The Passion of Dolssa

by Julie Berry

  “Death might be a mercy for her.” Sazia gazed at the girl’s wan face. “I don’t like it either. But listen to what she said. She must be a heretic, and sentenced to die. Somehow she got away. Do you think they will just let her go?”

  My eyes smarted with tears. She was practical, always, and cool-headed. But still, I wouldn’t have expected this of my Sazia.

  “She can’t be a heretic,” I said. “Look at her face. Like a sad angel.”

  “What did you think, that heretics grew horns?”

  I had heard words to that effect. Horns, and giant genitals, too.

  “There won’t be room in all Provensa for me to hide from Plazi if any harm befalls you.”

  Sazia’s forebodings often went too far. Fortune-tellers are in the warnings business, just as marriage brokers are in the love business. We each have biases that follow our trade.

  I made my decision. The girl’s face made it for me. “There won’t be room in hell for my wretched soul if I leave her here to die,” I said. “We’ll take her with us, and you’ll help me.”

  Sazia pursed her lips and stood. “So be it, then,” she said. “I’ve warned you.”

  Sazia climbed the slope and persuaded Garcia that all was well and that they should resume their journey, while Symo helped me wrap the donzȩlla in a blanket and hide her in his small cart, obscured by some bags of seed. She struggled against our efforts to bundle her into the barrow.

  “I must follow the river to the sea,” she said feebly. “North and east is my route.”

  “And that is how Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore follows you,” I told her, “north and east along the Aude. We will take you to the sea if that’s where you wish to go. But we will take you south and east, away from the river route. That will rid you of your pursuer.”

  She was too weary to protest any further, so she yielded herself reluctantly to our care.

  Sazia and I walked with Symo’s cart, which rattled along behind Garcia’s. Symo walked with the Garcias and Gui, which suited me. Privacy was our best hope. We kept a sheet handy to drape over the girl’s face any time other travelers came into view.

  I jumped at hoofbeats and birdcalls. I worried that every shadow was the friar, come to snatch my poor bird. But no one wondered at our cargo. With each passing hour, I pictured the inquisitor’s course veering farther and farther off from ours.

  I’d armed myself with the whip Sazia had told me to bring, to use against anyone who had clever ideas about what to do with country lasses walking the roads alone. Already I’d been forced to brandish it once at a shrimpy pair of harvesters who wanted to tumble in the weeds, but we’d managed to fend them off with words rather than blows. Another time a man of high bearing and very proud countenance rode past us. He stopped to study me full on in the face, then pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks and rode on. Not that I wanted his kisses, mind, but I was annoyed. That ugly, was I? That common? What else would I be, strolling along a country road at such an hour? Did he hope to find an heiress?

  My little bird poked her head up from her blankets like a turtle emerging from its shell. “Do you have any cheese?”

  Sazia rolled her eyes. “Next she’ll want roast beef,” she said. “Food’s in the other cart.”

  “Leave off,” I said. “She’s been starving. And it just so happens, I do have cheese.” I pulled a small brick of cheese, wrapped in a cloth, from my little pouch. “Remember? You told me to bring it.” I broke off a section and offered it to the girl, then pulled my hand back. “A bite will cost you your name.”

  She turned away. “I can’t trust anyone with my name.”

  I took a bite. “I can’t trust strangers with my cheese.” It wasn’t my kindest moment.

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s Braida.”

  “There, Braida,” I said. “That wasn’t so hard, was—”

  “She’s lying,” Sazia said.

  The girl’s face grew pink. She scowled at my sister.

  “My name is Pitrella Braida,” she said more humbly. “Surely, you will allow me the privacy of my family name, given my situation.”

  My hardhearted sister shook her head. “She cares about someone by that name,” she observed. “But Pitrella Braida is not her own name.”

  “What are you, a devil?” cried the girl. Up ahead, Garcia turned to look back at us.

  “Plazi always said you were a little devil,” I said loudly to Sazia. “But that’s just Plazi for you.” I turned to our prisoner. “You’d best shush if you don’t want to be found out.”

