Mercenaries (12 page)

‘If, as you say, Drogo is like his father, I need you to rein him in.’

William laughed out loud, and it made no difference to his humour that he saw the way it annoyed the Lord of Aversa.

‘Why do you laugh?’ he snapped.

‘You came here a long time ago, Rainulf.’

‘So?’

‘Do you remember that journey?’

‘That does not tell me why you laughed.’

William, though he was looking at Rainulf, was back on that long road south. The first thing the
brothers had discovered was that they came from a race that was unpopular; it was better to deny they were Normans – hard, given their size and colouring – than admit to it. That they should not be loved in Frankish Anjou was accepted; the Angevin territory bordered on Normandy and had suffered much from incursion, though not without an equal amount of retaliation.

It was when they came to cross the Loire at Tours that it really struck home. The locals had memories that went back two centuries. Viking raiders – and the good folk of Tours saw no distinction between a Norman and a Norseman – had sailed up the river and inflicted on the city all the rapine and mayhem for which they were famous. To the inhabitants, it was as if it had happened yesterday.

Even the monks in the local hospice had treated them with a very unchristian reserve; they did not believe them to be true pilgrims, given the number of mounts and their nature – that was made obvious by the way they indulged others who were genuinely on the road to various shrines, pilgrims from as far away as Denmark, Caledonia, Hibernia and England. Too many Normans had passed this way claiming the status, when truly they were on the way to fight and that was before Drogo was caught in the nunnery, which led to much shouting, the drawing of swords in a place of sanctity, followed by a hurried dawn
departure. It was that memory which had made William laugh, along with Drogo’s justification for his actions.

‘I feel sorry for them,’ he had insisted, when William castigated him for the twentieth time. ‘They don’t want to be in a nunnery, it’s their damn families who have put them there.’

‘They put them there to keep them chaste, not for the likes of you to deflower them.’

‘Deflower? There wasn’t a virgin in sight.’

‘No doubt you tried them all?’

‘Not even I am that stalwart, brother, though I confess, if I could have stayed, there were enough covert glances to make me think I could have died happy, and some of those from aged creatures who you would think past such impious thoughts.’

What to say to Rainulf: that Drogo had an appetite that made his own father look tame? That was unfair to Tancred who had never strayed from wedlock in his carnality. His second son could not see a wench without trying to have his way with her, and many a fight had he been saved from, merely because he had so many brothers who would take his part, even when he was clearly in the wrong. There must have been fathers in the Contentin who heaved a sigh of relief to hear he had gone south, just as there were those in that same part of Normandy with numerous bastards at their hearth, the paternity of which could be, with
some certainty, laid at Drogo’s door.

In Tours he had climbed the nunnery walls to get at his conquests, and insisted they stay for extra days, with the excuse that the horses were fagged, only for his brother to find out the true reason when the hue and cry broke out, caused, Drogo had insisted, by the jealousy of some fellow engaged on the same mission as he, who opened the door of a paramour’s cell to find him on top of her. As trenchant as his activities, were his views on the subject of nunneries.

‘Me,’ Drogo had added, ‘I would shut them all. It’s one thing for a man to renounce the world and become a monk, but to force a woman into chastity is wrong. Mind, there were a few black habits sneaking about as well as my cuckold. I wasn’t the only one favoured with a bit of warm flesh, the hypocrites.’

William had ventured to advance the concept of family honour, even although he knew that Drogo had never let an insult to their name pass, knowing he was wasting his breath. Drogo would never change, and in truth, what he had said about nunneries had a great deal of validity. Certainly there were some young women who elected to become Brides of Christ, but for the majority they were incarcerated against their will because of some transgression real or imagined, and perhaps only on the possibility of sin.

Or they were widows; their late husbands’ families wanted them out of the way, and on many occasions it
was more to do with an inheritance than any notion they might cause disgrace: a woman in a nunnery was not likely to remarry. Then, of course, there were the wives who had cuckolded husbands powerful enough to do with them as they wished. They, according to his brother, who had made a habit of night-time excursions in every place they had stayed, were the most needing of his attentions.

