Sir Dunstan Füller's page

As a squire attached to the retinue of his kinsman, Sir Turec, Dunstan Fuller turned heads wherever he went. He was a handsome, healthy young Saxon with raven black hair and cornflower blue eyes gleaming with cockiness. After his trials he has come to look older than his years. Sir Dunstan is still handsome in a driven, dangerous sort of way but his features have become leaner and the over-confidence in his eyes has been replaced by an intense, some would say scars of war, or a gleam of bloodlust at times. He is dressed well, in the garb of a Saxon knight; bearing the device of a Red Lion on a sable field. He wears a light mail shirt, and keeps a broadsword and dagger for protection.

He has taken the Red Lion as his own device, in honor of his lost kinsman. However, Sir Dunstan wears it on a field of sable.

The youngest son of Arth and Hilla Fuller, young Dunstan has long been a source of both great pride and great frustration to his parents. Born in the city of Lüneburg in the Year of Our Lord 1259, he was 11 years old when his family moved from the bustling market city to the wild frontier of the Siebenburgen. In the new environs, his father went from being just one of scores of noble-born landowners to one of perhaps 20 edlers in a city where cleverness and political noose could make him so much more. Dunstan has enjoyed the fruits of Arth’s success ever since.
Dunstan has never lacked for anything other than the fact he knows he will never inherit and will have a modest allowance at best if his father is doing great when he becomes older. He has spent much of his life seeking mischief and popularity in equal measure, neglecting his chores and education whenever he was able. Ambition and hard work were completely alien to him. The arrival in Kronstadt of a distant cousin, Sir Turec, changed everything.

From the time the pale knight who bore the device of the Red Lion entered his life in AD 1270 until the time Sir Turec perished on the Franco-Fleming War in 1303, young Dunstan worshipped him. The Red Lion was strong, intelligent, noble and devil-may-care; everything that Dunstan wanted to present to the world himself. Accompanying the knight on a journey through France and Venice in AD 1273-1274 only reinforced his desire to follow in Sir Turec’s footsteps. His idol picked up a fellow ward during his sojourn to the capital, a boy called Gabriel, and the knight treated the mysterious boy like his natural son. Indeed, young Dunstan assumed that Gabriel was in fact Sir Turec’s natural-born son, the product of a youthful indiscretion when the knight was a mere squire. After all, Sir Turec’s tales belonged to an older man, and Dunstan never could pin down his kinsman’s age despite his youthful good looks.

The best way to emulate his hero, young Dunstan decided, was to become a knight too. Despite his lack of training as a page, the young edler convinced his father to lend his support to squiring the boy out. Now under the tutelage of his hero, the young squire swiftly learned his duties and worked much harder to execute them. He enjoyed the company of his fellow squire, Gabriel, and came to see him as a cousin (albeit a bastard one). The two lads trained hard, with Dunstan’s strength and skill at arms complementing Gabriel’s speed and quick mind. Both of them had a youthful crush on Ceolwynn, a Scottish noble lady in Flaunder’s court, and her mysterious origins only spur them on more, but she was quite friendly with their master. For her part, Ceolwynn reserved her own demure regard for the gallant Sir Turec, and kept the two lads at a purely platonic distance.

When the Eight Crusade was called and Sir Turec chose to take up his arms and make the pilgrimage, young Dunstan was excited. He was already old for a squire, and he saw this as his time. Finally, here was a war! He could adorn himself in glory, prove his bravery and prowess, and earn his spurs! Gabriel was less impressed, but Dunstan dismissed his reluctance as the faint-hardheartedness of a fellow who lacked the mettle to be a knight.

Throughout the course of 1270, Dunstan learned that a military campaign is far from glorious. He proved his kinsmen proud when he defended a family at rest of robbery and worse during the skirmishes in Acre, but otherwise he dealt with interminable periods of boredom, interspersed with bouts of dysentery and other illnesses he could never think possible to exists. In December of AD 1704, he was very pleased to hear that Sir Turec had accepted a secret mission to travel on the crusade’s business, and then bitterly disappointed to be told that he would remain behind. While his master would be off winning glory, Dunstan would be left in the retinue of a French knight from Provence, one Sir LaBeau of Nice.

The young knight was unusually influential given his relatively low station, and he was a commanding and charming fellow at that, but Dunstan performed his duties without enthusiasm. The fact that Gabriel too had been abandoned was cold comfort. Sir Amory, a roguish and worldly compatriot of their master, quickly offered his friendship and both lads soon drifted into his orbit as well.

Word reached the camp some weeks later that Sir Turec had perished in a skirmish with rebels on a treacherous mountain road not thirty miles from Zara. Count Martin of Blois himself offered a stirring eulogy for Dunstan’s kinsman. The valiant Sir Turec fell to his death from the mountain road, his horse speared through the heart as he made a gallant charge in defense of his fellow crusaders. Dunstan was inconsolable; Sir Amory comforted him, and in the months to come he grew to trust and idolize the charming knight almost as much as he did Sir Turec, but not quite the same.

Sir Amory disappeared without a trace on the island of Corfu in May of 1273. For the life of him, Dunstan cannot think why the Frenchman abandoned the crusade without so much as a word, and his warm memories of Amory seem strangely hollow. Indeed, his memories of the entire duration of his association with him are curiously hazy. A godly pilgrim, Lady Iulia, who was a friend of his late cousin, often visits with Dunstan. She says that in the course of one’s duties as a squire one can become desensitized to much, and the routine can inveigle memories of unimportant matters. He really shouldn’t worry over much about the past, and should instead focus his energies on the future. Her words comfort him, and they seem to make great sense.

Dunstan finally earned his spurs on the 7th July, 1273. He was part of an armed sortie to gather supplies north of Chrysopolis when a small battle took place between the forces of the Crusade and those of the Latinkon mercenaries that serve the Baibars Sultan of Egypt. Heedless of danger, young Dunstan threw himself into the fray against a number of Latinkons who had surrounded the famous knight Tresdin of Le Mans. He unhorsed two of the Latinkons and killed a third before sustaining a mace blow to the head. Keeping his own saddle despite his grievous wound, he was in the forefront of the pursuing French as the Latinkons fled. In his moment of addled triumph, he then caught an arrow in the chest and finally fell. He was barely conscious when they knighted him on the field, and it was thought that he would not survive his wounds.

Sir Dunstan was delirious with a brain fever and approaching death from blood loss and infection when brought before Iulia and her allies in the Crusade infirmary. Out of compassion for him, and to honor the memory of her departed friend, Iulia cared for him until he was able to heal his wounds and recover. His body has made a full recovery in the months since, but unfortunately Sir Dunstan’s emotional state continues to deteriorate as he seems without direction and purpose. Now it’s 12705 and the crusade has ended for over a year, and Sir Dunstan finds himself in Venice one of the cities he visited with Sir Turec in his childhood, and still trying to find sense of purpose and direction. The only thing that alleviates his temper is the letters from his family, and a new found liking for some books, while keeping to his training with the sword and his war horse Cenric where he can harness his frustrations into something productive. One of Ser LaBeau retainers has grown attached to Sir Dunstan, a young girl that tended to him with Iulia when he was wounded, and now his companion, and while her interest may be more than just tend and care for him, he is blinded by his lack of direction, and her approaches go beyond notice, but this not stop her from trying, as she strives to bring back the man she knew before all the losses from the crusades, like he still needs to come back from where ever his mind is, yet he finds comfort with her, as she understands that the crusade took from him more than it gave him.