The Passion of Dolssa (46 page)

Every footstep made me nervous, but none more than the tread of a clergyman. What I feared most of all were the black-and-white friars. Two by two, they made their way everywhere.

Outside Perpinhan, a group of Franciscan brothers offered
sọpa
to the poor. I was dirty and desperate enough to stand in line. I drank down the hot soup they offered me.

An older friar gazed into my eyes. “Bless you, my daughter,” he said. “You are very young to look so hungry and cold.”

His kind eyes lured me in, made me long to trust him. Did they always feed the hungry? Might my sisters or Symo have passed this way? I guzzled the soup as fast as I could.

“What is your name, child?”

A few gulps more, and I returned the bowl, bowed my thanks, and ran away. No churchman should ever hear my name. I hadn’t yet thought of another to give.

I picked my way across the Pirenèus Mountains, stealing clothing and begging food as I went. Where I could, I slept in barns, huddled next to calves and goats. The mountain air was cold, and winter was fast approaching. I had to get to warmer Aragón, or perhaps Catalonha, south of the mountains. The language was different there, but not so different that I couldn’t manage. The church would be there, too, but perhaps word of a runaway heretic girl would be slower to reach this way.

For I was the traveling heretic now. I was Dolssa. The fugitive running from the Church, bereft of family and friends.

Every night I prayed for Plazensa, for Sazia. For Symo, too, wherever he might be. I prayed for Jobau’s soul, for Mamà’s, and for Dolssa’s, too, though it lay safe in her beloved’s arms.

Sweet and pure Dolssa, who willingly gave up her life for ours. And that knight, who died trying to help her! Had I known he was an ally, what might have been?

She need not have died. The world would have been better served by letting us die and preserving her gifts. She was a shining light. The world needed lights like hers more than it needed a soothsayer, a tavern keeper, and a failed matchmaker.

I missed my sisters. Whenever I lay down to sleep, I felt as though Plazensa and Sazia were my lungs, robbed from me, and I couldn’t breathe. When finally I slept, Symo appeared in my dreams, without a word, holding me in his arms as he’d done before, resting his head upon my shoulder.

I began telling fortunes for pennies, or for food, for travelers I met on the road. I was a fraud, of course; I didn’t have Sazia’s gifts. But I could make things up. I knew well from watching Sazia what people liked to hear. I could often learn a good deal about them just by listening to their chatter and studying their appearances. I told them things about themselves that they hadn’t told me, and they hailed me as a true fortune-teller. It was thievery of me, but less so, I thought, than stealing food and clothes outright. I gave some entertainment for my pay. I began to have the means to feed myself and buy from peasant women some of their warmer secondhand clothes.

I was the fortune-teller now. I was Sazia.

When asked, I told them my name was Astruga.

I crossed the Pirenèus and kept my journey pointed south, deep into the kingdom of Aragón. Here the land was different, drier and warmer. I missed above all the call of the seagulls, and the murmur of
la mar
. But ports, I knew, were places where stories were told, where churchmen came and went. Better safety, I thought, could be found inland.

Their language was different, but not so much that I couldn’t keep pace. An accent was not a drawback for a fortune-teller; it made me exotic. But I worked to imitate the local dialects so I could blend in as much as possible.

One cold night I pooled my pennies and begged of an older woman a low price for a bed for the night. She let me in and fed me. I told her my name was Maria and that I came from Tolosa. This far from Provensa, she wouldn’t recognize my false dialect.

She seemed glad of my company, and I was glad of hers. She told me to call her Mima. I helped her clean her cottage after supper, and brought in wood for her in the morning. I paid for my room and made to leave, but she told me if I wanted to, I could stay.

Trust her.

Bonjọrn
, Dolssa.

I lived with Mima for two months. She never asked where I came from. She gardened, she took in washing and boarders and sold supper. I helped her. She was a widow, she told me, with a son she hadn’t seen in years.

I watched Mima watch her neighbors pass by, and in time I began to see one particular man hold her gaze more than any other. A
grizzled cobbler who often bought her suppers and who lived just up the street.

One night I followed him out the door.

“Do you like her cooking?”

He looked at me as though I’d gone daft. “I eat it, don’t I?”

“Marry her,” I told him.

His shoes ground a hole in the red dusty path. “How’s that?”

“Marry her,” I repeated. “Eat her food for the rest of her life, without price.”

So he did.

Mima asked me if I’d look after her house for a while. As a favor, she put it, but I knew it was her gift of gratitude. It was the first time I’d ever lived truly alone. I planted her garden in the spring. I took special care to plant many onions.

The cobbler grew fat on Mima’s cooking and made more shoes than ever. He made special shoes for Mima’s aching feet, and that was more love than her tired bones knew how to receive. I hadn’t utterly lost the old matchmaking magic.

I took to telling fortunes in my little cottage. Mima sent people to me, and they brought silver pennies, and sometimes bits of meat or fish, in return for my predictions. When my customers were young and unmarried, I predicted spouses for them with special accuracy.

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.