The remainder of the lances, after a Mass said on the quayside, weighed in darkness, with a messenger sent to light a beacon built on the promontory of Scilla. The night chosen was clear, without a moon, but showing enough starlight to satisfy de Ridel, the water was choppy, as it often was in this narrow channel, and flowing quite fast, but a southerly wind kept them from being carried too far down and away from Cape Faro, this while each man struggled below decks to keep his animals calm.
Three stacks of wood had been built at intervals on the open beach and Roger looked towards Scilla, seeking the sign to tell him his men had sailed. When he saw that lit beacon, he ordered his own fires ignited to act as a guide to the ships, which stood off till first light before anchoring close to the shore. Lines were then used from the beach to haul them in till their keels touched sand, their ramps once lowered ending in shallow water, the ship rising to re-float freely as the equine cargo was discharged.
The beach was soon a mass of men and mounts and, given surprise was the key to their endeavour, the column of lances quickly headed inland, making for Milazzo, the first major town on the northern coast, traversing a landscape as fertile as any the Normans had ever seen. The next weeks were, with no force of any note to stop them, the very best they could be, culminating in the taking and sacking of Milazzo, that followed by a raid inland to so ravage the lands around Rometta that the formidable fortress town, denuded of a garrison by the Emir al-Hawas, opened its gates to avoid destruction.
The booty from both towns was massive but it was matched by what they took from the countryside: there were cattle and sheep to steal, amphora of oil and wine to load aboard purloined donkeys, manor houses to raze to the ground and precious objects to appropriate from the Orthodox churches they encountered; so much, indeed, that it was necessary to return to Cape Faro, where the ships were still anchored, so that this abundant plunder could be shipped back to Reggio.
That such a course of action disappointed al-Tinnah was obvious: he knew only continuous pressure would distract an enemy who would soon hear that this Norman incursion had ceased. Roger had his own concerns but they had to be put aside for the sake of keeping happy his men: the Milazzo peninsula, and any notion of beginning to fortify it for the future invasion, would have to wait.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Normans, herding before them sheep and cattle, drawing behind their own laden packhorses plus numerous beasts of burden, once they emerged from the trees that shielded the beach at Cape Faro, were presented with a very different sight to that which they had left a month before. The sea was not blue but grey now, reflecting the clouds under which it lay. The water was no longer choppy but angry, with white-crested waves rushing up the beach, driven by a wind strong enough to direct stinging sand into their faces, this while the ships which they needed to load pulled hard on their anchors as they rose and fell on the swell. They could not load in this.
‘Well,’ Roger called, ‘we shall not want for food and wine. Set up camp.’
The land on which they settled was a narrow strip between the sea and an inland lake, so fresh water, without which they could not have stayed, was plentiful. Trees surrounded that lake and wood-cutting parties immediately went to work, this while the livestock was herded into an area that could be turned into paddocks with long cut branches, others used to make horse lines for the mounts, still more timber employed to fill the pit fires on which the food for the soldiers would be roasted.
Few orders were required for this, either with or without animals: it was common work for an army on campaign, a daily ritual eased by the fact that the weather, if windy, was dry, while they had plentiful supplies of everything they needed, which was not always the case. Travelling with a minimum of baggage, there were no tents for the leaders, and since the few houses and fishermen’s hovels that had existed in the vicinity had been burnt down the day they landed, Roger and his captains would, like their men, sleep under brushwood cover, as would a still-disgruntled Ibn-al-Tinnah.
Before that he had to boat out to Geoffrey Ridel and get some assessment of how long the weather would remain foul. A rowed boat on an angry sea presented nothing unusual for Roger: as a boy he had fished and swum off the Normandy coast, and when it came to white and disturbed water nothing he was experiencing now could compare with the kind of waves which broke on that shore. Likewise he was comfortable on the bucking and dipping deck.
‘If we are to be here long I will have to forage for feed. The sheep and cattle need it, as do our mounts.’
‘If you are asking me to tell you how long this will last,’ Ridel replied, ‘you may guess, for that is all I can do. It could abate tomorrow or it could be a week.’
‘The ships’ captains must have some notion of the time of year.’
‘This might be the inland sea, Roger, but it is no different to what we knew as boys and young men, subject to any number of winds, north, south, east and west, and they change in a blink of your eye. We may get a tempest from Africa or the Levant just as bad, and in this narrow channel it becomes ten times worse. Be patient and wait for a good wind to take us back across the straits.’
The morning brought no respite, obliging Roger to send out parties to forage, more as a precaution against continued bad weather than a pressing need. A cautious commander, he also sent out individual scouts to ensure that no force was approaching of a size that could pose a threat; the opinion of an impatient al-Tinnah, that such a thing was unnecessary, he politely squashed.
‘Al-Hawas must know what we have been doing. Protecting his own land might be of more importance to him than ravaging yours.’
The emir made a gesture meant to imply that no Norman could comprehend the true situation. ‘It is my body he wants, my severed head on a pike. He thinks me still in Catania and nothing will tempt him away from that prize.’
‘Unless he knows you are with us.’
That was said to end the discussion, not because Roger thought it true and, since it was one of the emir’s times for prayers, he suggested he ask Allah to grant him a calm sea. This again raised in the eyes of his ally a frown of disapproval of the tactics being employed, which, in his opinion, leant more towards mere banditry than a proper pursuit of any long-term aim.
You cannot hide several hundred men for very long, especially when many are mounted, before the smell they create begins to carry on the wind: not a farmyard stench, but one with its own particular composition of human and animal waste mixed with wood smoke and cooked food. It was a stink with which every Norman lance was familiar, so when one of Roger’s scouting pairs picked up a faint trace they first checked their own position to that of their confreres camped at Cape Faro. A wetted, held-up finger indicated it was not from that source: the wind was from the wrong direction.
It took a sharp appreciation to then dismount and hide the mounts in a copse, with only one of the pair, careful to use what cover he could, heading unarmed and on foot, in the direction from which he thought it came, in the end climbing a tree to get sight of the mass of soldiers encamped behind the nearest set of hills close to the shore. Seeing they were making no attempt to move, the man stayed where he was until dusk and the point at which they knelt to perform their evening prayers, carefully seeking to establish their number before creeping back to join his companion. Getting back to their own camp presented little difficulty: the light from the Norman fires was reflected on the clouds.