Jack Ludlow: Warriors

‘Enough,’ William insisted, as Drogo continued to relate those amatory adventures he had indulged in at home, quite forgetting the trouble his activities had caused: he was the father of more bastards than could be counted on the fingers of his hands. ‘Home is far off in time and distance. We must turn our thoughts to that which concerns us here.’

Drogo frowned more from habit than irritation; William might be the oldest and Tancred’s heir, but too often in their growing years he had assumed near-parental powers.

Yet he deferred to him, not just as an older sibling but also as a chief; Rainulf Drengot commanded the Normans of Campania, but William was his senior captain and had led the mercenary contingent in the recent invasion of Sicily. A measure of his stature, gained in that conflict, was his soubriquet: he was now more commonly referred to by those he led as Bras de Fer, a title bestowed on him by his confreres after a single-combat encounter outside the walls of Syracuse. William Iron Arm had fought and defeated the ruling Saracen emir, a giant of a man who claimed to have on his belt the notches of a hundred skulls.

Humphrey, his beetle brow furrowed, stood suddenly, and went to the door that led from the vestry to the chancel of the cathedral, opening it to ensure no one was listening.

‘Suspicious as ever,’ said Mauger.

‘The only people I trust are in this room,’ Humphrey insisted, before sweeping the assembly with a glare on a face that, with its large overbite and close-set eyes, lacked beauty, ‘and that is not wholehearted.’

‘You sleep with your purse between your legs,’ scoffed Drogo, Humphrey’s parsimony and mistrustful nature being a family joke.

‘He would when you are around, brother,’ crowed Geoffrey.

Drogo laughed. ‘He has not got between his legs anything else to tempt me.’

‘I cannot think why you bother, Humphrey,’ William said with a weary air, looking at the now closed door. ‘Who would want to overhear this foolishness?’

‘You should slacken sometimes, Gill,’ Drogo insisted. ‘A little foolishness would do your soul good.’

For ‘foolishness’, Drogo meant gaiety and that covered much of the ground that lay as a difference between the two eldest brothers. Drogo was mercurial by nature, laughing one second but equally likely to resort to a fist fight the next if he felt impugned. He was also a womaniser, never without a concubine to bed when he was at what passed for home, and ever on the lookout for companionship on campaign or when travelling. William was steady and serious, and while not, as Drogo called him, a eunuch, he was restrained in his carnality, engaging in the odd liaison, without ever forming permanent attachments.

‘I’ll leave the priests to worry for my soul, brother, because I have four of you to use up all my concern.’

‘We can look after ourselves,’ Mauger responded, with all the confidence of the youngest present.

‘Can you?’ William replied, looking past Mauger at the crucifix on the bare stone wall, the son of the God he had been raised to believe would see everything, and who would one day judge him for the sins he had committed in life. Then he looked at his brothers, all big men and broad of shoulder, all with golden hair and faces made red by the Italian sun. ‘I thought that too. I thought I had become heir to a brilliant future, only to have Rainulf snatch it away.’

‘His child may die.’

William responded to Geoffrey with a withering look. ‘And with a willing bedmate he may breed many more.’

That induced a long silence, as each of the recently arrived trio contemplated what had happened since William and Drogo had come to Italy. Both had taken service with Rainulf Drengot and both, through sheer ability, had risen to lead companies of men, William even more. He had become Rainulf’s right hand, to be consulted frequently at a time when Campania was in turmoil and the mercenary leader had himself felt under threat.

Drengot had betrayed the Duke of Salerno, a trusting soul who had granted him not only the hand of his daughter but also the dowry gift of the Lordship of Aversa, raising him from mere paid retainer to the status of influential landowner in his own right. Rainulf had shown little in the way of gratitude: when his wife died he had switched his allegiance, and thus the overpowering force he could put in the field, to a fellow of staggering mendacity called Pandulf, Prince of Capua, marrying his sister to seal the bargain. A termagant and an unwilling spouse, that was a union Rainulf had come to much regret.

Even for a Lombard, Pandulf of Capua, known to all as the Wolf of the Abruzzi, had shown a greed and lack of integrity that was remarkable. Having deposed the Duke of Salerno and dispossessed his remaining children, he had grown even more grasping, bearing down on subjects in both fiefs, people who hated him, and stripping from them, with Rainulf’s help, ever-increasing wealth. No one, petty baron, trader, farmer, priest, bishop or monk was safe from his depredations.

Pandulf loved gold, not God, and like all avaricious men, he had, in time, overreached himself, attacking and ravaging the lands of the wealthy Monastery of Montecassino. Not content to merely seize its treasury, he threw the elderly Abbot Theodore into his dungeons and parcelled out the monastery’s extensive lands to Normans, men he had suborned from Rainulf’s service. Indeed, from being the greatest source of Rainulf’s wealth Pandulf had become too powerful, a threat to the now ageing mercenary leader — childless, and, thanks to his tempestuous marriage, much given to taking refuge in drink.

The Wolf’s depredations had, through the intercession of Guaimar, the Duke of Salerno’s son, reached the ear of the Western Emperor, Conrad Augustus, but it was what he had done to the holy men of Montecassino that proved his downfall. The irate emperor had come south from Germany with a great army to restore Montecassino and put the villain in his own dungeons. William de Hauteville, advising Rainulf to leave his untrustworthy ally to his fate, had engineered a truce with Conrad — a combination of force that obliged Pandulf to flee.

The reward for Rainulf had been imperial confirmation of his title under Guaimar, the newly elevated Prince of both Salerno and Capua. This, for a Norman who had come to Italy with nothing but his horses and his weapons, was elevation indeed, a title and fiefdom from which only the emperor could remove him. At the ceremony of investiture outside the walls of Capua, Rainulf had brought forward William and embraced him, bidding him kiss the gonfalon that denoted his title, an indication from a man without offspring that his senior captain should be his heir.

William had gone off to Sicily leading all but a hundred of Rainulf’s men, sustained by that promise of a brilliant future; he had returned to find Rainulf’s termagant wife shut up in a nunnery, a new young and lusty concubine in his bed, the Imperial Count of Aversa sober and cradling in his arms a mewling male infant he called Hermann, who would one day, he made plain, succeed to his lands and title; William de Hauteville would get nothing!

‘Put the matter to the vote,’ Drogo suggested, not for the first time. ‘Let the men decide who to follow, you or Rainulf.’

William looked at Drogo long and hard. They had been through much together, growing up, in coming to this place and what had occurred since. Drogo had been his lieutenant in Sicily and had not in any way let him down; he was a fighter any man would be happy to have at his side. His flaw, if you excluded his inability to pass a woman without trying to bed her, was his lack of judgement. Yet looking around the faces of his brothers he saw they too shared Drogo’s view.