Paras looked at her and pricked her ears. Then she said, “What is ‘Paris’?”
“It’s where we are. This city. Don’t you know anything?”
Paras said, “I told you. I’m only a filly. I won’t be a mare until January first. Then I’ll know lots more things. How old are you?”
Frida didn’t answer. She didn’t know.
For a moment, Frida thought that, in spite of the money and the purse, the horse wasn’t her concern. She could go back to her little cubbyhole up in the cemetery and pretend that she hadn’t seen Paras and that her life was the same as always. But then she thought that, if her life was the same as always, she didn’t quite know what she was going to do. Just talking to Paras had been a change for her—even the dogs who didn’t bark at her, when they looked at her face, then looked for her collar and leash, and saw that she had neither, simply looked away. Frida sighed. Sometimes the thing that you wanted to do did make you sigh, just because it was a hard thing to do.
It was not a pleasant day now. It had started out sunny, but the clouds were scudding in and the wind was picking up. Frida did not smell rain in the wind, but the leaves that hadn’t been cleaned from the streets were lifting around them. Paras noticed, too. Frida said, “Are you tired?”
“I am,” said Paras. “I had a hard race yesterday, and I was exploring most of the night.”
“Do you lie down when you are tired?”
“Of course I do,” said Paras.
“Well, I think you should take a nap. I’ll show you a spot.” And she led Paras around the little grassy park to the spot where there was a hedge and some other bushes. She said, “Maybe if you curl up next to the hedge and make yourself as small as you can, no one will see you.”
“What will happen if they see me?”
“They will take you to jail.” Jacques had always told her that if she wandered away from him, looking like a dirty stray, she would be put in dog jail, and it would be even more confining than that room in Lyon.
Paras could tell from the way Frida scowled and shivered when she talked about it that jail was a bad place, so she followed her over to where some bushes were cut into strange shapes and she nestled down as tightly as she could in a more or less hidden spot. She tucked her back legs underneath her and folded her front legs, and curled her neck around and tucked her nose in beside her hooves. She was a limber, slender horse, and a nimble bucker, so this was the way she liked to sleep. Frida brought along the purse, and pushed it under the hedge with her nose. She made sure that the magnetic lock was closed and the purse itself was well hidden. She said, “After lunch, I will come up with a plan.”
“Lunch?”
“It’s when humans come here to eat. But the cafés are all shut up today, so they are going to eat inside. That’s good for us.”
Paras was sleepy, indeed. She blew the air out of her nostrils and let her eyelids drift closed. Pretty soon, she was making a ruffling noise with her lips. Frida sat nearby and watched her, as she had so often watched Jacques before he disappeared.
TWO
It may be that the humans around the Place du Trocadéro did not notice Paras—maybe they were busy, or cold and looking down at their feet as they trotted from building to building. It may be that the leaves were blowing around and the clouds came and went, and the sun and shadows flickering together blinded the humans to the sight of a bay filly, nicely grown, sleeping by the hedge below the statue of the other horse that stood in front of the giant building. But there was someone who was watching, who had seen the whole thing from the beginning, who knew perfectly well that Frida lived in the neighborhood and that she was a free dog, and this someone was Raoul. Raoul was a raven, and he had a nest in a tree just down the Rue Benjamin-Franklin. He lived there alone most of the time. He was different from the other ravens he knew in that he liked Paris. The others, especially the females and the chicks, preferred the woodland to the west, which the humans called the “Bois de Boulogne,” or the countryside. Raoul had seen plenty of that, but for a bird his age, which was old old old, there was more to do and more to see in the city, and not so many arguments. Ravens were an argumentative lot, and Raoul had had his fill of it. Perhaps the other ravens didn’t know that he had a mate, Imelda, who was almost as old as he was. The two of them had plenty of offspring, so many that they had parted amicably when she had indicated to him that she was tired of reproducing, and also of listening to what she called his never-ending observations.
He watched Paras sleep for a while, then watched Frida get up and walk over to the only café where the tables sat in the open, and nose out a piece of bread that had slipped under a chair and been missed by the cleaners. After she did that, she sat near a medium-sized child and stared into the child’s face, and, sure enough, the child handed her something else, maybe a piece of cheese. Then the child’s parent scowled and shook her finger, and Frida walked away. A few times, Raoul had tried to persuade humans to give him things he wanted, but they had just laughed at him. However, it didn’t matter. Raoul would eat anything—he especially liked ants, which were tiny but crisp and salty—and he was, he would admit, a little fat.
Raoul flew back to his nest and curled up in there. It was in a good spot—protected on one side, but with a view of the neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of birds, ones that Raoul considered frivolous, like sparrows, buntings, warblers, swallows, and tits. Not to mention woodpeckers in the trees, and thrushes on the ground, and pigeons, pigeons everywhere. Paris was a city of birds, and if the starlings were kings, then the ravens were knights. The avian city was a raucous place—most of the time Raoul couldn’t even hear what the non-bird population was saying, the Aves were so loud.
For the rest of the day, Raoul thought of Paras as simply an oddity—something that would pass as all oddities did, and Paris was full of oddities, always had been. Out in the country, the days were monotonous, the sun came up, the rain fell or it didn’t, the wind blew first from one direction and then another, the grass grew, the females and the chicks squabbled about every little thing.
* * *
PARAS SLEPT for a long time, and woke up nervous. She was not in her stall, either at Maisons-Laffitte or at the racecourse, and she did not recognize the bizarre cubical plant that ran along her back and made it itch. She was lying in dirt. She snorted and nearly jumped up, but then she saw Frida, sitting with her front feet neatly together and her haunches square. Frida said, “You slept for a long time. It’s dusk.”
And certainly it was; the sky was darkening more rapidly than the earth. The buildings all around, though, retained a pale glow, and that was what told Paras that she had made a terrible mistake when she pressed open the door of her stall at the racecourse and gamboled out into the world.