Pestilent, pustulant, riddled by vice and wracked with pain, the King lay abed, and his subjects rejoiced, but secretly, and in expectation.
         The doctors, such of them who had not yet been killed, consulted their Galen and Avicenna and were united in their advice: alcohol and narcotics, so that the King be kept in a permanent stupor. In this way they hoped to wait out the storm. But the King, whose stomach had been flayed by a lifetime of excess, could no longer keep most liquids down, and spent his days sitting bedsore in a state of glittering fury.
         Astrologers and alchemists arrived, employing poultices, oils, ointments, linaments, douches and creams, and departed with no result and no payment except their lives. Servants left his chamber weeping, escorted by guards, and rarely returned.
         The King made his terrible command: I shall be cured within a week or everyone in this household shall die, by which he meant, beyond his doctors and servants, also his brother and sisters and children and grandchildren and mistresses and his new young mouse of a queen.
         Non interna, ergo externa, the doctors reasoned, and with the assistance of the queen they prepared a mixture of balsam and spirits of wine, in which they soaked his sheets and nightclothes and wrapped him therein, and sat all of them in eager attendance around the royal bed.
         That night the King writhed as the cloths burned his seeping skin but in the morning he showed more animation than he had in months. The process was repeated, with still more heartening results.
         On the fourth day the King proclaimed himself fit enough to hear the Holy Word, and it was read to him, such lessons on mercy and forgiveness as he desired to hear, and he wept at their truth. Thus it was also on the fifth and sixth days. His sores had dried, his lungs no longer rattled.
         On the seventh day he announced himself well enough to return to affairs of state the following morning. All in attendance proclaimed the glory of God. Solitude for this last night, prescribed the doctors, weepingly supported in this suggestion by the queen. So by the light of the late afternoon he read the gospels, and when the chamber grew dim he drew a bedside candle closer and in this way ignited his bedclothes and was engulfed in a terrible holocaust. He burned with his family Bible and although the horrified servants extinguished the inferno as quickly as they could, he perished in terrible voiceless agony over the following week, and all his subjects, much relieved, proclaimed the glory of God.
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