Mercenaries c-1

by Jack Ludlow

  The duty on which they were engaged was a common one in this world: a vassal had refused to meet his obligations, declaring that he was no longer subject to Capuan rule, but instead claimed his fief was held from the papal enclave of Benevento, and thus his sovereign lord was the Pope. It was an excuse, of course, a pretext to avoid payment of his feudal dues. For this fellow, the Lord of Montesarchio, the problem was simple: the Pope was in Rome and lacked an army, while the Prince of Capua had Rainulf Drengot in command of several hundred armed and brutal war lovers only too keen to collect what was owed, and more besides.

  William had been told there was a good road from Aversa to their destination and he assumed, since no one bothered to inform him, they were taking a route through the hills in order to effect surprise. They had been riding for more than one glass of sand when Odo de Jumiege, the captain of the expedition, called a halt by a gurgling stream. This ran through a glade of decent pasture, which also provided shade from some trees. The horses, once watered, were hobbled and left to graze, and the men looked to their own comforts, those needing to piss careful to do so downstream of the place where the horses might again drink.

  None of the men would themselves drink water in a land so abundantly supplied with wine and several, having eaten fruit and dried meat as well, lay down to nap, using their saddles as pillows. William was about to do likewise when Odo approached and ordered him to stand as sentinel on the route they would take.

  ‘Our Lord of Montesarchio must anticipate that his impertinence will not go unpunished, and he is a bold fellow who claims to command fifty fighting retainers. Make sure it is we who surprise him and not the other way round.’

  There was no choice but to do as he was bid, even though it was absurd to think their enemy would come so far, at least ten leagues, to attack them. He, along with the absent Drogo, might be confused about the tangled web of local vassalage, but he knew too much about basic tactics to be fooled by such a command. This Lord of Montesarchio had a defendable tower: he would stay in that and hope that an assault would be reckoned too much trouble. No one in their right mind took on Normans in the open, even when they outnumbered them two to one.

  The reason for Odo’s action was not hard to fathom: he had not taken kindly to the inclusion of the brothers de Hauteville in his command. He had men he trusted, men he had fought alongside before, who knew his commands and would obey them without question. These newcomers had an air of superiority about them, even if they seemed able fighters. William particularly acted more like a leader than a supporter, which clearly irked the captain. Thus he ensured the elder brother ate the dust of his fellow mercenaries and he would, at times like this, be denied rest; if he was inclined to insubordination, the sooner Odo found out the better.

  The station William was required to take, at the crest of a slight rise, had no shade, and so was uncomfortable as the heat of the day steadily increased. Equally tiring was the glare of the sun on a landscape of grey rock and tree-filled valleys. It was those on which he kept his eye, looking for any signs of human movement, like startled birds rising into the sky in sufficient numbers to denote a strange and powerful presence, aware that he used to do this at home when trouble threatened. For a moment he was back there, standing atop the wooden tower that overlooked the family manor house, and the woods he was examining were not those of Italy, but the thick forests of the Normandy bocage. Sometimes, in high summer, it had been this hot.

  Many times on the road south he had wondered if they were doing the right thing, only to come to the same conclusion on each occasion: there was no way of knowing. As his cousin of Montbray would have said, their lives were in God’s hands. All they could do was to follow his ways and keep their souls fit for salvation. The recurrence of that thought brought forth a wry smile: Drogo was certainly doomed to eternal damnation.

  They had gone to pray for the soul of Duke Robert when they heard he had died, though Drogo had insisted he did not deserve their supplications, but William had, in part, been seeking some sign of what he should do. Through his mother, he had some claim on the ducal title; one that could be challenged, certainly, but valid nevertheless. Would the Norman barons accept Robert’s bastard as his heir? Hands clasped in prayer, he had deduced some would and some would not. There would be trouble in his homeland and that posed for him a question: was that where he should be?

  That his father had entertained high hopes for all his offspring was no secret; he spoke of it often enough, but he had held the highest expectation for his eldest son. The way Duke Robert had rebuffed him before Bessancourt had wounded Tancred, for William knew his father had never had aspirations that any of his five sons by his first wife should aim for too high a station. He had raised them to serve their duke not displace him, based on the oath he had given to the duke’s father always to serve his heirs. To Tancred, that oath was sacred.

  Were there now, at this very moment, men trying to engage Tancred in revolt? They would be wasting their time, and not just because of given oaths. For all his paternal fecundity, Tancred was not a power in the land; he could field his feudal obligation of ten lances but no more. Certainly he had friends, but what he would have now would be men with much more land and authority than he seeking to use him, and if William had still been at home they would have tried to engage him as a figurehead, the aim being to depose his bastard namesake. Once that was achieved, it was impossible to believe they would bow the knee to a de Hauteville. It would be folly to suppose otherwise.

