The Passion of Dolssa (36 page)

Plazensa sighed. “Jobau,” she called upward, “lower your ladder.”

A boar’s grunt was our answer.

“Jobau,” Plazi persisted, “we have men here who think you might be a holy young maiden. Lower your ladder.”

Jobau told us, and all within earshot, which precise anatomical parts of a jackass he thought we were.

“Drop your ladder, you drunken swine, or you’ll get a flogging that’ll smack you sober,” called Lop.

The ladder came down with a crash and a shower of insults. Lop climbed up, prodded the fetid heap of straw and blankets Jobau called a bed, and came back down. Jobau kept a steady torrent of abuses hurling down upon us for a good while after, and I’d never liked him better than I did just then.

“Satisfied?” Plazensa’s eyes flashed.

“That’s it, then,” said the knight, but the friar held up a hand.

“Where do you store your wine and ale?” he asked my older sister.

She blinked at him. “In the cellar.”

“I thought so.”

Plazi wordlessly rose and slid aside the wooden slab that guarded the opening to her precious stores. Lop held a candle and descended the ladder. He disappeared, leaving us with the knight and the friar watching us.

Keeping our faces still. That was the hardest part.

“Did you venerate Dolssa as a holy woman?” asked the friar.

Plazensa didn’t flinch. “We knew there were those,” she said calmly, “who called her a healer. A
medica
. To us, she was just another boarder at the tavern.”

She made me proud.

A piercing scream met our ears. Lucien de Saint-Honore jumped. From down below, we heard Lop swear. Mimi shot up the ladder and into the tavern. She disappeared under the bar, hissing at us.

I crouched down for a look at her. “Are you all right, cat-cat?” I asked in my infant voice.

“Why would there be a cat in an empty cellar?” demanded the friar.

“Tending to the rats, of course,” Plazensa said haughtily. “I run a clean establishment.”

We waited longer. And longer still. Finally the
bayle
appeared from out of the ground. He had a nasty gash running alongside his nose, beading angry drops of blood.

“If I ever see that cat of yours again,” he told us, “I’ll skin it alive.”

“Where’s my candlestick?” Plazi asked him.

The
bayle
headed for the door, with the knight and friar following. “Fetch it yourself,” he said. “Your devilish cat made me drop it.”

I think I was still shaking that night, when Symo arrived, and we told him what had happened. He might as well know all, since he’d become our brother.

He kicked off his boots and stretched his foul-smelling feet onto a nearby chair.

“It was bound to happen,” he said. “You’re lucky they didn’t find her.”

Mimi strutted by and arched her back—a Mimi who had just feasted on her own specially caught raw fish. Plazensa had told me to buy one from Litgier, but he refused payment.

“We’ve fixed a room for you,” Sazia told Symo. “The room that used to be Dolssa’s.”

“And just like that, I’m banished to bed?” He stretched his burly arms, cracking several joints in the process. “Where’s my dinner?”

Taking advantage of Plazensa just isn’t done. My older
s
rre
bit her lip and sliced him a plate of duck and turnips with murderous efficiency.

I couldn’t abide conversation, nor the stench of his feet. I left the bar and sat in a low chair by the wall, peering out at the darkness of the lagoon through the shutters.

More low clouds had rolled in on sea breezes, blocking any gleam from the night sky.

I couldn’t bear to think of Dolssa, alone in her darkness all night. She must be terrified. After the men had gone, I went downstairs and sat with her for a time, but we none of us dared stay long. Should anyone return, all must seem as usual.

And would they return?

Might the
bayle
recall that he had not, blessings upon our mangy cat, searched the wine cellar as well as possible? Where else could we take Dolssa where she could hide in peace? For she could not stay here forever. Nor could she ever return to the open in Bajas.

We needed time to think, and a good space to hide.

All was quiet in the tavern, save for the unpleasantly moist sounds of Symo’s chewing.

I laid my head in Plazi’s lap. I needed to hide my melancholy from Symo’s unfeeling eyes. Plazi rolled her bracelets like cartwheels across my back.

Symo rose to his feet. “Let’s move Dolssa somewhere safer.” We stared at him. He pulled on his boots. “Dinner, by the way,” he said, “was fairly good.”

“Ignore him, Plazi,” I said. “He’s an ape, not a man.”

The ape peered through the shutters. “It’s good and dark tonight,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

He pulled on his coat. “Get your holy
femna
,” he whispered, “and let’s be off.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Not until you speak sense.”

“Just get her and come.” His voice was dangerously low. “Walls have ears.”

Plazi and I retreated behind the bar to confer.

“What should we do?” I whispered. “Should we trust him? Could this be a trap?”

“Any hiding place is better than this one,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”

The door shut. We looked up to see that Symo had gone. What? Plazi and I stared. What could it mean? Would he now betray us?

I ran after him, out the door and out into the street. Only the faintest sound of footsteps told me he was heading uphill toward town. I flew after him until we collided in the dark. We both stumbled. Symo only barely caught me before we fell.

