‘I should have stopped in Troia, as I was asked to do.’
‘If you wish to return there, do so with my blessing.’
‘William…’ Mauger protested.
Robert did not let that intercession interfere with his anger at a greeting so at variance with his expectations. He had travelled too many leagues to get here and sacrificed too much. ‘What makes you think I require your blessing?’
‘You will starve without it.’
‘I think,’ said Kasa Ephraim, ‘that I had best depart.’
‘If you wish, friend,’ William replied, with a glare that now included Mauger. ‘And you can take these two with you, for I have people whose interest I care about to attend to.’
Turning away from the doorway, William nearly burst out laughing. Tirena was favouring his half-brother Robert with the kind of fierce glare she once reserved for him.
‘Murder?’ said Mauger, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘He was drunk and so was the man he killed. The duke was about to take us into service, but that went by the board as soon as Serlo stuck in the knife.’
‘What about Father?’ demanded Geoffrey.
‘I assume he came home, but I was gone by then.’
‘You left him at Moulineaux?’
‘I did what he commanded me to do,’ growled Robert. ‘I saw Serlo onto a boat in the bay at Granville and came south. I wonder now if it was wise.’
‘You caught William at a bad time,’ Drogo insisted. ‘Perhaps an apology…’
‘If he wishes to give me one I will take it!’
Drogo shook his head: that was not what he meant but there seemed little point in saying so, though he did think this younger sibling of his had an arrogant manner.
‘Do we know if Serlo got to England?’ asked Mauger.
‘How would I? His fate is in the hands of God, and if he has drowned, what of it? He would certainly have seen the end of a rope if he had been taken.’
‘He’s your brother.’
‘He’s my half-brother, just like William, so before you chastise me for a lack of concern, take him to task, or are you all too afraid?’
If there had been any sympathy for Robert de Hauteville then, it evaporated. If he had not been blood, there might have been murder in Melfi.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In a world where news travelled slowly, normally at the pace of a walking man or a sailing merchant vessel, the death of the Eastern Emperor, Michael IV, spread like wildfire, because it directly affected the life of everyone in half of Christendom, as well as having a bearing on relations with the rest. Given the unrest in Apulia, it acted to create as much confusion as it did to engender raised hopes. Michael IV had, from humble beginnings, proved to be a successful ruler, in that he had held together an empire many of his neighbours, all of them ravenous for a share of the spoils, saw as ripe to fall apart. He had also managed to survive in the cauldron of imperial politics to die a peaceful death.
Once a handsome courtier and junior officer, brother to a hugely powerful court official, Michael had become the lover of the fifty-year-old Empress Zoe, and had succeeded to the purple on the death of her first, ageing husband. That was an end replete with all the attendant accusations of assassination: first, it was rumoured, he had been left debilitated by frequent doses of a slow poison and, when that failed to send him to his grave, with a drowning in his bath.
Michael, it transpired, had not only kept Zoe content, but several other concubines as well, though increasingly epilepsy, the affliction from which he suffered, had seriously impeded his abilities as both a lover and an emperor. It was a measure of the authority of self-interested courtiers, not least a brother who acted as the power behind the throne, that a man so distressed by increasing illness could reign for so long.
The succession was always a fraught affair, so to those observing and calculating their own position, the tangled skein of Byzantine politics would now become even more unpredictable as those who hoped to inherit the power of the deceased fought for influence. The news that the heir to Imperial Purple was another Michael, related by marriage to the deceased emperor’s father, Stephen — a one-time ship’s caulker risen to the rank of admiral — arrived hard on the heels of the first, and a steady stream of rumour mixed with fact followed as the drama of imperial succession was played out.
Zoe must have approved of the new Michael, yet he demonstrated scant gratitude for her support. Once installed as emperor, she had been banished from the city to a nearby island in the Sea of Marmara, her head shaved and her wealth purloined, but being much loved by the citizens of Constantinople, as well as heir to the ruling Macedonian house, that had caused riots in the Byzantine capital.
Michael V, appearing for the games at the Hippodrome, had been pelted with stones and shot at with arrows by the mob, causing him to send hurriedly for Zoe to appease their wrath, but, even if he showed her to the crowd to prove she was free, he had acted too late. In yet another twist, Zoe’s hated sister, Theadora, who had been shut away years before, was dragged out and acclaimed as joint-empress. Michael, called the Caulker because of the profession of his father, who had taken refuge in a monastery, was hauled into a public square and had his eyes put out.
Zoe was left to co-rule with her sister, but that did not last: she would rather have shared power with a horse. Within months, and now in her sixties, Zoe had taken a third husband, while Theadora was sent back to the nunnery. The new emperor, to whom Zoe was happy to surrender her power as well as her charms, was a one-time courtier, now styled Constantine IX, leaving everyone who passed on the story of these events to wonder at how such an entity as the Eastern Roman Empire could last.
That last tranche of news, the name and identity of the new emperor, came to Apulia with a nasty sting in the tail, for Constantine, as was usual, had reversed many of the acts of his predecessors, which meant that the favourites of both Michaels had been sent to the dungeons, while many of those they had imprisoned were freed and reinstated to their previous rank. One such was the general called George Maniakes, and he was on his way to Apulia to restore the power of Byzantium. Having escorted Kasa Ephraim back to Montecchio, prior to his onward journey to Salerno, William and Drogo were once more face to face with Prince Guaimar.
‘Height,’ William replied, when asked to describe the man he had served under in Sicily, his palm going above his head by three hands. ‘Arduin will confirm that.’
‘Did he not nearly strangle the old emperor’s brother?’ asked Guaimar, as Arduin nodded.
‘It took three of us to stop him,’ said Drogo, ‘and even then I’m not sure we did by force.’
As an admiral, Stephen, the caulker, had been useless, only in place because of his connection to the ruling house, and George Maniakes had made no secret of the fact that he despised him. An arrogant man of incredible strength, as well as size, that strangulation had been a one-handed attempt at murder, which would have succeeded had he not been stopped; but to lay hands on a man with such powerful connections had not been wise and had led, once news got back to Constantinople, to his downfall. It was a fitting irony that this happened just after he had achieved his greatest campaign successes, the defeat of the main Saracen enemy followed by the capture of the most important city in Sicily, the great port of Syracuse.
Due to that same arrogance, as well as the increasing conceit which came with victory, he had fallen out with William, denying the Normans, as well as a body of Varangians led by Harald Hardrada, the right to plunder a city they had helped to capture, and one which had refused terms when besieged. All knew the laws of war and the citizens of Syracuse were no exception: a walled city offered terms of surrender, that then forced an army to invest and subdue it, forfeited the right to mercy.