by Jack Ludlow
Thus the two leaders found themselves face to face. The Greek Count of Montenero was not gorgeous now, he had been in close combat and was as bloodily stained as the Norman, and if he was fresher, he lacked Roger de Hauteville’s height and reach: the Norman sword swung in a wider arc than his, making it hard for him to get close to landing a blow, and by engaging as he did he had created a situation he would have been well advised to avoid. The men knew their leaders: the contest had become personal, lessening the general melee, and the count was no match for the man he faced.
He fought valiantly, even as it became clear he was outmatched, his sword taking blow after ringing blow as he put up a stout defence, never letting it show that, barring a shock, there could be only one outcome. Swinging hard and continually, his arms and shoulders aching from the continued effort, Roger beat down the man’s every effort to best him, wondering why he did not drop back, let fall his sword and beg for succour.
Yet Roger knew why he fought as he did: this was his fief and, in effect, his life. Everything he had of himself and his personal esteem coursed through the blade with which he fought: he had to kill this man before him or die in the attempt, there was no other way with honour. That came when he, tiring also, failed to parry a sweep of Roger’s sword and in seeking to recover from that error he left himself exposed. The following blow, the broadsword held high and swung with maximum force, caught the man at the join of his shoulder and neck. It did not decapitate him, the mail cowl under his helmet prevented that, but the blade sunk deep into his neck, forcing his head to cant at an angle, as a fount of bright-red blood spewed from the ruptured arteries and the light died in the man’s dark eyes.
Those he had led lost heart, but they had so incensed their Norman opponents by their fortitude that few were spared, so that the hard ground of the interior of Montenero was fed with much blood. Some fought on with the despair which comes from knowing death awaits and it is better to expire fighting than on your knees, falling back until they found themselves under the canopy of that ancient acropolis. It ended there with slaughter and the Norman leader, his chest heaving, leaning on his sword, rasping that combat should cease, aware that for once, he was being ignored.
When it did stop there was no one left to kill and Roger, looking around the stone columns of the ancient building, tried to say that what held them up would make fine foundation stones for his castle: tried but failed – he lacked the breath to make himself heard even by the men right at his side.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I have been faithful to my word, Robert, sending you everything I pillaged as well as the revenues I have gathered from those who submitted.’
‘Everything? I think not, Sprat.’
‘Stop calling me that.’
‘I am your liege lord, I can call you what I wish.’
Roger was aware that his brother was uncomfortable, as to his mind so should he be. Famed for his generosity, he had not been that with him, quite the reverse: the revenues sent to Melfi in the last year had stayed there in their entirety.
‘I decide who is my liege lord, not you, and as of this moment I am not inclined to acknowledge a man who acts like a common thief.’
‘I will not let you address me so,’ Robert yelled, his voice echoing off the stones of the great hall. Meant to cow Roger, it signally failed to do so.
‘How are you going to stop me, unless you are willing to use your dungeons? I cannot pay my men, damn it, Robert, I can scarce feed them. What happened to the half of the revenues I was promised, all that gold I sent you?’
‘It has been used wisely.’
‘For what?’
‘The needs of my holdings, which are of paramount concern.’
‘Your coffers are full to bursting, I’ll wager. Is it that you have become a miser?’
‘The revenues of the lands I have are mine to do with what I wish…’
‘Which clearly does not extend to keeping a solemn promise.’
‘Promise? I recall no promise.’ The booming voice had mellowed, but it was the sly look that went with it that really annoyed Roger. ‘A discussion yes, a proposal and one larded with avarice from you, given you were without prospects lest I grant them to you.’
‘Have I not served you well? Half of Calabria accepts you as suzerain.’
‘You have served me as you should.’
‘Perhaps you fear me, Robert.’
‘If you believe that you are a fool.’
‘The one thing am I am not is a fool, brother. Pay me what you owe or I will depart your service.’
‘Do you think you, of no account, can threaten me?’
‘If I am of no account I may as well depart.’
Seething, Roger turned on his heel and left. The next heard sound was of him and his knights riding out of the castle of Melfi. What should have troubled the Guiscard more was that accompanying them were Ralph de Boeuf and many of the men Robert had sent with his brother to Calabria.
‘I have never known him like this,’ Geoffrey said, ‘And I have good reason to say those words, for Robert has never been short with me.’
‘You are another one,’ Roger replied, not without asperity, ‘who is going to boast of his liberality, something I am sick of hearing about.’
The remark made Geoffrey frown. ‘I beg you take some more wine and calm yourself.’
‘How can I be calm? How can you just sit at this table and eat and drink while I am being cheated?’
If Roger had a reputation for being diplomatic it had deserted him in the face of his treatment. He had been fuming since he left Melfi and no amount of hospitality from Geoffrey was going to assuage it. Two years he had spent campaigning in Calabria, sustained by the promise of two things: half the revenues, obviously, plus the promise that Robert would return to complete the conquest of the province once he had settled matters in Apulia. Neither had been kept and Roger had found himself making war with diminishing resources and disgruntled lances, men not being paid that which they were due because everything was being remitted to Melfi. What plunder they acquired from resistant places like Montenero did not last much beyond their desire to celebrate with wine and women. His own purse had been emptied to keep them fighting but that was now bare.
