“How did you get interested in this period?”
Volstrup smiled again while he shrugged. “Romanticism. Mine was the late Romantic era in the North, you know. And the Scandinavians who originally settled in Normandy, they were not Norwegians, as the Heimskringla claims. Personal and place names show they came, at least for the most part, from Denmark. After which they proceeded to fight and conquer from the British Isles to the Holy Land.”
“I see.” For a silent minute, Everard ran the facts through his head.
Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, together with other kin, reached southern Italy in the previous century. Countrymen of theirs were already on hand, fighters against both Saracens and Byzantines. The land was in turmoil. A leader of warriors, who joined one of the factions, might come to grief when it did, or he might do very well for himself. Robert ended as Count and Duke of Apulia. Roger I became Grand Count of Sicily, with a firmer hold than that on his own territory. It helped that he had obtained a papal bull making him apostolic legate of the island; that gave him considerable power within the Church.
Roger died in 1101. His older legitimate sons were dead before him. Thus he left the title to eight-year-old Simon, child of his last wife, half-Italian Adelaide. She, as regent, crushed a baronial revolt and, when sickness also took Simon off, handed an undiminished authority over to her younger son, Roger II. He took full mastery in 1122, and set about regaining southern Italy for the house of Hauteville. Those conquests had fallen away after Robert Guiscard’s death. The claim was resisted by Pope Honorius II, who did not care for a strong, ambitious lord as the immediate neighbor of the papal territories; by Roger’s rival relatives, Robert II of Capua and Rainulf of Avellino, Roger’s brother-in-law; and by the mainland people, among whom there stirred ideas of city autonomy and republican government.
Pope Honorius actually preached a crusade against Roger. He must needs retract it when the army of Normans, Saracens, and Greeks from Sicily prevailed over the coalition. By the end of 1129, Naples, Capua, and the rest recognized Roger as their duke.
To nail down his position, he needed the name of king. Honorius died early in 1130. Not for the first or last time, the medieval intermingling of religious and secular politics brought about the election of two claimants to the throne of St. Peter. Roger backed Anacletus. Innocent fled to France. Anacletus paid off his debt with a bull proclaiming Roger king of Sicily.
War followed. Innocent’s great clerical partisan, Bernard of Clairvaux, whom the future would know as St. Bernard, denounced the “half-heathen king.” Louis VI of France, Henry I of England, and Lothair of the Holy Roman Empire supported Innocent. Led by Rainulf, southern Italy revolted anew. Strife went back and forth across that land.
By 1134, Roger seemed to be getting on top. The prospect of a powerful Norman realm alarmed even the Greek emperor in Constantinople, who lent his aid, as did the city-states Pisa and Genoa. In February 1137 Lothair moved south with his Germans and with Innocent. Rainulf and the rebels joined them. Following a victorious campaign, in August he and the Pope invested Rainulf as Duke of Apulia. The emperor started home.
Indomitable, Roger came back. He sacked Capua and forced Naples to acknowledge him lord. Then, at the end of October, he met Rainulf at Rignano….
“You’ve settled in pretty well, I see,” Everard remarked.
“I have learned to like it here,” Volstrup answered quietly. “Not everything, no. Much is gruesome. But then, that is true in every age, not so? Looking uptime after all these years, I see how many were the horrors to which we Victorians smugly closed our eyes. These are wonderful people, in their fashion. I have a good wife, fine children.” Pain crossed his face. He could never confide in them. He must in the end watch them grow old and die—at best; something worse might get them first. A Patrolman did not look into his own future or the futures of those he loved. “It is fascinating to watch the development. I will see the golden age of Norman Sicily.” He stopped, swallowed, and finished: “If we can correct the disaster.”
“Right.” Everard guessed that now going straight to business would be kindest. “Have you gotten any word since your first report?”
“Yes. I have not yet passed it on, because it is very incomplete. Better to assemble a coherent picture first, I assume.” As a matter of fact, it was not, but Everard didn’t press the point. “I never expected an … Unattached agent … so soon.”
Volstrup straightened where he sat and forced firmness into his voice: “A band of Roger’s men who escaped from the battlefield made their way to Reggio, got a boat across the strait, and continued here. Their officer has reported at the palace. I have my paid listeners among the servants there, of course. The story is that Rainulf’s total victory, the slaying of the king and prince, was due to a young knight from Anagni, one Lorenzo de Conti. But this is mere hearsay, you understand. It is gossip that reached them after the fact, in fragments, as they straggled homeward through a country in upheaval, full of people who hated their kind. It may be worthless.”
Everard rubbed his furry chin. “Well, it needs looking into,” he said slowly. “Something that specific ought to have some truth behind it. I’ll want to sound out the officer. You can fix that up for me, can’t you, in a plausible way? And then, if it seems this Lorenzo fellow may be the key to it all—” Again the hunter’s tingle went through his skin and along his backbone. “Then I’ll try to zero in on him.”
1138 α A. D.
To Anagni on its high hill, some forty miles from Rome, came a rider one crisp autumn day. Folk stared, for horse and man were uncommonly large; bearing sword and shield though at present unarmored, he was clearly of rank; a baggage mule followed on a tether; yet he fared alone. The guards at the city gate to which he came answered respectfully when he drew up and hailed them in rough Tuscan. Advised by them, he passed through and wound his way to a decent inn. There he got his gear unloaded and his beasts stabled and fed, while he took a pot of ale and a gab with the landlord. He was affable in a gusty German fashion and readily learned whatever he wanted to know. Presently he gave a coin to one of the boys and bade him carry a message to the right place: “Sir Manfred von Einbeck of Saxony sends his respects to Sir Lorenzo de Conti, the hero of Rignano, and would fain call upon him.”
They brewed a grand local beer at Einbeck in those nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Manse Everard remembered. He needed a little whimsy to keep him going, keep him from too much silent crying out to his ghosts.
The title he used, Italian “Signor,” German “Herr,” bore a less definite meaning than it would later, when the institutions and orders of chivalry had fully developed. However, it bespoke a fighting man of good birth, and that sufficed. Eventually, on the Continent, it would merely signify “Mister”—or would it, in the strange world uptime?
The boy sped back with an invitation to come at once, Outsiders were always welcome for the news they could convey. Everard changed into a robe, which a Patrol technician had judiciously given the wear and tear of travel, and accompanied his guide on foot. The streets were cleaner than most because a recent rain had washed their steepness. Narrow between walls and overhanging upper stories, they were filling with gloom, but in a strip of sky he glimpsed evening light ruddy-gold on the cathedral that reared at the summit of the hill.