The Archer's Return: Medieval story in feudal times about knights, Templars, crusaders, Marines, and naval warfare during the Middle Ages in England in the reign of King Richard the lionhearted
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End of Book Three
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This is the third book in Martin Archer’s acclaimed rewriting of newly found twelfth century parchments describing the lives and experiences of a company of medieval English archers. You can find and preview the others by going to Amazon.com and entering “Martin Archer” as the item for which you are searching.
The first book of this saga tells the tale of the fighting and experiences of the survivors of a company of English archers as they attempt to fight their way home from the crusades. The second book describes when happens when William and the survivors of his company reach cruel and brutal England in the closing days of the late twelfth century. This is the third book. It describes what happens when William leaves his son and brother behind in order to earn coins leading newly recruited archers back to the Holy Land to fight as Marines both on land and on English galleys.
There are more parchments in the trunk and a fourth book in this saga of medieval England is in progress. If the mice haven’t eaten too much of the parchments it will describe William’s experiences when he returns to his son and brother in Cornwall – and gets enmeshed in the fighting between the supporters of King Richard and the supporters of Prince John.
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Martin Archer is also the author of the acclaimed novels of “The Soldier” saga. Book One, “Soldiers and Marines,” is about a young man who goes off to war and decides to stay on active duty after his years of hard fighting in the front lines finally come to a close.
Book two “Peace and Conflict” follows Chris Roberts as he battles the military bureaucracy to stay on active duty and then is thrown into the senseless meat grinder of Viet Nam, first with the Legion and then with the anti-communist western forces.
Book Three “War Breaks Out” describes the role of an increasingly senior Roberts in the vicious war between the Soviet Union and NATO that would have occurred in Germany if Moscow had decided to fight rather than tear down the Berlin wall.
Book Four “War in the East” describes his participation in the intense combat and likely outcome of a war that still may happen if China invades Russia to regain its eastern territories and the west sides with Russia.
Book Five “The Islamic-Israeli” war is about the role of a now-retired Roberts in a coming war when an Islamic Coalition suddenly invades Israel and the Middle East is forever changed by Israel’s support for it surprise new ally, the Kurds.
Sample Pages from Book One of the Archer Saga
“THE ARCHER’S QUEST”
Chapter One
“THE ARCHER AND THE BISHOP”
The weary men straggle out of the desert and into the port late in the morning. There are eighteen of them, all English archers, and most of them have walked every night for the past three days. The only exceptions are two wounded men on a makeshift litter being dragged behind a dusty camel and a brown robed priest riding on an exhausted horse and holding a sleeping young boy. The boy is wrapped in a dirty priest’s robe to protect him against the chill of the spring day.
The dirty and begrimed young man walking at the front of the column stops and waits until the priest reaches him.
“How’s George?”
He gestures with a tired wave of his arm towards the sleeping child as he asks.
“Your son is fine,” answers the priest as the horse stops.
The boy wakes up and twists around to get more comfortable in the Priest’s arms when the horse stops. Then he sits up straight and looks around.
“Put me down Uncle Thomas, I want to walk with my father and the men for a while. My arse is sore and I’m thirsty.”
And with that he wriggles out of the priest’s arms and slides off the horse. He is barefoot and wearing a rough brown shirt that hangs to his knees. Edward the tailor made it for him before he’d been killed by the unlucky stone that had been catapulted over the wall by the Saracens and hit him in the head.
“Look Papa, what is that?”
The boy asks the question as he massages his rear with one hand and with the other points to the flat gray expanse of the Mediterranean that spreads out beyond stone houses and the ships in the harbor.
“That’s the big water I told you about that is so salty you can’t drink it. And those things out there on top of the water are the big ships. They’re called cogs and they carry people across the big water just like the boats on a river can carry people across the river. The only difference is that those out there are much bigger.”
The boy is not convinced as he stands there studying the scene in front of us.
“They look little.”
“They’ll look bigger when we get closer.”
“Really?”
The boy looks back intensely at the scene in front of him. Then he shakes his head and looks back at his father questioningly.
“Your Uncle Thomas is right, George. All of us can fit on one of those cogs with room to spare. The big ones can carry as many as a hundred men or even more. That’s how your uncle and I and all the archers got here from England. Almost a hundred of us came on each boat. And that’s how we’ll go back – all together.”
Except we’ve got to get our pay so we can hire a boat and there will only be eighteen of us instead of the one hundred and ninety two that came out from England with King Richard seven years ago - and that’s if we can get the arrow out of Brian’s leg without it rotting and Athol the ox drover stops getting dizzy and falling down when he tries to walk.
What I don’t tell George is that we’ll have no way to hire a boat unless the bishop pays us all the money Lord Edmund contracted to pay us to defend his fief and villages two years ago. Well we’ll know soon enough.
The walk down the hill to the port takes about an hour. We follow the dirt trail down the hill to the low walled caravanserai where the traders and their horses and livestock stay outside the city walls.
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The city is so packed with Christians and Jews fleeing the oncoming Saracens that the city gates are closed and the master of the caravanserai adjacent to the city is only allowing his traditional merchant customers and rich refugees to enter. Everyone else is camping and starving outside - thousands of them. Even at a distance we can smell the people and their livestock and see the dust they are raising.
Shouts and a great wail goes up as we come into sight and the people see us walking in. They know what our arrival means. It means Lord Edmund’s castle and lands have been lost and the Saracens will be coming. At best, these people will have to convert to Islam; and most likely they’ll all be put to the sword or taken as slaves. And so will we if the Bishop of Damascus doesn’t pay us so we can get away or ransom ourselves to freedom.
