The Passion of Dolssa (16 page)

From the waterfront, I toiled up the hill toward Bajas proper, with sea breezes pushing at my back. The bells of Sant Martin’s rang. Time for prayers. On such a busy workday, I didn’t expect many people at church, and that suited me. I wanted a word with Dominus Bernard.

I passed by the street where Na Pieret lived, and met Symo coming around the corner, with Gui beside him. Sapdalina, I saw, came up the street behind the brothers, and watched them both with an expression of pathetic longing.

“
Bonjọrn
, Symo, Gui.” I bowed in a friendly way. “What a difference a bath makes, no?”

“
Bonjọrn
, Botille.” Gui grinned, then elbowed his brother. “What ails you, Symo? No
bonjọrn
for our only friend in Bajas?”

Symo’s beetle brows bristled. “What do you mean, ‘our only friend’?”

Late morning sun glinted off Gui’s supernal teeth. Sapdalina, who had parked herself invisibly nearby, as only she could do, nearly fainted at the sight of his smile.

“I don’t want to be your only friend,” I told them. “So let me introduce you to some more friends. This is Sapdalina, the best seamstress in all Bajas.”

Poor Sapdalina flushed salmon pink.
“Botille!”

Gui gave her a good-natured bow, and Symo jerked his head stiffly in her direction.

“Sapdalina could stitch you some clothes better fitting your new position,” I told Symo. “You’re heirs to the vineyards now. You shouldn’t dress like the lowest farmhand.”

I was rewarded by a stare that would intimidate a rampaging boar. But Gui let out a loud laugh. “She’s right, you great slob,” he said. “It’s time we dressed better.” He glanced at Sapdalina. “You’ll come by, then, and measure us?”

If Sapdalina could have bowed till her nose touched the ground, she’d have done it. “I shall come every hour,” she said, “until I catch you at a convenient moment for the fitting.”

Symo groaned. Gui had the grace to keep silent, but I saw his wish to unsay his request.

“Well, then,” I told the merry group, “it sounds as though you have your amusements spread out before you for some time to come.
Bonjọrn
.” I hurried off.

“Botille.”

I turned back to see what Symo wanted.

He scrubbed his dark scalp with his fingernails. “How fares your, er, sister?”

“Which one?” asked Sapdalina.

“He means, of course, the sister who traveled with us,” I told her. But he wasn’t asking about Sazia. I understood him. “The journey has fatigued her,” I said, “but she’s resting well.”

He nodded once and then strode off elsewhere. An odd fish was Symo.

I finished the climb to Sant Martin’s, pushed open the old oak door, and stepped inside the sacred darkness.

A little light entered through the glass windows near the ceiling, beyond the reach of thieves. They were the only glass windows in all Bajas, and the way light rippled and fanned through them fascinated me. Like rays of glory from heaven, piercing the dusty gloom of the church, making each airborne mote shine like a star.

Dominus Bernard was nowhere in sight, so I knelt near a shrine to Johan the Evangelist. I fingered Mamà’s crucifix, still hanging about my neck. It was a small bit of silver, very precious, worth more than its price, because it had been Mamà’s. I wondered which lover had given it to her. When I was younger, I liked to imagine it was a great and wealthy
senhor
, and that he had been my father. Now I didn’t bother with such fancies. I just thought of Mamà.

We, her daughters, weren’t very holy, heaven knew, but that didn’t mean we held no reverence for holiness. We were Christians, like anyone. With a savage like Jobau to care for, and our livings to make, piety was a luxury.

Mamà had been a courtesan. A beauty about the court of the counts of Carcassona. Moving from man to man is never an upward path. The last man was Jobau. It never bothered me to discover, as I grew older, that Mamà had been a fancy whore, an adulteress, and a sinner. Mamà loved us. She loved her lovers. She loved miserable Jobau. I remember her loving strangers and neighbors and even poor, starving lepers. She loved Jhesus, too. Wasn’t it the Evangelist who told of the many times when Jhesus forgave sinful women? And our own Santa Maria Magdalena, of whom the Lord said that her sins were forgiven, for she loved much, the same who sailed across
la mar
to Provensa with Santa Sara?