‘I am at a loss to know what you think I can do.’
About to bark at Geoffrey, Roger stopped himself: abusing this affable and somewhat ineffectual de Hauteville would do nothing to help him. Geoffrey had Loritello and his captaincy of Brindisi, the latter gifted to him by Robert, the former held from the time of Drogo.
‘You may have been too successful, Roger.’
‘How can a man be too successful?’
‘You do not know Robert as I do,’ Geoffrey responded. ‘He does not warm to anyone he feels can match him in the field.’
‘He’s jealous?’ Roger asked.
‘Not jealous, but inclined to be made uncomfortable by an ability he perceives might equal his own. He fell out with William, Drogo and Humphrey, though I would add falling out with the latter was too easy.’
‘I pose no threat to him.’
Geoffrey sat forward and for once replied with feeling, which led Roger to think he was talking more about himself than the problem being discussed. ‘It is for the person who feels threatened to judge such a thing.’
‘Will Robert listen to you?’ he asked, in a calm voice.
With just a trace of bitterness Geoffrey said, ‘He never has before.’
‘I need you to advance me some funds.’
That made his brother guarded, though it did not engender an outright refusal. ‘I cannot spare much.’
‘I don’t need much. I am going west and when it comes to food and fodder Robert will provide them whether he likes it or not.’
Good as his word, Roger de Hauteville lived very well off the Guiscard’s lands: when his men ate beef it was from his brother’s cattle, when his horses downed oats they came from Robert’s grain stores. It would have ple
ased him to know that such theft, when reported back to Melfi, nearly produced an apoplexy.
Roger’s stop in Capua was of short duration: although he was made welcome, it was clear that his brother-in-law found his presence either irksome or inconvenient and no intercessions by his sister carried any weight. Richard’s relations with the Guiscard were fragile, as suited two equally powerful magnates whose interests did not always coincide. They would combine if the Norman position in Italy was threatened, but that did not extend to a deep common purpose and the fear always existed on both sides, in a world where suspicion was rife, that one great Norman fief might combine with outside forces to destroy the other, despite a long-standing commandment that, here in Italy, Normans did not kill Normans.
The Prince of Capua took care to keep his operations to the west of the Apennines, while Robert Guiscard made sure none of his lances strayed into his neighbour’s bailiwick. If they met at all it was in the papal fief of Benevento, which straddled the mountains and was rich in everything that was of value in their world: field crops, orchard fruit, vines, livestock, fish and timber, as well as all the trades that commanded good payment. Both Norman fiefs had treaty relations with the papacy in the Principality of Benevento; both treated such obligations more in the breech than the observance.
There was also the jealousy of Richard’s captains: a de Hauteville was too prominent a personage to be a mere lance, too well connected to be employed as a mere warrior, quite apart from the fact that he had arrived in Capua leading fifty followers. To show them any favour was to upset the delicate balance any leader had with his own key supporters. After a month of well-fed idleness, Roger knew his own men were becoming impatient: like every Norman in Italy, these men served for reward and plunder. It was time to move on.
‘To where?’ asked Ralph de Boeuf.
‘We could offer our swords to Gisulf of Salerno.’
‘If we do, we’ll soon find ourselves fighting the men we are living with now at odds of a hundred to one.’
There was truth in that: having swallowed Capua, Richard continued to press in on the territories of his one-time nominal suzerain, so squeezing Salerno that the prince could only now say with certainty he ruled in his own city.
‘I have also heard that Gisulf is short on sense.’
‘Let us travel through that city and see what presents itself.’
The sight of a strong party of Normans riding towards Salerno did not go unnoticed: word of their presence reached the city gates before they did. Prior to that, Roger and his men had sat on a high hill looking at the great bay on which the city sat, one of the premier trading ports of Western Italy, rival to Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, all of them wealthy, all of them victims over the last five hundred years of internecine Lombard rivalries, expanding and contracting as one fief rose and another diminished. Now they faced the Normans, a bitter pill for Salerno, given it was the duke of that city who had first sought their mercenary aid to fight the Saracens.
‘They are accustomed to disquiet,’ Ralph observed, his eye following the trace of the exterior walls. ‘How long do these Lombards have?’
‘How long do we Normans have, Ralph?’
‘There’s no one to threaten us.’
‘God has a way of marking and dealing with hubris.’
‘God in heaven, you are dismal.’
Roger smiled. ‘I am made thoughtful, Ralph. We have just ridden the same roads that my eldest brothers traversed many times and they are now bones. William’s iron arm did not save him from a secret knife, nor did being a doughty fighter spare Drogo the same fate. Sitting here, I feel somehow their presence, more so than at their tomb in Venosa. This is where my family’s adventure began.’
‘And where yours will end if we don’t eat soon.’
Roger nodded, and taking a tight hold of the reins of the mounts he led, he gently kicked with his heels to set his horse in motion.
