YOU CAN’T TELL WHAT PEOPLE ARE LIKE BY LOOKING AT their noses or their ears. Or what they’re feeling by looking at their hands. But when you look into their eyes…
Bertie’s eyes, darting and daring, and Ygerna’s eyes, patient and gazing; Queen Guinevere’s, burning, freezing; Tom’s, easy and friendly and amused; Sir William’s eyes, one bloodshot, one glittering.
I can see that long line of Zarans straggling out through the Land Gate, leaving their homes, and the boy Godard caught, and that woman the Flemish louts assaulted in the forum, and the five Saracens—before their eyes became flames of fire.
I think eyes tell the weather of the spirit.
In the churches here, there are small paintings called icons, and in them Mary and Jesus and the saints and martyrs and patriarchs and virgins all have much larger eyes than in paintings in England or France:
dark almonds lit with inner light,
doe-wide, sometimes wistful,
watchful and designing,
full of longings and long-suffering,
darkling, somehow smudged, old-young and see-in-the-dark,
secretive, inward.
Byzantine eyes! They’re mysterious. Look into them, down deep, and you begin to wonder whether you can understand them at all.