The Passion of Dolssa

by Julie Berry

  I had to play up the part of the fortune-teller, so I hung curtains around a corner near the door, where I placed a small table and two chairs. When someone wanted a fortune, they dropped a coin in a slot in my outer wall. It clinked in the bowl on my table, which signaled me to veil my face, don my earrings, and assume my role. I blew out the candles, ushered them in, and let the charade begin. It didn’t yield enough money to support me, quite, but with the garden and Mima’s help, I managed.

  Mima worried about me, so she brought me little gifts of grain or vegetables, or wool to spin. When it came time to pay tribute money to the local senhor, Mima paid mine without a word.

  One day she brought me a sack of barley. I studied it and wondered to myself. Could I recreate Plazensa’s brew?

  Good luck smiled upon me. In a few weeks I had four jugs of foaming ale. I sold it by the glassful to Mima’s neighbors, earning enough to eat for a while and buy still more barley. These Aragónese enjoyed the novelty of my brew. I hoped it would stay that way.

  I talked to Plazensa as I did my work. I’d become her, also.

  In the steady sunshine of Aragón, it was hard to know when one season bled into another. I woke one day to realize that a year had passed since I lost my old life. I woke another morning, and found it had been three. I was Maria now. My life in Bajas seemed so far behind me, though the events of my final day there were forever etched in daily memory. I still prayed each night for Symo’s and my sisters’ souls, wherever in this world or the next they might be found.

  Sometimes, in the night, I thought of all the ways life could have been different. What if I’d heeded Sazia’s warnings and avoided the trip to San Cucufati? What if I’d passed by Dolssa’s spot on the riverbank a moment before, or after, and heard no sound at all? What if I hadn’t told our group to separate when hunted by the soldiers?

  I’d be dead, in the latter case, along with my sisters and Symo. For Dolssa’s and Jobau’s sake, I tried not to wish that it were the case.

  These thoughts were blades, and there was no point reopening cuts.

  If I’d never met Dolssa, who would I be today? What if I’d never known the girl in love with God?

  And Symo. I had all the time in the world to wonder what might have been possible there. He was the most infuriating tozẹt ever to make me want to twist his ears. I hoped he’d survived. Even if he slept in another femna’s arms and counted his blessings at being rid of that dangerous Botille. I hope he lived long and fat and contentedly, growing his own chickpeas and tying his own grapes in some safe, hidden corner of the world.

  I went through the quiet motions of my days. I carried water from the spring to water my vegetables. I came in time to be fond of my neighbors. But life was muffled. Muted. Even my lightest moments were wrapped in relentless grief and loss, pressed down by the anxious taste of waiting for hopeful news that would never come.

  BOTILLE

  pringtime came, and Mima pined for a pilgrimage to Barçalona. There was a monastery there, Sant Pau del Camp, where an uncle of hers had been a monk, and she longed to see it before she died. Not that death was anywhere near her, as robust and cheery as she was now. But she was determined, and her cobbler would not leave his trade, so she begged me to accompany her.

  I resisted. I wanted no part of monks or friars or churchmen. Barçalona worried me, that seaport town. Sant Dominic’s Order of Preachers was sure to have a foothold in such a busy place, even if not at the abbey at Saint Paul of the Countryside.

  But Mima pressed me. She didn’t dare travel alone. A trip would be good for me, she said. I’d been too melancholy for too long, she said. Who knows, I might find a little romance on a journey such as this, she said.

  I wanted romance as much as I wanted Lucien de Saint-Honore to knock at my door. But after all she had done for me, I didn’t have the heart to keep saying no to Mima. Go, said the familiar voice.

  Perhaps a journey would do me some good. I was Maria now, and nobody knew my face. I could keep to myself and attract no danger.

  So I journeyed with Mima to Barçalona from our tiny settlement on the outskirts of Balbastro. Outside Barçalona, we sought shelter from rain at a women’s convent and passed the night in the dormitories. I hesitated at first, but Dolssa’s voice said, Go without fear.

