Across France, the children are on the march.
Seduced by a shepherd boy with a vision of freeing Jerusalem through the power
of innocence alone, tens of thousands of children have left their homes and set
out upon a new, peaceful crusade. As they stream through the city of Chavigny
in Poitou, they are singing the old crusading ballade: Song of Palestine.
The melody awakes memories in the heart of a rich widow,
Blanche. Long ago, when she was still young and beautiful, she had been in love
with a poor knight, who followed Richard the Lionheart on crusade and never
returned. An oblique reference to a man of the same name in a letter addressed
to someone else awakes an irresistible longing to go to the Holy Land herself
in search of her lost love.
Blanche sets out on a personal crusade, across the
war-torn Languedoc, daring the pirates and slavers of the Mediterranean -- only
to find a man, who is nothing like she remembered him, and anything but pleased
to see Blanche again.
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