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By Root 2520 0

he could see nothing sinister in it. Nevertheless, since he was passing, he meant to make some enquiries, and rode unescorted and unmarked in order to do so. He left the Loire five miles short of Blois and, turning up the valley of the Cisse, rode slowly past the walls of the manor of Chouzy until he reached Coulanges beyond, where he reserved a room in a primitive tavern. He stopped at the Abbey of La Guiche on the way, and they told him all he wanted to know, even showing their records. He could see nothing wrong: the only other piece of local gossip they furnished he had already half guessed. He might have regretted his own small charade except that he was enjoying it, and he was perfectly sure, from long experience, that he was not being followed. There was even a proverb. ‘It’s gone to Coulanges,’ they said, when something had vanished.

The valley was beautiful. Sunk on the edge of the forest of Blois, it brimmed with the scent of hot grapes, hanging heavy in the groves just above, and reverberated to the rumble and splash of the flour-mills, devouring the first of the grain of the petite Beauce. This time he could dismount and talk to the hot-faced families he found working above the sparkling water. He sat with the boy, breaking bread with them, and listening to the snatches of laughter and song. Two of the Clarisses he had met at La Guiche passed, riding mules, their gleaming wimples directed towards him, and once he saw a servant cantering past, with the Chouzy blazon on his sleeve. Later, when he had eaten and slept for an hour in the tavern, he took his horse alone and found his way through hamlets and orchards back to the Loire, where the late sun lit the sandy banks and cool water. Tying his horse, he stripped to his small clothes, and swam.

Here he was alone. The river of kings carried him onwards in silence. He became aware of the broad unchanging harmony of its passage, decorated by the liquid surge of his body, and the sweet, high flourish as it surfed about distant stones. He heard birdsong, and music, and words filled his mind like the scent of the grapes. His senses woke. Behind, in another dimension, a man was speaking in Greek. Bessarion, discoursing on Plato, on Platonic love. What he felt now, loosed to the sun and the water, was not Platonic love. It was unbearable.

Just then, he saw the men on the shore, two of them, leaning against their mounts, talking. He noticed them because of the horse, a prince of a chestnut with a cream-coloured tail, loosely hobbled, its nostrils flared, patiently watching as if it were waiting for him. Then behind, half out of sight, he saw the girl.

He knew her. The blaze of emotion stopped his throat so that he had to fight to stay where he was, against the push of the current. He saw the face, pale as a Venetian mask above the light robe, but the hair about it was brown.

He exclaimed. The girl vanished. The grooms, when he looked for them, had gone as well, and all the horses. When, lifting himself out of the water, he stood where they had been, he could see nothing, not even a hoof-mark. And behind, beyond the reedy bushes that sprang by the shore, there was nothing either: no road, no trace of a building, merely the orchards heavy with fruit, and a copse of beeches, with the smoke of a hamlet rising beyond them.

Tell your doctors that you never have waking dreams. The girl had been no one he knew. The girl had been no one.

The sun was sinking. The air, losing its heat, made him shiver. He had turned to step back into the water when the nearest hedge trembled, and he faced about, thinking he was wrong; it had been real; the grooms had come back. Instead, three different men stepped out and began walking towards him.

These were neither grooms nor casual footpads. The sun burned like fire on their helms, and the light on their chain mail and cuirasses danced sudden and bright as a spout of dazzling hot water. They all carried clubs.

He could do nothing against them but run. He flung round to do so, and met the first blow from the three others behind him.

It