Warriors Read Free

personalknights, part of the familia of his liege lord, the son of the man he himself had served so faithfully. That suzerain, Duke Robert of Normandy, had ignored written requests more than once, and had then rebuffed the same appeal in a face-to-face meeting. For men bred to war, with no hope of advancement in their homeland, the brothers de Hauteville, first William and Drogo, and now joined by Humphrey, Geoffrey and half-brother Mauger, had taken the well-worn route to Italy and mercenary service, where the martial prowess of the Normans was highly prized and well rewarded.
     
    ‘Enough,’ William insisted, as Drogo continued to relate those amatory adventures he had indulged in at home, quite forgetting the trouble his activities had caused: he was the father of more bastards than could be counted on the fingers of his hands. ‘Home is far off in time and distance. We must turn our thoughts to that which concerns us here.’
    Drogo frowned more from habit than irritation; William might be the oldest and Tancred’s heir, but too often in their growing years he had assumed near-parental powers.
    Yet he deferred to him, not just as an older sibling but also as a chief; Rainulf Drengot commanded the Normans of Campania, but William was his senior captain and had led the mercenary contingent in therecent invasion of Sicily. A measure of his stature, gained in that conflict, was his soubriquet: he was now more commonly referred to by those he led as Bras de Fer , a title bestowed on him by his confrères after a single-combat encounter outside the walls of Syracuse. William Iron Arm had fought and defeated the ruling Saracen emir, a giant of a man who claimed to have on his belt the notches of a hundred skulls.
    Humphrey, his beetle brow furrowed, stood suddenly, and went to the door that led from the vestry to the chancel of the cathedral, opening it to ensure no one was listening.
    ‘Suspicious as ever,’ said Mauger.
    ‘The only people I trust are in this room,’ Humphrey insisted, before sweeping the assembly with a glare on a face that, with its large overbite and close-set eyes, lacked beauty, ‘and that is not wholehearted.’
    ‘You sleep with your purse between your legs,’ scoffed Drogo, Humphrey’s parsimony and mistrustful nature being a family joke.
    ‘He would when you are around, brother,’ crowed Geoffrey.
    Drogo laughed. ‘He has not got between his legs anything else to tempt me.’
    ‘I cannot think why you bother, Humphrey,’ William said with a weary air, looking at the now closed door. ‘Who would want to overhear this foolishness?’
    ‘You should slacken sometimes, Gill,’ Drogo insisted.‘A little foolishness would do your soul good.’
    For ‘foolishness’, Drogo meant gaiety and that covered much of the ground that lay as a difference between the two eldest brothers. Drogo was mercurial by nature, laughing one second but equally likely to resort to a fist fight the next if he felt impugned. He was also a womaniser, never without a concubine to bed when he was at what passed for home, and ever on the lookout for companionship on campaign or when travelling. William was steady and serious, and while not, as Drogo called him, a eunuch, he was restrained in his carnality, engaging in the odd liaison, without ever forming permanent attachments.
    ‘I’ll leave the priests to worry for my soul, brother, because I have four of you to use up all my concern.’
    ‘We can look after ourselves,’ Mauger responded, with all the confidence of the youngest present.
    ‘Can you?’ William replied, looking past Mauger at the crucifix on the bare stone wall, the son of the God he had been raised to believe would see everything, and who would one day judge him for the sins he had committed in life. Then he looked at his brothers, all big men and broad of shoulder, all with golden hair and faces made red by the Italian sun. ‘I thought that too. I thought I had become heir to a brilliant