Mercenaries (13 page)

All would be spared if the castle surrendered, the Lord of Montesárchio alone being taken to face Prince Pandulf, along, of course, with his coffers. If they refused to surrender, the Normans would threaten both the lord and his vassals down to the meanest peasant with the most horrible death, and if necessary sit down to starve them out, cutting the vines and olive trees in the surrounding farmland, destroying any seed so that nothing could be sown in the next season, and living off the crops in the fields or storerooms, even if it took months, with an occasional hanging, drawing and quartering below the walls of one of the townsfolk to remind the garrison of their forthcoming fate.

The idea of building ballistae and knocking down the walls, or sending over the top tight bundles of
fired and oil-soaked straw, was not the Norman way; they were cavalry not artisans. Of course, messages would be sent back to Rainulf to ask if he wished to speed matters up, but hope rested on the reluctance of the men of the garrison to sacrifice their blood for a result which could only be gainsaid if a force came to relieve them, and no such force existed.

Odo waited until the sun was sinking in the west, in the hope that, behind them, it would give those rushing the place a few extra seconds before discovery. Then he ordered them to stand by, and after a few moments, with their mounts now stamping impatiently – for trained to war, they knew what was coming – he gave the command to attack. The progress to the very edge of the trees was not hurried, there were too many loose branches and unseen hazards on the uneven ground that could cripple a horse, but out of the shade and with nothing but strips of farmland before them the riders kicked their mounts into a gallop.

There was no ordered line in this: it was who could get there fastest that counted and in such a situation William de Hauteville’s great height and bulk counted against him, so much so that he cursed Odo’s spite in choosing him. This was a task for the lighter lances, the men who bore down least on their animals, for quite apart from their own weight the horses had to bear the burden of the fighting equipment they wore and carried. Soon William was bringing up the rear,
and no amount of spurring could make his horse go faster. He could hear the sound of a blaring trumpet and knew the defenders had seen the approach and were raising the alarm.

The first riders were halfway up the steep causeway before he got to the base, while beneath him he knew his mount was breathing hard. It took heavy spurring to get him to begin the ascent, and even then his hooves were getting poor footing on the loose surface. Up ahead he could see the gate was shut and the way barred, which made him wonder at the stupidity of his confrères to keep going in the face of a defence they could not hope to breach.

They were milling around on the flat ground before that gate when the first great stone came over the crenellated wall. It missed them all but set their horses off in panic, which had them rearing and bucking, hard to control, as more stones followed. William hauled on his reins to halt his mount; there was nothing but death or a maiming to be gained by going further and he was yelling for those under the hail of stones to pull back. One stone took a rider right on the crown of his helmet, leaving William unsure if he imagined or actually heard the man’s neck snap. Another hit the ground in front of a horse and, bouncing, took its fragile leg, bringing it to its knees and throwing its rider.

The men under that assault were fighting their
animals not the enemy, for if their mounts had been trained for combat they had not been trained to withstand this. His own horse was using the slope to back up, only his hold on the reins keeping its head facing what was going on above. Only when he saw that three riders had got out from under the hail, did he let it have its head, and it was round and slithering away from any danger as soon as he did that.

The first crossbow bolt hit the ground in front of him, and it was only an automatic reaction that made him press hard to alter his mount’s direction. Shoulders hunched, he felt as if he was naked and there was no point in slowing or turning to see how the others were faring; the only place of safety was out of range. On the flat ground again the going eased, but even well winded his horse did not slow, for in its brain it had its own set of demons from which to flee.

Four men and five horses made it back to the woods, the riders breathing as heavily as their mounts. One of the attacking party was certainly dead, another probably so and they could see the wounded horse struggling to stand while the defenders amused themselves by trying to kill it, and the rider it had cast off, with more stones. Glaring at Odo, William was presented, at least in what he could see, with a face utterly indifferent to what had just occurred.

He heard his captain order one man forward
with him, and as they rode towards the base of the causeway, Odo dropped his lance and attached to it a strip of white cloth. Walking his horse halfway up he stopped and began to shout, the words he used floating back to be just audible to his company, who had emerged from the trees, most leading their mounts, to show their number – to William, another error: they should have stayed hidden so that the defenders had no idea of what they faced.

