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Giuliano’s nature to covert it, was it?” Cosimo said. Then softer still, “When we were boys I told him I would kill him before I let him accede to the head of the House before me. And he just laughed as if it had been a jest, telling me rather to kill those who stood in front of me.”
    He watched his mother greet another grieving couple, cousins of theirs, and he said softly, “If the situation were reversed and I lay there dead and Giuliano stood here alive, would you tell him that he was the favourite? That he would be a better leader of the House than me?” But his mother did not answer the question. He put his lips closer to her ear and said, “Everyone always loved him more than they loved me. He was the one who remembered everyone’s name and children’s names. He was the one who would readily help those in need, rather than grudgingly. They fear me and respect me, but I don’t think so many would weep so at my death, do you?”
    His mother still did not acknowledge what he said and it started angering him. “If I was dead, what would you tell Giuliano, that he would succeed without me? That he does not need me the way that I need him?” His mother leaned a little away from him now, as if she did not wish to hear this, but he pulled her back close to him and said, in a low hiss, “It was Giuliano who wished our father dead. Not me. He said I would never become leader of the House otherwise. He said we should pray regularly for his early death. Perhaps he prayed and planned for mine too, but that is not the way things have turned out, is it?”
    In the emptiness of Giuliano’s absence he found the angry words would not be stilled. “What if I had slain Giuliano?” he asked, pulling his mother tightly to him. “What if it was me who had hired the assassins to strike him down, simply to prove that I could live a life without him, only to find that I could not?” She lowered her head and he hissed, “If he was here now he would advise me to stop talking so. He would tell me that if it was anybody else than you I was blabbering to I would have to kill them afterwards. And I would have. He knew who needed killing and when.”
    He felt his mother trying to pull away from him and then felt the platform they were on jostled from behind. There seemed to be more people in the crypt now. The air was hotter and he could hear murmurs of concern amongst the mourners as they were pushed and squeezed against each other. His mother, now being jostled from the other side, tried to shake her arm from his, but he was holding onto her tightly. “This is a fitting metaphor for our grief,” he said. “Let them keep coming and they will crush one another.”
    Now he could hear yelps of alarm from those about them and he saw one woman fall to the floor. She screamed as she fell and the piercing shout had the same effect that the sight of an assassin’s knife being raised in the air would have had. Everyone was suddenly pushing and shouting, trying to make their way to the stairs before they could be dragged by the deathseekers’ hands to the ground and trampled. They had all carried the thought of deathseekers into the crypt with them and now had created it as something real. The fragile moment of considering the fate of Giuliano in the afterlife was replaced with the more immediate consideration of their own fates in this life. But the more people panicked the more fell and were trampled upon. Their own fear had become manifest to attack them.
    â€œThis should’ve been my funeral,” said Cosimo, shouting, now, to his mother. “This is how I would like to be remembered.” And then the platform was upset by the pressing crowd and he felt his mother’s arm being pulled from his own. He fought against the crowd now, pushing people away from him, reaching out for his mother as she sank into the mob. And it seemed to