You make no sense, Mademoiselle. Dancing is not war.

It took Gaspard a year to get back to Paris. A fever came on him from breathing the river water; it left him very weak. He recuperated at home, in his village near the Pyrenees. There, nothing had changed. But in Paris the city had fallen, the Emperor been forced into exile. He will come back, old soldiers said, he will return with the violets.

And he did, escaping Elba, the loyal rallying to his march home. Paris cheered and laughed and danced. In a thousand places the Bourbon lilies were torn down, ripped out, painted over with the Imperial bees.

Gaspard went immediately to the Opera. Ink on the handbills was still wet: AMALIE DUMONT.

dance.

ORPHEUS ET EURIDICE.

He caught her leaving her dressing room, dressed for the street in pelisse and bonnet, carrying a silk muff. The dressing room behind her overflowed with flowers and shawls and perfume and fans and small enameled boxes the pink of new skin, the white of exposed bone.

"Amalie. I have come home."

She whirled on him. "What has that to do with me!"

"Everything." He looked at her steadily. She would never dance for him again, he knew. It didn't matter. He would watch her from the stalls, from the pit, from the wings. She could not escape him. He would send her flowers every night. He would wait for her at the alley door, and hobble after her carriage, and wipe the blood from her slippers off stone steps.

"Leave me alone, damn you! Stop haunting me!"

"Never. I will never desert you. I have given you all that I am."

"I didn't want it!"

"That doesn't matter." It was not to be expected that she would comprehend. She was not a soldier.

"Please, please leave me alone."

"Never."

"I can dance now! I never wanted to make my life as a dancer, it was only a means to . . . I wanted to wear silk dresses and drive in carriages and be . . . but now I am a dancer. You have done this to me! Now go away!"

He gazed at her, unswerving, without pretending he did not understand. "No."

"Please . . . "

Gaspard said, "One cannot desert blood." She could not be expected to know that either. Blood was not tin. Once blood was shed, it was shed. One could only remain steadfast to the cause of its shedding.

"But I don't want you!" Amalie cried, and hid her face in her long slender hands. She sobbed aloud. Dancers and stagehands stopped in astonishment to look at her. Gaspard looked, too, drinking her in, his fond gaze never wavering until she rushed away into the foyer and then the street, where with his one leg he could not swiftly follow.

Dancing is not war, Mademoiselle. Dancing is . . . art.

Art is no more than whatever animates it, drives it. And what animates us but blood?

Many things. Honor. Courage. Loyalty.

That is what I have just said. Loyalty. It has a terrible life of its own.

Everywhere she went, he was there. He watched her laughing at the Theatre-Francais, strolling on the new Champs-elysees, shopping for slippers or gloves, stepping down from her carriage for a ball in the rue Chantereine. All of Paris seemed Bonapartist now, the few Royalists gone, or shuttered in their houses, or silent. Gaspard wore his uniform proudly as he watched Amalie. Watched her walk, watched her talk, watched her eat, watched her drive. Watched her dance, one leg kicking high in a grand battement. He never tired of watching. He never got enough.

"Go away," she whispered, or shrieked, or whimpered. "Leave me alone. For the love of God . . . "

God had nothing to do with it. He would love her unfailingly, always.

She danced Les Pommes d'Or, and the crowds almost tore the theater apart. She danced La Triomphe de la France, the music ink still wet, and the Emperor's brother attended, Prince Lucien. She danced La Vengeance d'une Mere, and Le Journal de Paris called her "a jewel of the Empire. On stage, she is not merely woman, but becomes something infinitely more powerful, infinitely more French. Amalie Dumont becomes the steadfast spirit of France herself."

The only time Gaspard lowered his eyes from her face was when her feet bled, the blood soaking through the soft-toed slippers.

One night in June she danced Medea et Jason, the night all the bells of Paris rang for the victory at Ligny. Gaspard stood outside her house in the rue Sainte Marie when the news came, two days later, of the defeat at Waterloo. The coalition marched toward Paris. Many of the rich were evacuating. Gaspard watched the footman fling open the door of her carriage.

"You have waited too long to leave the city, Amalie. The roads are blocked." They were the first words he had spoken aloud in a month.

She stopped, one delicate foot set on the carriage step, and looked at him with hatred so pure it shone, like silver. "Do not try to stop me!"

"You will be back."

She was, by evening. Looters and roving mobs roamed the streets just ahead of the invaders. The mobs plundered houses, fought quick sharp skirmishes, set fires. Smoke rose above the city, and sometimes screams. Gaspard stood stiffly on guard at Amalie's gate, unmoving.

She jumped from the carriage, carrying her valise in one hand and silk muff in the other. Her black hair straggled from its chignon; her pelisse was dirty and torn. The foamy sides of the horses heaved and labored. Blood smeared her left cheek.

"Amalie."

She whirled on him, a move so smooth and quick it might have been a pirouette. Gaspard smiled to see it. At his smile, something shifted in Amalie's face. She began to breathe in quick sharp pants, and in her eyes leaped something that Gaspard seemed to recognize. He said, "Yes . . . from blood-" and had time for no more before she raised the pistol from her muff and shot him through the heart.

"Mademoiselle!" the coachman gasped. "Mademoiselle-!"

"Inside. Get inside now." She ran into her house just as a burning brand was hurled at the house opposite, landed, and set the wooden structure aflame.

Gaspard never moved as the fire swept toward him. His one good leg stuck out straight, and his hand covered his heart. His eyes looked toward Amalie's house, and never wavered, not even once.

