Warriors Read Free Page A

future, only to have Rainulf snatch it away.’
    ‘His child may die.’
    William responded to Geoffrey with a witheringlook. ‘And with a willing bedmate he may breed many more.’
    That induced a long silence, as each of the recently arrived trio contemplated what had happened since William and Drogo had come to Italy. Both had taken service with Rainulf Drengot and both, through sheer ability, had risen to lead companies of men, William even more. He had become Rainulf’s right hand, to be consulted frequently at a time when Campania was in turmoil and the mercenary leader had himself felt under threat.
    Drengot had betrayed the Duke of Salerno, a trusting soul who had granted him not only the hand of his daughter but also the dowry gift of the Lordship of Aversa, raising him from mere paid retainer to the status of influential landowner in his own right. Rainulf had shown little in the way of gratitude: when his wife died he had switched his allegiance, and thus the overpowering force he could put in the field, to a fellow of staggering mendacity called Pandulf, Prince of Capua, marrying his sister to seal the bargain. A termagant and an unwilling spouse, that was a union Rainulf had come to much regret.
    Even for a Lombard, Pandulf of Capua, known to all as the Wolf of the Abruzzi, had shown a greed and lack of integrity that was remarkable. Having deposed the Duke of Salerno and dispossessed his remaining children, he had grown even more grasping,bearing down on subjects in both fiefs, people who hated him, and stripping from them, with Rainulf’s help, ever-increasing wealth. No one, petty baron, trader, farmer, priest, bishop or monk was safe from his depredations.
    Pandulf loved gold, not God, and like all avaricious men, he had, in time, overreached himself, attacking and ravaging the lands of the wealthy Monastery of Montecassino. Not content to merely seize its treasury, he threw the elderly Abbot Theodore into his dungeons and parcelled out the monastery’s extensive lands to Normans, men he had suborned from Rainulf’s service. Indeed, from being the greatest source of Rainulf’s wealth Pandulf had become too powerful, a threat to the now ageing mercenary leader – childless, and, thanks to his tempestuous marriage, much given to taking refuge in drink.
    The Wolf’s depredations had, through the intercession of Guaimar, the Duke of Salerno’s son, reached the ear of the Western Emperor, Conrad Augustus, but it was what he had done to the holy men of Montecassino that proved his downfall. The irate emperor had come south from Germany with a great army to restore Montecassino and put the villain in his own dungeons. William de Hauteville, advising Rainulf to leave his untrustworthy ally to his fate, had engineered a truce with Conrad – a combination of force that obliged Pandulf to flee.
    The reward for Rainulf had been imperial confirmation of his title under Guaimar, the newly elevated Prince of both Salerno and Capua. This, for a Norman who had come to Italy with nothing but his horses and his weapons, was elevation indeed, a title and fiefdom from which only the emperor could remove him. At the ceremony of investiture outside the walls of Capua, Rainulf had brought forward William and embraced him, bidding him kiss the gonfalon that denoted his title, an indication from a man without offspring that his senior captain should be his heir.
    William had gone off to Sicily leading all but a hundred of Rainulf’s men, sustained by that promise of a brilliant future; he had returned to find Rainulf’s termagant wife shut up in a nunnery, a new young and lusty concubine in his bed, the Imperial Count of Aversa sober and cradling in his arms a mewling male infant he called Hermann, who would one day, he made plain, succeed to his lands and title; William de Hauteville would get nothing!
    ‘Put the matter to the vote,’ Drogo suggested, not for the first time. ‘Let the men decide who to follow, you or