Odo’s demand was straightforward: surrender the fortress and the body of the Lord of Montesárchio, and the garrison would be spared; refuse and they would face siege and assault, and no quarter would be given once the inevitable happened. In time-honoured fashion, when refusing such a demand, Odo was greeted with boos and whistles, while several of the defenders climbed onto the parapet and turned to bare their arses.

‘Then I ask to be allowed to collect the bodies of my men,’ he called.

A single voice answered, and the men at the edge of the woods strained their eyes seeking to see the man whose surrender they sought. It was a high voice, near girlish, that told Odo his wish was granted. That brought from him a wave of an arm and, obviously prearranged, four of the still-mounted men detached themselves and rode forward. Odo himself had dismounted and gone to look at the bodies, perhaps
hoping that one man was still alive. Following that, he went to the horse with the broken leg, and gently lifting its head, he took out his knife and cut its throat.

‘Looks like we’re here for a while,’ said one of the men beside William.

‘Let’s hope there are some decent women in the town, then,’ replied another. ‘I’m sick of that bitch I bought last year.’

‘There’ll be a few bitches in this Montesárchio sick of us afore this be over.’

‘Best get digging first, to bury our own, and we’ll need a priest.’

‘Two men dead an’ for a daft notion.’

‘That’s Odo. If he has a brain, it’s in his arse.’

Saddened as he was, William felt a stirring of relief in overhearing that conversation: he was not alone!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Guaimar did not like Ascletin, and he liked even less being cooped up in a travelling coach with him for days on end. The Pierleoni son had only one topic of conversation: himself, and it was one he was happy to talk about endlessly. All his actions were brilliant, all his friends adored him, his family were amazed at his perspicacity, his fellow clerics at his grasp of the intricacies of Holy Scripture and, of course, his parishioners were in awe of so elevated a personage holding the office of bishop.

His diocese was the mountain town of L’Aquila, perched in the high Apennines, on the direct route from Rome to the Adriatic. He had never actually visited the place, though he was happy to take what revenues came his way to help fund his true purpose in life, which was to pursue the Papacy and thus
elevate the name of the Pierleoni to rank amongst the highest in Christendom.

In this he was naturally backed by his family’s wealth, but Guaimar soon discerned that the Pierleoni, when it came to money and influence in the city of Rome, were way behind the other leading families who could trace their roots back not decades, but centuries. Ascletin might call them arrogant; they probably behaved as if he and his tribe barely existed.

He also seemed acutely aware that his family’s conversion from Judaism to the Latin faith was a drawback; he felt he needed to stress their adherence to Christianity and he did so relentlessly, and always with praise for the far-sightedness of his grandfather, a wise, nay brilliant, man from whom he had, of course, inherited those desirable attributes. It was all too desperate in its constant repetition and insistence, made worse by the slow rate at which their convoy was travelling and by his continuing habit of treating Guaimar as if he was a youth in the presence of an adult.

The road to the imperial heartlands of Germany was the best maintained in Italy, and one of the most travelled, studded with comfortable inns and religious establishments where those who had the means were happy to stay. This was diminished somewhat by the fact that they were buffeted about in a coach; on horses the party could have managed twenty leagues a day,
with a stop every fourth day to rest the animals. In this caravanserai, with teams of six animals per coach needing constant replacement, ten leagues was a matter of some exhilaration, a lot less being more common, which promised a month cooped up with this terminal bore.

On their too frequent halts, nothing but the best was good enough for the party: the Pierleoni son was intent on impressing everyone with his fabulous wealth, and he planned his stops in advance, sending ahead a rider to the next place of rest to ensure that they knew who was coming, and also to make certain that food of the required standard was produced.

He had another worry, one he was gnawing on now: Ascletin had designs on his sister, and being the self-centred creature he was saw none of the disapproval in her eyes that his slimy attention produced. He was the type to think everyone smitten by him, and not just the fair sex. Every owner of an inn, every abbot at the monasteries at which they rested, all the monks, and even the Archbishop of Milan, when they had stayed at his palace, was expected to be stunned by this paragon.

It was in a tavern in Verona that he had overheard Ascletin telling one of his family retainers, one of a tribe of valets brought along to see to his personal needs, in a voice brimming with confidence… ‘I will have the lovely Berengara, who is so clearly attracted
to me, but not until I see how her brother stands with the emperor.’

