The Passion of Dolssa

by Julie Berry

  Dolssa de Stigata wasn’t one of them. But what, then, in Jhesus’s name, was she?

  BOTILLE

  f course we will help her.”

  “Hush, Plazi!” I hissed. Walls had ears. It was dangerous to discuss Dolssa aloud. She still slept in the back room where we’d hidden her, on a cot behind a curtain.

  Plazensa chopped carrots and onions for the day’s dinner, while I plucked a plump young polẹt. I’d already wrung its neck and bled it, and now it was my job to preserve the feathers for a pillow, and the meat for the sọpa.

  Outside the Three Pigeons, sunlight sparkled off little waves of the lagoon. The sky glowed with sunrise, like a morning in heaven. Gulls called to one another from the shallows, where shellfish begged to be crunched between their beaks, while around the tavern our other, more fortunate polẹts clucked and waddled over the packed-dirt streets, foraging for bugs. It felt wonderful to be home.

  A fragile wail from next door penetrated the partition between the tavern and the neighbors next door.

  “Oh!” I cried. “Lisette has had her baby, then?”

  Plazi smiled. “The day you left. A tozẹt. Big enough, and strong, but it will not stop crying. Didn’t you hear it last night?”

  I shook my head. We’d been tired enough to sleep through a war, after our four days’ march. I eyed my sister’s pile of legums. “You should add another onion.”

  Sazia slumped into a stool by the bar and stirred her bowl of porridge. “Dolssa is danger, Plazi,” she said. “I keep telling Botille, but she won’t listen. That girl is being hunted by an inquisitor. They killed her mother. You can count upon it, they will find her.”

  Plazensa frowned. “Why should they? Did you tell anyone about her?”

  “Only Symo knows. He was there when we found her.” The chicken’s stubborn underwing feathers would not yield. What harm, I wondered, were a few tiny feathers in the sọpa?

  The harsh, barking bray of a dying donkey floated down to us from the loft. Jobau, waking up screaming. We were used to this. Provensa’s long years when the crusaders came every summer, killing and burning, had never ended for him. His dreams, some nights, made him a madman.

  Plazensa released a rope attached to a pulley, whereon a bucket was tied. It rattled down, and from it she pulled an empty jug. She replaced the jug with a full one, and a hunk of flat fogasa in the bargain, then hoisted on the ropes to raise the bucket up to the loft. The pulley had been my idea, and I was rather proud of it.

  Jobau’s liver-stained hand fumbled for the bucket. Before long, a belch informed us that our lord and master was safely disposed of for another morning.

  “You’re only wasting the fogasa,” observed Sazia. She poured honey over her porridge.

  “Jobau,” Plazensa called, “Sazia wants to know if you actually eat the fogasa.”

  “Plazi!” groaned Sazia. “Must you look for trouble?”

  A rude gesture from the lip of the loft was our reply.

  “What Mamà ever saw in him . . .” Sazia muttered.

  Another rude gesture.

  Plazi dropped her legums into the crock over the fire. “He was handsome,” she said, to goad our sister. Sazia grimaced. Jobau’s yellow skin, his haggard flesh, his long wisps of foul, unwashed hair . . . I didn’t despise Jobau like Sazia did, but to see him as handsome took more imagination than I had.

  Of course, Sazia’s real problem with Jobau was that he was her father.

  “Enough about Jobau,” I said. “We have more pressing problems to think about now.”

  “The girl.” Plazensa twisted sprigs of rosemary over the sọpa pot. “Cut up the polẹt for me, will you, Botille? I’ve got to chop parsnips.”

  Just then a huge figure emerged from the back hallway. I jumped. It was the fisherman from the tavern the day before our journey. I noted the brief glance he and Plazi shared. So. Another of her clients, slinking away. We pretended we hadn’t seen him. This was the routine. Perhaps he was becoming a regular. But how much of our conversation had he heard?

  I pushed the feather bag out of Mimi’s reach, then shoved my fist up the bird’s bottom and grabbed a handful of squishy entrails.

  “We will keep her here safely,” Plazi said. “We’ll keep her secret.”

  “How?” said Sazia. “By locking her away forever? Some life that would be.”

  Plazi waved her knife. “We’ll tell people she’s our cousin, come to stay with us.”

