The Passion of Dolssa (12 page)

Sazia clearly would have liked to ask more questions, but she looked over my shoulder. “He’s well down the road,” she said. “He grows smaller with each step. Who was he? Already, I don’t like him. Look what he’s done to you. Your heart is racing.”

I ignored her questions and dragged her back the way we’d come, ignoring Garcia’s shout from the cart. “You come too,” I called to Symo over my shoulder. “We need your help.”

I slid down the trail my footsteps had matted in the tall grasses, back to where the poor girl lay. Her eyes were closed. She was still.

In an instant I was six, finding my mother.

No.

I threw myself down on the mud and grass beside her. I rubbed her cheeks. I stretched myself over her body, not to crush but to warm her.

“Open your eyes,” I cried. “Talk to me. Help is here,
galineta
, sweetheart, wake up!”

She was cold. But not completely. Her body shuddered, and she coughed.

I heard Symo ask my sister, from a dozen leagues away, “Does she know the girl?”

Sazia knelt beside me, and together we rubbed the creature’s arms and trunk and face. There was almost nothing there.

“Don’t stand there, you great ox,” I told Symo. “Go get some wine and a blanket. If your goats have any milk in them, get us some. We’ll need you to carry her too.”

Symo started up the slope, for once without any protest.

“Don’t tell the others,” I called to him. He halted, turned, then shrugged and carried on.

“How’s he supposed to not tell?” Sazia wrapped her coat around the girl. “They’re waiting and wondering what’s become of you. Garcia the elder is hopping to be on our way.”

“I don’t know. Give her to me.” Forget Symo carrying her. I eased her into my lap myself and rocked her back and forth. The poor girl tucked her head under my chin. I could feel her shallow breath down my neck. At least she was breathing. I breathed along with her. In, out, in, out.
This is the way we stay alive.

Symo returned quickly with a shallow bowl of foamy milk and a blanket. He knelt and held the bowl to the girl’s face and tipped some in. Dribbles ran down my skin under my frock. The girl snorted and spluttered, then began suckling the lip of the bowl like a baby at the breast. My own full-size baby.

“What did you tell them?” Sazia asked Symo. She tucked the blanket around us both.

“That Botille had taken a fancy to having a little nap here by the river.”

“You
what
?” I cried.

Symo shrugged. “Did you give me a better option? Not everyone has your gift for lying. It was the best I could do. I told them you asked for a comforting drink of warm milk before lying down.”

The girl in my arms roused herself somewhat, and raised her head.

“I’ll pickle you when we get home.” I turned to my patient. “Are you alive,
donzȩlla
?”

Her wet lips worked up and down as though she hadn’t realized the bowl was gone. Swallowing seemed an altogether new experience. “Is there more?”

I wanted to cheer, hearing a voice come from that hollow body.

“Slowly,” I said. “We’ll get you some. But you must drink slowly, or you’ll give it back to us, and we won’t like that a bit.”

She shrank. “Just a little more?”

Symo went to get some. The girl drooped against my shoulder. Overhead, the sky grew paler, lit with orange at the far horizon.

“Tell us your name,” I whispered. “What do they call you back home?”

She grew so still that I feared she’d left us. I shook her slightly.

“No name,” she murmured. “No home.”

Symo returned with more milk. The girl’s determination to drink it gave me hope.

“Botille,” Symo said, “Garcia and Gui have no patience for this game you’re playing.”

“And whose fault is it that they think I’m playing it?”

“We’re losing time,” he said. “Let’s bring the girl with us and be on our way. We can explain how we found her to them.”

Milk ran down the invalid’s chin and into her lap. She pulled away from the dish and turned toward me. It was an effort.

I could not say how old she was. I would have thought young, though her wasted appearance could have belonged to a much older woman. But her eyes—they were older than lifetimes.

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

Sazia, who stood frowning down on the whole proceedings, spoke up. “To stay is to die.”

“In Christ’s name, tell them nothing, unless you would murder me.” This speech left her tired and coughing.

“Murder you!” I cried. “Weakness has made you mad. You are on death’s very door. Come, and we will nurse you back to health. Our friends will do you no harm.”

The girl didn’t take her eyes off me. “Far better I die here,” she said, “then follow and die at the hands of my enemies.”

I remembered the inquisitor, and tucked the blanket more tightly around her. “They’re looking for you, aren’t they?”

She closed her eyes.

“The friar said he would lead you back to God,” I told her.

“I never left God.” She opened her eyes. “He means to lead me by the fastest route.”

From higher up on the banks, we heard Garcia calling to us.

“Just a moment, Garcia!” I hollered back. “I . . . I’ve been ill. I am changing my clothes.”

Symo’s eyebrow rose, and I realized my mistake. “Run up and wait with them,” I ordered. “I’m not changing my clothes around you.”

“No one asked you to.” Symo left.

“I barely escaped,” the girl went on. “My mother did not.” She sank in upon herself then. Her eyes grew dull, her face slack.

Sazia’s face brooded darkly.
What do you see, little
s
rre
?
I wondered.

“Blackness.” My sister answered my thoughts aloud by whispering in my ear. “She is a storm cloud of sorrow. You wander in, you may never find your way out.”

“So we leave her to die, then?” I whispered back. “I’m surprised at you, Sazia.”

