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Call to Crusade begins a four-book saga of Godric MacEuan, Scottish knight and siege lord of the First Crusade. At Godric's side, readers relive the glory and horror of that epic conflict of religions and cultures that still overshadows our world a thousand years later. "Deus lo volt! God wills it!" The book is fiction, but the story is true.

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Publié par	Tom Vetter Books, LLC
Date de parution	12 février 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781941160015
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CALL TO CRUSADE

The Recollections of Lord Godric MacEuan on the First Crusade:
Volume One

Tom Vetter

An Imprint of
Tom Vetter Books, LLC
Publishers
www.tomvetterbooks.com
Dumfries, VA

Call to Crusade. Copyright © 2013 by Thomas G. Vetter. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact the Author at:
tomvetter@tomvetterbooks.com.
Thomas G. Vetter, writing as “Tom Vetter,” has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The views and opinions of the characters are their own, consistent with the time and nature of the period and places in which they lived. As such, these too are fictional.

All rights reserved under International and Pan- American Copyright Conventions.

First U.S. Edition

Map of Dunnottar © 2013 by Thomas Vetter
Relationships Chart © 2013 by Thomas Vetter
Book design by Thomas Vetter of Tom Vetter Books, LLC
Copyediting services by http://www.thebookscrubber.com/
Ebook conversions by http://www.makemyebook.com/
Cover photo by cosma, used under license from BigStock.com

US Trade softcover version ISBN-10: 194116000X.
US Trade softcover version ISBN-13: 978-1-941160-00-8.
.epub version ISBN-10: 1941160018.
.epub version ISBN-13: 978-1-941160-01-5.
.mobi version ISBN-10: 1941160026.
.mobi version ISBN-13: 978-1-941160-02-2.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
“If you want peace, prepare for war.”

Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus,
“De Re Militari”

Dedication

To Harrison. His avid readership inspires my Muse.

* * *

Preface: The Manuscript
Forty years ago, while working a summer job to pay for college, I was hired to clear junk from the house of a professor of medieval history, a deceased bachelor who left all to his college. The contents of the house had already been auctioned and the executor wanted the place cleaned for sale. In a dark corner of the attic, I found an overlooked trunk. The executor told me to trash it, but when I asked for it to haul my stuff to and from college, she demanded ten bucks. I stuffed the receipt in my pocket and the trunk in my old station wagon.
The weekend I finished that job, I dragged out the trunk and went through the contents. Underneath heavily edited drafts of papers on the First Crusade, I found a manuscript on old parchment, the Latin text written by a shaky hand. This was not the professor’s work but someone else’s, composed long ago. And thanks to an executor’s greed, I owned it.
I could not understand much of it then, except to discern that it was a memoir of some kind, written by one Godric MacEuan, Baron of Cenachedne, wherever that was. I had no time to go through it, so I put it in the trunk and packed books and clothes on top. It stayed in the trunk, forgotten, for a very long time.
Only recently did I come across it again. Now the trunk was a box of nostalgia with a mystery at the bottom. I thought it might be interesting to learn what Godric had been so determined to tell.
It took me two years. Thanks to Latin translation software, I could glean the gist of his narration, and then wrestle out the nuances. In the end, I was able to relate Godric’s memoir in colloquial English.
It is an astonishing tale. Godric MacEuan was a master of siege warfare. He built the nuclear weapons of his age and used them in the first Crusade to conquer Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
Godric MacEuan was a remarkable man. This is his story.

