The Passion of Dolssa

by Julie Berry

  How angry would Senhor Guilhem be? Would he even come? Could some kindly saint in heaven have intervened on my behalf and made him forget my yarn about the virtuous noble maiden? Might his mysterious supper guest be someone else altogether?

  I waited.

  What a dunce I was to think I could make a match for a nobleman! What a price I’d pay for his anger. Foolish, foolish!

  This would be the end of my matchmaking altogether. It would be a blow to the goodwill we held in Bajas. That worried me most. I made matches not solely for the money, though the bon Dieu knew we needed that, too. But all my weaving and winding of ties between the townsfolk and our family were meant to keep us safe. To allow us to fit, and not just fit but be welcome and needed. Even after four years here, with Plazensa’s exotic ale and cooking mingling on the tongues of these wine-drinking Provençals, we were still out-of-towners. A whore’s daughters, charges of a drunken vagrant whose brawling days weren’t gone from memory, with Sazia playing soothsayer, and Plazensa playing a bit of the whore herself. So long as we were liked and helpful, we got on, but if not, may the bon Dieu help us.

  Bats swooped overhead. I hunched my head down into my body. Why wouldn’t Senhor Guilhem come, so I could catch him? Yet I prayed he would not come. I strained to see and hear.

  And then I heard footsteps along the path. It was Senhor Guilhem, dressed in a surcoat, hose, cape, and tall feathered hat. He’d even taken my bait about dressing fine! Oh, if only I could slither off this rock, crawl into a hole, and disappear.

  The time to approach him was now. But I couldn’t bear it. So I waited and watched.

  Having reached the wood, Senhor Guilhem seemed unsure of what to do next. He stood uncertainly upon the path.

  He ventured a pace or two into the trees, only to return just as quickly.

  He leaned against a stout tree, then decided it wasn’t to his liking.

  I swallowed. What to tell him? I lured him here with a lie. What lie could I now invent to salvage his pride?

  “Donzȩlla,” he cried softly. “You can come out, Donzȩlla. There is no need to fear.”

  Sazia would have died laughing at our nobleman made the fool. I’d die of mortification.

  I decided to cut through the vineyard some distance away, then make myself appear to run along the road. I could tell him that I’d only just had word from the noble lady. That she was delayed by, oh, sickness, or discovery of her plans by her jealous parents. Something like that. The time was now. I rose from my perch, then halted.

  Voices floated up from the woods. A woman’s voice, mingling with Senhor Guilhem’s.

  What in the name of heaven?

  My skin prickled. Had the tale I’d spun come true?

  I crept down through the trees for a closer look.

  “Don’t be afraid, noble lady,” I heard Senhor Guilhem say. “No harm will befall you. I swear upon my onor.”

  “No harm?” answered a dusky voice. “Not even to one such as I?”

  Senhor Guilhem bowed and swept his hat off his head.

  “Never, so long as I live,” he said. “Come, dine with me in my home. I know your sufferings, and I long to assist you.”

  The voice hesitated in replying. “But that God himself should have shown them to you,” she replied, “how could you begin to know my sufferings?”

  “Come out to the path.” Guilhem grew more eager by the minute. “I will lead you from here to safety. You shall be under my protection.”

  The woman’s dusky voice wove a spell around the night. “You sound like an honest man,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  Footsteps crunched through the undergrowth. I ventured forward.

  A dark figure left the wood and stepped onto the path.

  Senhor Guilhem moved closer.

  We both saw her. Senhor Guilhem stepped back.

  She was rumpled and worn. Branches clung to her black clothes. She drew back her hood. Moonlight lit the streaks of white in her hair. Her bearing was tall and proud, but her eyes were sunken, and her cheeks hollow with age and hunger.

  “A heretic,” whispered Senhor Guilhem.

  “Blessings on you,” said the woman.

  “No!” Senhor Guilhem’s cry was shrill. “Do not bless me! I do not ask you to bless me!”

  What had I done?

  The bona femna slipped her hood back over her hair. “But, gracious Senhor,” she said, her voice laden with hurt. “You promised me protection!”

  “Not for you!” cried our nobleman. “Never for you. I thought you were someone else.”

