That was the first time she retched, but not the last.
Osmond de Vertin began to fret as the night wore on, then as the grey light began to tinge the sky he began to shout in frustration. By the time the sun was above the Apennines he was raving at his men, cursing them for fools. He had already seen that the undulating road from Salerno, though full of carts going into town with produce, was barren of folk leaving. Mounted and riding furiously, he made for the monastery, to find the monks at lauds, having had their breakfast. There was no sign of Guaimar, his sister, or a loaded packhorse and the response of the inhabitants to his threatening questions met with looks of ignorance.
Osmond was no fool; he would not have risen to his present position if he had been a dolt. He was well aware that he had been tricked. First he sent off messengers to Salerno; a party was to set off north, and seek information, with the instruction not to be gentle.
‘Demand of the peasants if they have seen Guaimar; if they so much as shrug, whip them till they speak.’
Sensing the monks were secretly enjoying his discomfort, he bade his men dig a pit and start a fire with the monastery’s own logs. The Abbot, a venerable old man, was seized, then roped about his feet, his waist and his chest, before a lance was rammed through the ropes and he was lifted by two strong men who advanced with him suspended towards the now blazing logs.
What could he tell them? No horses had come from the old duke’s heir, nor any clothing. Osmond was incensed enough not to care; to him the old man represented all those educated swine who could read and write and talk in high Latin while laughing at his ignorance. He ordered him seared, and the two men holding the lance moved him over the flames, which immediately began to burn his flesh amid his hellish screams.
Half the watching monks were on their knees praying, the rest were crying for mercy for their Abbot. Osmond signalled that he should be taken away from the blaze before the ropes burnt through, not from compassion but so that he could be held up to see what had been done to his mortified flesh. There was his face burnt beyond that which could be recognised, his simple garments scorched off his body to reveal flesh blistered and peeling from his aged frame. Was he dead? He might as well be; there was no recovery from such mutilation.
‘Every one of you will face this, unless I get an answer,’ he bellowed. ‘And if you die in the flames I am sure that Christ will welcome you into the Kingdom of Heaven, for you will have faced the fires of Hell on this earth.’
It was one of the servants who spoke up then, coming forward at a grovel, to say that various people had come from Salerno over the past weeks with horses, but they had taken them away again. Others had come with bundles of clothing, as gifts to the monastery, which were still lying untouched.
‘Show me,’ Osmond barked.
He took his sword to the wrapping, and being sackcloth it parted with little effort. The clothes inside were the garments of a rich woman, dresses and the like, of velvet, one or two trimmed with ermine. For Osmond de Vertin it was like a stab at his hopes; when the servant, ordered to hold them up, did so, he recognised the garments that had once graced the sylphlike young body of the girl, now grown to woman, he had decided days before would be his wife.
The servant should not have looked at him questioningly, nor sought to smile in the hope of reward. Osmond saw it as mocking, and with a scream he stuck his sword into the poor fellow’s ribs, and hauled hard to pull it up through his heart.
By the time he got back to Salerno, having left the roofs of the monastery buildings blazing behind him, and the Abbot dead, he knew that Guaimar and his sister had got away, maybe going north without using roads, probably by sea. The fishermen came in with their catch for the day to be questioned, and even with two who had protested hanging from a warehouse gantry, and the entire day’s catch floating in the harbour, the others, kneeling and pleading for mercy, had nothing they could tell him.
One fellow was held upside down above the harbour waters and interrogated about the chances of catching a sailing boat that had been at sea since daybreak. Despite being ducked and near drowned half a dozen times he still insisted that the chances of finding a boat at sea were close to impossible. He survived, wet but breathing, too stupid to know that another answer might have saved him his ordeal, without knowing how lucky he was.
It was the way his men looked at him that really troubled Osmond. Normally respectful, they were now giving him the glances a fellow throws to a dead man. He would have to go north himself and tell Pandulf what had happened. Could he stop at Aversa and plead with his old leader to intercede, and if he did what could Rainulf say to the Wolf to assuage his wrath? The Normans were careful never to sacrifice each other, but was this an error too great to forgive? And there had been bad blood in Aversa at Osmond’s desertion; would Rainulf Drengot, even if he begged on his knees, just throw him to the Wolf, for Pandulf to do with what he liked?
CHAPTER SEVEN
The plain stretched as far as the eye could see, flat and fertile, dotted with small windmills, the strips of cultivation full of people working to plant their spring crops. The two riders on the road between the River Volturno and Naples attracted attention, but what looks did come their way were far from friendly; to the people toiling in fields they were clearly not of their kind and the differences extended beyond mere occupation. They were tall, blue-eyed and fair in a world where the people were generally dark, small and swarthy. That height difference was more obvious when they dismounted to walk their horses and they towered, one of them excessively so, over those with whom their animals shared a trough.
Any greetings offered were ignored and not just because they were in barely comprehensible Latin. Habit made the peasants of Campania cautious, and these giants were armed with big swords and sharp knives; if the locals carried anything they were farming tools. Close to, it could be seen that the faces of these strangers did not take well to the climate, and in places the reddened skin had peeled. Both kept a leaf in their mouth to protect them from a burning overhead sun that would blister an exposed lower lip.
To look at the horses was to know these men. Those on which they rode had the height and fine lines of an animal bred for swift movement. The first-led horses were sleek and well cared for, those behind a last pair of pack animals. As well as the slung pouches containing the riders’ possessions, there were lances, helmets and shields strapped to the animals’ sides, the whole assembly identifying them as men whose trade was oppression. The one word spat out was never said in their hearing, only when they had passed by: Normans.
Their destination was a square tower of white stone rising out of the waves of heat that made the ground ripple. Soon strips of farmland gave way to green pasture, and endless paddocks full of horses, which were the subject of close scrutiny, for the de Hauteville brothers had grown up surrounded by equines in all their forms. The railed fields each had a thatched byre into which the animals could retire from rain or, as they had now, the mid-morning sun. Haystacks were liberally dotted between these paddocks and the air was full of that sweet smell of piss and dung, which was ever present where horses were kept in numbers.
Past the paddocks, running towards the tower, there were lines of round huts with pointed thatched roofs set around a huge barn; the inhabitants, if there were any, inside in the shade, that is, with the exception of the tribe of near-naked children who stopped playing to look up at these passing strangers. The cries they emitted brought to the door of one hut a short, round, black-haired woman.
‘We seek a knight by the name of Rainulf Drengot,’ said William, in Latin.