Looking at the man who now employed them he was tempted to relate the tale he had recalled, but he decided it might not sit well with him. ‘Why did I laugh? One day, Rainulf, you must let me relate to you Drogo’s adventures and you will laugh too. I assure you it will be a long day. If his seed is any good you will be able to trace his route back to Normandy by the bastards he created.’

‘It is that very thing about which I need to talk. Now he is here and he is causing trouble. He will not desist from disquieting the women of other men.’

‘So?’

‘He might be killed for this habit.’

‘I think you have already observed, Rainulf, that is not easy. So what do you want from me?’

‘To make him your responsibility.’

‘And if I decline?’

‘I like trouble with my enemies, not with my soldiers.’

William said nothing for several seconds, just
holding Rainulf’s gaze. The inference was obvious: either rein in Drogo or saddle up and depart.

‘How do your men come by their women?’

‘Mostly they buy them. There is always a peasant with too large a brood willing to sell a daughter.’

‘Then I must ask you to advance the price of one and the time to find him a concubine. The only way to keep Drogo out of that kind of trouble is to give him something to occupy his attention.’

Rainulf thought for a moment then nodded. ‘The price is not high, but any woman who comes here cannot be the kind to cause trouble. If your brother buys, it must be on the arrangement that the girl can be returned.’

William decided, as he saw Drogo coming back to join them, that such a sanction was not one to pass on to his brother, otherwise he would try out every wench in Campania. Besides there was a more pressing concern.

‘And I will need another hut in which to sleep.’

‘That can be arranged when you return.’

‘Return?’

‘Yes,’ the Lord of Aversa called as he walked away. ‘You are about to earn your keep.’

CHAPTER TEN

William knew he was under scrutiny. The men on this expedition were all mercenaries of long experience; he was still, though popular, the newcomer, perhaps with a chance to show his peers that the tales of the fighting he had done in the past were not boasting but true. It was also significant that Drogo had been left out; separating them had been deliberate.

Bringing up the rear of the party he was enveloped in the dust of a dry autumn. There had been no rain for weeks and his surcoat was covered in so much dust that the red and black colouring that now identified him as one of Rainulf’s men was quite hidden. Once more, he had a leaf in his mouth to protect his lower lip, and on his head he wore a straw hat bought in Aversa. But it was battle service, so his helmet was to hand, hooked over his saddle, while under the mail
hauberk, even at this early hour of the morning, his body ran with sweat.

Both dust and heat eased somewhat as the company left the flat agricultural plain and moved up into the rocky foothills and a cooling breeze, manoeuvring up a track that previous downpours had scarred clear of earth, the metal on the hooves occasionally ringing as a foot struck bare rock. Far ahead, in the clear air, the higher hills rose all the way to the forbidding mountains of the southern Apennines, set in a bluish haze like jagged broken teeth. Somewhere between there and where they now rode lay the place where he would be tested.

The duty on which they were engaged was a common one in this world: a vassal had refused to meet his obligations, declaring that he was no longer subject to Capuan rule, but instead claimed his fief was held from the papal enclave of Benevento, and thus his sovereign lord was the Pope. It was an excuse, of course, a pretext to avoid payment of his feudal dues. For this fellow, the Lord of Montesárchio, the problem was simple: the Pope was in Rome and lacked an army, while the Prince of Capua had Rainulf Drengot in command of several hundred armed and brutal war lovers only too keen to collect what was owed, and more besides.

William had been told there was a good road from Aversa to their destination and he assumed, since no
one bothered to inform him, they were taking a route through the hills in order to effect surprise. They had been riding for more than one glass of sand when Odo de Jumiège, the captain of the expedition, called a halt by a gurgling stream. This ran through a glade of decent pasture, which also provided shade from some trees. The horses, once watered, were hobbled and left to graze, and the men looked to their own comforts, those needing to piss careful to do so downstream of the place where the horses might again drink.

None of the men would themselves drink water in a land so abundantly supplied with wine and several, having eaten fruit and dried meat as well, lay down to nap, using their saddles as pillows. William was about to do likewise when Odo approached and ordered him to stand as sentinel on the route they would take.

‘Our Lord of Montesárchio must anticipate that his impertinence will not go unpunished, and he is a bold fellow who claims to command fifty fighting retainers. Make sure it is we who surprise him and not the other way round.’

