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On top of cascading silks, dressed in high-collared robes of black, sat the personage mourned. In their last testaments, women usually specified a fashionable hair style and robes, and men their most-prized ceremonial battle helmet and armor. Standing on pilings three feet high, the bier stood ready. Around it milled the highest of nobles, also dressed in black, the dead noble having chosen these eight persons to bear the pall cast by his or her death. These eight people stood near the funeral bier between the two outermost battlements of the castle. Over the towering battlements seeped the noise of the crowd. Through this crowd these pallbearers would carry the deceased to the pyre grounds. Only nobles of high rank or members of the Imperial Family merited all the panoply and fanfare o
