‘I have never known him like this,’ Geoffrey said, ‘And I have good reason to say those words, for Robert has never been short with me.’
‘You are another one,’ Roger replied, not without asperity, ‘who is going to boast of his liberality, something I am sick of hearing about.’
The remark made Geoffrey frown. ‘I beg you take some more wine and calm yourself.’
‘How can I be calm? How can you just sit at this table and eat and drink while I am being cheated?’
If Roger had a reputation for being diplomatic it had deserted him in the face of his treatment. He had been fuming since he left Melfi and no amount of hospitality from Geoffrey was going to assuage it. Two years he had spent campaigning in Calabria, sustained by the promise of two things: half the revenues, obviously, plus the promise that Robert would return to complete the conquest of the province once he had settled matters in Apulia. Neither had been kept and Roger had found himself making war with diminishing resources and disgruntled lances, men not being paid that which they were due because everything was being remitted to Melfi. What plunder they acquired from resistant places like Montenero did not last much beyond their desire to celebrate with wine and women. His own purse had been emptied to keep them fighting but that was now bare.
‘I am at a loss to know what you think I can do.’
About to bark at Geoffrey, Roger stopped himself: abusing this affable and somewhat ineffectual de Hauteville would do nothing to help him. Geoffrey had Loritello and his captaincy of Brindisi, the latter gifted to him by Robert, the former held from the time of Drogo.
‘You may have been too successful, Roger.’
‘How can a man be too successful?’
‘You do not know Robert as I do,’ Geoffrey responded. ‘He does not warm to anyone he feels can match him in the field.’
‘He’s jealous?’ Roger asked.
‘Not jealous, but inclined to be made uncomfortable by an ability he perceives might equal his own. He fell out with William, Drogo and Humphrey, though I would add falling out with the latter was too easy.’
‘I pose no threat to him.’
Geoffrey sat forward and for once replied with feeling, which led Roger to think he was talking more about himself than the problem being discussed. ‘It is for the person who feels threatened to judge such a thing.’
‘Will Robert listen to you?’ he asked, in a calm voice.
With just a trace of bitterness Geoffrey said, ‘He never has before.’
‘I need you to advance me some funds.’
That made his brother guarded, though it did not engender an outright refusal. ‘I cannot spare much.’
‘I don’t need much. I am going west and when it comes to food and fodder Robert will provide them whether he likes it or not.’
Good as his word, Roger de Hauteville lived very well off the Guiscard’s lands: when his men ate beef it was from his brother’s cattle, when his horses downed oats they came from Robert’s grain stores. It would have pleased him to know that such theft, when reported back to Melfi, nearly produced an apoplexy.
Roger’s stop in Capua was of short duration: although he was made welcome, it was clear that his brother-in-law found his presence either irksome or inconvenient and no intercessions by his sister carried any weight. Richard’s relations with the Guiscard were fragile, as suited two equally powerful magnates whose interests did not always coincide. They would combine if the Norman position in Italy was threatened, but that did not extend to a deep common purpose and the fear always existed on both sides, in a world where suspicion was rife, that one great Norman fief might combine with outside forces to destroy the other, despite a long-standing commandment that, here in Italy, Normans did not kill Normans.
The Prince of Capua took care to keep his operations to the west of the Apennines, while Robert Guiscard made sure none of his lances strayed into his neighbour’s bailiwick. If they met at all it was in the papal fief of Benevento, which straddled the mountains and was rich in everything that was of value in their world: field crops, orchard fruit, vines, livestock, fish and timber, as well as all the trades that commanded good payment. Both Norman fiefs had treaty relations with the papacy in the Principality of Benevento; both treated such obligations more in the breech than the observance.
There was also the jealousy of Richard’s captains: a de Hauteville was too prominent a personage to be a mere lance, too well connected to be employed as a mere warrior, quite apart from the fact that he had arrived in Capua leading fifty followers. To show them any favour was to upset the delicate balance any leader had with his own key supporters. After a month of well-fed idleness, Roger knew his own men were becoming impatient: like every Norman in Italy, these men served for reward and plunder. It was time to move on.
‘To where?’ asked Ralph de Boeuf.
‘We could offer our swords to Gisulf of Salerno.’
‘If we do, we’ll soon find ourselves fighting the men we are living with now at odds of a hundred to one.’
There was truth in that: having swallowed Capua, Richard continued to press in on the territories of his one-time nominal suzerain, so squeezing Salerno that the prince could only now say with certainty he ruled in his own city.
‘I have also heard that Gisulf is short on sense.’
‘Let us travel through that city and see what presents itself.’
The sight of a strong party of Normans riding towards Salerno did not go unnoticed: word of their presence reached the city gates before they did. Prior to that, Roger and his men had sat on a high hill looking at the great bay on which the city sat, one of the premier trading ports of Western Italy, rival to Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, all of them wealthy, all of them victims over the last five hundred years of internecine Lombard rivalries, expanding and contracting as one fief rose and another diminished. Now they faced the Normans, a bitter pill for Salerno, given it was the duke of that city who had first sought their mercenary aid to fight the Saracens.
‘They are accustomed to disquiet,’ Ralph observed, his eye following the trace of the exterior walls. ‘How long do these Lombards have?’
‘How long do we Normans have, Ralph?’
‘There’s no one to threaten us.’
‘God has a way of marking and dealing with hubris.’
‘God in heaven, you are dismal.’
Roger smiled. ‘I am made thoughtful, Ralph. We have just ridden the same roads that my eldest brothers traversed many times and they are now bones. William’s iron arm did not save him from a secret knife, nor did being a doughty fighter spare Drogo the same fate. Sitting here, I feel somehow their presence, more so than at their tomb in Venosa. This is where my family’s adventure began.’
‘And where yours will end if we don’t eat soon.’
Roger nodded, and taking a tight hold of the reins of the mounts he led, he gently kicked with his heels to set his horse in motion.
The de Hauteville name got Roger an immediate audience as well as accommodation in the Castello di Arechi, the towering fortress that overlooked the town, but Gisulf of Salerno did not impress. The prince was too shifty in nature and that trait was marked in both his features and manner. He fidgeted constantly, unbecoming in a nobleman who, whatever his own anxieties, had a need to appear calm before his court, many of whom were present and loud in the way they reacted to his pronouncements, however outlandish. Dark-complexioned, with black hair and eyes, Gisulf looked and acted like a schemer and, given what he had been saying to Roger, one with a tenuous grip on reality. He had already created a great armed host from nothing but his imaginings, and sent it, with Roger at its head, to inflict a terrible defeat on Richard of Aversa.
‘I see his head on my city gate,’ he cried.
‘You speak of a man to whom I am related by marriage, sire.’
Gisulf, slightly hunched and too gaudily dressed for his slight figure, waved an impatient hand: such ties clearly meant nothing. ‘And you would be paying back his family for what they did to your own, the treacherous swine.’