I only knew one prayer. Mamà had taught me the Paternoster. The “Our Father.”

Le nostre Paire que es els cèls

sanctificatz sia lo teus nom

avenga lo teus regnes

e sia faita la tua voluntatz sicò el cèl et e la tèrra.

E dona nos a nos oi le nostre pan qui es sobre tota causa.

E perdona a nos les nostres deutes,

aissí co nos perdonam als nostres deutors.

E no nos amenes en temptacion

Mas deliura-nos de mal.

Our Father who is in heaven,

May your name be sanctified.

May your kingdom prevail,

And your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.

And give us our bread, as we have true need,

And pardon our debts

Just as we pardon others’ debts.

And lead us not toward temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

I felt my Mamà’s peace as I spoke the words. Smelled her lavender-scented hair. Like the starry, sunlit dust, her love beamed down on me from heaven.

“What do my eyes behold?” A laughing voice from behind me sent Mamà’s sweetness tinkling down like shards of broken glass.

I stood. “
Bonjọrn
, Dominus Bernard.”

“Botille, at prayer?” The priest’s smile was almost as dazzling as his windows. “I’ll make a good Christian out of you yet.”

I smiled. “Do you make good Christians with sermons, or with kisses?”

The rogue didn’t even have the grace to blush. “The kiss of peace, my daughter. I am generous with the kiss of peace.”

He needed punishment for this. “Generous you are, indeed,” I said. “I hear congratulations are in order. A new addition to your growing family.”

His composure fell somewhat. “Astruga?”

“Bravo for your honesty.”

He clucked his tongue sympathetically. “You’ll help her, won’t you, Botille?” he asked me. “See to it that she’s safely situated?”

“What will
you
do to help her?” I inquired. “By rights, you should be the one offering help. At the very least, you should pay my fee.”

“I,” said our village priest, with an air of great injury, “will give her the sweetest wedding mass a pretty young
toza
could wish for. At my lowest possible price.”

I shook my head and leaned against the wall. “Why did they send you to Bajas, Dominus Bernard?” I said. “A face like yours could have gone to Tolosa. Or París.”

He laughed. “Who says it didn’t?”

This was news to me. “Oh?”

“They sent me here,” he said, “after a few unfortunate misunderstandings.”

“With noblemen’s wives?”

He winked. “A bishop’s concubine, among others.”

“For shame!” I wagged a finger in his face. “You tell me too much, Dominus,” I said. “You ought not to trust me so.”

“Why, Botille,” he said, “you are the one
femna
I know I can trust.”

Because I was smart, and because I was not beautiful. A man’s good female friend, that was me. No matter. I was certainly not standing in line for Bernard’s kisses.

I patted his hand. “Why did you ever become a priest?”

He looked affronted. “It’s my calling,” he said. “I was always marked for the clergy. Do I not minister to the fold? To the sick, to the dying? Am I miserly at dispensing comfort?”

It was true. In every respect except continence, Bernard was a model priest.

“Plus, I like to sing,” he teased. “But what brings you here, Botille?”

I wondered whether I could trust him as much as he claimed to trust me. I decided to make a beginning at it. “You saw me return last night from my journey.”

“
Oc
. Na Pieret’s nephews. She is overjoyed,” he said. “Go on.”

I hesitated. “On my travels, I heard of friar inquisitors traveling in search of heretics.”

Dominus Bernard’s face darkened.

“Do you know anything about this?”

He shifted his weight. “Yes,” he said slowly. “This Order of Preachers has gone
castrum
to
castrum
and
vila
to
vila
, interrogating people to see if they believed in and honored the old
bons omes
and
bonas femnas
.”

His words echoed throughout the old church. They made my skin prickle.

“Have they come here?” I realized I was whispering.

He shook his head.

This silent, private conversation—even it was dangerous. That made me furious.

“Why should they care,” I asked, “if we honored the friends of God? They’re just quiet, pious old people—why would we
not
honor them?”