  I listened to the sisters chant their nighttime prayers. How lucky they were to have each other.

  In the morning, I rose before Mima, and couldn’t return to sleep, so I went outside to look at the rose gardens. I knelt to admire the showy yellow blossoms. Beyond them were pinks and whites, all swaying together in the dim morning haze.

  I noticed a movement farther off in my line of sight. Two young sisters of the convent—novices, I supposed—sat talking in secret behind taller shrubs. I watched as they whispered back and forth. Soft sounds of laughter met my ears. Were they breaking rules? Was there a vow of silence? Their covert friendship among the roses made me smile.

  I lost track of time, soaking in the blossoms while the sun climbed in the sky. What a thing, to tend and grow not food, but splendor. I quickly cut a small branch with a swollen bud from the yellow shrub. I would see if by chance I could keep it moist and alive this whole journey home, and plant myself a rosebush.

  The secret friends arose and parted from each other with kisses on their cheeks. The shorter one ran inside, while the other headed my way, toward the garden. I tucked my guilty rosebud under my dress and felt a thorn prick tender skin. The girl saw me then and froze. She made to turn back toward the convent and escape my prying gaze. But I saw her eyes before she recognized mine.

  “Sazia.”

  She turned back, and we ran into each other’s arms.

  My Sazia. Alive and whole and warm in my grasp. My baby srre.

  She was taller than I was now. Leaner. Her hair, hidden behind her wimple. Her eyes, her teeth, her very own nose and cheeks, like no one else’s could ever be. They were hers, and she was mine. I wouldn’t have believed that after so much pain, my heart could still hold this kind of joy.

  Grácia, Dolssa, for bringing me here. Grácia for this miracle.

  Her story was soon told.

  She’d been caught. Not the night of the burnings, but early the morning after. Soldiers brought her back to Bajas. The terror she endured was beyond imagining. Friar Lucien, Prior Pons, and Bishop Raimon had already left for Tolosa. They were worried about Lucien, whose wounds had healed astonishingly, but who now seemed possessed by a fit of melancholy. They left other friar inquisitors to clean up the mess Dolssa had left in Bajas.

  Soldiers brought her to Sant Martin, where the churchmen stayed, and Dominus Bernard bargained for Sazia’s life. If she would join a convent, she would be spared. Sazia agreed, and the presiding friars, who did not share Lucien de Saint-Honore’s animosity for Dolssa and her helpers, rejoiced over her as a lost sheep regained into the fold. So off to a Dominican convent in Narbona, Sazia was sent.

  “Did you learn anything of Plazensa?” I asked her, there among the flowers. “Or . . . Symo?”

  She shook her head. A painful silence filled the space between us.

  “So, you went to the convent.”

  “I raged against it at first,” she told me. “I was so sick with grief and anger that I could barely eat. I thought of trying to flee, but if they caught me, my old sentence of execution would return. I spent miserable months in the hospital wing. There I became friends with one of the older women named Sister Margarethe. We were both ill together. She taught me to read.”

  As Sazia recovered, she fell into the new rhythms of life. She found a taste for study, especially under Sister Margarethe’s tutelage. She made friends with other sisters. After a year there, Sister Margarethe was offered a position as abbess at the convent outside Barçalona. She invited Sazia, now under the name Sister Clara, to come with her.

  “Sister Clara,” I repeated. “It’s so strange to think of you with a new name. But I have one too. I’m Maria.”
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br />   Sazia grinned. “An excellent choice.”

  I told her about my little home in the country. “You shall come live with me,” I told her. “We’ll be together again. No one will know where or whom you are. We’ll be safe.”

  Sazia was slow to reply.

  “Do you still fear that if you leave, you’ll be punished?”

  She shook her head. “No. Sister Margarethe cares for me. She is not like the friars.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Then it’s settled! Come back with us in two days’ time.”

  I waited for an answer, until I realized silence was her answer.

  “It’s so good to see you, Botille,” she said.

