Land of the Silver Dragon

POSTSCRIPT

At sea off Sicily, midsummer 1093

Rollo stood on deck, watching the land of his birth disappear into the hazy light of early morning. The ship had sailed at dawn; the bustle and hurry of departure were now just a memory. Above him, the big sail filled with the westerly wind, so that the sleek craft sped over the deep, profoundly blue water.

Rollo was thinking about his kinsman, Roger Guiscard. He pictured the handsome face; heard in his head Bosso’s smooth, civilized tones that masked the reality of the man’s tough, ruthless nature.

Roger had a personal motto: The right hand of God raised me up; the right hand of God gave me courage.

With a wry smile, Rollo wondered if the Almighty had bestowed a little of that courage on him, too. He was going to need it.

Rollo had sent word home to King William. Via an elaborate chain of discreet men and women, many of whom Rollo had himself recruited, he had dispatched a carefully coded message, telling William what he had found out concerning the rumours of an expedition to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims. In what Rollo sincerely hoped was in a still deeper and more impenetrable level of code, he had added a brief, succinct report on the Norman kingdom of the South, and its ruler’s current opinions and preoccupations.

Count Roger, Rollo reflected as the distance between the ship and Sicily steadily increased, could not have so much as had a suspicion of the report’s existence, let alone set eyes on or, God forbid, interpreted it. Not that Rollo had done anything but give his king a fair and accurate account; the sin, in Count Roger’s eyes, would be in Rollo’s sending the report at all. If the Count had discovered the treason — for it was certain that it would be in those terms he would view it — then Rollo would not be where he now was. He’d probably be …

Bearing in mind Count Roger’s views on the suitable treatment of those who had, in his view, betrayed him, Rollo did not permit himself to dwell on that.

He had waited, staying with his mother in Sicily, for King William’s response. From time to time, he had imagined the message speeding on its way to him. He was proud of his men and women. He had chosen them carefully, looking out always for people who stood a little apart; who observed with intelligence but were not overhasty to give an opinion. His approach usually followed the same pattern. He would find an opportunity to speak privately to the potential recruit, and, within quite a short time, would have an idea whether or not the person had what he was looking for. Sometimes he got it wrong. Far more often, his initial instincts were right.

The work he required of his recruits usually amounted to no more than the passing on of written and sometimes verbal messages to the next person in the chain. For this they were well-paid, and the reward guaranteed continued efficiency. Very occasionally, he would seek out someone who happened to live in a place where certain information could be found, and, again, the reward was not inconsiderable. Rollo believed he had a solid network of discreet, reliable spies, for want of a better word. It was at times reassuring to remember the achievement.

The king’s reply had reached him a week ago. With it, Rollo’s faint hope of being able to return swiftly to England dissolved like smoke and blew away.

King William wasted only a few words in recognition of what Rollo had told him so far, and thank you were not among them. Kings did not habitually thank their subjects for services rendered. Then he had gone on to give Rollo his further orders. Now, in response to them, Rollo was setting out in a very different direction from the one which, were his heart to lead the way, he would have pursued.

He gazed down into the blue water, creasing out in a great white-tipped ‘V’ from the ship’s stern. England. If his life were his own, he’d have gone north to England. His heart suddenly heavy with longing, he wished there were some way he could send word to Lassair.

His mother had succeeded in setting his mind at rest; that was something for which he could be very thankful. Her trance-induced vision, as she sat with closed eyes clutching the bracelet Lassair had given to her son, had revealed a picture of danger dissipating. Rollo had known there was danger: he had sensed the treat to Lassair within his own body. Or perhaps it was his soul … he did not know. There was no way of discovering what the nature of the danger had been; he was resigned to that. The crucial thing was that it had passed.

In addition to what Giuliana had revealed to him, his own gut feelings told him Lassair was safe.

For now.

That, he reflected wryly, was something else it was better not to dwell on.

There was a long way to go before he could once more turn for England. The ship was sailing east: heading for Byzantium. Rollo’s mission now was to discover how matters lay with Emperor Alexius Comnenus.

Balancing his weight evenly on both feet, and resting his folded arms comfortably on the ship’s stern rail, Rollo went over all that he knew and had recently found out.

In the dozen or so years that he had worn his crown, Alexius had made his great capital a centre for Christian freedom and learning. It had been no mean feat, Rollo reflected, bearing in mind the constant threat that Alexius faced from the Seljuk Turks. Recent converts to Islam, and with the single-minded zeal of the new recruit, these Turks were steadily, stealthily conquering all the lands around them, including Jerusalem, doing everything in their power to win over the inhabitants to Islam as they did so.

Their capital was a mere hundred miles from Alexius’s beautiful, sophisticated city. Bearing in mind the success they had experienced so far, Rollo doubted whether Alexius slept easily in his bed at night. Did he lie awake, picturing the invasion that must surely come? He would be aware, no doubt, of the difficulties of pilgrims attempting to visit the Holy Places. Would he, man of the world that he was said to be, condemn the Turks for their intransigence? Would he think them foolish, for refusing to countenance a constant stream of visitors who could have been exploited for much-needed income? Would he be furiously indignant at the very idea of the fierce nomadic Turks who now held the sites treating Christian pilgrims so cruelly?

