Free Warriors by Jack Ludlow

substantial force could hope to approach from any direction without being seen a whole day’s march distant. Inside, the fortress was spacious, with well-constructed buildings that could house hundreds of knights, sufficient stabling for their mounts, and vaults below and lofts above that could store enough supplies to sustain them for an eternity, while the keep was large enough in which to train to fight so that no warrior could become rusty by confinement.
    Built by the Byzantines on the site of an old Roman watchtower, it had a water supply that could not be stopped, several deep wells that sat inside the veryrock on which the castle stood, and on three sides lay steep escarpments which reduced the options for any attacker to a frontal assault up the causeway to the crossing, at the end of which stood huge oak gates, studded with metal. On either side of the outer castle entrance stood a pair of towers, barbicans that made the area before the drawbridge a deadly place for any man at the mercy of besieged crossbowmen.
    Arduin was already inside, back in the place he had come to occupy when first appointed, and he was on the steps that led to the great hall when his first Normans entered through the castle gate. In his mind he could see what was to come, himself at the head of a formidable army, taking from Byzantium towns, cities and especially the great ports which sustained them with their fabulous revenues.
    There was another vision: he might need a figurehead to give him the legitimacy needed to persuade others to revolt, but he would be no more than that. Men had risen before from seemingly humble origins to a noble estate, why not he? His arrangement with Prince Guaimar was for an equal division of the spoils, but that might be something he could circumvent with success. In part, the happy face with which he grasped the arm of William de Hauteville and the first contingent of knights was fed by such thoughts.
    ‘A messenger, William, to bring in the rest.’
    ‘Already sent, Arduin,’ the Norman leader replied. ‘I would also ask a message be sent north to the Normans of Troia, suggesting they desert Byzantium and join us.’
    ‘Do you think they will be tempted?’
    ‘No, they have prospered too much from serving the Eastern Empire, but not to ask might make them more of an enemy than we now need and I would want them neutral. It never does to wound Norman pride.’
    Arduin flashed a look at William de Hauteville then, wondering at the level of his pride, indeed the pride of the whole clan; all twelve of them.

CHAPTER FIVE

    The great castle of Moulineaux stood stark and pale grey, high on the hillside, set against the deep-green and corn-gold fields of the Normandy landscape, dappled by sunlight and high white clouds, with a rolling slope, part cultivated fields, part woodland, reaching down to the silver ribbon of the winding River Seine, the whole now dotted with tented encampments. Beyond the fluttering pennants of the great lords who occupied these pavilions there were boats and barges plying their way upriver, some to Rouen, others which would continue on to Paris and perhaps all the navigable way to fertile Burgundy, for the Seine was a major artery of trade with the interior, a source of great wealth to whosoever controlled the river as it exited to the sea.
    To the elderly man who emerged from the deep woods on the high ridgeline, the sight before him spoke of different things: it reminded him of his heritage and the tales he had heard at his grandfather’s knee. Once that same river had been the means by which his Viking forbears had terrorised this part of the world, as they had done so many others, sailing their longboats up to and beyond the island on which Paris stood, and besieging the city until paid enough treasure to depart.
    The land around this part of the Frankish Kingdom, from the coast to the core, had been rich, fruitful, full of churches, monasteries, castles and walled towns the men