He clutched me by my arms and forced me to look at him. He was nothing but darkness, and a gleam upon eyes and teeth.

“Why did you leave?” I asked him.

“Why did I come, is the question!”

He was so angry. Symo was always angry, but this frightened me.

“You came because you had to, you bungler,” I reminded him. “You invented the lie, and you’re seeing it through.”

“Did I have to, Botille Flasucra? Did I?”

Oh,
Dieu
. With my sisters and Dolssa in mortal peril, must I appease Symo’s temper, too? Heaven help me! But the brute demanded I face him.

“No,” I said.

He relaxed his grip.

“You didn’t have to. Now let me go.”

He released my arms. I almost stumbled again, I was so off-balance, but I righted myself this time.

“I didn’t have to come, but I came. And still you do not trust me. You stand there, asking your sister, ‘Should we trust him?’ ‘Is this a trap?’
Mon Dieu
!”

Could people hear us?

The thought of Dolssa, huddled in the cellar, gave me strength. “I hardly know you,” I said. “I have Dolssa’s life to think of, and my sisters’. And now the friar’s here—”

“Sssh.” He took my elbow and led me back down the hill toward the water.

We stood alone on the dark beach. The air smelled of salt and sand and fish. As though all was peace, and harvesttime, and autumn nights. Not the end of everything.

“‘Now the friar’s here’?” He prompted me to continue.

“
Oc
.” I breathed in the wet sea air. “Now the friar’s here, and I have no answers. Only fears, and danger everywhere I turn.”

Symo kicked at the wet sand. It splashed in clumps into
la mar
. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“No.” My answer surprised me. Didn’t I? “No, I don’t hate you. I just don’t like you much.”

He looked out over the water. He laughed a little, a dry, bitter sound. The first time I’d ever heard him laugh. Then he stood a while. There was only enough light to see the glint in his eyes, and the stirring of the wind through his dark hair.

“You can hate me if you like, Botille,” he finally said, “but you’ve got no choice but to trust me. I should have thought you’d have the sense to see that.”

I wanted to be far from here. Long gone, with my sisters and Dolssa close by me.
Carry me away,
I begged
la mar
,
far away to safety. Then bring me back home to the Bajas I knew before.

“Come on, then,” Symo said. “It’s dark enough. Let’s pack some food and lead your Dolssa to my wine cellar, out in the vineyards. She’ll be far more comfortable there.”

LUCIEN DE SAINT-HONORE

tate your name.”

The scrawny lad across the table from Lucien mumbled something.

“One more time, my son?”

“Garcia.” The boy licked his chapped and peeling lips.

“Garcia.” Lucien wrote the word on a piece of parchment. They had experimented, first with the notary, then with having Bernard, the parish priest who’d brought the boy in, take transcription, but neither was quick enough. The priest’s writing was full of errors. Ignorant provincial clerics. No wonder the people were susceptible to error, with an
illiteratus
expounding scripture to them.

“Surname?”

The boy gazed at him blankly. They sat in the dusty sacristy of Sant Martin’s church. Barely more than a closet, it was filled with candlesticks, censers, vessels for wine and oil. The youth sweated in his seat as Lop, Senhor Hugo, Bernard, and Lucien looked on.

“Family name,” suggested Lop, seated on a short stool in one corner.

Lucien looked expectantly at the boy.

“What is your father’s name, son?” asked Senhor Hugo, who stood against the back wall, watching like a vulture on a bare branch as each person was examined.

“Oh. Garcia.”

Lucien decided to let it pass. He wrote “de Bajas” after the boy’s name. “How old are you?”

The boy sighed with relief. Finally a question he could answer. “Fourteen.”

“Garcia,” Lucien said. “Do you now, or have you ever at any time, known, spoken to, bowed to, adored, venerated, given gifts, food, shelter, or aid to, or otherwise succored a heretic, one of the so-called
amicx de Dieu
?”

The boy turned to Dominus Bernard in a plea for help. “I . . . pardon?”

The priest just stared at the floor.

This boy was clearly slow of mind. But that could be useful. Lucien smoothed his pile of parchment leaves. No hurry, no hurry at all.

“Have you, my son, ever seen any people called
bons omes
or
bonas femnas
? The good men and the good women, sometimes called the ‘friends of God’?”

The boy frowned. He seemed relieved; this wasn’t the question he’d been fearing. “There used to be an old lady, a few doors down. Esmerelda. Folks would bow to her, and she would bless them. Mamà would have me take fruits to her sometimes.”

E-s-m-e-r-e-l-d-a.
Lucien wrote the name carefully. “Do you know her family name? Any other names by which she was known? No? No matter.” He dipped his quill in the ink. “Is she still alive?”

The boy shook his head. “Been dead for years.”

“And do you know where she is buried?”

The boy’s expression said this was a daft question. “Churchyard,” he said. “Same as everyone else.”

“I see.” Lucien laid down the quill and looked more closely at the boy. “Now, Garcia,” he said, “did you think Na Esmerelda was good?”