So might any footloose adventurer do. Manson, though, drew the royal notice by more than his size. He had much to tell, notably about the Eastern Empire. Half a century ago, Roger’s uncle Robert Guiscard had come near taking Constantinople; barely did the Greeks and their Venetian allies turn that tide. The house of Hauteville, like others in western Europe, still cherished ambitions yonder.
But there were certain curious gaps in what Manson related; and he bore an underlying bleakness, as though some hidden sin or sorrow forever gnawed him—
“No matter,” Roger decided. “Let’s to our harvest. Will you ride with me?”
“By your leave, sire, I think I could better serve under your son the Duke of Apulia,” said the wanderer.
“As you like. Dismissed.” The king’s attention went elsewhere.
Everard pushed through roaring swarms. Heedless of the papal ban, the host had said its prayers at dawn; now oaths ripped across commands, japes, yells in half a dozen languages. Standard-bearers waved their staffs to mark locations. Men-at-arms brawled their way into formation, pikes and axes bared aloft. Archers and slingers deferred to them; not yet was the bowman the master of infantry. Horses neighed, mail flashed, lances whipped on high like reeds in a storm. These were Normans, native Sicilians, Lombards and other Italians, Frenchmen, miscellaneous bullyboys from across half of Europe. In flowing white above their armor, silent but wildness aquiver in them, waited the dreaded Saracen corps.
Manson and his two attendants, hired in Bari, had set up camp in the open, until the king summoned him yesterday after returning from parley. In the city he had also purchased—or so everybody else believed—mounts, a pack horse, and a charger, the last a great barb that nickered, tossed head, stamped hoofs, ha, ha among the trumpets. “Quick, help me on with my outfit,” he ordered.
“Do you really have to go, sir?” asked Jack Hall. “Damn risky, I reckon. Worse’n fightin’ Injuns.” He looked upward. Invisibly high, riders poised on their cycles and scanned the field through instruments that could count the drops of sweat on a man’s face. “Can’t they take out that hombre you’re after—quiet-like, you know, with a stun beam from above?”
“Get cracking!” Everard snapped. “No, you idiot, we’re steering too bloody close to the wind as is.”
Hall reddened and Everard realized he had been unfair. You couldn’t expect an instant grasp of crisis theory from an ordinary agent in place, hastily co-opted. This man was a cowboy till 1875, when the Patrol recruited him. Like the large majority of personnel, he worked in his own milieu, maintaining his original persona among the people who knew him. His secret self was a contact for such time travelers as came by, informant, guide, policeman, whatever they needed. If anything really untoward happened, he was to send for qualified help. It simply chanced that he d been taking a vacation in the Pleistocene, hunting game and girls, when Everard had been, and that he was good with horses.
“Sorry,” Everard said, “but I am in a hurry. Action starts in less than half an hour.” Given the information he brought from Anagni, Patrolmen had “already” charted the fatally wrong course of the battle. Now he would seek to turn it back.
Jean-Louis Broussard got busy. Meanwhile he explained, “You see, my friend, what we do is dangerous enough. An open miracle, that men witnessed, that is not chronicled in either history, ours or this misbegotten one—it would be a new factor, warping events still worse.” He was a more scholarly sort, born in the twenty-fourth century but operating in France of the tenth, not as an enforcer but as an observer. So much information perished when nobody at the time recorded it, or recorded it wrong, or when books moldered, burned, were mislaid. If the Patrol was to guard the time-stream, it must know what it guarded. As vital to it as its police agents were its field scientists.
Like Wanda. “Hurry, God damn it!” Set her aside. Don’t remember her, don’t think about her, not now.
Hall occupied himself with the stallion. “Well, but I’d say you’re too valuable a guy to throw into that fracas, sir,” he persisted. “Like puttin’ Robert E. Lee in the front lines.”
Everard made no reply, save inside his skull. I demanded this. I pulled rank. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t quite tell you, but I’ve got to strike the blow myself.
“We have our part, you and I,” Broussard reminded Hall. “We are the reserves, here on the ground, if things go badly.” He left unspoken the fact that in that case the causality vortex would probably have grown unredeemably great.
Everard had slept in his shirt and pants. Over them went a quilted coat, plus a similar coif and spurred boots replacing shoes. The coat of mail slid smoothly down from head and shoulders to hang to his knees, divided from the crotch so he could ride. Supple, it felt less heavy than you might have expected; the weight was well distributed. A noseguarded spangenhelm was secured above. A sword belt, dagger on the right, completed the ensemble, which a Patrol workshop had produced to his specs. He hadn’t needed more than a little practice, for he’d long since made a point of acquiring as many combat techniques as possible.
He put foot in stirrup and mounted. Ideally a warhorse was raised to its master from colthood. This, though, was a Patrol animal, more intelligent than is natural among equines. Broussard reached him his shield. He slipped his left arm through its straps before taking the reins in that hand. Heraldry had not yet developed, but individuals sometimes used symbols, and in a fit of forlornness he had painted on his a fabulous bird—a turkey. Hall offered him his lance. It too handled easier than its length suggested. He gave the men a thumbs-up and trotted off.
Commotion was dwindling as squadrons formed. Borne by a squire, the banner of the younger Roger hung gaudy from a crossarm at the head of the army. He was to lead the first charge.
Everard drew nigh, reined in, and lifted his lance in a kind of salute. “Hail, my lord,” he called. “The king bade me join you in the vanguard. My thought is that I might best ride on the outside at the left.”
The duke nodded impatiently. Battle eagerness flamed in him, for his years numbered but nineteen though already he had won fame as a brilliant and gallant warrior. In the Patrol’s history, his death on another field, eleven years hence, without legitimate issue, would in the long run prove evil for the kingdom, because he was the ablest son of Roger II. But in this history, today was doomsday for the lithe and lively boy.
“As you will, Manson,” he said. With a laugh: “That should keep things quiet there!” Commanders of later military would have been appalled at such sloppiness, but so far nobody in western Europe was long on organization or doctrine. The Norman cavalry was the best you’d find this side of the Byzantine Empire or the two Caliphates.
As a matter of fact, it was the left flank that Lorenzo would hit. Everard cantered into position and studied his surroundings.
Beyond the road, the enemy had likewise marshalled. Iron glinted, color splashed a mass of horses and men. Rainulf’s knights were fewer, about fifteen hundred, but close on their tails pressed foot that brought the numbers up to Roger’s or a little more—townsmen and peasants of Apulia, pikes and bills a walking forest, come to defend their homes against this invader who had laid other lands waste.
Yeah, his own contemporaries think Roger’s too hard on rebels. But he’s only being like William the Conqueror, who tamed northern England by making a desert of it; and unlike William, when he’s at peace he governs justly,