He surprised her, who was a woman not easily startled. She touched her left ear as if she were not at all sure she had heard those words spoken. “What mystery is this you speak of? Have you some hidden knowledge of events lost in the past in the time of the blessed Daisan?”
“This took place long before the time of the blessed Daisan. They are hidden from us only by the passage of years. Only by death, which hides us all in the end. I pray you, have you any news of the one called Liathano?”
“Of her, no. She was lost in a haze of fire.”
“Truth rises with the phoenix,” murmured the beauty, and Alain felt the pinch of those words in his heart as though some unnoticed hand were trying to get his attention.
“What did you say?” he asked him.
“‘Truth rises with the phoenix,”’ the young man repeated patiently, and his smile made the folk nearby murmur and point as if he had just done something extraordinary. “We who believe in the truth and the word speak so, to acknowledge the sacrifice made by the blessed Daisan, who died so that our sins might be forgiven.”
“Agius’ words are seeds grown in fertile soil,” said Alain.
Constance shut her eyes, touched a finger to her own lips as she might touch the mouth of a lover.
“‘His heart’s blood fell to Earth and bloomed as roses,”’ Alain added.
She looked at him, just a look, that was all. That gaze, met and answered, nothing more, until her expression shifted, grew puzzled, almost intimate, and she extended a hand and beckoned him closer. She sat in a chair at the rear of the wagon in which he had earlier seen her riding. Her breath fogged the cold air. When he stood next to her, she touched his cheek.
“You are marked as with a rose,” she said. “A curious birthmark. I’ve never seen such a one before.”
“It is not a birthmark but the memory of a false oath,” he said. “It serves to remind me of my obligation, something I cannot see except in the faces of other human beings.”
“Who are you?” she asked him, and looked at Baldwin as if for an answer, but Baldwin did not speak. He was staring at the sky and he raised a hand and pointed.
“Is that the sun? See there. It’s almost gone below the trees, but it has a bluish cast. As though haze screens it, not clouds.”
First a soldier turned, then an elderly woman. Others, facing west like the biscop and Lord Baldwin, raised hands in supplication. A flood of crying and rejoicing lifted from the assembled cavalcade as a covey of quails flush in a rush of wings up from the brush.