  “Maria.” My hurt wouldn’t keep silence.

  She stroked my cheek. “How I have prayed for you.”

  I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “And I for you.”

  “Praise God for bringing you here to me!”

  I’d never heard Sazia speak so before. Who have you become, little srre? What happened to my teasing, mocking, ungovernable girl?

  Bells in the convent began to ring. To find her, and not keep her, pierced my heart.

  “I like my life here, Botille,” she said. “I’m learning so much. The sisters . . .”

  She was my sister, still, and I knew her thoughts. She was worried I’d be vexed with her. Something new had found a hold on her affections. My Sazia could never return to me.

  “It’s all right.”

  She took courage. “It’s good to be one of the sisters.” She took a deep breath. “It is good to belong here.”

  But you belong with me.

  The old Botille would have scolded her mightily and marched her out by the ear.

  But I was Maria now, and Sazia—Clara—was grown up.

  “May I visit you again?” I asked.

  She beamed. “I hope you will.”

  I nodded. “I will see what I can do. I don’t much like the thought of spending time at a Dominican convent.”

  Her cheeks colored. “They’re not all like the inquisitors in Tolosa.”

  Hear her, defending them! The order that tried to kill us!

  Bells rang again. Sazia began to be anxious to go. “It’s time for prayers.”

  “I never would have predicted, oh, soothsayer, that you would one day be a nun,” I told her with a smile. “You never had any use for holiness before.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, srre,” she said earnestly. “That was before I knew Dolssa.”

  BOTILLE

  ima and I returned home and fell back into the rhythms of our lives. Summer came in, with heat enough to melt any desire I felt to live. I toiled all day in the garden and in my little brewery. Local farmers had less time for fortune-telling during the dry season of the year, when water must be hauled from streams backbreakingly far away, so I had to work harder to feed myself. The blistering air never moved, and I gasped as Mima and I tilled her plot. If my sweat could have watered my garden before the sun baked it off me, it would have been a mercy to me and to my onions.

  Bajas had plenty of summer heat, but nothing like this. Grateful as I was for the safety of my hidden life, I was reminded so often of who I was—an alien in a strange land, far from the world that worked as I wished it would.

  I thought often of Sazia in her cloister. If I’d had to spot her solely on the life she led, I never would have recognized her. Would those who knew me ever recognize me? I couldn’t recognize myself.

  One scorching evening before the sun set, when the day’s work was done, I collapsed onto my cot. Too hot to eat, too thirsty to live, but too limp to trudge to the stream for a bucket for drinking and washing. What I’d give to dip my feet in la mar tonight. Scoop up a bucket of oysters and eat them cold. Instead I lay panting atop my covers, feeling the dusty red soil of Aragón cling to my weary skin. If the heat would’ve let me, I’d just go to sleep, but in the stale air of the cottage, sleep wouldn’t find me for hours.

  The sun was nearly set. I loosened my dress.

  A coin clinked in my fortune-teller’s bowl.

  I moaned. What, now? At this hour, when I was so filthy and spent?

  I rolled slowly upward and reached for my scarf, which I wound around my hair. I attached my earrings, made an attempt at dusting myself off, then opened the door.

  A tall man entered in a cleric’s dark robe and hood. Lucien de Saint-Honore.

  No, it wasn’t. It was only my fevered imagination. Every clergyman was still Lucien to me. This man wasn’t quite tall enough. He walked with a limp.

  I took a step back. In the fading light, I couldn’t make much of the hooded face. But I never read fortunes for churchmen.

  “I’m sorry, good sir,” I told him, “but I am not giving fortunes at this hour.”

  The man regarded me, though what he saw in the dim light, I couldn’t guess. Hopefully, not my dirty face.

  “A pity,” he said. His voice rasped like a sick person’s, but he did not seem ill. “I have come a long way. Word spreads of your fortunes.”

  A new fear gripped me. I did not want a reputation. Was it time to move on and begin anew? Had I stayed here in Mima’s hut outside Balbastro too long?