There was no choice but to do as he was bid, even though it was absurd to think their enemy would come so far, at least ten leagues, to attack them. He, along with the absent Drogo, might be confused about the tangled web of local vassalage, but he knew too much about basic tactics to be fooled by such a command. This Lord of Montesárchio had a defendable tower:
he would stay in that and hope that an assault would be reckoned too much trouble. No one in their right mind took on Normans in the open, even when they outnumbered them two to one.

The reason for Odo’s action was not hard to fathom: he had not taken kindly to the inclusion of the brothers de Hauteville in his command. He had men he trusted, men he had fought alongside before, who knew his commands and would obey them without question. These newcomers had an air of superiority about them, even if they seemed able fighters. William particularly acted more like a leader than a supporter, which clearly irked the captain. Thus he ensured the elder brother ate the dust of his fellow mercenaries and he would, at times like this, be denied rest; if he was inclined to insubordination, the sooner Odo found out the better.

The station William was required to take, at the crest of a slight rise, had no shade, and so was uncomfortable as the heat of the day steadily increased. Equally tiring was the glare of the sun on a landscape of grey rock and tree-filled valleys. It was those on which he kept his eye, looking for any signs of human movement, like startled birds rising into the sky in sufficient numbers to denote a strange and powerful presence, aware that he used to do this at home when trouble threatened. For a moment he was back there, standing atop the wooden tower that
overlooked the family manor house, and the woods he was examining were not those of Italy, but the thick forests of the Normandy bocage. Sometimes, in high summer, it had been this hot.

Many times on the road south he had wondered if they were doing the right thing, only to come to the same conclusion on each occasion: there was no way of knowing. As his cousin of Montbray would have said, their lives were in God’s hands. All they could do was to follow his ways and keep their souls fit for salvation. The recurrence of that thought brought forth a wry smile: Drogo was certainly doomed to eternal damnation.

They had gone to pray for the soul of Duke Robert when they heard he had died, though Drogo had insisted he did not deserve their supplications, but William had, in part, been seeking some sign of what he should do. Through his mother, he had some claim on the ducal title; one that could be challenged, certainly, but valid nevertheless. Would the Norman barons accept Robert’s bastard as his heir? Hands clasped in prayer, he had deduced some would and some would not. There would be trouble in his homeland and that posed for him a question: was that where he should be?

That his father had entertained high hopes for all his offspring was no secret; he spoke of it often enough, but he had held the highest expectation for
his eldest son. The way Duke Robert had rebuffed him before Bessancourt had wounded Tancred, for William knew his father had never had aspirations that any of his five sons by his first wife should aim for too high a station. He had raised them to serve their duke not displace him, based on the oath he had given to the duke’s father always to serve his heirs. To Tancred, that oath was sacred.

Were there now, at this very moment, men trying to engage Tancred in revolt? They would be wasting their time, and not just because of given oaths. For all his paternal fecundity, Tancred was not a power in the land; he could field his feudal obligation of ten lances but no more. Certainly he had friends, but what he would have now would be men with much more land and authority than he seeking to use him, and if William had still been at home they would have tried to engage him as a figurehead, the aim being to depose his bastard namesake. Once that was achieved, it was impossible to believe they would bow the knee to a de Hauteville. It would be folly to suppose otherwise.

Thanks to Geoffrey de Montbray, the de Hauteville brood were better educated than most of their contemporaries. Tancred had fought alongside Geoffrey’s father, his brother-in-law, and had been present when he was killed by a Saxon axe while helping to regain the English throne for King Ethelred. He had raised the boy and helped him to the priesthood
not just as an act of family duty, but to have at hand someone lettered and well read who could minister in the Hauteville church and also act as a tutor to his sons. His nephew had repaid him handsomely.

There was no escaping his teaching; no excuses were acceptable. Thus all those down to children too young to tutor could read, write and speak Latin. They had been taught a fair amount of history, culled from the manuscripts that Geoffrey had seen as he studied for his office at places like the great Abbey of Cluny. They knew their catechism and their Stations of the Cross, just as they knew that if they needed intercession in any of their affairs, only prayer could provide it. But if Geoffrey taught them one thing above all others, he taught them to think.

