Curioso looked around. "I don't like the idea. It is the only strategy if we are helpless, but are we helpless?"
Annette rimmed her cup. "No, chere, we are not. We are weak but not helpless."
He felt all his tiredness come back. "I see I am the wrong person to ask. I don't want you back in his hands. He is trickier, stronger, than any of us. I have been up on his mountain, and though we beat him together that time, there is no reason why we should do it a second time. "
Tirseng said: "I think she is right. We cannot beat the guards, and we cannot survive in the open without more preparation. We have to go back, Curioso."
Curioso looked beaten. Annette had not seen him like this before. She put her hand on his shoulder. "What is it, beloved?"
"I once loved someone, and I lost him on a mountain somewhere, and he is gone from me forever though he haunts every footstep. And now there is you, and I don't want to lose you, and I am afraid of it, for the first time. I can't help it, I would not say this to any other people in the world. I came down off that mountain, and now I am afraid."
There was a brief silence. Then Tirseng spoke: "Remember what the Geshe said when he recovered from his near-mortal illness, and we came back from not having found your brother, and sat by his bedside?"
Curioso nodded. "He said: 'After you meet Death for the first time, you never breathe the same way again'. It is true. I do not want to lose life, I have become greedy for it, for this woman, for this tent, for the storm, for it all. I never cared about Death before, and now I hate it. I hate its wastefulness, the stupidity of it. I don't want to lose this. I am afraid of losing it. It paralyzes me."
They sat together, all quietly for another moment. Then he said: "O.K. We'll go. You are both right, and this weakness of mine will pass. But I tell you what. If we get out of this alive, the three of us, we must promise to meet in the Cafe de la Paix in Paris one fine Spring day, and then we will walk along the quays in the sunshine. Some day when things are happy again. Let us say, noon, May 1st, 1941, Cafe de la Paix, Paris. Whatever happens."
They shook hands on it, formally. And then they got up and began packing their belongings for the stormridden trip back down into the valley.