  Sazia laughed. “She’s obviously noble, Plazi. No one would believe she’s our cousin.”

  Plazi chopped her remaining parsnips as if they represented all our problems. I hacked off my chicken’s thigh in the same spirit.

  Sazia shook her head. “She can’t stay forever. You must see that.”

  “Marry her off, then,” Plazi fumed.

  They both stopped. They turned toward me slowly. Oh, no.

  I took a step back. “You’re joking,” I said. “Impossible. And I only work for a fee.”

  The tavern door pushed open, and we all froze. Even Sazia pasted an artificial smile upon her face. We were just three innocent sisters having a harmless, amusing conversation.

  It was only Sapdalina.

  “Good morning, Plazensa, Sazia, Botille.” Sapdalina wouldn’t make eye contact if eye contact could save her immortal soul in Paradise. “Lovely morning, isn’t it? I’m sure it is, for those who”—she burst into tears, and phlegm mushroomed from her nose—“aren’t teetering at the brink of starvation . . .” Here Sazia handed her a clean cloth for her face. “Or will be, as soon as their aged fathers die, which is bound to happen any day now”—a moist sneeze—“leaving them penniless and cold in an unforgiving world.” She sank into a barstool, then leaped off it, yelping as though the stool had bit her buttocks. “Oh! I’ve no right to sit. The seats are for paying customers, and Santa Sara knows, I could no more buy an ale than I could marry a king’s son. But I ask for nothing so lofty as a king’s son!” She forgot the cloth, and wiped her facial productions onto her long, straight bodice. “Just a man, ever so common, and ugly, too, if it pleases God, and if he wants to beat me, I probably deserve it. So long as he doesn’t get too violent, I won’t complain.”

  “Sapdalina,” Plazensa said severely. “You don’t need a husband. What you need is help.”

  “Who says she doesn’t need a husband?” I demanded. Sapdalina’s fee would be small, but a fee, nonetheless.

  “I do.” Plazi’s eyes blazed. “She needs lessons. In the art of catching a man.”

  Sazia groaned into her empty porridge bowl.

  “You brought some men back home with you, Botille. I hear one is quite handsome.” Sapdalina smeared her hand under her nose. “Could I have the other one? You can save the handsome one for customers with more money.”

  I pictured Symo and Sapdalina in each other’s arms, and had to gnaw on my knuckles to keep from laughing out loud.

  “Well, Botille?” Sazia teased me. “Shall we announce Sapdalina and Symo’s wedding?”

  “Ooh, Symo, is that his name? See-moo, See-moo. It’s not a mouthful, at any rate. Some names would be unbearable to have to say over and over and over.”

  Like Sapdalina. Sazia, who could read our minds, snickered at me. I wrenched the polẹt’s other leg off, but only the bones came, leaving the fat and flesh dangling behind.

  “Sapdalina. Child. You are unfit to win the love of a dog, much less a man,” Plazi told her. “You need lessons, and I’ll give them to you.”

  I silently gave Plazi one of the tongue-lashings she’s famous for. Sometimes she reads my thoughts too, and I hoped this was such a time. Now is not the time for a rescue project! We already have one, and she lies dreaming in the back room!

  “I’d be so grateful for lessons,” Sapdalina said, “but I have no way to pay for them.”

  “Is there anything you can do?” inquired my older sister. “Besides sneeze?”

  Sapdalina sat a little straighter. “I can stitc
h like anything.”

  I dropped my squashy chicken on the table and silently demanded that Plazensa look at me. Finally she met my gaze. Sazia joined the circle. We thought of Dolssa, and her tattered but once-fine clothes. I thought of finding her a husband. I thought of keeping her alive. Plazensa dared either of us to object to her new project. Even Sazia, reluctantly, agreed.

  “Stitching,” I told Sapdalina, “could help.”

  Thus I found myself leaving the tavern and heading along the slip for the docks, in search of Guilhem, our highest—and practically only—ranking bachelor in Bajas. A knight, the son of a knight, and nephew to a great lord in Narbona. He enforced the collection of taxes and rents heavily, but what nobleman did otherwise? He quitted himself bravely when roving faidits, those displaced nobles who’d lost their lands during the Crusade, came looking to stake new claims in small Bajas.

