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 Montesarchio 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