  Thanks to Geoffrey de Montbray, the de Hauteville brood were better educated than most of their contemporaries. Tancred had fought alongside Geoffrey’s father, his brother-in-law, and had been present when he was killed by a Saxon axe while helping to regain the English throne for King Ethelred. He had raised the boy and helped him to the priesthood not just as an act of family duty, but to have at hand someone lettered and well read who could minister in the Hauteville church and also act as a tutor to his sons. His nephew had repaid him handsomely.

  There was no escaping his teaching; no excuses were acceptable. Thus all those down to children too young to tutor could read, write and speak Latin. They had been taught a fair amount of history, culled from the manuscripts that Geoffrey had seen as he studied for his office at places like the great Abbey of Cluny. They knew their catechism and their Stations of the Cross, just as they knew that if they needed intercession in any of their affairs, only prayer could provide it. But if Geoffrey taught them one thing above all others, he taught them to think.

  ‘Are you asleep?’

  Odo de Jumiege’s hard tone interrupted this string of thoughts and reminiscence, but it was not enough to make William turn round.

  ‘I was tasked to watch the approach, and that is what I am doing.’

  ‘A glance behind you might have shown you we were breaking camp.’

  William did turn then, and he stared just as hard at Odo as the captain was glaring at him. ‘Just as it might have made me miss something important.’

  ‘Get saddled up and mounted.’

  ‘And my station?’

  ‘Where do you think?’ Odo growled.

  William sprang to his feet so quickly, to tower over Odo, that the captain, who was as tough as boots, actually recoiled a step. ‘As you wish.’

  Needing to assert himself, Odo barked, ‘I don’t wish, I command.’

  William smiled then, in the same way he had once smiled at Duke Robert, which was insulting and deliberately so. ‘So you do, Odo.’

  Again bringing up the rear, William was at least, now they were in wooded country, spared mouthfuls of dust, but he was not spared the thought that he would have to do something about the man Rainulf had put in command of him. He was not given to disobedience, but neither was he given to buckling under domination. The difficulty was, how to go about it: in a troop of twenty-five knights, most of whom would be loyal to their leader, to raise a sword could be suicidal. A fight with Odo held, for him, no terror
, but if they all took their leader’s part…

  Most of the men Rainulf employed came from the same source: a land full of warriors with not enough wars to fight, added to endemic malcontents, content to live a good life off the backs of their liege lord’s subjects and the purloined property of his enemies. They were tough and far from gentle, so there was no appealing to them for fairness; the only thing they would respect was martial prowess. But then William de Hauteville had a different thought: he knew Odo to be tough, but was he clever? In short, could the captain be outwitted?

  Such considerations sustained him throughout a day of much riding, walking, and frequent halts, through a night when the provisions from the panniers on packhorses were roasted or boiled and consumed, and throughout the next day until they finally came in sight of the fortress of Montesarchio.

  The sun was high in the sky, but the Normans were hidden from any sentinels, sat in the deep shade near the edge of a forest to observe the high central tower and flanking walls. The packhorses had been left back in the woods, along with a couple of trussed-up foresters they had encountered who, free to run, could alert their quarry. Two men had been detached to care for them and every man looking out at their objective was now fully ready for battle, lances in hand and helmets on, all bearing Rainulf’s colours.

  It was really a small castle of cream stone blocks set on a hill shaped very like the conical helmets they wore, with the stronghold on top, served by a steep, winding causeway. William’s first thought was that even in an undulating landscape the mound was unnatural: it was just too much of, and too high, a protrusion. Possibly it was a strand of volcanic rock, they were after all in a land of live and extinct volcanoes, but he doubted it.

  To him, it looked like something that had been built up deliberately to house a tower from which most of the surrounding ground could be observed, not least the old Roman road which ran straight back to Aversa. Not that his view was sought: Odo’s idea was to emerge from the trees and rush the place, trying to get up that causeway to the heavy wooden gate before it could be shut in their face.

  William, being one of the half a dozen men detailed to attempt this, was surprised no one questioned what was an absurd command. The distance was too great, at least seven hundred paces, and that was just to the bottom of the causeway. Gallop across that space and their horses would be slightly winded; to then force them up a steep slope, which looked from here to be made of loose stones, was going to be hard work. They would do it, but not at speed, and if the defenders had crossbows, both mounts and men would present perfect targets, and be outside a gate which had been slammed shut well before they could get to it.

  Twenty-five lances could not attack and subdue a place like this. It had been designed to withstand a siege, and everything about the fortress was given to that — the cleared flat farmland between these woods at the base, with not even an olive tree to hide the approach — the way the stone buildings of the town, with their red-tiled roofs, had been also kept away from the access route. The only notion William had was to wait until nightfall so that they could get under the walls on foot and in darkness, to perhaps surprise the garrison at first light if they opened a gate they were bound to shut at night.

  He did not propose this for the very simple reason he knew he would be ignored. He was the last person Odo de Jumiege would take advice from, and the rest of the men were indifferent. They would do as they were told, and if it failed so be it; William had already overheard enough talk of how they generally went about their business in such situations.

