She didn't say what she had been told. Gaspard said desperately, "But you danced for me. You stood on the toes of one foot, the other leg raised so high . . . I have fought in so many battles with that picture of you in front of me. I have fought only for you." Even as he said this, he knew it was not true. And yet it was.

She smiled. "How loyal. The constant soldier. But you might better have fought as a means to your own preferment."

"You are my means to preferment," he said, and saw in her eyes how foolish it sounded. "There was blood on the step . . . "

"There will be blood here if you do not leave," she said quickly, as the clumping of a man's boots started down the staircase. Instantly Amalie vanished. But this time the soldier would not shrink into the shadows. He stood his ground.

Monsieur Endart was old. Bent, stooped, white-haired, perhaps blind, or nearly so. He walked slowly past the soldier and never glanced at him at all.

Gaspard smiled at the door through which Amalie had disappeared. Soon the child would be born, in cries and pain and blood. He could wait. Waiting was a necessary tactic of war.

You began dancing during the First Empire, n'est-ce pas? Your first role was in the corps de ballet of Dauberval's La Fille Mal Gardee. But none of the notices mention you.

No.

No one knew, then, what you would become.

None of us, young man, can know what we will become.

He was sent to Spain, under Marshal Murat. In Madrid he fought against rioting citizens outraged at the seizure of their homeland, armed with sticks and stones and the tools of their trade. He shot a blacksmith waving a hammer in one hand and a poker in the other, and a stonemason firing a rifle so old it must have belonged to his grandfather, and a baker with flour on his apron. The riot was quelled in less than a day. Later, when Spain was invaded by the English, he went back, serving under the Emperor himself.

He was gazetted a corporal.

At Seville he was wounded: four ribs and a collarbone broken. It healed leaving only a puckered scar and a slight bumpiness where the bones had knit. He caught a disease of the bowels, and then a fever, and survived both.

He was made a lieutenant.

Every night, just before sleep, he pushed aside the face of the stonemason, mouth surprised into a long slit in his rough beard just before the bullet tore into his throat. He pushed aside the baker and the blacksmith and pictured Amalie Dumont, dancing on the stone stoop, one leg raised so high in an arabesque that it seemed to disappear into the shadows of the street.

When he returned to Paris, it seethed with soldiers. Danish, Swiss, Dutch, French. Once more he could not find her. Gaspard was older now; he knew people; he had developed an air of command. People answered his questions. He found her not at the Opera but in a second-rate company just in from the provinces. She danced again at the end of a line of ballet girls: thin, hollow-cheeked, too pale. Her attitude croisee wobbled.

In the dressing room she sprawled on a ramshackle chair, bent over the ribbons of her slippers. The other girls, jammed all together in the small room, twittered and stripped.

"Mademoiselle Dumont."

"You!"

"Yes, me. I've come to take you to supper."

She glanced nervously at the door. "I can't."

"Why not?"

"I am otherwise engaged, Lieutenant . . . uh . . . "

"Gaspard Lafort. Break the engagement."

The girls twittered more loudly, exchanging amused glances. She said, "No, no. Please leave."

"Where is your diamond merchant? And the baby?"

"He died," she said, and he didn't know which she meant. It didn't matter. "Please go!"

Gaspard folded his arms across his chest and waited. The man came in, eventually. Not a dancer, nor a soldier. An innkeeper, perhaps, or a small farmer. The innkeeper scowled.

"Mademoiselle Dumont comes with me," Gaspard said. "Good day, Citizen."

"Amalie!"

"I will see you later, Michel." With eyes demure and downcast, her beauty returning with male rivalry.

After the tavern supper, in his room at the inn, Gaspard said, "Dance for me."

She did, briefly, sly pas de chats and airy bourrees, nothing too difficult. During an entrechat she almost lost her balance. She ended with one leg raised high. He saw the bruises on her bare thigh. He pulled her to him-carefully, as if she were glass filigree-and kissed the bruise.

In the morning she was gone, and with her his purse, his kit, his boots, and his sword.

What have been your favorite roles, Mademoiselle?

I have no favorite roles.

He was sent to Russia, the vast, the unknown.

The advancing army, 500,000 strong, met only small skirmishes. The enemy retreated. At night wolves howled, the first Gaspard had ever heard. By October, the cold froze skin and nose hairs. The Emperor wore a peasant woman's shawl over his uniform, for warmth. They took Moscow, but as soon as they had taken it, the Russians themselves burned it to the ground. There was no food, no fuel, no shelter. Only cold. Gaspard fought looters in the burning capital, army soldiers beside frozen rivers, mounted cossacks on steppes so swept with wind that it was hard to stand upright long enough to fire.

Crossing an icy river, the ragged army was attacked. A shell landed beside Gaspard and exploded. His leg was ripped off at the knee.

In the cold, the blood drained more slowly, but not so slowly that he couldn't feel it leave his body, watch it stain the snow red. He lay on his back, frigid wind howling over his face, and stared at the gray sky. In every snowflake he saw Amalie, dancing. In the tavern bedroom, her feet had not bled. They bled now, in memory, and each red drop was the blood of the baker, the blacksmith, the stonemason, the Austrian soldiers, the Moscow looters, the mounted cavalry that Gaspard had shot.

