Blanche changed her form so slowly and so sweetly that at first the little mouse and the Unicorn did not suspect her power. Djinnsky stayed by her side, changing as she changed, counterpoising his darkness to her light, his tautness to her smoothness. The mouse and the Unicorn watched and imitated. Few words were spoken. From time to time, Blanche came to a stop and nodded her head to them, implying that they should repeat what they had just seen so that she could watch them do it.

Sometimes she would nod and smile a tender little abstracted smile, nothing so wholehearted as approval, but yet encouraging, as if she meant to say something like, "Not bad for a start and likely, perhaps, to get even better, with a thousand repetitions, or two thousand or three or five." Other times, she would scowl and motion them to be still and watch as she did it again. Once in a great while, she would walk over either to the Unicorn or to the mouse and change a posture, take hold of a leg and show the shape of a movement. Blanche was at once very gentle and very severe, as if what she was teaching was at once very difficult and quite essential, immune to compromise.

Each day's work was exhausting and satisfying, draining and replenishing. Blanche and Djinnsky seemed tireless, as if they were simply repeating phrases from memory, perhaps modifying them ever so slightly out of simple caprice. What they did was, however, clean and elegant. It did not either overreach itself or stray off into confusion. If the movements sometimes seemed quite complex, the flows surprising in their direction and reach and recoil and repeat, they never lost definition or clarity. Blanche and Djinnsky did not show off. This was so different than acrobatics, not a matter of feats at all, but rather of exposing what already existed in space and time, in sequence and rhythm.

When the little mouse acrobat became aware that she was hearing music, there was no jolt of surprise, because the music played so softly that it seemed that it must always have been there and escaped her notice only because she was too preoccupied with other things to hear it. The music was inside her. Of this, the little mouse acrobat was immediately convinced. Once she heard it, it made the task of dancing, this endless imitation of Blanche, much easier, because it guided her.

It gave her time in accessible and intimate units and also both readied and steadied the flow of energy and impulse into the various muscles of her body. Once she heard this music within her, the little mouse acrobat felt and held her body differently. A small smile came to her face, as if she were bemused that it had taken her so long to catch on. Her movements were no longer separate, but each one maintained an alliance with the one before it and the one after, all under the influence of the music. Oddly enough, in the music she felt she heard echoes of the white rabbit and of the snow leopard. She sensed the special smile of the white rabbit, the curl of the smoke of his pipe, only gentled, not pretending beyond itself. There was a sense of reunion.

The little mouse acrobat looked at the Unicorn who danced by her side. It occurred to her that, of the four, she had been the only one who did not hear the music. She was always used to thinking of herself as the exceptional one, the one who was out ahead, and the one who did feats that made others admire her. Now she was the slowest one, the one who came behind, the one for whom the others had to wait. Once she heard the music, it seemed to her that how Blanche danced had changed. There was more verve, more gusto, more invention, more seduction, also more irreverence, as if Blanche was now beginning to turn loose something very familiar to her that she had been holding in check.

Now Blanche seemed to be getting younger and more lithe, more flexible, as if she were an incarnation of spring. Her hair grew longer and took on the delicate green color of the weeping willow's branches in very early spring. As she grew lighter and more free in her movements, Djinnsky grew darker, more adamant, as if he were the spirit of a lowering day before a splendid thunderstorm came to sweep the sky clean and make it fresh and pale blue as a robin's egg.

The little mouse acrobat felt a sudden pang of jealousy in her breast, something hot and painful and powerful. Blanche's dancing was so beyond her. Why was it that Blanche was graced to dance that way? Why Blanche and not she? As she thought these thoughts, the music inside her dimmed and almost disappeared. Even in the midst of her dancing, the little mouse acrobat gasped. She could not let this music go. It was the envy that dimmed it. The love of the music saved her. Blanche was Blanche and she was who she was. She could never become Blanche and Blanche could never become her. Why, she wondered, did she hate herself so much that she wanted to become someone else, to become something that she was not? What was wrong with being a little mouse?

