The Divining

by Wood, Barbara

  PRAISE FOR BARBARA WOOD

  "Wood crafts vivid sketches of women who triumph over destiny."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "Entertainment fiction at its best."

  —Booklist

  "Absolutely splendid."

  —Cynthia Freeman, New York Times bestselling author

  "Wood creates genuine, engaging characters whose stories are fascinating."

  —Library Journal

  "A master storyteller."

  —Tulsa World

  "[Wood] never fails to leave the reader enthralled."

  —Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of A Woman of Independent Means

  Other Books By

  BARBARA WOOD

  Virgins of Paradise

  The Dreaming

  Green City in the Sun

  This Golden Land

  Soul Flame

  Vital Signs

  Domina

  The Watch Gods

  Childsong

  Night Trains

  Yesterday's Child

  Curse This House

  Hounds and Jackals

  Books By

  KATHRYN HARVEY

  Butterfly

  Stars

  Private Entrance

  Turner Publishing Company

  200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950

  Nashville, Tennessee 37219

  445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor

  New York, NY 10022

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  The Divining

  Copyright © 2012 Barbara Wood. All rights reserved.

  This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The Divining is a work of historical fiction. Although some events and people in this book are based on historical fact, others are the products of the author's imagination.

  Cover design by Gina Binkley

  Interior design by Mike Penticost

  Cover image: St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1507-8 (oil on panel)by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino) (1483-1520)

  National Gallery, London, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wood, Barbara, 1947-

  The divining / Barbara Wood.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59652-858-1 (hardcover)

  1. Young women--Fiction. 2. Rome--History--Nero, 54-68--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.05877D58 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2011039853

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 17 18—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my husband Walt, with love.

  BOOK ONE

  ROME, 54 C.E.

  1

  S

  HE CAME SEEKING ANSWERS.

  Nineteen-year-old Ulrika had awoken that morning with the feeling that something was wrong. The feeling had grown while she had bathed and dressed, and her slaves had bound up her hair and tied sandals to her feet, and brought her a breakfast of wheat porridge and goat's milk. When the inexplicable uneasiness did not go away, she decided to visit the Street of Fortune-Tellers, where seers and mystics, astrologers and soothsayers promised solutions to life's mysteries.

  Now, as she was carried through the noisy streets of Rome in a curtained chair, she wondered what had caused her uneasiness. Yesterday, everything had been fine. She had visited friends, browsed in bookshops, spent time at her loom—the typical day of a young woman of her class and breeding. But then she had had a strange dream ...

  Just past the midnight hour, Ulrika had dreamed that she gotten out of bed, crossed to her window, climbed out, and landed barefoot in snow. In the dream, tall pines grew all around her, instead of the fruit trees behind her villa, a forest instead of an orchard, and clouds whispered across the face of a winter moon. She saw tracks—big paw prints in the snow, leading into the woods. Ulrika followed them, feeling moonlight brush her bare shoulders. She came upon a large, shaggy wolf with golden eyes. She sat down in the snow and he came to lie beside her, putting his head in her lap. The night was pure, as pure as the wolf's eyes gazing up at her, and she could feel the steady beat of his mighty heart beneath his ribs. The golden eyes blinked and seemed to say: Here is trust, here is love, here is home.

  Ulrika had awoken disoriented. And then she had wondered: Why did I dream of a wolf? Wolf was my father's name. He died long ago in faraway Persia.

  Is the dream a sign? But a sign of what?

  Her slaves brought the chair to a halt, and Ulrika stepped down, a tall girl wearing a long gown of pale pink silk, with a matching stole that draped over her head and shoulders in proper maidenly modesty, hiding tawny hair and a graceful neck. She carried herself with a poise and confidence that concealed a growing anxiety.

  The Street of Fortune-Tellers was a narrow alley obscured by the shadow of crowded tenement buildings. The tents and stalls of the psychics, augers, seers, and soothsayers looked promising, painted in bright colors, festooned with glittering objects, each one brighter than the next. Business was booming for purveyors of good-luck charms, magic relics, and amulets.

  As Ulrika entered the lane, desperate to know the meaning of the wolf dream, hawkers called to her from tents and booths, claiming to be "genuine Chaldeans," to have direct channels to the future, to possess the Third Eye. She went first to the bird-reader, who kept crates of pigeons whose entrails he read for a few pennies. His hands caked with blood, he assured Ulrika that she would find a husband before the year was out. She went next to the stall of the smoke-reader, who declared that the incense predicted five healthy children for Ulrika.

  She continued on until, three quarters along the crowded lane, she came upon a person of humble appearance, sitting only on a frayed mat, with no shade or booth or tent. The seer sat cross-legged in a long white robe that had known better days, long bony hands resting on bony knees. The head was bowed, showing a crown of hair that was blacker than jet, parted in the middle and streaming over the shoulders and back. Ulrika did not know why she would choose so impoverished a soothsayer—perhaps on some level she felt this one might be more interested in truth than in money—but she came to a halt before the curious person, and waited.