Loyalty has "a terrible life of its own"? I do not understand you, Mademoiselle.

No, probably not. I do not think ghosts are romantic, Monsieur. Not beautiful ethereal maidens floating over graveyards. Not tenderhearted Wilis, bloodless sylphides. Our dead are not beyond loyalty-nor beyond revenge. Their blood imprisons us.

Mademoiselle?

Do you know that I have danced every day since my retirement? Every last day?

Really? Danced every day, for no one?

I did not say that.

I don't understand.

You don't need to. But this will be my last performance, thank God. And soon, I think . . .

Yes?

I shall see for myself how much revenge the dead are owed for their loyalty.

Mademoiselle?

We shall see.

JANE YOLEN.

Jane Yolen lives in Massachusetts. She is closing in on two hundred books published, and about as many short stories. Called "America's Hans Christian Andersen" and "America's Aesop," because of her many children's stories, she is also the author of novels and poetry for adults that have won the Rhysling Award, the Asimov's Readers' Poll Award, the Mythopoeic Society's Asian Award, the World Fantasy Award, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award.

There are many fairy tales that personify death; they can be found in cultures all around the world. The Brothers Grimm variant, "Godfather Death," was the basis for a terrific story by Roger Zelazny in Black Thorn, White Rose. Now Jane Yolen has her own unique take on this classic theme.

GODMOTHER DEATH.

by Jane Yolen.

You think you know this story. You do not.

You think it comes from Ireland, from Norway, from Spain. It does not. You have heard it in Hebrew, in Swedish, in German. You have read it in French, in Italian, in Greek.

It is not a story, though many mouths have made it that way.

It is true.

How do I know? Death, herself, told me. She told me in that whispery voice she saves for special tellings. She brushed her thick black hair away from that white forehead, and told me.

I have no reason to disbelieve her. Death does not know how to lie. She has no need to.

It happened this way, only imagine it in Death's own soft breeze of a voice. Imagine she is standing over your right shoulder speaking this true story in your ear. You do not turn to look at her. I would not advise it. But if you do turn, she will smile at you, her smile a child's smile, a woman's smile, the grin of a crone. But she will not tell her story anymore. She will tell yours.

It happened this way, as Death told me. She was on the road, between Cellardyke and Crail. Or between Claverham and Clifton. Or between Chagford and anywhere. Does it matter the road? It was small and winding; it was cobbled and potholed; it led from one place of human habitation to another. Horses trotted there. Dogs marked their places. Pig drovers and cattle drovers and sheepherders used those roads. So why not Death?

She was visible that day. Sometimes she plays at being mortal. It amuses her. She has had a long time trying to amuse herself. She wore her long gown kirtled above her knee. She wore her black hair up in a knot. But if you looked carefully, she did not walk like a girl of that time. She moved too freely for that, her arms swinging. She stepped on her full foot, not on the toes, not mincing. She could copy the clothes, but she never remembered how girls really walk.

A man, frantic, saw her and stopped her. He actually put his hand on her arm. It startled her. That did not happen often, that Death is startled. Or that a man puts a hand on her.

"Please," the man said. "My Lady." She was clearly above him, though she had thought she was wearing peasant clothes. It was the way she stood, the way she walked. "My wife is about to give birth to our child and we need someone to stand godmother. You are all who is on the road."

Godmother? It amused her. She had never been asked to be one. "Do you know who I am?" she asked.

"My Lady?" The man suddenly trembled at his temerity. Had he touched a high lord's wife? Would she have him executed? No matter. It was his first child. He was beyond thinking.

Death put a hand up to her black hair and pulled down her other face. "Do you know me now?"

He knew. Peasants are well acquainted with Death in that form. He nodded.

"And want me still?" Death asked.

He nodded and at last found his voice. "You are greater than God or the Devil, Lady. You would honor us indeed."

His answer pleased her, and so she went with him. His wife was couched under a rowan tree, proof against witches. The babe was near to crowning when they arrived.

"I have found a great lady to stand as godmother," the man said. "But do not look up at her face, wife." For suddenly he feared what he had done.

His wife did not look, except out of the corner of her eye. But so seeing Death's pale, beautiful face, she was blinded in that eye forever. Not because Death had blinded the woman. That was not her way. But fear-and perhaps the sugar sickness-did what Death would not.

The child, a boy, was born with a caul. Death ripped it open with her own hand, then dropped the slimed covering onto the morning grass where it shimmered for a moment like dew.

"Name him Haden," Death said. "And when he is a man I shall teach him a trade." Then she was gone, no longer amused. Birth never amused her for long.

Death followed the boy's progress one year closely, another not at all. She sent no gifts. She did not stand for him at the church font. Still, the boy's father and his half-blind mother did well for themselves; certainly better than peasants had any reason to expect. They were able to purchase their own farm, able to send their boy to a school. They assumed it was because of Death's patronage, when in fact she had all but forgotten them and her godson. You cannot expect Death to care so about a single child, who has seen so many.

Yet on the day Haden became a man, on the day of his majority, his father called Death. He drew her sign in the sand, the same that he had seen on the chain around her neck. He said her name and the boy's.

And Death came.

One minute the man was alone and the next he was not. Death was neither winded nor troubled by her travel, though she still wore the khakis of an army nurse. She had not bothered to change from her last posting.

"Is it time?" she asked, who was both in and out of time. "Is he a man, my godson?" She knew he was not dead. That she would have known.