I did light a candle later that morning, and asked my father to name the dead man in the rites. Not much. Nothing at all, really. He’d been alive, young, living—for good or ill, knowing happiness or not. Then he was dead in a tavern on a summer night. The night my own life altered again and love came in, as through an open window. A gift. A blessing of the god.

What are we to make of such things overlapping, coinciding, in our days?

Chapter XV

All wars bring suffering with them, but the worst are civil wars.

Someone wrote this down first, of course, someone always does. But it can seem, if you read the works of chroniclers, that every writer of the history of his time, or an earlier one, knows the phrase, believes it, uses it himself.

It isn’t even subject to the usual issue of which side of a conflict the writer takes as his own. Civil wars mean father against son, brother against brother, villages divided, a country in chaos.

But…the observation is only sometimes true, one might better say, and some have. Not always. “Always” is a dangerous word. But consider an invading force: coming through mountain passes when the snow has melted enough, pouring in numbers down valleys and their rivers, to conquer. Rape and murder, fire and atrocity, bodies chopped to pieces in villages and towns, children spitted upon pikes, the ruthless theft of everything that isn’t buried in woods or fields or hidden some other way. Gold and goods looted from holy sanctuaries, country estates, homes, farmhouses, artisans’ shops. Men and women tortured to reveal hiding places, killed if there are none. Famine, with food stolen everywhere, because armies need to eat.

These horrors come more often with an army from away—and they do come. They are part of the dance of War with Death. It has been painted. Leaders of armies know what they must offer to keep the loyalty of their soldiers while many of those are dying themselves one way or another, mostly of disease, some on battlefields. And commanders must feed their men, far from home.

Nonetheless, it is still proper to write that civil wars bring their own kind of grief. They can leave a land depleted, broken—and vulnerable to invasion. The one war begetting the other. Few things happening in any country on such a scale are not noticed elsewhere, and can be seen as an opportunity.

The fates of kings, princes, dukes, courts, all are interwoven with each other, and with the lives of those they govern, well or badly.

He’d had no reply from the king in Orane. None. It was a shaming outrage. He flushed just thinking on it. He had written twice, was not going to disgrace himself and his lineage by doing so a third time.

Laurent de Barratin had many defining traits, but foremost among them, perhaps, was pride.