So this was where war started. She remembered the feeling she had had the day she had dressed up as a male mouse and gone off to enlist in the army. She had had a secret and the secret had given her a thrill. She had felt better than everyone else, alone and isolated. She had had a hope that was really no hope at all, but actually a mask for despair. She had been convinced that she knew who she was or that at least she was on her way to finding out, when actually she had been in full flight from something very near, something she now found very dear. She didn't think it had been any different for the male mice, even for the Seven-Headed Seven-Crowned Mouse King, himself.

The music picked up its pace within her, becoming gay as a jig. Suddenly Djinnsky broke away from Blanche a few paces and nodded to the Unicorn. The Unicorn smiled at the little mouse acrobat. His horn glowed more fiercely and freely golden than she had ever seen it do. The music in her mind shifted and changed tone, as if an immense organ blew triumphant blasts of light. How astonishing it was to watch Djinnsky and the Unicorn dancing and cavorting. They were at once wild and free and restrained and in full control. The Unicorn could leap almost as high as Djinnsky, who would whirl and disappear and then reappear only a second later to leap almost up as high as the sky. Blanche beamed and so did the little mouse acrobat. The little mouse acrobat became so caught up in watching the dance of Djinnsky and the Unicorn that she forgot all about herself, until the music changed.

The music was still swift, but it became softer and lighter, took on a new gentleness and roundedness. Was it a flute she heard in the background, intertwined with a horn and an oboe? The little mouse acrobat did not know, but she was stunned to see Blanche beckoning to her. Could Blanche possibly mean that she, the little mouse acrobat, should come forward and dance with Blanche? This was simply not possible. This went beyond imitation. She was not worthy of any such honor.

Before she could come forward, the little mouse acrobat blushed bright red and bowed deeply, curling herself back into herself, as if for a last moment of respite before she released herself into dance and movement. She felt for a moment like a wisp of dandelion seed awaiting the wind. But no moment can last forever, so she soon straightened and came forth lightly, even tremblingly on her feet to where Blanche waited.

What a dance that was, far beyond the power of words to tell, for words are neither so quick nor so cunning as feet and, being made of air, lack the body, the elevation, the extension that is the glory of dance. Yet, since paltry words are all the story teller, often heavy of foot himself, has to call upon, words must serve.

Blanche looked the little mouse acrobat in the eye. The little mouse acrobat, all attention and stillness looked back. Blanche's eyes were smooth as a vast lake that is newly thawed after it has been frozen through a winter that has lasted almost as long as forever is.

Then Blanche began to spin and to twirl, to leap and let her feet beat as gracefully against each other as the wings of migratory birds in flight. To the little mouse acrobat's great surprise, when Blanche began the dance, she could follow. It was not effortless, the way it appeared to be for Blanche, but it was also not impossible. The music guided her, inspiring her and calming her all at once. Her body had a center, something she remembered from her days of doing flips off the pendula of grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather and even great-great-great-grandfather clocks. Only now her center was different.

It had softened, so that she was in touch from her center with all of her little body. Now only had her center softened, but so had her will. She could set herself in motion swiftly, but gently. There was no longer that sense of precipitate total commitment, nor the danger-be-damned kind of recklessness. If she leapt and she beat her feet together or leapt and spun, she knew in advance where the landing was and kept herself composed throughout. Where before there had been fits of ferocious willfulness, now she had the sense of alterations between moments of willed effort and moments of yielding, a back and forth that let her relax even in the center of the dance. She felt the dance coming to her and coming through her.

Now Blanche's aspect had changed again. She looked not so much young as full, rounded, brimming with the promise of life. The music slowed and deepened. Violas and cellos could be heard in the background. Blanche led and the little mouse acrobat followed, as Blanche and her movements became more and more rounded, more and more charged with giving birth to all manner of forms that were round in their own ways. So much came forth from the circle, from the emptiness that was contained with it. Everything that came forth had in common the rhythm and logic of coming forth. To know this in her own body both soothed and stirred the little mouse acrobat. As she danced, looking into Blanche's eyes, she saw that, while she was just exactly what she was, she had so much in common with everything else that also was, on condition that she remember her own shape, her own form, her own mouse manner of coming forth.