  I peered more closely at the stranger. Again I thought back to the Dominican friar, but I knew it couldn’t be him. He frightened me, though. I needed to get him out of there.

  “I don’t give fortunes to holy men,” I told my visitor. “I can’t afford to offend the heavens.”

  “But you can afford to offend me?”

  I handed him his coin back. “You’re not from Aragón.”

  “Neither are you.”

  “Provençal?”

  “As are you, or so my ear tells me.”

  “You know,” I said, “you sound terrible. Truly. Do you want a drink of water?”

  He coughed. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  I frowned. “Too bad my bucket’s empty.”

  He shook his head, then pushed the coin back. “Please,” he said, as though the word were foreign to him. “A favor. From your native countryman. I’ve come all this way with a question pressing heavily. They said you could lead me to the answer.”

  He would not go away. I might as well keep his coin. It was the first I’d seen in more than a week. “Hold a moment.”

  I stirred up the ashes in the fireplace enough to kindle a small blaze, just enough to light a candle. I set it on the table.

  “Sit,” I said. “Hold out your hand.”

  I took his palm and began to massage it. The Sazia I remembered had taught me well, even if Sister Clara would never touch a man’s hand again. A small sigh escaped his lips. It worked every time.

  “You have traveled long,” I began.

  “I already said that.”

  “Who says you didn’t?” I snapped. “Be still, or the spirits will not speak to me.”

  I rolled the fleshy thumb in its socket. “You’re troubled in mind.” I racked my brains for more to say. His dusty cloak and covered face gave me little to work with. Then I remembered his limp. “You’ve been wounded . . . in body and spirit.” I felt rather proud of that last little touch.

  “As anyone could see,” said he.

  I was tempted to bend his thumb back the wrong way. “You’ll not get your money back for your rudeness,” I said. “Be quiet and wait.”

  The night air was stiflingly hot. I knew better than to let this arrogant creature in my door, then I’d gone ahead and let myself be persuaded.

  “You should not give up hope,” I said at length. It seemed like a promising direction. “What you seek is nearer than you think.” Everyone, I found, was seeking something.

  The stranger made a little snorting sound.

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Non, pardon.” He coughed. “Dust in my nose.”

  I shifted my attention from his thumb to his fingers. I noticed how his cloak shadowed his features. “You are also, I think, hiding from something. Or someone.”
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  He didn’t object. A good sign.

  “You have lost a loved one.” Everyone had. “They watch over you.”

  “What is your name?” he asked me.

  The interruption peeved me. I was just getting going. “What does that matter?”

  He waited.

  “My name’s Maria.”

  “Do you live alone here, Maria?”

  My gut turned to water. “Not so alone,” I said, “that others won’t hear me if I scream.” Clergy or no, he might be forming some plans for me tonight.

  He held up both hands. “Peace.” The hands rested again on the table. “I must say, I’m disappointed,” he rasped. “You were praised to the skies. But you’ve told me nothing to answer my question.”

  The end of my scarf came loose and clung to the back of my sticky neck.

  “Why don’t you quit wasting my time and tell me what your question is?” I said. “Then perhaps I can help you.”

  He thrust his hand at me. “Aren’t you supposed to guess it?”

  “Aggravate me too much,” I told him, “and the spirits may anger and punish you.” I rubbed his hand. I may have also tugged on the hairs on the back.

  “I wouldn’t want angry spirits after me.” He mocked me, the pig. How quickly could I get him gone? Even a sleepless, sweaty summer night was better than his irksome company.

  “The question is, where have you been so long, Botille?”

  I couldn’t find breath. The raspy voice was gone. The voice I knew had come back to me.

  He took my hand in his.

  With my free hand, I reached over and snatched off his hood from his head.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me to come find you?”

  Symo’s face in the candlelight. Here, in my home.

  I can’t be certain of what happened next. The chair Symo sat in did not survive it.

  I stood up, embarrassed, wiping tears off my face. He clambered to his feet and stood before me.