‘My friend,’ he said, with an expression he hoped conveyed his sincerity. ‘We have nothing to lose. The weather is still against us and I swear to you, even if Messina opens its gates, my men and I will go back to ravaging the possessions of al-Hawas.’
There was no choice but to accede, even if the emir did not believe what was being said: he was not in command, the leader was Roger de Hauteville and his goodwill was more important than any other consideration. Leaving a bloody, corpse-filled battlefield to the ravages of scavenging peasants, with a proud, bruised and bandaged Serlo at his side, Roger led his band south, which brought them outside one of the many gates of Messina, a mere four leagues in distance.
Roger rode forward under a truce flag, leading the few survivors of his recent battle with halters round their necks, to demand a parley with the leading citizens, some of whom were already on the battlements. Immediately they refused to come out to open ground to talk, forcing Roger to make his offer with a craned neck.
‘You see before you what remains of those tasked to defend you, so you are at the mercy of myself and those I bring with me. Open your gates and not a hair on the head of anyone in Messina will be harmed. Deny me what I ask and I will burn your houses to the ground and make dust of the bones of everyone who resides within your walls.’
Expecting they would seek time to talk amongst themselves, Roger was surprised by the speed and the brusque nature of the response, which was in Greek, immediate and negative from a greybeard, probably an elder of the city, who first stated that he knew of the Normans and their habits of rapine and plunder, insisted he did not believe what he was being told, then concluded with the words, ‘Do your worst.’
‘You have no notion of what my worst is.’
‘Hear this, barbarian,’ the old man called. ‘Many have tried to take our city and have left their blood in the dust of the fields around it. You will do the same, for you do not have the means to stay outside our walls for the time it will take to starve us into submission, a thing even an ignorant like you must know requires a fleet of ships that would block our access to the sea.’
‘I will send for those, never fear.’
The old man just laughed, which induced the same in those who stood with him. Such a response made Roger’s blood boil. His bluff was being called and in the most insulting way possible, which could not but diminish him in the eyes of the men he led. If he was noted for his sound common sense, this was one occasion when that gift deserted him: his bloodline was the stronger.
‘Then defend your walls.’
As a force to mount such an assault, Roger had pitifully few men, less than four hundred in total after the losses, albeit they were small, in his recent battle. Added to such constraint was the lack of enthusiasm from anyone other than his own nephew as to the chances of success. Hurriedly made scaling ladders were all they could manage to assault stout walls and Roger’s assertion of little in the way of defence was met amongst his fellow Normans with ill-disguised scepticism. Yet no man refused, their leader might be right and the Calabrian levies, fired with anti-Sicilian bloodlust, were too ignorant to make sense of what they faced.
The attack, launched at dawn the next day, was not a fiasco because of poor execution, it was rendered foolhardy by the sheer tenacity of the defenders who, if they were untrained, had fire in their bellies. Time and again the Normans got their ladders against the walls, with hardy fighters clambering to the top, and just as often the task of those seeking to follow was to break the fall of the repulsed warriors in the hope of saving their bones.
Roger did at least manage to get his feet on the parapet, only to find himself assailed by dozens of frenzied citizens, who seemed to care little how many of them died to force him to withdraw, lucky to get a foothold on his ladder and keep enough distance between himself and those trying to kill him to allow an ignominious retreat. The Calabrians fared even worse, leaving scores of their number twitching and dying at the base of the walls and forcing the man in command to call off the assault.
For Roger the humiliation of this reverse was total and there was no one close to him, seeing his mood, who had the temerity to tell him the attack should never have been launched in the first place: the thunderous look and the mood that went with it indicated to advance such an opinion was a sure way to die. Before him, as he stood out of crossbow range, he surveyed a scene of tangled bodies and smashed scaling ladders, this while horns blew from the parapets to crow the victory of those within the walls.
His request that he be allowed to collect his wounded was denied: they could expire where they lay and if they did not then the city had knives in plenty to slit their gizzards, adding they would not be buried and no prayers would be said for their souls. Let the vultures and the carrion crows cleanse their bones, for there they would lie to warn any other invader of the fate that awaited them. Roger raised his sword before his eyes, as a makeshift cross, then uttered a promise that sounded very like a curse.
‘One day, Messina, I will make your women keen for the death of their men and their boy children, and that before I send every one of those wailing creatures to the slave markets of Africa.’
Sheathing his weapon he gave the orders that would take them back to Cape Faro, a journey made with none of the joy and anticipation of the outward leg, and it was a mood not cheered by the sight of the shore and the angry waters off the cape. They still could not load the ships.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The gloom of such a reverse was bad enough; what followed was worse. The citizens of Messina, fired by their success and in their thousands, issued from their walls to pursue their foes, and it was only a lack of coordination that prevented them from sweeping what remained of Roger’s band into the sea. It took every lance he had to bring their attack to a halt and that was only made possible by the narrow neck of land that lay between Lake Faro and the sea.
‘They do not know how to fight.’ Serlo insisted, now with even more wounds than hitherto.
Roger, bruised himself, was reluctant to answer his nephew, for to do so would only underline the depth of his miscalculation. If he had ever questioned the sense of the word ‘hubris’ he knew what it meant now. He had allowed his own ambitions to cloud his judgement and the men he led were being called to account for his folly.
‘Think on their numbers, Serlo,’ he replied, indicating a landscape full of humanity. ‘And our losses.’
‘Leaders?’
‘At times such as these, men of the right kind come to the fore.’
‘Then they will pay a high price for their hopes.’
Every city, if it wished to stay unconquered, made sure its citizens had access to arms, swords and pikes, as well as some ability to use them. He had massacred the trained soldiers who had abandoned the protection of their walls but this he faced now was of a different order. They lacked the skill of the Normans but skill would not overcome odds of a hundred to one. Roger had lost half his strength, not all killed, but enough so wounded as to be unfit for battle, while everyone else was carrying injuries and that took no account of their shattered morale.
If he wished to hold here he would be required to split them in two, sending an equal number to the north of Lake Faro where another neck of land lay between fresh water and the shore, this while his opponents, once they had fully deployed, would have the power of decision about from which area to launch an assault. Time was against him: contained on this exposed cape, if he had ample food for his men he did not have enough for his horses. Without horses he could not launch the counterattacks that would keep these people at bay, and on foot he lacked the numbers, especially given his split force, to form enough of a defence to secure the integrity of his encampment.