The Self-Penned, Hitherto Continuing Legend Of The Most Illustrious Knight-errant To Ever Have Her Tale Told; A Lone Heir Of Enviable Peerage, Tamer Of The Questing Beast, Breaker Of A Dozen Armies, Savior Of A Hundred Princesses; Invitee To A Thousand Royal Courts; The Woman Who Found Excalibur, The Holy Grail, And The Bleeding Lance; Whose Armor Gleams Bright Enough To Light Up The Night Sky; Singularly Possessed Of All The Virtues Of Heaven, Forgiven By Saint Peter For Indulging In All The Vices Of Hell – Emasculator Of Every Man Who Dare Read Beyond This Cover – The Self-Made Scholar, Scoundrel, Swordswoman, Sinner, Saint, and Sapphic: Vanessa Ricourt!
Perhaps I’ve embellished slightly. Still, no doubt if you’re learned enough to read this far – though I took great pains to write it clearly and boldly enough that even those who struggle in such matters could at least get the gist of things – you’ve heard of me. Whether a bard has captured your fancy with tales of my daring valor – no doubt unseen for centuries before my procession to myth – or a salacious gossip mill whispered tales of my virility so explicit one must purchase an indulgence just for hearing them; it matters not to me.
For the benefit of future generations, for whose sake I toil endlessly until such time as God sees fit to reward me with a seat at his right hand for my efforts – pleading for a fable of glory and valor to shine light in the darkness my absence has no doubt brought – permit me to indulge in a brief aside before I get to the good stuff.
I was born Vanessa Ricourt: the first daughter and only heir to the Ricourt fortune, until – upon my eighth summer – my parents were blessed with a darling baby boy. Alas, we dwell in a world of injustices, and my greatness as their scion was stymied as they bundled me up and sent me to the farthest nunnery they could find. Oh well, no hard feelings.
My illustriously well rounded and utterly irreplicable set of skills began to take form there. Not a soul on this Earth could ever hope to quench my hellion fire – but in that house of God, the nuns were the first to see it for the blessing upon humanity that it was. They tempered my will, focusing it into an ever burning torch of righteousness. Lifted me from the dirt of ignorant selfishness and blessed me with the clarity to see that there was no greater honor than to help thy fellow man. Though they omitted the benefits of Earthly glory, I was keen enough to read the subtext: all the humble knights had so few stories because they never told anyone to spread them. I vowed not to make the same mistake.
Sadly, for all their wisdom, the nuns too were only human. Among the roaring flame they stoked within my soul burned an ember of carnal passion, and alas – they had sworn their only lover was The Lord. Fortuitously, my parents had seen fit to have me tutored in the art of persuasion. In my sixteenth year I put forth the argument that if my efforts filled the convent so fully with jubilant rapture that they could naught help but scream The Lord’s name to the heavens – then truly such efforts were worthy of praise, and to be indulged in as often as our rigorous schedules allowed?
The Mother Superior was sadly possessed of an all too common closed-mindedness about such matters. Upon returning to find I had enthralled the entire cloister in a bout of rigorous worship – though perhaps, upon reflection, she had heard our exaltations from the countryside – she cast me out into the world. This was, of course, nothing less than the hand of The Divine working to guide me to where I would do the most good, but even I was not untouched by the tinge of sadness that came with saying goodbye to all of my very good friends.
Tragedy begot tragedy: an illness had struck my family. It took my brother first, and my parents knew that, ere the month was out, the same fate would befall them. On the eve of my eighteenth birthday a courier sought me out in a nearby village, where I had been contenting myself with humble works befitting a learned woman in an attempt to put my exile behind me. The company of the innkeeper’s rather buxom daughter went a long way towards soothing the matter. Into my hands he delivered a letter bequeathing the entire family estate!
Our ancestral grounds, and all who toiled upon them – mine to do with as I saw fit. I confessed to that most hospitable of hospitaliers that fate had drawn me elsewhere, and our tryst had met its end. She bequeathed me a souvenir to remember her by, though lacking in wealth as she was – it took the form of her personal undergarments. Her father, a stubborn and pig-headed man, chased me out with a broom upon witnessing her display of affection – claiming hysterically that my touch had changed his daughter, who could never settle down with an honest, God-fearing man after being exposed to my salacious arts. He was likely correct, but to this day it still vexes me why he said that as though it were a tragedy. Feeble minds, one must suppose.
I departed the town at once to reclaim my birthright after ten years away. Though all the riches of all the nations on Earth would still fail to stave off the grasp of contagion, my parents had amassed a fortune that would be the envy of many noble circles. Wealth begets wealth, as they so often told me, and I returned to a manor even more grand than the one that dwelled in my memory. Verdant gardens just steps from resplendent, hand laid brick paths, trod along by purebred white mares drawing my opulent carriage. I had no use for it.
Despite Temperance being the virtue that comes least naturally to me – though still far more than most men could ever hope to muster – I could see at once that this place was nothing more than a gold-trimmed monument to hedonistic self indulgence. As the servants spilled forth from the front foyer to greet me, at once could I see through the smokescreen of decadence before me that such trappings had ensnared every penny my parents earned. How could I hope to sally forth into the world to do good from such a gilded cage?
I spent the week taking stock of the finances. Such matters were trivial for one of my blessed brilliance, and with a single firm decree I liquidated them all. The staff were aghast, but those who questioned me, even those decades my senior, shrunk from my steeled resolve. I know not what has become of that place now, nor do I care. In securing me the funds to begin my quest, it had served its purpose.