  “You are devils, both of you,” she whispered, and a tear ran down her cheek, “to torment a Christian maiden so. I’ve told you my troubles. You pride yourself with the thought of helping me, but you’re helping me to my death. God in heaven! Would that I had died with my mother!”

  “Maybe,” Sazia ventured, “you should just give her the cheese.”

  So I did. As I handed it to her, a thought came into my mind. Be patient with her. Not my own impulse, surely. Patience never was my strength. But as I watched her eat her cheese, too quickly, too hungrily, and I remembered my own lean winters, I thought how this genteel young lady had probably never learned how to tighten her belt and get by. All right, I told the thought. I’ll try.

  She wiped crumbs off her lips with her fragile fingers, then settled back down in her nest to sleep. Before she did, she opened her deep-set eyes and looked at us both.

  “My name,” she said, “is Dolssa de Stigata. I am from Tolosa. With this information, you could betray me to a heretic’s fiery death, though in the name of God, I swear I am no heretic.”

  I glanced at Sazia. She nodded slowly.

  “Good to meet you, Dolssa de Stigata de Tolosa,” she said. “I am Sazia Flasucra, and this is my sister Botille. We are both of the fishing town of Bajas, at present. We have an older sister, Plazensa. We will take you to our home and hide you there. We will never betray you.”

  Dolssa closed her eyes. “I am in your hands, and you are in God’s, so I remain where I have always been.” In minutes she was asleep.

  Dolssa de Stigata, I learned, was a girl of miracles. There is no other way I can account for how we made it back home to Bajas without the Garcias or Gui discovering her. Granted, Symo’s cooperation was vital. But cooperation from Symo, the surliest, most uncooperative pig I’d met in a long history of meeting pigs, could also be logged as a miracle.

  An example: at dinnertime on the first day, we passed through the village of Fontcobèrta. A gang of overgrown tozẹts swarmed our carts and asked where we were bound. We told them, Bajas. They then demanded “trade.” They poked at the parcels in Garcia’s larger cart, then descended on Dolssa’s little barrow. These ruffians ignored our men’s threats. I was about to make the colossal blunder of using my whip, when the ringleader of the band, pawing close to Dolssa, let out a howl and pinched his nose shut. His comrades did the same, and one by one slunk off, telling us they weren’t interested in trading in pig mẹrda, thank you very much.

  “What was that about?” wondered a baffled Gui.

  “Your farts scared them off,” Symo said. “At long last, a good use for them.”

  “Oho,” bristled Gui, “if you want to talk of farts—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Your wind could knock over a barn.”

  “Your farts aren’t exactly honeysuckle vines. You talk like there’s a turd in your throat.”

  Fame of our stench spread. No one would sell us dinner in that village, so we had to make do with our provisions. I tiptoed over to the barrow and sniffed, but I smelled nothing strange at all. Dolssa needed a bath, but no more than young Garcia did. It had to be a miracle.

  Ghost odors notwithstanding, we sailed right under the noses of people passing by on the roads. I wondered if Dolssa would take her leave of us in the night, but she didn’t. Under cover of darkness, we pulled her off the cart so she could stretch her legs, but she returned to us and slept on the groun
d, tucked and bundled between my sister and me.

  But not before another miracle. It lingered with me long afterward. We girls stood concealed in a small copse of trees near the road, having just passed water in preparation for sleep. Two shadowy figures, a man and a woman, stepped out from behind the trees. I feared bandits, but their hollow faces, gray hair, and poor, frail shapes clad in somber black clothing made them seem more like ghosts.

  “What do you want?” Sazia whispered.

  “Bow to us?” came the old man’s plaintive voice.

  I turned to my companions in confusion.

  “Bow to us,” pleaded the woman. “Ask us to bless your souls. We are friends of God.”

  Time stood still. My skin tingled. Almost, I confess it, I wanted to bow.

  “Make no bow,” whispered Dolssa into my ear, “and give them no honor. It is a bon ome and a bona femna. Once, great cortezia and onor were shown to these amicx de Dieu in Tolosa in all the villages in these lands. That is what Blessed Dominic called a heresy, and that is why the crusaders came.”

  The poor, thin pair was on the verge of tears. The man bore up the woman with his arm.

