The name is the most fragile thing about a person.

The bones can survive a thousand years.

The teeth can hold their chemical signatures across a millennium.

The DNA, if conditions are right, can be read long after everything else about a person is gone.

But the name needs people to remember it, to say it, to write it down.

If nobody writes it, and if the people who knew it die, the name is gone.

Conquest Man’s name disappeared somewhere in the eleventh century, and no amount of scientific analysis in the twenty-first can bring it back.