As they made their way through the streets leading to one of the great gates that would take them north, they passed ancient temples now dedicated as churches, and buildings falling into ruin as the stones were stolen by the populace; Ascletin was busy distributing small coins to an endless series of grasping hands, the owners of which, out of sight, called out a blessing and a hope that he would one day occupy the office of the Bishop of Rome.
If Guaimar was in any doubt as to what he was supposed to ask Conrad Augustus, these outpourings of pious anticipation in return for money, accompanied by the look Ascletin gave him, dispelled it.
CHAPTER NINE
A little more than a week passed before William de Hauteville’s fellow mercenaries began to avoid him in one-on-one fights in the training area. He was there first every morning, working with a pair of heavy rocks he had found to rebuild his strength to that which it had been when he had left the family home, and that was formidable. Drogo was hard to beat, his brother near to impossible, susceptible only to a piece of clever guile, and even then his opponent had to be lucky. For such a big man, half a hand taller than anyone else in Rainulf’s band, he moved with grace and speed on foot, and with deadly control mounted; his destrier having also been put endlessly through its paces so that it, too, had been brought back to peak performance.
Drogo had caused a different set of problems, and since unsupervised fighting with weapons was forbidden in a society of high-tempered young men, it was his fists of which they came to be cautious. Usually jolly and full of tart good humour, he was nevertheless easily slighted, this younger brother, ever ready to take umbrage and throw a telling punch without warning. But it was his attitude to the womenfolk in the camp that touched many a raw nerve: he saw them as common property; his confreres did not!
Most of the men had a local concubine to look after them, and several had bred children. It was galling the lack of respect Drogo showed these women, waylaying them in his heavily accented Latin and seeming to seek their favours, acts which were not always unwelcome, for he was a handsome devil with a beguiling smile. Not that their own men respected them: the women they kept were as good as slaves, but they were damned if another was going to be allowed to treat them with regard.
Rainulf had just over three hundred lances under his command, split into three companies, each with its own captain, and it was telling the way none of these men were overkeen to have the brothers under their command, seeing in them a threat rather than an asset: in William someone with an innate ability to lead others, someone who might usurp their position rather than enhance it, for if no one was keen to do mock battle with him, they found him easy to deal with otherwise, while Drogo could cause internal squabbles.
Rainulf still trained himself, so he could ensure that others stuck to their task, but it was clear he was past the actual prime of his fighting life. He too had once been the best; he could not have risen to lead these men if he had not, and it was with mixed feelings that he watched the way the men he commanded began to naturally defer to William de Hauteville, rather than to those he appointed to lead the companies.
‘Send him away,’ said Odo de Jumiege, Rainulf’s senior captain, a much scarred veteran and second in command of his force. ‘His brother too.’
‘You fear him?’
‘I think perhaps you should fear him, Rainulf.’
‘I wonder. He seems to have no side to him.’
‘None he is showing now. What he will be like in time is harder to say.’
‘Perhaps we should test him.’
‘How?’
‘That is easy, Odo. I will make him responsible for his brother’s behaviour. If he turns out to be more loyal to his blood than to me, it will mean he cannot be fully trusted.’
There had been no more private dining with Rainulf — in fact there had been few words exchanged since that first night — and William had discovered that he kept his men, even his captains, at a certain arm’s length, perhaps to underline the fact that the service they gave was moneyed not feudal. Nor did Rainulf reside in that square tower, using it only as a place from which to command his forces; he lived in a more sumptuous villa on the edge of Aversa, all marble, murals and mosaics. This he shared with his much younger wife, Pandulf’s niece, in what was said to be a stormy association.
Given they trained and ate with the men, some of whom had been in Campania for years, William and Drogo soon learnt about the world into which they had ridden as well as the man who commanded them. Rainulf too had come south with an elder brother, one Gilbert, who had been killed at a great battle on the field of Cannae in Apulia. There the Normans and their Lombard paymasters, who were fighting to gain independence, had suffered the same fate at the hands of a great Byzantine host as the Roman legions had suffered at the hands of Hannibal of Carthage.
Before Cannae, the Norman mercenaries, faced with Greek or Lombard opponents, had always been victorious; not this time. Constantinople deployed against them not only a good general with a substantial army, but a weapon equally as potent in battle as the Normans: the Eastern Emperor’s Varangian Guard, men from the land of Kiev Rus, of the same Norse stock as themselves who, unlike the opponents they normally faced, did not break or flee, but stood their ground and used the great axes, which were their principal weapon, to deadly effect.
Chastened, the Normans had retired to Campania, to take service with new paymasters, but some had returned to serve, as mercenaries, the very Byzantine General who had defeated them, such was the volatility of life in these parts. Over the days that followed they struggled to get to grips with the seeming chaos of Southern Italy, and perplexing it was: a land of shifting fiefs, of claim and counterclaim, peopled by Lombards who ruled a mixed Greek and Italian-speaking population, with feudal oversight claimed by two emperors.
On the eastern side of the Apennines, directly opposite Campania, lay the Principality of Benevento, nominally a papal fief but one that was a cause of endless dispute. Below and to the east of that stood the Byzantine provinces of Apulia and Calabria, collectively known as the Catapanate, which, under a good ruling proconsul, was a land of peace and prosperity, the Adriatic and southern coasts dominated by great, near-independent trading ports like Bari, Brindisi and Taranto.
Threatened — and these proconsuls and ports often were by Lombard uprisings, Saracen raids, and even the odd attack from the Western Emperor and the Pope — they presented a formidable foe, as long as the leader was competent and he was given an army. Generally it was the opposite: there was either no one in office or some venal satrap given the position by court intrigue, which made febrile that which was unstable. Constantinople was far away and it was a place too often ruled by emperors who were weak or self-indulgent, which fired endlessly the dreams the Lombards had of a kingdom encompassing the whole region. It was in pursuit of that very dream they had been beaten at Cannae.
It took many repetitions to get hold of what was a mass of confusion in terms of allegiances and ownership of land and titles, just to comprehend that the Campania region alone contained three distinct fiefs: Naples, Salerno and Capua. The lords of these territories were rarely associates, never friends. They sought constantly to undermine their neighbours, not difficult since each province was riven with petty baronies that were forever transferring their allegiance and often in conflict with each other and what passed for the centre of power.
‘My head is spinning, brother,’ Drogo complained, after one lengthy explanation. ‘This part of the world makes the Contentin look like a haven of order.’