  We liked him well enough. But even if we hadn’t, he was single and not yet thirty. He still had a thick crown of hair. He was the only groom I could think of for Dolssa.

  I knew I’d find Senhor Guilhem at the docks. I braced myself to spring upon him my most audacious matchmaking plot yet. There would be obstacles. He’d be hard to win over. These nobles of ours, here in the sunny south, were raised on trobador songs right along with their wet nurses’ milk. Mundane, earthy, baby-making, sọpa-eating marriage was a far cry from the elaborate love of poised and pretty ladies at court that they preferred. It was all a game to wrap up their greed for a dowry in an elegant package. And Dolssa would certainly have no dowry. How had I let Plazi talk me into this?

  I slipped off my shoes and felt the wet sand squelch through my toes. My mutterings about Plazi disturbed a graceful pair of bright pink flamencs dipping their great beaks in the shallows in search of breakfast. They flapped off in protest, and I laughed at their dangling pink legs. A bit like mine had been, even a wash or two after my grape-stomping.

  I reached the fishy docks, pink and white with their splatterings of shattered prawns and seagull mẹrda. Past the docks, the shimmering salt pans lay. Soon the autumn sun wouldn’t burn away water fast enough to yield our precious salt, and the workers would have to wait till next summer.

  A small fishing boat was just coming in, clanging its bell for someone to come help with the tackle and tie the ropes. Already in port was a vessel I recognized.

  “Botille, my beauty!”

  Giacomo Arbrissi, a merchant sailor from Florença, waved to me from his dock. I was no more his beauty than he was my grandmother, but the stout and hairy salesman always let me have first look at the items he’d brought to sell because, he said, I knew more about the lives and wants of townsfolk than any bayle or priest.

  I greeted him with a kiss on both whiskery cheeks. “Bonjọrn, Giacomo!”

  “Come away with me to Florença, Botille! Someday I’ll take you with me.”

  I grinned. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Giacomo was our source for goods we could never find in Bajas. His trading route took him to Itàlia, Fransa, Provensa, and Aragón, but he always took time to enter the lagoon of la mar and peddle his wares to tiny Bajas and the other ports around its circumference. It was practically an act of charity. We were poor here. Only what we could pull from the sea or the soil was ours, and then, not for long.

  “Come see what I have for you.” Giacomo pulled me toward his boat. I climbed down a ladder into the stuffy hold. “Who needs what I have today? Exquisite olive oil—”

  “We make plenty of our own,” I said.

  “Some beautiful knives—”

  “Fishermen,” I said. “Plazensa, but we can’t afford them. The usual handful of people with money. Na Pieret, maybe.”

  “Take a deep whiff of these pungent spices, all the way from India!”

  “Ooh, folks will like these, especially if you sell them by the pinch.”

  “Books, from Rome, treatises on theology—”

  I shook my head. “In Bajas? Who here would want those?”

  “Not even your priest?”

  “Hah!”

  Giacomo wiped the sweat off his shiny pate. “Will no one want my nice parchment and ink?”

  I considered. “There’s the notary,” I said. “He’s the only one who could use it.”

  Ever the optimist, Giacomo turned to another parcel. “Cloth!” he cried. “Good stiff English wool, beautifully woven in Flanders; and silks from Byzantium. Ever seen such colors?”

  “Not since you were last in port.” I smiled.

  Giacomo pulled out a little stool and sat upon it. “Botille,” he whispered. “Tell me. Who in Bajas is in love or courting? Betrothed, or soon to be?”

  He shook two silver combs, tipped with carved and painted bone, from a velvet pouch.

  I took a dainty comb and held it up in the one shaft of sunlight penetrating the hold.

  “You know of secret lovers before they know themselves,” said Giacomo. “Tell me. Who needs to see my pretty combs? I have ribbons, too, for the poorer tozẹts to buy for their tozas.”

  I sighed. “I’ve fallen a bit behind in my work,” I told him, “but I’ll soon set things to rights. Then I’ll bring you buyers.”

  “A buyer, perhaps,” wheedled Giacomo, “who may buy a pair for you?”

  I planted a kiss on his shiny dome. “Don’t bet your silver purse on that, old friend.”

  “I’ll carry you away to Florença!” he called after me as I climbed back onto the dock.