For armaments I took the ceremonial bastard sword and heraldic shield that had hung at the head of the dining hall, so many nights drawing my eye over supper. The most dignified of those horses served as my steed, and I set it upon the task of carrying me to an artisan capable of forging me a worthy set of armor: one whose shine would never tarnish, that the Ricourt family crest might sear itself into the eyes of all who came across it.
Alas, reality is often cruel: those most lustrous of metals are also the softest – and it would simply not do for my tale to end at the hands of an errant brigand with a makeshift bludgeon. I settled instead on a suit of purest steel, with the caveat that I be instructed fully on its maintenance by the man who forged it – such that I could restore its mirror shine personally if need be. Regrettably, he was a hermit who kept no family: if there had been someone of the fairer sex to keep me company in that time, it just might not have been so boring. Satisfied with a month’s tutelage, as I could bear no more, I departed into the world.
Those first few days made it apparent that, though I was possessed of a zeal rivaling all the saints combined – my worldly knowledge was tragically insufficient for performing the Earthly labors I had hoped to undertake. Elegance, grace, diplomacy – I was peerless in all of these things, and yet the world beyond the sheltered walls of manors and cloisters paid them little heed. Surety of arms, lightness of fingers, and all the myriad skills needed to perform an honest day’s labor – though not the most glamorous of learned undertakings, I must admit are no less than the foundation of the tale you now read.
I set to finding myself tutors. My fortune had dwindled considerably in the commission of my vestments, so I turned to the laypeople of the land to be my instructors. As fortune would have it, the folly of men is such that they often leave widows behind. Though they find themselves oft omitted from the record – for those of us with blessed eyes to see them, let no mistake be made: these women possessed all the skill of their late husbands, and then some.
In exchange for a modest stipend, a hard day’s work, and an evening’s company; I had found my instructors. Militiawomen honed my skill at arms, beggars showed me the finer points of larceny that my purse might stop being pinched, I even tarried a summer with a band of poachers lest I find myself wasting in the forest. Cooking, cleaning, tailoring, medicine, animal husbandry: all the myriad invisible skills that go so oft unmentioned in tales such as these did I devour ravenously, that none might say I could not stand upon my own two feet against the world.
Though of course mastery came naturally to me, taking merely the seven years for all of these skills that most take to learn one, still I found myself vexed by a simple conundrum – one no amount of divinely ordained talent could overcome: the day simply had not enough hours! Polishing my armor, sharpening my sword, buffing my shield, mending my gambeson, tending my steed, cooking, eating, sleeping, riding, wooing – the vexing arithmetic of balancing all these things left me no time to hunt glory! I needed a squire.
That search was the first meaningful struggle along the way. The conundrum was simple, though comprehending it made it no easier to untangle: no father would permit his boy to learn under a woman, nor would he permit his daughter to learn the trade of knighthood. Though it had oft crossed my mind to simply abscond with a child who desired to follow in my footsteps – regrettably my legacy can ill afford such besmirchment. A burgeoning spinster may perhaps have suited me, but alas – the time I would have spent properly enjoying a woman’s company would undoubtedly have been longer than what she had saved.
My problems were solved rather unexpectedly when I saved, among many others, a boy from a burning church. He already had no parents to speak of – and though the doors of the community opened swiftly for the priest and all his congregation, all turned the boy away. After a truly righteous castigation from which even the parish priest reeled, they revealed the heart of the matter to me: the boy was black skinned. He had come from the south, from a country and by means of conveyance nobody seemed to know – nor care. This, they reckoned in their ignorance, was a crime, nay, a sin; and for all that they fancied themselves devotees of Christ on the cross, they held firm in their conviction that it was unforgivable.
I argued no longer; any other task the world could provide me would have been time better spent. I demanded simply a horse and cart for my services, and asked the boy if he would follow me – that I might teach him all there is about being right in this world, and all the skills to do it. With a silent nod, our covenant was sealed. He proved at once a most invaluable companion. Pensive, thoughtful – he took to those most mundane of drudgeries with a zeal that came closer to my own than any I had ever met.
Thus, with my corporeal matters tended to, I was free to pursue the glory to which all true servants of God aspire to, that they might echo through the annals of history as an aspiration for others. I must admit, it is a mortal failing of mine that I only thought now, five years later, to begin recording such things. Already some of my tales begin to be tarnished by distance from my grand labors: cynics cursed with closed minds and onerously mundane lives who simply cannot fathom that the things I accomplished really happened precisely as I stated them – blessed with so unerring a memory as I am – to say nothing of those who simply besmirch my good name for envy that one of the fairer sex had accomplished such feats.
Let me then append the record of a few common misconceptions before I begin chronicling the tales that befall me from this point on: when I broke the siege of Camelot, it was not ‘a drunken rabble of rowdy militiamen’: but no less than a full army of Spaniards, at least ten thousand strong. I did not present to the King of the Bretons a ‘mangy dog in a costume’ but in fact the actual Questing Beast brought to heel by my will alone – the reason one cannot see it displayed proudly in his manor grounds is simply that it began to devour all the other game he kept. Finally, and perhaps the most egregious distortion of my legacy: I have not, nor will I ever under any circumstances, lain with man. Any man who claims to have ‘bedded’ me is a charlatan and a fraud – should I ever find one claiming so in person; I shall befall him with such a wrath as to rival the crucifixion of Christ himself.
Thus concludes the precursory necessity of establishing from what circumstances my legend grows. Read on if you wish to be enlightened by the one true account of my endeavors upon this Earth!