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 Montesarchio, 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 Jumiege, 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 Montesarchio 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 Montesarchio 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 Jumiege’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