The de Hauteville name got Roger an immediate audience as well as accommodation in the Castello di Arechi, the towering fortress that overlooked the town, but Gisulf of Salerno did not impress. The prince was too shifty in nature and that trait was marked in both his features and manner. He fidgeted constantly, unbecoming in a nobleman who, whatever his own anxieties, had a need to appear calm before his court, many of whom were present and loud in the way they reacted to his pronouncements, however outlandish. Dark-complexioned, with black hair and eyes, Gisulf looked and acted like a schemer and, given what he had been saying to Roger, one with a tenuous grip on reality. He had already created a great armed host from nothing but his imaginings, and sent it, with Roger at its head, to inflict a terrible defeat on Richard of Aversa.
‘I see his head on my city gate,’ he cried.
‘You speak of a man to whom I am related by marriage, sire.’
Gisulf, slightly hunched and too gaudily dressed for his slight figure, waved an impatient hand: such ties clearly meant nothing. ‘And you would be paying back his family for what they did to your own, the treacherous swine.’
Roger wondered at that misinterpretation of the past, which got loud approval from most present: certainly Richard’s uncle, Rainulf, had cheated his brothers, but Gisulf’s own father had not treated William and Drogo well at all; indeed, if this inelegant prince was a schemer, then it was a parental inheritance. Guaimar, who had sired this fellow, had done his best to play off Rainulf against the de Hautevilles. That he had not succeeded in getting them to kill each other came from an over-reliance on conspiracy rather than a lack of the desire to indulge in such a thing.
While listening with seeming intent to the prince, Roger was taken with one of his advisors, a tall sallow-complexioned fellow in a skullcap, very much older than the rest of the courtiers present, not given, either, to reacting with enthusiasm to their lord’s more outlandish suggestions. Indeed, the slight smile that played around his lips hinted at a more realistic grasp of where Gisulf stood in relation to the main enemy, for there were others. Roger’s brother, Mauger, from his castle of Scalea, preyed on Gisulf’s territories from the south, as much as Richard of Aversa did from the north and west.
‘You will dine with me this night, Roger de Hauteville, and we will speak. Plans must be laid, messages sent to Naples and Amalfi to seek alliance – I will not deal with that pile of ordure they call the Duke of Gaeta.’ Gisulf stopped both his pacing and fidgeting and fixed Roger with his beady eyes. ‘Would a force of Saracen mercenaries be an advantageous idea?’
He spun then to face the tall fellow in the skullcap.
‘Ephraim, do we have the funds to pay for such aid?’
‘If you sell your plate, sire, yes.’
‘Sell my plate? Am I so reduced that I cannot dine off my gold?’
‘The man whose head you wish to see on your city gates is an avaricious neighbour.’
Gisulf spun to look at Roger again. ‘You see what a robber your Richard is, you see how much I have to give him to have peace? He demands bezants and I must pay.’ The cunning look came on now in full force. ‘But you will also see what wealth you could gain if he were no longer my bane.’
Having been given an apartment, Roger retired, wondering how long he should stay in this land of fairies and their dreams. Quite apart from any ties to his sister, he was disinclined to do battle with his powerful brother-in-law to advance the cause of a Lombard, especially one who would seek to swindle him, even if he had a chance to succeed, which he most certainly did not. In contemplation of this, he was distracted by the knock at the door of his chamber, opening it to find the man called Ephraim outside.
‘I wonder if we may have a private word?’ Roger stood back and indicated he should enter, quite naturally looking to ensure he was not armed. Once inside and the door shut, the fellow looked at him and smiled in a friendly way. ‘You remind me of your brothers, William and Drogo. It is striking how you all resemble each other.’
‘If you had seen my father you would know why.’
/> ‘Ah yes, Tancred. He and I did much business, even if we never met.’
‘Business?’
‘I served as a conduit by which your brothers could send money back to Normandy.’
‘You are a Jew?’
‘With a name such as mine, could I be otherwise?’
If Ephraim was a Jew he had none of the physical traits associated with his race, barring the sallow complexion: he was tall, well proportioned and the facial features were even and handsome.
‘I used to accompany my father to the home of a Jew in Rouen.’
‘To whom I remitted your brothers’ gifts. I recall some mention of the building of a stone tower as being his heart’s desire.’
‘He always left that house in Rouen with a smile.’
‘Did he get his donjon?’
‘He did, but only after William had begged the Duke of Normandy for permission.’ Roger, recalling that such a thing had angered his father, was suddenly aware of his lack of manners. ‘Please sit, sir. Can I get you some wine?’
‘That would be most pleasant. I recall sharing many goblets with William.’
‘Not Drogo?’
‘Less so Drogo,’ Ephraim replied with a wistful look. ‘He was, how should I say, more impetuous than William, and although we transacted business it did not extend to conversations regarding his well-being.’
‘Why have you come here?’ Roger asked, handing over one goblet and sitting down with his own.
The Jew did not reply at once: it was as if he were searching for the right words. ‘I must tell you that I am in the service of the Prince of Salerno, as I was in the service of his father. I hold the office of collector of the revenues of the port.’ When Roger did not respond Ephraim added, ‘You do not see it as strange that a man of my race is entrusted with so valuable an office?’
‘I would not see it as likely in Normandy, but this is Italy. Things happen here that are strange to us northerners.’