Dominus Bernard sat down upon a bench. “Because it was our way,” he said at length. “Not Roma’s way.”

All our wars, and all our dead, for nothing but this? “We say
oc
, and they say
si
,” I said, thinking of Giacomo. “That’s our way too. Shall we die for that?”

“The Church decides, Botille,” said our handsome priest, “what is holy and what is not. We decided the
bons omes
and
bonas femnas
were holy without consulting the Church. And look about you.” He gestured to the empty chapel. “No one is here for prayers.”

“What has that to do with anything?” I whispered. “The village is busy at work, fishing and brewing and working the harvest. Does the Church
think the
bons omes
and
bonas femnas
are what keep good Christians from their prayers?”

“They need someone to blame.” Dominus Bernard’s youthful beauty faded a bit when he looked as pensive as now. “Dominic de Guzmán, the founder of their order, was convinced the Church had grown lax and stagnant from Tolosa to Narbona and beyond. Perhaps it had. But he looked about him, saw the friends of God, and decided they were the reason. That’s where the trouble began.”

“You are a man of the Church,” I said, “and this is your native land. What do
you
think?”

He raked his hands through his curly hair. “I . . . I think these inquisitors vaunt themselves too much. The Crusaders did their work and leveled these lands. Soaked them in blood. But still a few friends of God remain. So now these inquisitors think to bring the war to each
castrum
and village in the region. Their inquisition will succeed where we village priests have failed, they say, since the Dominicans are so much smarter than us priests, with all their theology studies. They’re forcing the
senhors
and nobles to do what they wouldn’t do before the war: execute heretics and brutally punish those who were kind to them.”

I turned over his words in my mind.

“They should abandon this mania,” Bernard said. “The
bons omes
and
bonas femnas
are fugitives now. In another generation they will all be in their graves. Why punish people for bowing to them decades ago, when that’s what everyone did?”

“You don’t seem very worried about heresy,” I observed.

He leaned in closer. “Don’t tell the friars,” he said, “but my own uncle was a
bon ome
. He feared God as much as the pope. Our family bowed to him hundreds of times. Thousands.”

“But surely,” I said, “that all lies in the past.”

Dominus Bernard shook his head. “Not to the inquisitors, it doesn’t. One fear enflames them: falsehoods destroying the faith. So where we see neighbors being neighborly, they see heresy spreading. We see a lad bow to an uncle; they see a sympathy forming that will damn the lad to hell when he’s grown. ‘Little foxes,’ they call the heretics, ‘spoiling the vineyard of the Lord.’ What they don’t understand, they destroy. And they believe they please our blessed Savior by doing so.”

I shivered. How close I’d been to Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore. Thank God, he had believed Symo’s tale about who we were.

Dominus Bernard clapped a warm hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about them, Botille,” he said. “We are small and poor in Bajas. They’ll not trouble themselves with us.”

“Why?” I asked. “Aren’t the poor just as vulnerable to heresy as the rich?”

Dominus Bernard laughed. “Very amusing. The Dominican friars own no property, as other religious houses do. When they conduct an inquisition and convict a heretic, the nobles often confiscate their goods and wealth. They’ll even convict the dead, dig up the bones and burn them, to shame their names, and sometimes to snatch property from their heirs. From this treasure, the inquisitors and their order are paid. They are performing a service, you see, for the counts and lords. Ridding their lands of falsehood.”

I rubbed my arms. The chapel felt cold, but I was beginning to see.

“So, naturally,” the priest went on, “they concern themselves mainly with inquisitions in places where there are offenders with goods worth confiscating.”

For the first time since our conversation began, I took a deep, relieved breath. “Just as well.”

“To be small and unimportant, Botille,” said my priest as I bid him
bonjọrn
, “is true freedom. That’s why I like Bajas. When you’re my age, you’ll see what I mean.”

MAURINDA

ust outside the town of Raissac-d’Aude, an old woman watched her grandchildren play on the grassy bank of the wide Aude River. Her name was Maurinda, and she had seen a great many things in her long life, many of which she would much rather not have seen.