‘Are you asleep?’

Odo de Jumiège’s hard tone interrupted this string of thoughts and reminiscence, but it was not enough to make William turn round.

‘I was tasked to watch the approach, and that is what I am doing.’

‘A glance behind you might have shown you we were breaking camp.’

William did turn then, and he stared just as hard at Odo as the captain was glaring at him. ‘Just as it might have made me miss something important.’

‘Get saddled up and mounted.’

‘And my station?’

‘Where do you think?’ Odo growled.

William sprang to his feet so quickly, to tower over Odo, that the captain, who was as tough as boots, actually recoiled a step. ‘As you wish.’

Needing to assert himself, Odo barked, ‘I don’t wish, I command.’

William smiled then, in the same way he had once smiled at Duke Robert, which was insulting and deliberately so. ‘So you do, Odo.’

Again bringing up the rear, William was at least, now they were in wooded country, spared mouthfuls of dust, but he was not spared the thought that he would have to do something about the man Rainulf had put in command of him. He was not given to disobedience, but neither was he given to buckling under domination. The difficulty was, how to go about it: in a troop of twenty-five knights, most of whom would be loyal to their leader, to raise a sword could be suicidal. A fight with Odo held, for him, no terror, but if they all took their leader’s part…

Most of the men Rainulf employed came from the same source: a land full of warriors with not enough wars to fight, added to endemic malcontents, content to live a good life off the backs of their liege lord’s subjects and the purloined property of his enemies. They were tough and far from gentle, so there was no appealing to them for fairness; the only thing they
would respect was martial prowess. But then William de Hauteville had a different thought: he knew Odo to be tough, but was he clever? In short, could the captain be outwitted?

Such considerations sustained him throughout a day of much riding, walking, and frequent halts, through a night when the provisions from the panniers on packhorses were roasted or boiled and consumed, and throughout the next day until they finally came in sight of the fortress of Montesárchio.

The sun was high in the sky, but the Normans were hidden from any sentinels, sat in the deep shade near the edge of a forest to observe the high central tower and flanking walls. The packhorses had been left back in the woods, along with a couple of trussed-up foresters they had encountered who, free to run, could alert their quarry. Two men had been detached to care for them and every man looking out at their objective was now fully ready for battle, lances in hand and helmets on, all bearing Rainulf’s colours.

It was really a small castle of cream stone blocks set on a hill shaped very like the conical helmets they wore, with the stronghold on top, served by a steep, winding causeway. William’s first thought was that even in an undulating landscape the mound was unnatural: it was just too much of, and too high, a protrusion. Possibly it was a strand of volcanic rock,
they were after all in a land of live and extinct volcanoes, but he doubted it.

To him, it looked like something that had been built up deliberately to house a tower from which most of the surrounding ground could be observed, not least the old Roman road which ran straight back to Aversa. Not that his view was sought: Odo’s idea was to emerge from the trees and rush the place, trying to get up that causeway to the heavy wooden gate before it could be shut in their face.

William, being one of the half a dozen men detailed to attempt this, was surprised no one questioned what was an absurd command. The distance was too great, at least seven hundred paces, and that was just to the bottom of the causeway. Gallop across that space and their horses would be slightly winded; to then force them up a steep slope, which looked from here to be made of loose stones, was going to be hard work. They would do it, but not at speed, and if the defenders had crossbows, both mounts and men would present perfect targets, and be outside a gate which had been slammed shut well before they could get to it.

Twenty-five lances could not attack and subdue a place like this. It had been designed to withstand a siege, and everything about the fortress was given to that – the cleared flat farmland between these woods at the base, with not even an olive tree to hide the approach – the way the stone buildings of the town,
with their red-tiled roofs, had been also kept away from the access route. The only notion William had was to wait until nightfall so that they could get under the walls on foot and in darkness, to perhaps surprise the garrison at first light if they opened a gate they were bound to shut at night.

He did not propose this for the very simple reason he knew he would be ignored. He was the last person Odo de Jumiège would take advice from, and the rest of the men were indifferent. They would do as they were told, and if it failed so be it; William had already overheard enough talk of how they generally went about their business in such situations.