levies of Rome — so exacting and methodical that every person, beast and acre in the land was counted.
Norman bureaucrats in their hundreds were sent to every burgh and village in the realm to undertake the census: no chore was left unaccounted for, no piece of thatch (even as small as the width of a man’s arm) left unmeasured, and no crop, creature or artefact omitted from the national reckoning.
The result of the great stocktaking, the like of which was beyond contemporary comparison, made William far richer than he had imagined — so rich, in fact, that it emboldened his avarice. Not only was he prepared to fund an immense standing army in England, of over 11,000 men, to meet the Danish threat, but he was also willing to commit 8,000 men to the defence of Maine.
The messenger also carried a private parchment from Robert, sealed and addressed to me. It was a request for us to return to Normandy. His father’s belligerence had led him to plan an attack for the following summer in the Vexin, to Normandy’s south, where Philip of France had installed provosts in Mantes and Pontoise. William intended to root them out and had asked Robert to prepare the army and lead the attack.
It was a typically cunning move by the King; not only was it yet another test of his son’s generalship, it was also a further test of his son’s loyalty in the face of his friend and former ally, Philip of France.
I assumed this last point accounted for Robert’s request for me to return. I anticipated that, as I had with Malcolm Canmore, I would now play the role of mediator between Robert and Philip.
It was another daunting task — but one, on reflection, that reinvigorated me. Life in Sicily had become too comfortable, and I was in danger of losing my sense of purpose. Not only that: Robert was a good friend, and I greatly admired Philip, so anything I could do to prevent war, and all that such a conflict would bring, represented a mission I was keen to accept.
Adela, Edwin and I completed our tasks for Count Roger by the end of the year and departed for mainland Europe in mid-January. We decided to take the same route as Sweyn and Mahnoor so that we could visit them at St Cirq Lapopie in Aquitaine. I had heard so much about the remote idyll in the Lot, a place so precious to Hereward and his family, and now I was keen to see it for myself. I also suspected that Sweyn may well have rediscovered his passion for adventure. Given that we were soon likely to be involved in more Norman military campaigns, I was hoping to persuade him to resume his place by my side.
St Cirq Lapopie was everything I had imagined. It was like an eagle’s nest, standing high above the gorge of the river on a rocky limestone promontory. It had had the same effect on Edwin when he first saw it, all those years ago, when he sailed up the Lot as Edith Swan-Neck’s emissary. I heard Adela whisper the word ‘home’ as she stared at the one place where she had found peace in her troubled life.
As we disembarked from the Lot barge and made our way up the steep path to the house, the greeting was not the one we had expected. No Sweyn. No Mahnoor. Only Ingigerd and Maria, in obvious and immense distress, with a trail of locals in their wake. They rushed to embrace Edwin and Adela, but their tears were not tears of joy at the return of two members of their family. I looked around and noticed that one of the barns had recently burned to the ground, but otherwise all seemed well.
Both women were in their early fifties, but looked fit and well. They had lived eventful lives and had, as the wives of the famous warriors Martin and Einar, often witnessed harrowing things. But the story they told us on our arrival was horrifying to the point of disbelief.
Sweyn had been away hunting with the estate steward and most of the men of the community, a week earlier, when the attack took place. It had begun in the middle of the night when a large gang of hooded men appeared, broke into the house and ransacked the cottages of everyone on the estate. Some of the estate men who had not gone with the hunting party resisted, but any who did were mercilessly cut down. The rest were rounded up, bound hand and foot, gagged and dragged away. The women and children were all herded into the barn, except Mahnoor.
No one could see exactly what happened next, but her suffering continued for some time. Her agonizing screams eventually turned into despairing whimpers before dwindling away to a merciful silence.
For at least another hour, everyone in the barn trembled in silence before the sound of horses signalled the attackers’ departure — but not before they had thrown torches on to the thatched roof. Only the nimbleness of one of the older boys, who had managed to climb up to the eaves and kick a hole in the straw before clambering down the outside wall to unbar the door, saved the occupants from being burned alive.
