“Later, Bartolomeo!” I left Marco groaning against the wall and my apprentice eyeing him with balled fists. The shouts coming from the garden had redoubled, if anything—could something have caught fire? Those torches dotted all about the garden . . . I ran back toward the stairs for a quick look, slipping the giraffe mask over my face again. My hose and boots were indecent, but I had to admit they were far easier to run in than skirts and clogs.

There was already a clot of servants clustered at the narrow servants’ entrance, where the servers had been whisking the platters in and out of the garden all night. “What happened?” I heard someone say, shouting to be heard over the commotion in the garden, and someone else yelled, “It’s the Duke of Gandia!”

I should have gone back to my kitchens to sort out the mess that had erupted, but I could see over everyone’s heads in my tall boots, and the sight of a tiger and a bear rolling on the grass made me hesitate. Bestial grunts came from beneath their masks as they swung and clawed at each other, and for a moment I wondered if I was imagining things. Had I come outside at all? Surely it was Bartolomeo holding down the bear and administering great hammer blows back and forth with his fist; surely it was Marco leaking blood through the mouth of his mask. But then I recognized the tiger—the tight striped doublet, the mask flying off to land in the crushed grass—and I heard Juan Borgia’s drunken howl as he shouted something foul in Catalan. The watching crowd howled back, half of them cheering, half of them swearing, and with the strange effect of the mask’s limiting eye holes, I thought for a moment that all those beast masks had become beast heads in truth, beast heads resting on sumptuous brocade doublets and velvet bodices. They froze me to the spot in horror.

Sancha of Aragon was watching with lips parted below her fox muzzle, dress dragged off her shoulder and one nipple showing darkly above the fox-fur trim of her bodice as she shouted for Juan to finish him off, finish him off! A cardinal in a horse’s long-nosed mask was whinnying drunkenly, laughing and calling for more wine. I saw Madonna Giulia on the very fringe, trying to call for order, but Leonello dropped his lion mask into her hands and swept her behind him, lion’s eyes flickering in all directions.

“Enough!” someone roared in a bull’s bellow. The strange bestial roaring died away, not slowly, as heads turned toward the masked bull with the curved horns. The Duke of Gandia and his opponent were the last to pull apart, rising with a final mutual snarl, panting and heaving. “Brawling before our guests!” the Pope shouted at his son, and descended to a rattle of furious Spanish.