  “Do you have any bread?” The man’s voice crackled with his plea. “A morsel for the friends of God?”

  They smote my heart. “Wait here.” I guided Dolssa back to where we would all sleep.

  Dolssa took my wrist in her weak grip. “If you feed the heretics,” she said, “you could be punished as one of their believers.” She covered her eyes with a trembling hand. “The same is true of feeding me.”

  I had no bread. Our stores were all in Garcia’s cart. Even the cheese I’d brought at Sazia’s cryptic request was gone.

  “Were it not for these amicx de Dieu, there would be no inquisitors hunting for me,” whispered Dolssa. “Yet who am I, now, who shares their fate, to judge?” She released my wrist. “Feed them if you will,” she said, “and may God protect your foolish generosity.”

  As she released her grasp, my mind went to a sack in the little barrow. I opened it. I knew it contained seed, not food. But there before me was a full loaf of bread, and the cheese cloth I had brought, full of fresh, soft, white cheese.

  “God bless your soul,” the bon ome said to me when I gave them the meal. I began to thank them, then halted, hating myself. Twice blessed I was that night, or twice cursed, by two different kinds of heretics, two different sets of damned believers. But the miracle of the cheese and bread, I was certain, was Dolssa’s.

  As she slept, and then took milk and bread and vegetables, Dolssa was, herself, the chief miracle. In two days she returned from the grave. There would be weeks of healing to come, but her improvement filled me with reverent joy. I had never been holy, but God and I were partners in mending this girl. I watched over her, tracking her every breath, as if she were my own sleeping eṇfan. Each sign of healing made me want to sing.

  Years before, I had found Mimi, our cat, as a starving kitten, no more than a few weeks old. She was frail and nearly bald, with a belly swollen full of worms. Sazia would have ended her life mercifully, but I refused, and insisted on nursing the kitten with drops of milk and bits of mashed chicken meat and fat. That which you tend, you come to adore with the kind of love that bypasses sense and reason. So it was for Mimi. So it came to be with Dolssa.

  She slept day and night, like Mimi, but there were times, when I walked near the barrow, when I heard her speak. Soft whisperings, as though she carried on a heartbroken conversation. Madness could do this, but she did not seem insane. Grief might make one mad, and if any had cause for grief, it was she. I heard her plead over and over, “Where are you? Where are you? Why have you left me alone?” Poor soul. She must be speaking to her mother.

  I was only six when I lost my mother. Is there a best age for such robbery? Was I better off for Mamà’s death being long ago, tucked behind the hopefulness of youth and the forgetfulness of time? Was Dolssa the lucky one to have had her mother longer? Or was she the more bereaved for being old enough to understand and remember all that she had lost?

  Night was fully dark when we arrived back in Bajas, but la luna revealed to us the town. For some distance, salty breezes off the sea had filled me with longing. Now, as we climbed Bajas’s round-domed hill, the lullaby of la mar’s gentle waves called to me. We were home.

  Na Pieret di Fabri’s house was one of the grander, taller ones in town, toward the top of the hill, near the church. We went there first. We made enough noise for all sorts to poke their heads out their windows to complain and ogle the newcomers. In Bajas, with all the holes in our walls connecting one house to the next, a sound heard by one was a sound heard by all (as newlyweds often learned to their chagrin), so in no time we had a full audience.

  I’d had two days of watching Gui and Symo’s azes swagger across muddy roads and fields like they owned it all. To hear them talk, their tanta’s vineyards had already made them rich as counts. I enjoyed watching them shrink a bit smaller now with all our curious Bajas eyes upon them.

  Astruga leaned out her window, bosoms and all, and called to the tozẹts to notice her. Dominus Bernard exited a front door and made the sign of the cross, the outrageous faker. I’d bet my inheritance if I had one that he wasn’t there comforting the sick or counseling the sinful. Correction: with the sinful, yes; counsel and comfort of a special kind. It was the home of the frisky Rixenda, whose husband, Peire, was a sailor often away at sea for days on end. Astruga saw Dominus Bernard, scowled, and retreated behind her shutters with a bang.