He had not at first chosen to be a soldier. Later, he had loved it. He had given his strength to war, and his will, and his blood, now seeping into ground too frozen to absorb it. Enemy ground. But the enemy must not have his blood power, even though he could not keep it himself. They should not have it. It must go elsewhere.

"Amalie," he whispered. "Amalie."

And fainted.

You have been dancing for over forty years, Mademoiselle. You have seen ballet change, become more refined and exquisite-the phantoms of Robert le Diable, the disembodied spirits of La Sylphide, and of course the ghostly dead brides in Giselle. You yourself have refused to dance any of these ballets, refused to dance at all unless the Opera revived the . . . the earthier works of an earlier time. Why is that?

No reason.

Come, there must be a reason. Is it loyalty to the . . . Mademoiselle? What have I said to amuse you?

In Paris the chestnut trees were in full flower, and June roses scented the night air. The soldier waited outside the Opera. He gazed steadily at the door, standing on his left leg, balancing on his crutch. His right leg was a stump, dipped and sealed in hot tar.

She came out alone, as if she knew this was the night he would be there. Flowers ringed her dark hair, and her ballet skirt was pink tulle and blue satin. Gaspard glanced down at her feet. The soft blue slippers were bloody.

"Bon soir, Amalie."

"Gaspard. You are-"

"Home. I am home."

She stared at his one leg and he saw the swift recalculations behind her eyes, the shift in reaction. Many people looked at him this way now. She smiled. "I honor your sacrifice for France."

"It was not a sacrifice for France."

She tried to look shocked, failed. "But surely-"

"It was for you. All of it. And when lose it I must, I lost it to you."

Her beautiful face turned wary. "You make no sense, Lieutenant."

"There is no sense to it. Only truth."

"Please excuse me; I am late."

She swept past him, but he grabbed her arm. "Dance for me once more."

"Let go of me!"

"Once more. So I can see what my loyalty has given you."

"Buy a ticket, Monsieur!" She broke free of his grasp and ran lightly down the street. Even in the darkness, even from behind, he could see how much more lightly she moved than she had before.

He bought a ticket the next night, many nights. She was no longer the last ballet girl in the corps de ballet. She led the corps. She danced in a small pas de trois in Les Amans Surpris. She danced a brief solo in Medea et Jason. Gaspard always stood where she could see him, in a front box or the side aisle or once, when he bribed a stagehand, in the wings. He stood on his one leg and gazed, unmoving, at Amalie.

Did you always plan to be a ballet dancer? Since you were a small child?

I never planned to be a ballet dancer.

But, surely, the discipline, the practice- I never planned to remain a dancer!

The war had gone wrong. In Paris, they could hear the guns. The tulips stood straight and tall in the gardens of the Tuileries, and the air smelled of hyacinths, decaying meat, drains. People pushed through the streets the Emperor had redesigned, the marketplaces, the quays and wide squares. They carried babies, dragged overladen carts, tugged on frightened donkeys. The enemy was only hours away-the Russians ate roast children for supper-the Prussians used babies for bayonet practice. Get out, leave Paris. Vite! Vite!

Gaspard hopped through the crowds, steadying himself with his crutch. Boys in uniforms too big for them, old men from battles nobody remembered-the National Guard prepared to defend the city. Artillery thundered closer.

Crossing a half-built square beside the Seine, where the paving stones were uneven, Gaspard fell.

For a moment, dazed on the ground, he thought he was back in Russia. Then his head cleared and he tried to rise. Some boys, thirteen or fourteen years old, rushed past, knocking him over again. A few yards away they stopped.

"Dis donc! A soldier of the Emperor!"

"You mean, of the upstart who stole the throne!"

"My papa says-"

Royalists. Coming now out of their holes. No, not Royalists but children, in another year they would be conscripted to the army, the nonsense knocked out of them. There would not be another year.

"Into the Seine with him, the swine, the traitor-"

They rolled him across the square like a barrel, over and over, the sword clanking at his side each time it struck the cobblestones. At the river three of them, one at each limb, hoisted him to the railing and toppled him over. He splashed into the water and sank.

Amalie. As his lungs grew hot and the current bore him along underwater, he thought, This is how she feels dancing. Weightless. Then his lungs burst and he gulped water. A second later his head broke the surface and he sputtered, only to go down again.

This time he saw her, there on the mud and rocks and green-slimed stone wall of the embankment. She was dancing. A slow pirouette while her filmy skirt drifted among the water plants. Retiree into attitude croisee, the left leg lifted behind, then opening flowerlike into arabesque. Gaspard reached a hand toward her, but she bourreed away, her smile enchanting. He smiled back. The moment was perfect. They were one.

He was seized from behind and pulled above water. Pain burst his lungs; water streamed out of his mouth and nose. "Get him aboard, non, non, careful-"

"He is dead!"

"He is not."

Amalie- Two men dumped him onto the deck of the fishing boat. "Lame, poor fellow. There, get him aboard."

"We will take him with us out of Paris. A loyal soldier of the Empire. . . the Prussians shall not have him. Paaaw, but he stinks."

"The river stinks."

"I wonder how he fell?"

Let us talk about the extraordinary reception your dancing received.

Long ago, you mean.

It was said-and I quote from Le Journal de Paris-that you "dance as if pursued by wolves. Savagely, relentlessly." Was that so?

Not wolves. Fire. Fire and blood.

I beg your pardon?

You do not have it.