  “So I shall be then, if needs must,” pleaded the woman. “Only keep me safe from those who hunt me.”

  He shook his head. He stepped back, and back again. He was almost in full retreat. “Leave here!” he cried. “No one saw me here. I shall tell no one I saw you. That is all the protection I can give you.”

  The woman genuflected. Once, her holiness would have caused him to kneel before her.

  “Then I accept such protection,” she called after him, “in God’s name.”

  “In any name,” cried the retreating form, “but his!” He ran until I could hear his footsteps no longer.

  The woman returned to the privacy of the trees. I blessed the dark for hiding me from her. She passed by close enough for me to hear the fugitive bona femna’s final malediction upon our young lord Guilhem.

  “Coward.”

  BOTILLE

  crave your pardon, Senhor, most humbly,” I told the stone floor. “I myself only received word that the beautiful noble lady’s plans had changed last night.”

  I stood in the open courtyard of Senhor Guilhem’s home. It was morning. The servant boy had ushered me in and bidden his master to receive me. I’d had a sleepless night to worry myself into a lather over what had happened in the forest. Now I needed to make the best of a bad mess.

  “Why didn’t you send me word?”

  He was angry. Not that I’d dared hope otherwise.

  “Senhor, I came to your home last night,” I said, “but you were not here.”

  The servant boy would already have told him this. It would give my story credence.

  “Did you travel to the forest,” he asked slowly, “to give me the message there?”

  Oh no.

  I raised my aching neck and looked at him. “No, Senhor,” I said, trying to sound surprised. “A maiden like myself? Alone in the woods, after dark?”

  I’d give a cask of Plazi’s ale to know what passed through his mind then. We sisters did not have the most maidenly reputations.

  “So you did not go to the woods.”

  I shook my head.

  His frown became a smile too broad. “Fortunately for you, neither did I,” he said. “Did you think I would believe a tale such as yours?” He laughed for all Bajas to hear. “When I go courting, I don’t go in the woods, searching for phantom domnas.”

  I bowed. “Of course not. I beg forgiveness for ever troubling you.”

  He rose and walked me toward the door. “No forgiveness is needed,” he said, “for I was never in the woods last night.”

  I heard the blade on the edge of his voice.

  I bowed once more and fled for home. If he was afraid, then so was I. The less I saw of Senhor Guilhem for weeks to come, the better.

  Garcia was worse. But Lisette’s eṇfan was better. She and her husband were overjoyed at the turn he’d taken. They showed their baby to anybody who would see him, and soon a parade of visitors came and went to the goat-cheese man’s house. Plazensa didn’t mind, for many of them stopped in at the tavern for a drink afterward, but I was puzzled. Glad news though it surely was, what could attract so much curiosity about a baby deciding to eat?

  And then I smelled the first whiff of the rumors, breathed out by customers quenching their thirst at the tavern.

  Martin and Lisette’s baby boy was healed in the night by a visit from an angel.

  An angel named Dolssa.

  I b
arged through the door to Martin and Lisette’s house. There sat Lisette like the Virgin herself, clasping the naked eṇfan to her breast.

  It was Lisette holding court to a rapt audience that frightened me. True, it was only her kinsmen, Martin’s elderly mother, his cousins, and their closest friends. In short, half of Bajas.

  “Then, two nights ago,” she intoned, “an angel appeared in the night. A woman in a white gown. With eyes like eternity, and hair like the sea at midnight!”

  A thrill of wonderment went through the listeners. An angel, in this very room? And why should they doubt? Good Christians did not speak lightly of angels. And there was the plump, peaceful child to prove it.

  “What did she do?”

  “She kissed the child and prayed over him,” she said. “Then she helped my lach, which had run dry, to flow down once more and feed him.” Lisette kissed her infant’s cheek. “He’s been drinking ever since. Day and night, the greedy little piglet!”

  “Dolssa,” someone said. “I never knew anyone named Dolssa.”

  “Is she a saint?” wondered a third. “One of the blessed martyrs?”

  I snuck out the way I’d come.

