And so my image of her then is a special burden: reclining in the half-light in a pile of dirty blankets, her red clothes already rumpled, studying the bracelet on her wrist, her skin the color of honey, her yellow hair, her yellow eyes. Her dark eyebrows—there was no delicacy in her face, no art.

Death is the dark mountain where the snow never breaks beneath your feet. Yet something in the way she looked made it hard to bear the thought of dying. And I cursed my weakness, for a free man comes to love death as a drunkard loves his bottle. It is painful to have reasons to live. And so I turned away from her, and in a little while I got to my feet and wandered outside into the sunlight.

I wandered towards the gate. Barbarians were there. You could hear them trying to break in, the rhythm of their hammers on the wooden beams, the lash of the whip, the beat of the cursed drum. I closed my eyes and blocked my ears, but even then I could feel the slavish rhythm in my heart and in my pulse, so deep within us runs that barbarian music. Our bodies are not made for the life we want to lead, for freedom, for emptiness—I saw that, I felt it in my body. That drumbeat can’t be stopped. Knowing that, it was as if something broke in me, something surrendered. I looked up at my brothers and sisters, perched on the walls and on the roofs of buildings, clutching their weapons and their instruments, watching the soldiers break down the door.

Over me above the gate rose up the ruins of a tower, squat, round, broken, hollow. There was a way of climbing to the top. I had discovered it when I was still a child, a way of scaling the stairless stones up to the remnants of a belfry high up above the town. Belfry, I say—once wooden scaffolding had supported a great bell, silent in my memory, except for when the beams had broken and the bell had fallen with a singing clash, as if waiting for the moment when a man was riding out into the snow, out through the double gate with all the world in front of him. Horse and rider died. Biters had taken days to slave away the wreck, for the bell cut deeply into the frozen ground. I remembered as I climbed the tower, the mass of fallen masonry and metal, the broken horse and man.