“I am weary of my groaning. . . .” he thought.
It was summer, but the high mountains were chill at night, and the deep cold soaked his thoughts. The word Lethe floated through his mind. Who would not choose to be happy? he asked himself. It is a switch in your mind, and someone can throw it for you.
He felt the slow, aching droplets of mourning being squeezed from his heart, one after the other, and wondered how long he could endure them, the relentless moments, each striking with the impact of a hammer, each a stunning, percussive blow. . . .
Throw a switch, he thought, and the hammerblows would end.
“Katrin deserves mourning,” he had told Davout the Silent, and now he had so many more Katrins to mourn, Dark Katrin and Katrin the Fair, Katrin the New and Katrin the Old. All the Katrins webbed by fate, alive or dead or merely enduring. And so he would, from necessity, endure. . . . So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
He lay on his back, on the cold ground, gazed up at the world of stars, and tried to find the worlds, among the glittering teardrops of the heavens, where he and Katrin had rained from the sky their millions of children.