  I pulled Plazi and Sazia away from the bar and told them what had happened. Sazia instantly comprehended the danger, but Plazensa was only rapt with awe.

  “She healed Lisette’s baby,” my older sister whispered reverently. “God’s miracles abound!”

  I took her by both shoulders. “Oc, but don’t you see?” I said. “The fame of this miracle will spread all the way to Tolosa. We won’t be able to hide her anymore. It won’t take the friars long to hear and to guess who this ‘angel Dolssa’ is.”

  Plazi’s face fell. We stood together in an anxious huddle.

  “What was she thinking?” I moaned. “How could she have done this?”

  Sazia lifted my face by the chin and made me look at her. “You wouldn’t speak this way, Botille, if you were the eṇfan’s mother.”

  “How could God allow her to suffer harm for such good deeds?” wondered Plazensa.

  I thought of the bona femna in the woods last night, and the ones we’d seen on the road. I thought of Carcassona, our first home, in our mother’s childhood days, before the crusaders came and expelled every man, woman, and child. All the burnings, and the blood. Holy wars fought because the Church thought our holy men and holy women were heretics. And now our Dolssa was their target.

  “Because this is Provensa, Plazi,” I said. “God does not shield the good from dying cruelly here.”

  I left my sisters and went to Dolssa’s room. She looked up at me with such a glad smile of welcome, my mouth went dry. After all she’d been through, after coming to trust me, must she now be punished for her kind deeds?

  “Dolssa,” I said, “there is a rumor spreading throughout the village that the neighbors’ failing eṇfan was cured by an angel visitor named Dolssa.”

  Her face fell, just as my heart sank. She rose and paced the floor. At least her feet were mending. Pray the bon Dieu she would not need them to take flight again.

  She stopped. “The child is well, then,” she said. “That is the important thing.”

  Not to me, it wasn’t. I confess it. How could she be immune to fear? “But, Dolssa,” I cried, “don’t you see? They’ll find you now.”

  She resumed her pacing. “They were always going to find me.”

  “How can you say that?” I clasped both her arms in mine. “You’ve been safe here. You’ve been mending. You could have stayed here forever with us.” My face grew hot, and I knew I would cry. “Dolssa, do you want to die?”

  I thought I saw a struggle in her eyes, between calm trust and fear.

  “No more than your neighbors wanted their eṇfan to die, Botille.”

  I sank down onto the bed.

  “To leave, then?”

  We looked up to see Plazi and Sazia standing in the doorway to Dolssa’s room. Plazensa hid her face in her apron. Sazia wrapped her arms around our sister.

  I couldn’t bear it. Not losing her, not seeing her so calm about it, not seeing Plazensa cry. Too much precious blood had already soaked into our dry southern ground.

  “We will fight it,” I said. “We will fight this rumor by proving there is no angel Dolssa. She’s flesh and blood like the rest of us.” I reached for Dolssa’s hand. “We will bring you out to meet them, and destroy this rumor before it takes root.”

  Sazia stared at me in horror, and my stupid error became plain. A holy woman and healer was less astonishing than an angel, but not by much. News could spread either way. And once she was known, what would happen to her?

  “No.” I retracted my earlier speech. “Never mind, it’s too risky—”

  “I will go.”

  We gaped at her.

  “Botille is right. My concealment is past. Let us go meet the village.”

  Voices called us from the tavern. Customers would be helping themselves to the ale and wine in another moment if we didn’t return.

  “Are you sure,” Sazia said slowly, “that this is what your love bids you do?”

  Dolssa took Sazia’s hands in her own. “It is what he would do, and did do,” she said. “That may be all I can ever know about his will for me from this point onward.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told her.

  “Once, he walked with me each day, and talked with me each night,” she explained. “Once, we were joined as two lovers with one heart. If those days are ended, and I never see him again, I will still remember them. If I only hear his voice now in the cry of an eṇfan, I can still come when he calls. If his call cannot reach my ears, I can still follow his feet.”

  I wished to heaven I’d never spoken aloud the idea of going out. It was madness, and Dolssa had caught the infection from me. But she was determined.

  “His feet, I am certain, would walk out that door to where the people were.”

