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author's note: as Tenshi said, almost an original. mostly fanfic, though. i'm still not sure how i feel about this. i mean, he was a real guy, an historical figure. oh well, he was a writer-- maybe he'd get a kick out of it. this is one half the movie character, one half the more historically accurate figure portrayed in all those dry biographies, all with a liberal sprinkling of my own fabrication. yes, i know i'm writing fic for a lousy popculture movie... dammit, i liked it anyway. lacking title "He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght."
He was no knight, Sir Ulric von Lichtenstein; I knew that when the false name fell from his tongue. My currency has long been words, and his were but crudely minted. He was no knight; he was an arrogant, rambunctious youth, and we stood even, eye to eye. I cannot say why I promised him an ancestry, why I traded my voice for his name. Perhaps it was only a simple need, survival, that little voice that whispers, shoe me, clothe me, feed me. Perhaps not. Perhaps some other little voice was murmuring, too: listen to me, know me. He was no knight. But on a horse, ah, he was magnificent on a horse. I could say that the rush of his horse was like the thunder, or that the bearing of his lance was straight and true, but it would all be so much rubbish before the pure and simple poetry of him. I would stake my lady's fortune for such poetry, these days, such that can set young ladies to sigh, and young men to dreaming. Such that can topple a man off his horse, leaving him on his back casting wondering eyes at the heavens. But I suppose my days of gambling for money are long since past. Now all my chance is spent on my words, betting my voice that they might understand. They want words of beauty, anatomical, a lovely face perched atop a lovely neck. Easy enough to spell that for them, to say the way she watched him: his lady angel following his thunderous passage, her wince, her tears, her tremulous laugh at his unscathed victory. (Not the way I saw him crashing angry through the rain, rivulets of ruthless mud on his rusting greaves.) Or mayhaps the token, the perfumed handkerchief, the careful embroidery of her affection. (Not the way I saw her crying, shameless, red-faced on the dusty field, begging him to understand.) They seek such perfect pictures, sweetness and story. They know nothing of beauty. Listen to me. Beauty is whooping helmetless for a raucous crowd, beauty is looking up for the first time and realizing that everyone is looking at you. Beauty is in the way true English sounds, falling new and eager from a French-born tongue; or in the cadence of halting Norman from English lips-- two languages kissing and withdrawing, each tasting of the other. Beauty is in the fierceness-- the shattered lance, the battlecry-- in the crucible heat of competition that can burn a heart to gold, or dust. Beauty is in the pain, too, in the newfound love or the broken heart, in the way he looked at her while he spoke to me-- in the way I heard my own, freshly-cast words in his voice, my love to light a fire in her eyes. Know me. No, no, forget me. I'm only a poet, my only words are someone else's. But know this-- He was, in truth, a perfect, gentled knight. ~fin~ by llamajoy
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