  All would be spared if the castle surrendered, the Lord of Montesarchio alone being taken to face Prince Pandulf, along, of course, with his coffers. If they refused to surrender, the Normans would threaten both the lord and his vassals down to the meanest peasant with the most horrible death, and if necessary sit down to starve them out, cutting the vines and olive trees in the surrounding farmland, destroying any seed so that nothing could be sown in the next season, and living off the crops in the fields or storerooms, even if it took months, with an occasional hanging, drawing and quartering below the walls of one of the townsfolk to remind the garrison of their forthcoming fate.

  The idea of building ballistae and knocking down the walls, or sending over the top tight bundles of fired and oil-soaked straw, was not the Norman way; they were cavalry not artisans. Of course, messages would be sent back to Rainulf to ask if he wished to speed matters up, but hope rested on the reluctance of the men of the garrison to sacrifice their blood for a result which could only be gainsaid if a force came to relieve them, and no such force existed.

  Odo waited until the sun was sinking in the west, in the hope that, behind them, it would give those rushing the place a few extra seconds before discovery. Then he ordered them to stand by, and after a few moments, with their mounts now stamping impatiently — for trained to war, they knew what was coming — he gave the command to attack. The progress to the very edge of the trees was not hurried, there were too many loose branches and unseen hazards on the uneven ground that could cripple a horse, but out of the shade and with nothing but strips of farmland before them the riders kicked their mounts into a gallop.

  There was no ordered line in this: it was who could get there fastest that counted and in such a situation William de Hauteville’s great height and bulk counted against him, so much so that he cursed Odo’s spite in choosing him. This was a task for the lighter lances, the men who bore down least on their animals, for quite apart from their own weight the horses had to bear the burden of the fighting equipment they wore and carried. Soon William was bringing up the rear, and no amount of spurring could make his horse go faster. He could hear the sound of a blaring trumpet and knew the defenders had seen the approach and were raising the alarm.

  The first riders were halfway up the steep causeway before he got to the base, while beneath him he knew his mount was breathing hard. It took heavy spurring to get him to begin the ascent, and even then his hooves were getting poor footing on the loose surface. Up ahead he could see the gate was shut and the way barred, which made him wonder at the stupidity of his confreres to keep going in the face of a defence they could not hope to breach.

  They were milling around on the flat ground before that gate when the first great stone came over the crenellated wall. It missed them all but set their horses off in panic, which had them rearing and bucking, hard to control, as more stones followed. William hauled on his reins to halt his mount; there was nothing but death or a maiming to be gained by going further and he was yelling for those under the hail of stones to pull back. One stone took a rider right on the crown of his helmet, leaving William unsure if he imagined or actually heard the man’s neck snap. Another hit the ground in front of a horse and, bouncing, took its fragile leg, bringing it to its knees and throwing its rider.

  The men under that assault were fighting their animals not the enemy, for if their mounts had been trained for combat they had not been trained to withstand this. His own horse was using the slope to back up, only his hold on the reins keeping its head facing what was going on above. Only when he saw that three riders had got out from under the hail, did he let it have its head, and it was round and slithering away from any danger as soon as he did that.

  The first crossbow bolt hit the ground in front of him, and it was only an automatic reaction that made him press hard to alter his mount’s direction. Shoulders hunched, he felt as if he was naked and there was no point in slowing or turning to see how the others were faring; the only place of safety was out of range. On the flat ground again the going eased, but even well winded his horse did not slow, for in its brain it had its own set of demons from which to flee.

  Four men and five horses made it back to the woods, the riders breathing as heavily as their mounts. One of the attacking party was certainly dead, another probably so and they could see the wounded horse struggling to stand while the defenders amused themselves by trying to kill it, and the rider it ha
d cast off, with more stones. Glaring at Odo, William was presented, at least in what he could see, with a face utterly indifferent to what had just occurred.

  He heard his captain order one man forward with him, and as they rode towards the base of the causeway, Odo dropped his lance and attached to it a strip of white cloth. Walking his horse halfway up he stopped and began to shout, the words he used floating back to be just audible to his company, who had emerged from the trees, most leading their mounts, to show their number — to William, another error: they should have stayed hidden so that the defenders had no idea of what they faced.

  Odo’s demand was straightforward: surrender the fortress and the body of the Lord of Montesarchio, and the garrison would be spared; refuse and they would face siege and assault, and no quarter would be given once the inevitable happened. In time-honoured fashion, when refusing such a demand, Odo was greeted with boos and whistles, while several of the defenders climbed onto the parapet and turned to bare their arses.

  ‘Then I ask to be allowed to collect the bodies of my men,’ he called.

  A single voice answered, and the men at the edge of the woods strained their eyes seeking to see the man whose surrender they sought. It was a high voice, near girlish, that told Odo his wish was granted. That brought from him a wave of an arm and, obviously prearranged, four of the still-mounted men detached themselves and rode forward. Odo himself had dismounted and gone to look at the bodies, perhaps hoping that one man was still alive. Following that, he went to the horse with the broken leg, and gently lifting its head, he took out his knife and cut its throat.