“Death might be a mercy for her.” Sazia gazed at the girl’s wan face. “I don’t like it either. But listen to what she said. She must be a heretic, and sentenced to die. Somehow she got away. Do you think they will just let her go?”

My eyes smarted with tears. She was practical, always, and cool-headed. But still, I wouldn’t have expected this of my Sazia.

“She can’t be a heretic,” I said. “Look at her face. Like a sad angel.”

“What did you think, that heretics grew horns?”

I had heard words to that effect. Horns, and giant genitals, too.

“There won’t be room in all Provensa for me to hide from Plazi if any harm befalls you.”

Sazia’s forebodings often went too far. Fortune-tellers are in the warnings business, just as marriage brokers are in the love business. We each have biases that follow our trade.

I made my decision. The girl’s face made it for me. “There won’t be room in hell for
my
wretched soul if I leave her here to die,” I said. “We’ll take her with us, and you’ll help me.”

Sazia pursed her lips and stood. “So be it, then,” she said. “I’ve warned you.”

Sazia climbed the slope and persuaded Garcia that all was well and that they should resume their journey, while Symo helped me wrap the
donzȩlla
in a blanket and hide her in his small cart, obscured by some bags of seed. She struggled against our efforts to bundle her into the barrow.

“I must follow the river to the sea,” she said feebly. “North and east is my route.”

“And that is how Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore follows you,” I told her, “north and east along the Aude. We will take you to the sea if that’s where you wish to go. But we will take you south and east, away from the river route. That will rid you of your pursuer.”

She was too weary to protest any further, so she yielded herself reluctantly to our care.

Sazia and I walked with Symo’s cart, which rattled along behind Garcia’s. Symo walked with the Garcias and Gui, which suited me. Privacy was our best hope. We kept a sheet handy to drape over the girl’s face any time other travelers came into view.

I jumped at hoofbeats and birdcalls. I worried that every shadow was the friar, come to snatch my poor bird. But no one wondered at our cargo. With each passing hour, I pictured the inquisitor’s course veering farther and farther off from ours.

I’d armed myself with the whip Sazia had told me to bring, to use against anyone who had clever ideas about what to do with country lasses walking the roads alone. Already I’d been forced to brandish it once at a shrimpy pair of harvesters who wanted to tumble in the weeds, but we’d managed to fend them off with words rather than blows. Another time a man of high bearing and very proud countenance rode past us. He stopped to study me full on in the face, then pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks and rode on. Not that I wanted his kisses, mind, but I was annoyed. That ugly, was I? That common? What else would I be, strolling along a country road at such an hour? Did he hope to find an heiress?

My little bird poked her head up from her blankets like a turtle emerging from its shell. “Do you have any cheese?”

Sazia rolled her eyes. “Next she’ll want roast beef,” she said. “Food’s in the other cart.”

“Leave off,” I said. “She’s been starving. And it just so happens, I do have cheese.” I pulled a small brick of cheese, wrapped in a cloth, from my little pouch. “Remember? You told me to bring it.” I broke off a section and offered it to the girl, then pulled my hand back. “A bite will cost you your name.”

She turned away. “I can’t trust anyone with my name.”

I took a bite. “I can’t trust strangers with my cheese.” It wasn’t my kindest moment.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s Braida.”

“There, Braida,” I said. “That wasn’t so hard, was—”

“She’s lying,” Sazia said.

The girl’s face grew pink. She scowled at my sister.

“My name is Pitrella Braida,” she said more humbly. “Surely, you will allow me the privacy of my family name, given my situation.”

My hardhearted sister shook her head. “She cares about someone by that name,” she observed. “But Pitrella Braida is not her own name.”

“What are you, a devil?” cried the girl. Up ahead, Garcia turned to look back at us.

“Plazi always said you were a little devil,” I said loudly to Sazia. “But that’s just Plazi for you.” I turned to our prisoner. “You’d best shush if you don’t want to be found out.”

“You are devils, both of you,” she whispered, and a tear ran down her cheek, “to torment a Christian maiden so. I’ve told you my troubles. You pride yourself with the thought of helping me, but you’re helping me to my death. God in heaven! Would that I had died with my mother!”

“Maybe,” Sazia ventured, “you should just give her the cheese.”

So I did. As I handed it to her, a thought came into my mind.
Be patient with her.
Not my own impulse, surely. Patience never was my strength. But as I watched her eat her cheese, too quickly, too hungrily, and I remembered my own lean winters, I thought how this genteel young lady had probably never learned how to tighten her belt and get by.
All right,
I told the thought.
I’ll try.

She wiped crumbs off her lips with her fragile fingers, then settled back down in her nest to sleep. Before she did, she opened her deep-set eyes and looked at us both.

“My name,” she said, “is Dolssa de Stigata. I am from Tolosa. With this information, you could betray me to a heretic’s fiery death, though in the name of God, I swear I am no heretic.”

I glanced at Sazia. She nodded slowly.

“Good to meet you, Dolssa de Stigata de Tolosa,” she said. “I am Sazia Flasucra, and this is my sister Botille. We are both of the fishing town of Bajas, at present. We have an older sister, Plazensa. We will take you to our home and hide you there. We will never betray you.”

Dolssa closed her eyes. “I am in your hands, and you are in God’s, so I remain where I have always been.” In minutes she was asleep.