She looked into Blanche's eyes, so calm and blue and deep and tranquil and saw there the possibility of being a tree, a mountain, a brook, a river, a rabbit, a flying swan whistling in the wind under the light of the moon, a silent deer, a toy, a leopard, a bear and even at last an owl. This was a shock to her, that Blanche knew the dance and the trance of the owl, that creature that frightened her so much and seemed so much the opposite of what she was. As Blanche went on and on, exploring the roundness of motion and all that it could bring forth, the little mouse acrobat noticed that the Unicorn and Djinnsky were dancing with them, too. This was a dance for four, not for two.

It seemed to her now that the music changed again, became softer and slower, sweet and deep, reaching to the edge where sadness and beauty intermingled. The little mouse acrobat danced and danced, more slowly, lingering at each phrase, as if to express regret that she could not give it more. But each phrase, each movement revealed the next phrase, the next movement. She could linger. She could appreciate, but there was no stopping. As she found a new ease and grace in the movements of the dance, she found also a new capacity for sadness. As she looked at Blanche, as she looked at Djinnsky, it seemed to her that they were aging before her very eyes.

The music went into a minor key. The viola and the French horn discussed the change. The cello chimed in, somewhere between ecstasy and melancholy. That Blanche could age, that her hair could go to rose and silver and nut and gold and then from rose and silver and nut and gold to snow, struck the little mouse acrobat as heart rending. Her sorrow straightened her back, gave her arms and hands a new delicacy of arch and curve, brought her attack at once a new discretion and a new precision.

If the moment was fleeting and if the moment was all there was, then what was there to hold in reserve? What was the point of refusing to reveal what you felt? Did she not owe it to Blanche, the aging Blanche, who had once been as tender green and lithe and tentative as spring's new willow, to pay her the tribute of showing what she had gotten from her, what she had gotten of her, what she found in herself?

How strange it was now that the little mouse acrobat seemed to find not only the music in herself, but also the dance. Blanche was only a flurry of snowflakes. The movement flowed out from her own center, carried her along with it, up on her toes, twirling, then leaping and extending, then closing back within herself, only to open up again like a flower that not only blooms but remembers.

Yes, she could dance the dance that was her own, the dance that was the dance of herself, the dance of a particularly nimble and vain little mouse who was still quite nimble but not quite so vain.

Blanche was gone. She had become snow not so different from that white stuff that the little mouse acrobat and the Unicorn had encountered right after they escaped from the great battle. Djinnsky was gone, too, as if he had become darkness and retreated into the distant sky somewhere in the space between the stars.

The music played on. The moon shone down through the clouds that were parted like a curtain. The little mouse acrobat and the Unicorn danced on and on, quite oblivious of where they were and even, at times, of what they were. Such a dance is neither chance nor necessity, but something in between, something from a place that the ingenious and owlish of the world, for all their intricate cunning, don't know. The little mouse acrobat now gave the owls of her dread no more thought. The hoot of the owl had become the tender sorrowful tone of the French horn, calling from the edge of the place where all form vanishes, where time triumphs over hope and does not even know that it has done so.

What, then, was it that the little mouse acrobat found in her dance with the unicorn under the moon after Blanche and Djinnsky had disappeared? Was it an answer to the question of war? We can only say, "Perhaps yes and perhaps no." These are matters that each and everyone, mouse or not, must ponder for himself or herself. War, this particular little mouse acrobat thought as she whirled and wondered beneath the moon, is a very loud voice, a noise of heavy feet and fists and need and greed, that must be answered in a very small voice, with light feet and tender hands and a resolute and generous heart.

The response, she felt, to the vice of war was peace and effort and kindness and rest and pity and belief and sadness and relief and joy and memory and hope, all this given a home in the little house of the mouse self, the modest body that now did this dance beneath the moon.

The music faded into the moonlight and joined the golden glow of the Unicorn's horn. As the moon was about to set in the west, the little mouse acrobat noticed an arch that appeared at the edge of the place where she and the Unicorn were dancing. She leapt up on the Unicorn's back. They danced through the arch and discovered themselves back on that same wooden floor where the terrible battle had been fought. Only now there was no trace of it.