The Passion of Dolssa (27 page)

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 barged 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.