“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.
Frida said, “Of course, the days are pretty short now.” She shivered. Paras shivered, too. Paras extended her foreleg and lifted herself, then shook. Leaves fell off her back. She grunted. Frida stuck her nose under the cubical, inedible plant (Paras had tried a bite), and pulled out the purse. Paras had forgotten about the purse. Right then, a raven flew in front of Paras’s nose and landed on the grass between her and Frida. Paras was wondering how to get back to the racecourse—really, she had been very confused, but getting back to the racecourse was the best idea—and Frida was wondering if her new friend, and, okay, her new source of funds, was going to disappear. It was because she was wondering this, and therefore distracted, that Frida didn’t go for the raven at once. She had never killed a raven, but a bird was a bird was a bird, and she was a bird dog. However, the raven cocked his head and looked her right in the eye, and she dropped that idea. Paras, the curious filly, leaned forward and stretched out her nose and sniffed the bird. He allowed this. He said, “I speak seven languages.”
Neither of the other two said anything, so Raoul preened himself a bit, then said, “French, English, German, Spanish, Romany, Basque, and Chinese. You may not know this, but all birds speak Chinese; however, there are so many dialects that sometimes we have a hard time understanding each other.” He cleared his throat and marched around in a little circle, slowly lifting his wings and lowering them, then spreading his tail. He said, “Tell me your names, please.”
Paras said, “Perestroika, by Moscow Ballet, out of M-M-M—”
“Thank you, that is sufficient. And you?” He lifted his wing at Frida. She said, “Frida.”
“That’s all?”
Frida nodded.
“I am Sir Raoul Corvus Corax, the twenty-third of that name. My establishment is just over there, on the Rue Benjamin-Franklin, but the family estate is out in Châteaufort—that’s straight to Versailles, then right.” The horse and the dog looked at Raoul blankly, as horses and dogs so often did. He cleared his throat again. “Let me say that, from my aerie in that tree”—he lifted his right wing this time—“I noted that you two damsels seemed to be in distress.”