The caravanserai master himself, a great bearded man, comes to the gate with several armed retainers as we approach and the shouting and weeping crowd grows around us with their shouted questions and reaching arms. He looks over my little column and then at me with a baleful eye as I stop in front of him with George holding my hand.
“So it is true? Lord Edmund and the castle have finally fallen?”
“Aye, they have; the road to Damascus is open.”
The caravanserai master crosses himself.
“Well, everyone needs a caravanserai so I guess I’ll be a Moslem again until the Christians or Jews come back. But these people,” he says as he shakes his head in resignation and gestures both towards the people gathering around us and the distant crowds, “I just don’t know.”
Well I know. Anyone who stays here will either be slaughtered or become a slave. That’s why we left four days ago when Lord Edmund fell.
Where is the Bishop of Damascus?
“He’s in the city at the Church of Saint Mary.” Then he gestures at the crowd again and shakes his head disgust and resignation, and adds “but you better hurry if you want to see him. I’ve heard he’s about to run o
ff and leave.
Read more: Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer”
or “The Archer’s Quest.”
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Sample pages from Book One of “The Soldier” saga
Book One
SOLDIERS AND MARINES
Dust and gravel periodically spray out behind the Jeep as it slowly backs up towards the top of the low ridge. The early morning sun is bright and already hot, and the periodic sound of thunder in the background has been coming closer for two days.
Three men are in the slowly backing Jeep as it moves over the abandoned farm land and up towards the ridgeline. The passenger sits impassively almost as if he’s in a trance. The gunner on the mounted machine gun crouches and squints down the barrel into the sun as he constantly moves it to the left and right. He is chewing furiously on a mouthful of gum.
Everyone in the Jeep is trying to be as quiet as possible. But it’s not working because of the engine noise and the periodic burst of sound each time the Jeep runs over a patch of rocks or breaks a stick. Each of the men is terribly anxious without saying it out loud.
The occupants of the Jeep are nervous. And rightly so. It’s the morning of July 29th and thirty four days earlier the Soviet-trained North Korean army poured over the border into South Korea. It catches the poorly equipped and under trained garrison troops of the South Koreans and their allies by surprise - they are everywhere overrun and either killed or pushed back.
The sky is partially cloudy and the flat field of the upward sloping rocky farmland is empty of life and crops. There are great towering white clouds to the north, but at the moment the men are traveling in bright summer morning sunshine. It’s dusty and hot on the rough track across the abandoned farm. The mud ruts from a previous rain are baked hard and the men in the Jeep don’t know what they will find when they get to the top of the rise they are slowly approaching. But they are highly visible as they slowly bounce over the uneven ground and seriously worried about it.
“Careful, goddamn it, careful,” the passenger hisses in an unnecessarily low voice as they slowly approach the summit. He is twisted around and trying to see over the crouching gunner behind the gun mount. The driver is slowly backing the Jeep upwards towards the top of the rise.
Damn the passenger thought to himself as he tries to stand so he can see better, and just when I was about to rotate back home for a new assignment. He is about six feet tall with close cropped gray hair, about 190 pounds, and, although he never did really think about it, glad he only has daughters who won’t be called to serve.
He’d picked up the driver’s carbine ten minutes ago, checked its banana clip to make sure it is full, and clicked its fire selector from single shot to automatic. The carbine had ridden wedged between him and the driver until they reached the start of the gradually rising farm land a couple of miles back. Now, holding the carbine in his right hand like a pistol and trying to keep his balance by holding the edge of the lowered windshield with his left, he is standing as high as possible in the slowly bouncing and rocking Jeep in an effort to see around the gunner and over the top of the ridge.
The passenger is a fairly chunky man wearing the shoes and summer uniform of a garrison officer instead of boots and battledress. His pants are filthy and ripped, but that’s what he’d been wearing when the war started and he hadn’t taken them off yet. There is a colonel’s badge on the summer soft cap he’d grabbed off the bedroom table and jammed on his head when he’d gotten the 3am call about the invasion and rushed to headquarters.
Brown hair streaked with white pokes out from under the Colonel’s cap. It was cropped short and neat when the war started, but it hasn’t been cut or combed for weeks. He is forty two years old and desperately needs a shave and something to eat. He’d been the commander of a tank battalion in Germany during the big war and knows trouble when he sees it.
What happened? Why weren’t we ready? Even bouncing along in the Jeep he can’t get the disbelief out of his mind. Once again the United States and the United Kingdom have been caught flat footed and ill-equipped.
The Jeep lurches to a stop at his whispered order. He hoists himself on the barrel of the carbine and slowly raises himself up as high as possible. Damn, still not far enough to see what’s on the other side. But he isn’t taking any chances. He’d quickly learned in Germany that it is really stupid to show yourself on a ridge line until you are damn sure you know what’s on the other side.
He hasn’t slept for days, his clothes are filthy, and he is totally exhausted. Being worried and backing slowly up a hill in a jeep brought back fleeting memories of the earlier war. He almost smiles at the memory. ……….
---“Soldiers and Marines” is available on Amazon.com---
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* Read more: Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer” or
“Soldiers and Marines.” *
**Martin Archer can be contacted at MartinarcherV@gmail.com. He would value your suggestions regarding these novels and publishing print versions
of them.**