Passing outside the door of the buffoon’s chamber, Guaimar had to stop himself from pushing open the door and thumping him on his clerical ear. Berengara, though polite, loathed him, and even if she had not, the assumption that he could have his way with her at a proverbial click of his fingers made her brother’s blood boil. But he had to calm himself – Berengara would be polite because they needed his aid; he could do no less. This restraint was made more difficult by Ascletin’s next remark.

‘No point in wasting my charms on a nobody. I will only grace her with my seed if her brother stands in some regard with Conrad Augustus. If the emperor shows he is inclined to aid the young booby, he will be a person whose support might be worth a lick of attention. At present he is nothing but a bore and I am stuck in my coach with him all day. The blessed fellow will just never shut up!’

‘The Papacy must be brought into the present age,’ Ascletin insisted, at the end of a long repetitive diatribe.

Guaimar had only been half listening, but the remark dragged him away from his concerns regarding Berengara, to leave him wondering if this was the first or the fiftieth time he had heard this in the last
three weeks. He had developed a look and a persistent nod that persuaded Ascletin he was paying attention when actually his mind, as it had been just now, was elsewhere, and it was easy to pick up the thread if his fellow-traveller ever posed a proper question; all he had to say was ‘But surely you have a solution’ to set him off again.

‘This notion that a Pope cannot be elected unless he is approved by the Western Emperor is absurd!’ Guaimar waited for what was sure to follow, and he was not disappointed. ‘Not, of course, that I would ever allude to that in the presence of the present incumbent. It would not do to have him in opposition to my ambitions for Holy Church.’

Why is it, Guaimar wondered, that this pompous fool thinks me so indebted to his family that I might not tell Conrad this myself? But, of course, he would not, for the election of a Pope was such an affair of arcane rights and privileges – as well as an occasion for an outbreak of furious violence from competing centres of power – it was a field best kept well out of.

‘Do you not agree, Guaimar?’

Forced by the directness of that question to look at Ascletin, he altered his stock response slightly. ‘But I know you have the solution.’

‘Holy Church must elect the man to lead it,’ Ascletin declared, ‘not a lay emperor. Only then can the factions
come together to agree on the candidate.’

‘Absolutely,’ Guaimar replied, moving aside a heavy curtain to look at the snow-capped mountains that enclosed one side of the Brenner Pass.

He also saw the faces of those peasants, male and female, holding large, flat, wooden shovels, whose task it was to keep the road clear of snow, and he wondered if that was a feudal service demanded of them or one for payment. Very likely it would be the former: in these parts there was no planting and sowing the fields in the winter season and he had already observed their cattle were kept out of the cold in barns, so whoever was their lord and master would not want them idle. Peasants with nothing to do became troublesome.

How different this was from Campania, where in parts near Vesuvius you could sow and reap four harvests a year – two was common throughout. Here, they depended on one. That blessing of climate and soil was, of course, part of Campania’s curse as well. Being so fertile it was also a land that produced much in the way of riches, a territory people would fight over to control. He was on his way to bow the knee to Conrad, but he could just as easily be on the way to Constantinople on the same errand.

‘A convocation of cardinals, abbots of the great monasteries, and archbishops, should elect a Pope.’ Ascletin was asserting this, as though such an idea
was original and his own, instead of one advanced by everyone who opposed imperial intervention. ‘And there should be no intrusion into the deliberations by the factions of Rome.’

Even that blatant piece of hypocrisy – he meant everyone except the Pierleoni – could not divert Guaimar from the thought which had hit him like a thunderbolt. It is not pleasant to realise you have made an error, and one so profound as to undermine your entire purpose. The Emperor Conrad had to be persuaded to come to his aid, made to see that the removal of Pandulf was essential, and the only solution to that problem was a military one. Strictures not backed by force would carry no weight whatsoever, but what would persuade the emperor to act when he had not done so in the past, even although the depredations of the Wolf could not be a secret.