The rumour-mongers and the gossips — those who liked to predict what the great and the good would do next — were already muttering that Alexius would surely appeal to Rome. He would ask the pope for some sort of armed force to assist him, both in protecting his own lands and also with the aim of driving the Turks from Eastern Christendom. It was, people muttered, in the pope’s interests to comply with the request, given the wild stories about good Christians cruelly and ruthlessly being converted from their faith by a knife at the throat.

Rollo speculated about what might be the result of such an appeal. He could not make himself believe in a picture of ordered ranks of well-drilled soldiery, sent by the pope to come to the aid of his embattled brother-in-faith in the east. Religion, after all, was a matter for the heart, not the head, and, once the heart got involved, good sense and rational thought tended to fly away.

Rollo drifted into reverie.

Fuelled by his apprehension, he saw in his mind’s eye a vision of the future. He saw not a tight, professional army, but a vast rabble of ordinary folk, hurrying over all the endless miles to Jerusalem, the fervour of faith lighting their eyes and numbing the pain in their half-starved, stumbling bodies.

Who would lead them?

Rollo’s inner vision roamed on, on, over the masses of suffering people who only went on, doggedly moving forward, because their faith would not let them stop.

After a while — and it seemed to take a long time, for there were men, women and even children in their thousands upon thousands — he visualized the head of the enormous, makeshift army. There, on magnificent horses richly caparisoned, rode a group of powerful, ruthlessly ambitious lords and kings of the West. They too were alight with fever. But their goal was something more than that of their humble followers: their besotted, fanatically determined eyes saw, shining with eternal light, brilliant and gorgeous under the eastern sun, a Christian empire of the East.

Was King William right? Rollo wondered. When, as it seemed it inevitably would, the time came, would Duke Robert of Normandy be there in the vanguard, as gorgeously and extravagantly decked out as the rest and every last soldier, boot, arrow, water bottle and stirrup financed by his brother William and the use of Normandy as security?

Rollo didn’t know. He did, however, have a strong presentiment that the king’s prediction would come true. I need to find out more, he thought, his mind seeming to fly over endless vistas of sun-baked sand under a deep blue sky. I have to go there, on towards the land where that vast wedge of humanity will make for, and see for myself …

With a start, Rollo pulled himself out of the vision and back to the present.

He was shaken by what his imagination had just shown him. It may not come to that, he told himself.

But he was very afraid that it would.

Distracting his mind, he turned his thoughts to Alexius’s capital.

It was, he had been told, a big, bubbling stew pot of a city, where men and women from all over the world came to trade, to fight, to study, and to learn a little of one another’s ways. Peoples of different faiths lived there, apparently in harmony, each accepting that others had the right to view God in the way that their own priests told them they should.

It was a place where adventurers went seeking their fortune. A place to which soldiers were drawn, in the hope that their talents would be hired by some lord spoiling for a fight. Vikings had gone there; later, following the Norman Conquest and the sea change in the nature of life in Britain, many of the defeated Anglo-Saxons had also fled south, offering their services to a new master and mixing their Norse and Saxon blood with the hot blood of the south.

In a sudden clear memory, Rollo recalled that Lassair had once told him of her great-uncles, the younger brothers of her beloved grandmother. Three had fought at Hastings, she’d said; two died there on the field, and one, the youngest, disappeared and was never heard of again.

Reflecting on it now, Rollo would have put money on that one having quietly slipped away and gone to join the Varangian Guard.

Maybe the old man was still alive, he mused. It was less than thirty years since the Conquest, and the man would have been in his prime back then. Lassair’s Granny Cordeilla had only died a couple of years ago, after all, and the brother who had fled England — Harald, as far as Rollo remembered, the name seeming to float effortlessly up to the surface of his mind — would have been several years younger.

I might even come across the old man, Rollo thought. I might be sitting in a tavern one sunny morning, next to a scarred old giant of a man with many a story to tell, and never know that he is the great-uncle of the woman I love.

He sighed, turning away from the ship’s rail and the last sight of the land of his birth. He did not know how far he would venture eastwards: to Byzantium, certainly; maybe even as far as the Holy Land. Wherever he finished up, he would be a long, long way from England.

Part of him still pined to turn round and set off northwards. Without actually knowing when it had happened, it seemed that Lassair had quietly taken up a place in his heart. He missed her; he longed to be with her.

‘But I cannot return yet,’ he said softly to himself.

For one thing, he had a duty to the king. William was an exacting but generous employer; serving him as he did, Rollo was steadily becoming a wealthy man, for he had little time or opportunity to spend what he earned. Besides, he could scarcely envisage announcing to King William that he’d had enough of being his spy and wanted to quit, in order to settle down and become a … a what? A farmer? A fenland fisherman? Rollo smiled.

In a moment of total honesty, he forced himself to recognize that there was another reason why he did not follow his heart and turn for England.

I am good at what I do, he thought. And, human nature being what it is, we tend to like doing the things we are good at.

He wasn’t going to return to Lassair just yet because the thought of what lay ahead was more of a draw than what lay behind.

The admission did not make him feel especially proud of himself. I am sorry, Lassair, he thought.

He hoped that, when finally he returned, she would be waiting for him.

But first, before he saw England’s shores again, he was going to Constantinople.