Jack Ludlow - Conquest

Successes he had: he won every fight in which he became engaged. Troina’s storerooms were again full to bursting and in order to draw his enemies on he moved his base some three leagues further north-west to a small walled town called Cerami, standing on a river of the same name, it having several advantages over Troina. Surrounded by high hills, it gave him a good view of the valley approaches by which he thought his enemies would come and in this he was proved correct. The Saracen host were finally approaching to give him the battle he so wanted and he knew it long before they threatened his position. He also knew the size, which, given the ground they covered, was close to being incalculable. The Normans were accustomed to being outnumbered, but this seemed to be of a different order of magnitude: if the reports he had were true, he was facing, with an army of some six hundred, including milities, some fifteen thousand men!

Only a third of his force were lances, yet the thought of retreat never entered Roger’s head: whatever the odds he would fight them here, on ground he had chosen, with Cerami at his back and the river before him, sure that those who had done battle with the Normans before would have learnt nothing, while the men from North Africa, probably the bulk of his opponents, had never met warriors like those he led. Besides, numbers did not confer skill and in some cases they could be a liability. Notions had been voiced that he should retire to Troina and allow them to break themselves on its walls, but Roger had no desire to be besieged again. He did want to hold Cerami, so when news came that a large force had been detached to work round his flank and occupy the town he sent Serlo and Jordan to prevent it.

His nephew had been promising, now he was more than that and he was also Jordan’s hero. Like any de Hauteville, Serlo led from the front and fought with a panache that few could match, adding to that a clear tactical brain and the ability to hold in close control those he commanded, this proved in the confines of Cerami. Faced with several thousand Saracens and in command of only fifty knights, he drove them out street by street, then routed them in the open, before disengaging to rush back to aid his uncle. What he saw then, cresting the hills on the opposite bank of the narrow river was enough to daunt the most stalwart knight.

The whole landscape was covered in men, horses, donkeys and camels, the dust they were kicking up on their march like a sandstorm. Facing them, on an upslope across the river, stood Roger’s tiny host, his lances on foot, their horses well to the rear and his contingents of milities holding the flanks which, luckily, were protected by ground so broken as to be near impassable even to infantry. It looked to Serlo as if their confreres would be swept aside.

‘How many are there?’ Jordan gasped.

Serlo laughed, to spread relief. ‘Not enough, cousin, not enough.’

Instead of coming on, and a sign that for all their numbers they lacked confidence, the enemy army stopped and began to make camp, an action which took hours, so numerous were they. Jordan had been sent to ask his father what he wanted Serlo to do. The answer he brought back was stay where they stood and when dawn arrived to be mounted. Night fell over so many campfires that the clouds, orange in colour, gave off enough light to see a face clearly, sound travelling easily to carry the cries of the imams calling their faithful to prayer.

Roger had his men sleep and waited till grey dawn to call upon his priest to bless them. The sound of their murmured prayers did not match the calling of the imams, nor did they make any noise as, confessed, they took the host. In each mind, Roger’s included, there would be an image of a loving wife, or perhaps a concubine for whom they had regard, a mother, a child or maybe just the green fields and high hedgerows of Normandy. Few had any certainty that they would survive this day, but by the time the sun was on their backs, every man was sure he had God’s blessing and was ready, if he was required to, to meet his Maker with a sin-free soul.

Their enemies had likewise stirred with the sun, a bustling mass of bodies, the Sicilians clad in garments of all colours to denote their various emirs, the North Africans easy to detect, they being dressed in all-covering black. Roger was more interested in seeking out the princes who led them, Ali and Ayub, sons of the Zirid sultan who ruled the old Roman provinces on the southern Mediterranean shore. Like Ibn-al-Hawas they were identified by the imperious way they rode to and fro on their splendid mounts, along the front of their levies, who cheered them as they passed, and that cemented another thought: Robert had beaten Al-Hawas at Enna; the two sons of a sultan might have richer blood than those they led, but that did not make them good leaders in war.

They, peering back, would have seen what looked like a silver thread running across the landscape, a thin line of mailed knights, with their teardrop shields and polished conical helmets. Perhaps they would have laughed to see so feeble a presence, pointed to the rabble on either flank, before them rows of embedded pikes, there to impale any horseman foolish enough to charge their lines, backed by a few crossbowmen. Whatever, it would seem to them that to sweep aside a single ribbon of Normans would be simple; their pike-and bowmen could be slaughtered later. Trumpets blew, the cheering rose, and the leading elements of the Saracen army began to wade the river, forming into one massive, deep column, aimed straight at the blue and white shield of the Count of Sicily.

‘They don’t seem much interested in Serlo,’ Ralph de Boeuf said, long fully recovered.

There was no alarm in his voice: it was merely a statement of what he and Roger could see, the Saracens were detaching no men to protect their flank against Serlo and his mounted lances. Their tactic, if it could be graced with such a name, was to be an all-out frontal assault.

‘They aim to brush us aside,’ Roger replied.

Ralph actually laughed. ‘Can they not spot a wall when they see one?’

‘God be with you, Ralph,’ Roger said, at the point where he could see the determination in the eyes of the Saracen front rank.

‘He is with us all,’ Ralph replied, ‘but note it, the men who lead this host are not with them.’

‘They lead from the rear.’

‘A collection of farts, then?’ Ralph joked.

Roger still had the opportunity to stand before his lances and give a rousing speech, but this was not a time in which rhetoric would be appropriate. Every man he led knew that they had one simple task, to stand firm in their line or to die.

‘Shields and lances,’ he said, without much raising his voice.

That was answered down his line: seventy Normans strong on either side of their leader, like a ripple, as shields came up and lances were lowered to form a solid wall of steel, and each man checked his other weapons — axes and knives — were to hand.

Following on from a shout of ‘Allah Akbar’, the men before them rushed forward to do battle, their voices rising into a terrifying roar. A wise general puts his best fighting men in his front line and even the divided command of the Saracens had taken that elementary course, so the fiercest combat of the day was at the very outset of the battle. Roger’s line was hard pressed, swaying back and forth like rippling waters as they were pressed back in some sections.

Yet the line never fractured: if a man fell it contracted a fraction, and those under pressure knew they had to regain the few footsteps of ground surrendered to hold the cohesion of the whole, fighting with extra ferocity to do so. The leading elements of the Saracens had died on Norman lances and they were either now wrenched out of mailed hands by falling bodies or useless without their metal tips. The positions were thus reversed: it was now the Normans fighting off lance points with swords and axes, yet those seeking to kill them had great difficulty in controlling what they did, so great was the press behind them.