Guaimar was now back in the archbishop’s palace in Salerno, and he realised he had acquiesced too easily in the cleric’s insistence that seeking help from the Eastern Empire was anathema. Both the courts of Bamberg and Constantinople were content to protest their rights as suzerain as long as neither sought to enforce it and the air of seeming harmony which they projected was a mask. There was deep mistrust between the two halves of the old Roman inheritance, but inactivity was the response: you stay out of South
Italy and so will we; you ensure stability on one side of the Apennines, and we will do so on the other.

Conrad had made an error in releasing Pandulf, and before he would do anything he would have to first admit that. He had not done so up till now, even if it was obvious, so what would change his mind? Conrad would not move unless he felt threatened!

Guaimar nearly said those last words out loud, so obvious was it to his now troubled mind. He should have sent to ask the Eastern Emperor for help as well, and damn the fears of his archbishop, for there was one truth that never evaporated: both emperors would dearly love to take over the whole region, east to west, if they thought that they could do so and hold it without endless conflict. The next problem to surface was how to alter what was a cardinal error.

‘… No, I must take care with Conrad Augustus to give him no inkling of my thoughts.’

God Almighty, is he still talking? Guaimar wanted to scream.

‘This, of course, will not be a problem. When he sees the power of the intelligence he has to deal with, I am sure I will have this so-called Augustus eating out of my hand.’ Ascletin leant forward over his chest of money to impart, again not for the first time, his conclusion. ‘I do not expect, of course, to be the next holder of the papal office, but the one after that, young Guaimar. That I think will be mine.’

Looking into Ascletin’s face, Guaimar thought he might have a solution.

The cries of the escorts were enough to alert everyone to the approach of their next stop and his fellow-traveller began to preen himself in a plate of highly polished silver; he wished to be seen at his best.

When told of Guaimar’s plan, Berengara was entranced, but was wise enough to insist they rehearse the thing before carrying it out, and her brother was, although initially sceptical, made wise to the fact that she was correct when he stumbled on the words he needed to use. The other thing his sister said was equally true: just because he had realised his error, there was no need to correct it that second.

If sitting listening to Ascletin’s witterings had been hard before, it was doubly so when impatience was added. The temptation to blurt out what had to be delivered with guile was nearly overwhelming, and lasted until they reached Innsbruck, where they were once again the guests of an archbishop. In a palace that would not have disgraced an emperor, the perfect setting was found for the argument Guaimar and Berengara needed to construct. The rooms were vast, and so were the connecting corridors, high ceilinged and given to echo. Placing themselves within earshot of the apartments allotted to Ascletin and ignoring
any passing servants, their raised voices carried a long way.

‘I absolutely forbid you to mention it.’

‘For what reason?’ Berengara demanded.

‘Telling Conrad such a thing will ruin what we are trying to do.’

Berengara had placed herself so she could see Ascletin’s door, and she nodded sharply to her brother to let him know it had opened a fraction, so she cried, ‘It is dishonest!’

‘It is necessary. If the emperor finds out we have sent a mission to Constantinople as well it will ruin everything.’

‘Why?’

Guaimar dropped his voice, hoping he had done so enough to have their eavesdropper straining. ‘The archbishop was adamant. Only the Western Emperor should be approached. To send for help from both could render useless our hopes. I need you to swear you will say nothing.’

‘Swear? Do you trust me so little?’

‘Berengara, a chance remark, a word let slip, and we will be undone. Conrad Augustus must come south with his army and get rid of Pandulf.’ Now he raised his voice again. ‘There is no chance of him doing that if he thinks we will take help from the Byzantines as well. When I swear allegiance to him, as I must, he will have to be convinced that it is inviolable.’

‘What if help comes from the east as well?’

‘What do we care who rids us of Pandulf, as long as we have Salerno?’

‘You will have Salerno.’

‘And you, my dear sister, will have a husband that goes with your station as my relative.’

They began to walk away from Ascletin’s door, still arguing, their voices fading until they were far enough away to collapse in a fit of giggles.

Ahead lay many more days of having his ears assaulted by his travelling companion, but it had been noticeable on that first morning after their ruse that Ascletin wore an expression on his face even more smug. They came to Bamberg eventually, through a week of snow, to find a town smaller than half a dozen they had passed through. Conrad had set up his court here because it was a fief of his own house and the palace of his predecessor and uncle, a move probably not popular with those who had to gather to elect and anoint a Holy Roman Emperor: the great magnates of church and state who represented half of Europe.