky, leaving a little sea of lights behind it.
I put my hands to my head.
The bed on which I'd been sleeping was no more than stone with straw strewn upon it, and it was coming to me slowly that I might be in some sort of jail.
But the wine. It had been too good for a jail. Who would give a prisoner wine like that, unless of course the prisoner was to be executed.
And another aroma came to me, rich and overpowering and so delicious that it made me moan. I looked about, or I should say, I tried to look about because I was almost too weak to move. But the source of this aroma was near to me, and it was a large bowl of beef broth. The broth was thick with bits of meat, and I could see the steam rising from it. It was still hot.
I grabbed it in both hands immediately and I drank it as thoughtlessly and greedily as I'd chunk the wine.
It was so satisfying it was as if I'd never known any food like it, that rich boiled-down essence of the meat, and when the bowl was empty I fell back, full, almost sick, on the straw.
It seemed something moved in the darkness near me. But I was not sure. I heard the chink of glass.
