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who was he? Who was this skeleton of a man lying in state in a bedroom of Aurverelle? The same Christopher who had set off on a May morning with fifty men and a suit of new armor to join the nobility of France on a futile and arrogant quest? No, impossible.
    He started to laugh, then: a hoarse, sardonic burst of hilarity that echoed off the walls and rattled the loose panes in the windows. And if the sky fell, they would uphold it on the points of their lances! Of course they would! And Bayazet would fall down on his knees before those most Christian knights and kiss the turds of their horses. To be sure!
    As though in response to his laughter, the door opened. Pytor entered, his face concerned, and he did not look much relieved when Christopher, after taking a good look at his seneschal, burst out with second round of giggles.
    “Master is pleased to be merry this morning,” said Pytor.
    Christopher stifled his humor. Even if it did not frighten Pytor it racked a pair of what were obviously fluid-filled lungs. He considered coughing for a moment, but decided that if he started, he might not stop for some time. Best to save the retching and gagging for later. “What else is there to be?”
    Pytor looked suddenly hopeful. “Does master know me?”
    Christopher sighed. Pytor would doubtless address him in the third person on his deathbed. “Yes, yes, I know you, Pytor.” He lifted his head, looked at the windows. How long? Three years? No, more. This might well be his deathbed. “Have I been raving?”
    “For weeks now, master.”
    “Quite mad, then.”
    Pytor colored, looked away. “I . . .”
    “Come on. Come on. Tell me. Was I out in the courtyard eating grass? Copulating with the mares, perhaps?”
    The seneschal shook his head. “Master was delirious with fever.”
    Pytor was being polite. It was more than a fever, and Christopher knew it. There were many things that could destroy a soul, and he had been intimate with at least two of them.
    Upon attempting to sit up, Christopher found that his head was splitting and, with a grimace, fell back onto the pillows. Pytor came forward, took a cup from the side table, and held it to his master's lips. Christopher gagged on the contents. “What . . . is this? It's like being clubbed over the head with an ivy bush.”
    “Guillaume brought it. He says that it is good for master.”
    Fluids, Christopher thought. Fluids and herbs. It made sense. No, he would not die. Living was worse. He would live: that was, unfortunately, the best he could expect.
    He took another swallow, forced it down, gasped at the taste. “Grandfather wouldn't have put up with this. He wouldn't have needed it, either.”
    “Baron Roger was a . . . considerably more robust man,” said Pytor, gently but insistently proffering the cup.
    Pytor was being polite again. In his youth, Roger had killed boars with his bare hands, had survived, undoctored, wounds that would have killed another. His political machinations had been as grandiose as his stature, as enormous as the vices he had embraced in his youth . . . and then suddenly abjured in his prime.
    The sudden change was legendary. There was even a song about it. He had the Free Towns in his pouch and let them go again!
    Something had happened. . . .
    Well, Christopher thought, something had happened at Nicopolis, too. And now Roger's descendent—the family sperm perhaps getting a little tired out after twelve generations of plotting, fighting, magnificently lecherous delAurvres—lay like a sick girl, lapping slimy decoctions out of a silver cup.
    Christopher drank until the medicine was gone, and then he coughed for the better part of an hour. Pytor held him while he hacked up the fluid and phlegm, and when his master was finished and exhausted, laid him back down, blotted his forehead, and tucked the covers around him.
    Like a sick girl. And what had happened to Roger that he had spent his last forty years puttering in his garden, planting an