* * *

One
I am old now, and known in many lands for my martial skills, but it was not always so. I was born to both duty and privilege, but I have had much more of the former than the latter. I have been a page, a squire , a knight, and a lord, but I have been a blacksmith and a slave as well. I am Godric MacEuan of Cenachedne. 1 I am called many other names: Godric the Siege Master, Godric the Castle-Killer, Godric of Jerusalem , and Godric, Lord of War. Islamites call me much worse for slaying so many of them, and I regard their pejoratives as a perverse badge of honor.
Before I earned those names, though, I first had to train in war , and earn a knight’s spurs. My story begins there .
* * *
I was born early in the year 1070 AD, a son of Sir Euan MacDougal, Baron of Cenachedne, the chief bodyguard and chosen battle companion of King Malcolm III, and of Mildred of Lundene, 2 lady-in-waiting and boon companion of his queen, Margaret. Because of my parents, my military training began very young, and my earliest memories include the princes and royal court of Scotland, in which I first grew up.
It was inside a rope circle in the palace courtyard that Crown Prince Edward and I first faced off against each other. We were both five years old and well matched, though I was a bit bigger than Edward, a heritage from my father. We were armed with short, blunt wooden practice swords and kite-shaped shields of a size we could manage. From the gallery, Edward ’s younger brothers, Princes Edmund and Edgar, looked on eagerly ; our mothers with maternal apprehension. Until now, we had only fought wooden posts—no danger there, nor much challenge. This was our first training bout, battling man-to-man against a real opponent, and it did not go well for either of us.
Our instructor, Cormac the Bruce—meaning Cormac the Strong —was both loud and brusque. “Right, laddies, begin . . . no, naw like that . . . stop the dancin’ about and attack yer opponent!”
Cormac was a most experienced man-at-arms and a true warrior, and he took his duty to train us very seriously. Educating the crown prince to be a warrior was a huge responsibility, and he refused to coddle us, for doing so completely undermined the warrior ethos .
“. . . Edward, what’re ye waitin’ for? Close in! You’ll both have beards before either of ye wins! Godric, your father defends the king, but ma wee daughters fight better ’n you. Hit ’im!”
Part of my problem was that Edward was more my brother than my own flesh and blood, and while we were competitive in everything, there was no animosity between us to fuel this fight. And maybe he felt the same way, for he was no more aggressive than I was.
So Edward and I just circled each other, whacking each other’s shields with our swords as we always did when playing—neither of us really inclined to hit the other.
Cormac grew louder. “Edward, stop bashin’ about! Use your shield to stop the blow and stab past it. Seek to hit the man, not his shield. Aye, like that!”
From birth, weapons had been our toys. We got wooden swords when we could walk and toy bows with blunted arrows when we could draw them . Whenever we found good straight sticks, in our imaginations they became staves and spears. From a stronghold we built of casks and sacks in the palace storeroom, the four of us sallied with our wooden swords and shields to chase about the palace grounds, terrorize servants, attack the retinue, and battle the king’s hounds, who happily served as wolves and boars in our mock hunts.
“. . . Godric, the point allus beats the edge. Stop slashin’ at ’im, and thrust! Dear Mother of God, but I’ve seen sheep can fight better . . .”
Combat is a knight’s play, and we came to it young. Skills with weapons brought strength, speed, and agility. The trouble was, we were too happy together to actually fight, and real fighting was what we needed to learn in this introduction to war.
It was Cormac who broke the stalemate. “Hold!” he cried. “Right. If you won ’t fight each other, then you must all fight me . Edmund and Edgar, get your arms and join in.” He picked up a man-sized shield, knelt in the center of the circle, and positioned each of us around him , with Edgar, the youngest, at his back.
“Right, laddies. Lay on!” he said. This is better , I thought, though I have no idea even now why I was willing to have a go at Cormac rather than Edward. In any case, we all lay on with a will.
Cormac used his shield to stop our blows. He retaliated against each attacker by slapping a cheek with his open hand. None of those blows had any power in them; they merely stung a bit, a slap of insult rather than injury . But by moving quickly, he held off the four of us, and we soon grew angry and frustrated as our cheeks began to burn. He taunted us as well, stoking our anger until we began to rage, slamming our swords —ineffectually—on that shield of his.
“Come on, ya wee bairns, ya puny lambs. Me tiny daughters are more fearsome than any o’ you. Can ya not hit me? Can ya not fight? Bring me princesses to make into knights . . . these princes canna’ fight at all!” Cormac chanted in a singsong way.
His insults did it then, finally—Edward and I began to think and time our attacks, each looking for openings in his defense, trying our best to get through and hit him by attacking simultaneously from two points . As we started to succeed, he suddenly gave our shields a push, knocking us down on our backsides. We were angry and crying now, from rage rather than injury, and the queen became alarmed. “Cormac!” she called.
“They are fine , Yer Grace,” he replied, without ceasing his defense. “They are learning to be men, and ’tis not an easy lesson .”
Finally, I ha