  And so it happened. Dolssa de Stigata greeted Bajas.

  She walked out the front door. She entered Martin and Lisette’s home. I worried Lisette might drop the baby.

  Dolssa held out her arms and bid Lisette and Martin to touch her and prove her real.

  She was not an angel, she told them, but someone who had devoted her life to prayer.

  It was not she who had healed their child, but God.

  Children ran at their parents’ bidding to fetch tantas and ọncles, mimas and paps. Whole streets returned with them. Lisette’s house overflowed, so Dolssa went outside to be seen. I stayed close beside her, lest Bajas tear her to adoring pieces.

  She stood there in her blue robe, with a simple white cap over her dark hair. And even if I’m called a liar for it, I swear this is true: clouds over la mar parted, letting a beam of golden sunlight pierce through and illuminate the spot on which she stood.

  We told them she was our friend from far away, come to visit. That they must not speak of her as an angel. We wished they would not speak of her at all, but allow her to live a quiet life of prayer, here in Bajas, and bless us with her silent presence.

  But Bajas, I feared, would not be so easily fooled. She was an angel in blue, halo and all.

  At the top of the hill appeared a face I knew well. Saura, wife of Garcia the elder, and mother to his namesake. She had heard of the holy woman, and she came running.

  The crowd was a barrier now, but the look on her face told everything. She was about to lose her husband and her son, to become a childless widow in one fell day. Na Pieret reached Saura, and linked her arm through her elbow. The concern on their faces smote my heart.

  What else could I do? I leaned in to Dolssa and whispered in her ear. She nodded, and together we pushed a path through the crowd toward the grieving women.

  We climbed the hill with all Bajas following, speaking to one another in hushed tones. It was Felipa’s burial in reverse: uphill, not down; raising the dead, God willing, not lowering them into the ground. Through it all, I watched Dolssa. She
who was so afraid of being seen by the friar had no fear now, though all the world watched her.

  We reached Garcia’s small maisoṇ. Saura’s neighbor woman came out, shaking her head.

  My heart sank, but Dolssa did not pause. She entered the maisoṇ with me at her heels. I asked Na Pieret, whose trip up the hill had tired her badly, to keep the others out and let Dolssa have peace. Na Pieret nodded and planted herself in the doorway.

  In the dark of the sickroom, I could not see at first. Garcia and his son lay stretched out on two cots. They were still and pale. I couldn’t bear to look. Just last week, they’d been our protectors, our cheery traveling companions. Young Garcia was far too young to die, with all his brainless jokes, vexing Sazia.

  Saura slumped in a corner. I didn’t know what else to do, so I sat and cried with her.

  Dolssa laid a hand on the elder Garcia’s chest, then rested her other on his forehead.

  “He is not dead,” she said.

  Saura stiffened. She looked up, but Garcia lay as still as ever.

  Dolssa moved over to young Garcia and rubbed his chest and belly. “He lives as well.”

  “If you can do anything,” came Saura’s strangled voice, “in God’s name, help us quickly, before their spirits have fled this world.”

  Dolssa pulled a short stool in between the two cots, and sat. She took each of the Garcias by the hand and held both hands in hers, then closed her eyes.

  I wished I could know what words she sent up to her beloved, if she was indeed praying. I could no more count on God to hear and bless me than I could count on the winds off la mar to consider my wishes and grant me my needs. Some days the wind was a friendly breeze at my back. It might just as likely blow the roof off the tavern.

  Saura’s prayers, on the other hand, I could hear. She rocked back and forth on her hips on the ground, with her bowed head resting upon her hands. As she rocked, she murmured her prayer.

  “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, oh God, blessed Jhesus, mother Maria, save my husband, my only son. Oh, God, if it is not too late, if I have not angered you too much with my sins, please God, save the child and his father, or I will go with them to the grave. How can I live? Why spare me? Has this holy woman come to mock me? Why does she do nothing? You can heal them, whether or not she can. Hear my prayer, holy Paire, my prayer for all these long days and nights, for I can pray no longer, nor even stand upon my feet. Grant me my son. Take me in his place. I’ll go gladly. But spare me my boy, and if you will it, his father to watch over him.”