Mahnoor was nowhere to be found and everyone assumed she had been taken by her assailants. But the men were found, dashed on the rocks below, eleven good men of Aquitaine, husbands, sons and brothers, all innocent victims of a vicious assault.
The most grisly discovery was made at dawn when the son of the pigman went to check on his herd. Mahnoor’s head had been impaled on a lance and stuck in the ground in one of the sties. Her luxuriant jet-black hair now fell in blood-soaked threads down her face, her jaw hung open hideously and trails of dried blood ran from her mouth, nose, ears and eye sockets. Her once captivating eyes had been gouged from her. What was left of her body was strewn around among the pigs, parts of which were still being consumed.
Of course, being fed to swine, the creature most reviled by Muslims, was a horrifying fate to one of her faith, as was the insult daubed in her own blood on the wall of the sty — ‘infidel’.
The most wretched part of it all was the fact that Mahnoor had just discovered she was pregnant. Sweyn’s hunting trip had been intended to put fresh meat and game on the table of a grand feast to celebrate the news.
The hunting party returned the next day, by which time, mercifully for Sweyn, all trace of the barbarism had been removed and Mahnoor’s remains buried. He hid his immediate reaction from everyone by turning his back when Maria and Ingigerd told him what had happened and walking away to the forest, a place he always returned to in times of stress. It was, after all, the place where he had found refuge after the massacre at Bourne.
He asked just one rhetorical question as he left, which was to say that he presumed the band of assassins had spoken Arabic? When Maria confirmed that they had, he hesitated for a moment before continuing his desolate trudge into the wilderness.
It is impossible to imagine what thoughts went through his head in those dark minutes and hours that followed but, just before dusk, he returned and asked to spend time alone at the side of Mahnoor’s grave.
Maria and Ingigerd took him food and a cloak later in the evening, and a fire was built nearby to warm him against the chill of winter. He politely resisted all attempts to comfort him and spent the night huddled next to the grave of his beloved wife, the mother of his unborn child.
The women took it in turns to check on him during the night, but on each occasion he was still in the same position, numb to all entreaties and to everything around him. Just before dawn it started to snow and, within minutes, he was covered in a shroud of snow, but still he did not move. They took him a bowl of game soup and a beaker of mulled wine at sunrise, which he consumed without seeming to taste or savour it.
Then he smiled a mournful, weak smile; for the first time, there were tears in his eyes.
‘I have to go. I know who did this terrible thing. I will avenge my wife and make him pay for what he did here.’
He said nothing more, other than to ask that one of the enclave of Arab merchants in Toulouse be paid to come and read from the Quran over Mahnoor’s grave. By the middle of the day he had loaded a small boat and was rowing himself down the Lot to Cahors.
When Ingigerd and Maria had finished their dreadful account, we immediately began to make a plan. We knew precisely where Sweyn was going and exactly who the culprit was whom he intended to slay. We assumed he would not go to Count Roger, but would want to exact his own revenge, and thus would need all the help we could offer him. Unfortunately, he had a four-day start on us. Ironically, we had almost certainly passed him somewhere on our journey, but on the busy road from Cahors to Toulouse it was easy to pass people unnoticed.
Adela was understandably impatient.
‘We must leave immediately! If we ride like the wind, we can catch him. He will want to get to Sicily as quickly as possible, but not as quickly as we want to catch up with him.’
Adela was probably wrong; a four-day head start for a man with only a single objective in his mind was a lot to make up, but it was worth a try. And she certainly tried.
We bought a string of horses in Cahors and rode them as hard as was humane. She did not want to stop and so, when the horses could do no more, we walked. It was the hardest task I had ever undertaken and my admiration for her grew by the minute. She never seemed to tire.
She was counting the miles and checking them off against the formula she had worked out to measure our