  “My bag is packed!” I set off once more in search of Senhor Guilhem.

  I found him in the counting house, leaning back in a wooden chair, in bored conversation with Lop, the bayle. I approached Senhor Guilhem and bowed.

  “Botille,” said my lord. “How fares your sister?”

  Oh no. Not Plazi. I bowed again. “Which one, Senhor?”

  “Your older sister. The alewife, and the beauty.”

  “My sister is in excellent health. Grácia.” I bowed again. “I wonder, Senhor, if you would grant me the opportunity to speak to you?”

  He waved his hand at the room as if Lop were not in it. “Speak on, then,” he said. “My time is leisurely today.”

  Lop’s eyes tracked my every move. There was something canine about our silent, gray-whiskered bayle. He was a man past his prime but not far past it, still able to strike fear into the hearts of drunken lads after a night’s revelry.

  “Bon Senhor,” I said. “A private word with you?”

  The knight’s eyebrows rose. “Off with you, then,” he told Lop. “The wench craves a private word.” He made it sound like a joke. The bayle looked none too pleased, but he left.

  “Well?” said Senhor Guilhem. “What will you have of me? Justice, I’ll guess. Is there someone bothering your family? Stealing from your tavern?”

  “No, Senhor. Something else.” I gulped. Normally, I didn’t worry about finding the right words. I just sailed right in and let the right words find me. But I fished in deeper seas this morning.

  “Senhor,” I began, “perhaps you are aware that one of the small functions I play in Bajas is that of a matchmaker?” Senhor Guilhem looked taken aback. “For marriages. I help people make good marriages.”

  He rocked his chair forward. “You make marriages?” he repeated. “So young as you are, and still a maid yourself?”

  I bowed. “You might say I have a talent for it.”

  He smirked. “To what do you attribute this talent?”

  I hadn’t expected this. “I . . . pay attention,” I said. “To people. I see who is shy, and who is lonely. Who is fussy, and who is patient. And so on. I put them together.”

  “And the people of Bajas,” continued Guilhem, “are shy enough and lonely enough to need help from you?”

  “Not everyone.” More was the pity, too. “But enough fail to see the person who could please them, because they focus on the wrong things.”

  “But you focus on the right things.” He stroked his beard. “Marriage,
you think, should please people?”

  I didn’t like the sarcasm creeping into his voice. “Senhor,” I said quickly, “have you ever considered marriage?”

  His mood grew dark. “To what does this question tend? Marriage to you?”

  I laughed. “No, Senhor! Never with me!”

  He leaned forward abruptly. “To your sister?”

  I swallowed a laugh. “Oh, Senhor,” I said. “Your honor would not long remain satisfied with a wife like Plazensa. She is only a peasant, after all, and what a temper she has! You see her beauty, but I can assure you, she has a tongue like an adder’s bite.”

  He rose and paced the counting house. This was not going well. If Guilhem began coming around to plague us at the tavern, Sazia would have a fit.

  “Jealous sisters say things like this about each other,” he muttered to himself.

  “I’m not jealous!”

  He laughed at this. “With a sister like Plazensa, how could you be anything but?”

  A pleasant courtesy.

  “I love my sister, Senhor,” I said, “but I must speak to you about someone else. I heard”—yes, this could work—“of a noble donzȩlla. One of exceeding beauty and virtue.”

  Guilhem was unimpressed. “To hear their parents tell it, the land teems with such fair donzȩllas. Never is one of them described as ugly and dull. But many are.”

  I waited.

  “Proceed.”

  So he was curious.

  “This lady,” I said, “will soon pass nearby this place. She has suffered a great sorrow.”

  Say something, you wretched man, and buy me time!

  “She was betrothed,” I went on, “to a most gentle and manly knight . . .”

  Guilhem sat a little straighter and thrust his shoulders outward just a touch.

  “But he died.” Maire Maria, I could think of no battles wherein he should have died. “Defending a bishop from assassins.”

  Guilhem frowned. A shocking story like this, he would have heard.

  “In Lisbona,” I added hastily.

  “In Lisbona?”

  I nodded solemnly. “All the way in Lisbona. So, this fair and virtuous lady is devastated with grief. Understandable, don’t you think?”