  Then Na Pieret di Fabri appeared in her candle-lit doorway to greet her new sons. She stared at them, and they bowed to her. She raised her trembling hands to Gui’s face, and kissed each of his cheeks. Symo next received this affectionate welcome, though given, I thought, with perhaps a little—a very little—less warmth than his handsome brother had found.

  “In a day soon to come,” the good domna proclaimed, “we will feast. My sister’s eyes have returned to comfort me in my old age, here in the faces of these, my new sons. But now, home, each of you, to your beds. I will keep my sons to myself. We have a lifetime of catching up to do. Garcia and his son will stable the animals, and we will deal with the luggage tomorrow.”

  So swept up in this reunion was I that I failed to see the mess we were in. While Garcia steered Pieret’s mule down the narrow tunnel leading to her stable below, Sazia tugged on my sleeve. “Dolssa,” she whispered into my ear.

  Symo turned and met my gaze. “The donzȩllas have much luggage in our little barrow,” he told his newly met tanta. “Like princesses, they packed too much. But since they might want it before morning, I will take it to their home tonight.”

  “Great cortezia has my new son.” Na Pieret beamed. “Like a true knight, he places the comfort of the fair donzȩllas first.”

  True knight, indeed.

  I heard a familiar voice calling out my name. Plazensa ran up the hill, her skirts clutched high to her knees, her black hair streaming behind her. She plowed into me, knocking me right into Symo’s barrow. Only by purest luck did I not hit Dolssa and crack her head open.

  “So you’re back,” Plazi scolded. “How dare you worry me so much, and then come back without even a scratch on you?”

  “Bon sẹr, Plazi,” I squeaked. “Can you get off me?”

  “And you, Sazia!” Plazi’s fury rose. We both knew it was only a cover for her worries, and we didn’t mind a bit. “Some truth-teller you are. To twist a poor girl’s heart like a dishrag, all soaked in fear, and for what?”

  Sazia submitted to Plazi’s furious kisses. “Sorry to disappoint you, srre.”

  “And to leave me alone with Jobau, moping around like the devil with a toothache!”

  It was then that I noticed Gui eyeing my older sister appreciatively. This wouldn’t do. I couldn’t have Gui favoring my harlot goddess of a sister. She’d never have him. I needed to marry him off to someone else. Those teeth of his were shillings under my mattress.
>
  Na Pieret di Fabri’s laugh rang out. “Forgive your sisters, Plazensa, and take this to drink to our health. They have brought home my prodigal sons.” She handed Plazi a large pitcher from her own vineyards.

  Gui stepped forward in his most gallant way. “May I have the pleasure—”

  “No, you may not.” I seized Plazi’s arm. “It’s late, and we must get home to bed. And, Gui, before you think of charming our sister, remember, we’ve traveled two days with you, and we’ve watched how you eat.”

  Symo apparently inhaled a puff of feather down at that moment, for he began coughing and choking so hard that Gui had to whack him on the back.

  “Leave off,” croaked his victim. “I’ll take them their things and be back soon.”

  “Plazi,” I hissed into my sister’s ear. “We are bringing home a surprise. Whatever you do, by your hope of heaven, when you see it, do not make a peep.”

  That night I lay in my bed next to Sazia, listened to la mar, and thought about all that had happened to me these four days. The trip and Sazia’s warnings. The friar and the dying bird. What if I hadn’t heard her sigh? What if I’d come along too late? What if I’d told the friar what I’d seen? Was she a heretic fleeing the pyres? Or was she somehow deceived, or mad and in need of a pastor’s help?

  I thought of Sazia’s warnings. Darkness and danger, sorrow and pain.

  But the miracles! The voices in my head. The signs that followed her. Was Dolssa de Stigata even flesh and blood?

  I thought of the feeble pair in the woods, the bon ome and bona femna. Once there were many of them throughout the little vilas of Provensa. The war to destroy them nearly destroyed our homeland. Old-timers spoke often of its bitterness and blood. Whole towns and cities had been burnt to the ground, and their people with them. Once the “good men” and “good women” were revered as holy, but now they were more feared and hated than devils. Not for their own sake, but for what was done, in the name of Christ, to those who believed in them or helped them or let them live among them.