His breath stank. I reached out to grab the string around his neck, to twist it in my hand until the slack was taken up. I held him at arm’s length and shook him once, gently. He went quiet, and I looked up at the stars. “Please,” he said, his voice full of fear. “You don’t really . . . eat flesh? You are not cannibals . . . as they say?”

I released him and stood up. It was too cold to sit. He followed me into the doorway and grabbed me by the arm. Inside the hall, my brothers and my sisters had slaved in from somewhere the corpse of a horse.

Some were stripping the skin away from the flesh, pouring off the blood into wooden buckets; some were sawing through the bones, breaking the joints apart; some were building up the fire. It was like a drug, the smell of fresh-cut meat. For me and for the barbarian too: he looked past me into the uncertain light, and at first he didn’t understand what they were doing. When he did, the strength of his body failed.

He leaned against the doorpost, panting heavily, his eyes wide with fear, and there were tears in his eyes, and his shoulders and his neck fell forward. He raised his hand up to his face, and with infinite effort dropped his forehead to his palm, and then ducked it to his armpits, once to each side, and murmured a little prayer.

I left him and walked down into the hall, looking for someone. The music was saying something to me. It was in a form called “no regret,” played with wavering purity on the long horn, a large, difficult, metal instrument, which someone had left behind when all the rest of us were left behind. The boy who had picked it up to make it his still did not possess the lungs for any but the easiest modes. This one, “no regret,” he played tentatively, using a melody plainer and sweeter than usual. He knelt wheezing on his bed in the hot firelight, and others squatted near him, listening. And the music told me something too. I thought, if I am going to die tomorrow, I don’t have time to cleanse myself of my desire. I may have time to satisfy it.

My brothers and my sisters were moving towards the center of the feast, to where the butchered horse was thrown onto the fire. Their desires were of the simplest kind. But mine was different. I had no interest in the food, though I was hungry. Instead, I turned aside and walked away under the shadows of the wooden arches, to my own bed and the bed beside it. She was lying on her side, with one arm stretched out. She was still asleep, or asleep again, for she had stripped off some of her red clothes and lay part-naked under dirty blankets.

I sat cross-legged, and she lay beside me with her face pressed against the outside of my thigh, her elbow in my lap. She lay soft and responsive, so I touched her with more force, to press some hardness back into the long muscles of her arm. And as her body came alive under my hand, her spirit coming back from wherever it had been, I thought of all the times I had seen her, every image, every song. So we woke to each other, my fingers suddenly sensitized by memory, her fingers opening under mine, responsive at first, then tight and hard as she woke up. That was the moment. I will remember it. And since then I have dreamed of loving, and all my dreams have been like that, trying to recapture the brittle tension not even of her kisses, but of that one moment, that moment when I held her by the wrist, reawakening to her as if from sleep while she pulled sleepily away. She tried to pull away, and I clamped my hand down on her wrist.