  After a moment, the fortune-teller lifted her head, and Ulrika was startled by the unusual aspect of the face, which was long and narrow, all bone and yellow skin, framed by the streaming black hair. Mournful black eyes beneath highly arched brows looked up at Ulrika. The woman almost did not look human, and she was ageless. Was she twenty or eighty? A brown and black spotted cat lay curled asleep next to the fortune-teller. Ulrika recognized the breed as an Egyptian Mau, said to be the most ancient of cat breeds, possibly even the progenitor from which all cats had sprung.

  Ulrika brought her attention back to the fortune-teller's swimming black eyes filled with sadness and wisdom.

  "You have a question," the fortune-teller said in perfect Latin, eyes peering steadily from deep sockets.

  The sounds of the alley faded. Ulrika was captured by the black Egyptian eyes, while the brown cat snoozed obliviously.

  "You want to ask me about a wolf," the Egyptian said in a voice that sounded older than the Nile.

  "It was in a dream, Wise One. Was it a sign?"

  "A sign of what? Tell me your question."

  "I do not know where I belong, Wise One. My mother is Roman, my father German. I was born in Persia and have spent most of my life roaming with my mother, for she followed a quest. Everywhere we went, I felt like an outsider. I am worried, Wise One, that if I do not know where I belong, I will never know who I am.
Was the wolf dream a sign that I belong in the Rhineland with my father's people? Is it time for me to leave Rome?"

  "There are signs all about you, daughter. The gods guide us everywhere, every moment."

  "You speak in riddles, Wise One. Can you at least tell me my future?"

  "There will be a man," the fortune-teller said, "who will offer you a key. Take it."

  "A key? To what?"

  "You will know when the time comes ..."

  2

  A

  S ULRIKA ENTERED THE garden behind the high wall on the Esquiline Hill, she pressed her hand to her bosom and felt, beneath the silken fabric of her dress, the Cross of Odin, a protective amulet she had worn since she was a child. She felt its comforting shape and reassuring hardness against her breast, and tried to tell herself that everything was going to be all right. But the ill-ease she had awoken with that morning had stayed with her all day so that now, as a red-orange sun began to set behind Rome's marble monuments, Ulrika could hardly breathe. She wanted everything to be normal again. Even things that, just one day ago, had annoyed her, she would welcome on this late afternoon. The issue, for example, of everyone's expectation that she marry Drusus Fidelius.

  Ulrika did not want to be disobedient. Rome raised its daughters to be wives and mothers. All of her friends were either married or betrothed (except for poor deformed Cassia, whose cleft lip guaranteed a lifetime of spinsterhood). No other aspirations were considered. A young woman on her own, without the protection of a man, was a rarity. Even widows were taken in by male relatives. Ulrika had confided in her best friend her wish not to marry, Drusus Fidelius or any man, and her friend had declared, "But no girl chooses to remain unmarried! Ulrika, what would you do?" Ulrika had no answer other than to say that she had always had the vague feeling that she was supposed to do something else. But what that was, she could not say. Her mother had trained her in basic healing arts, the manufacture and use of medicines, knowledge of human anatomy and how to diagnose illness, but Ulrika did not want to follow in her mother's profession, she did not wish to be a healer-woman.

  As she stood in the garden and watched the guests arriving for the dinner party, she thought: Roman men greet their womenfolk with a kiss on the cheek, not out of affection but to see if they detect alcohol on their sisters or daughters—so controlling the men are. But Ulrika had heard that women in Germania were treated with greater respect and equality by their men.

  Ulrika had flowered into womanhood among Rome's villas and streets and temples. She had known crowded and noisy cities, and a life of luxury in a fine house on the Esquiline Hill. But what of alpine forests shrouded in mist and mystery? Ulrika had devoured every book there was on her father's people, the Germans—had absorbed their culture and customs, their beliefs and history. She had even learned to speak their language.

  To what end? she asked herself now as she watched the guests arriving in the courtyard of Aunt Paulina's house. She recognized them all, ladies in flowing gowns, gentlemen in long tunics and handsome togas. Had it all been in preparation to travel to the land where she truly belonged? It would not be an easy journey. Her father, Wulf, had died long ago, before she was born. And if he left behind kinfolk, Ulrika would have no way of knowing who they were, how to find them. She knew only that he had been a prince and hero of his forest people, and that he had bequeathed to her a bloodline of Rhineland chieftains and mystic seeresses.

  A breeze wafted through the garden, stirring branches and leaves and the finely woven linen of Ulrika's long dress. She wore the latest fashion, which called for layers, an effect created by wearing a knee-length overdress as well as multiple shawls, all in varying lengths and shades of blue ranging from deep azure to the hue of the morning sky. Her long hair was braided and knotted at the back of her head, and concealed beneath a flowing saffron yellow veil, called a palla, that covered her arms and fell below her waist. Gold earrings and bracelets completed her wardrobe.

  She shivered. If I am destined to leave, when and how would I go?

  "There you are, my dear."

  Ulrika turned to see her mother enter the garden. Selene, at forty, was poised and graceful, her slim figure draped in layers of fine linen in reds and oranges. Her dark brown hair was swept modestly to a knot at the back of her head and hidden beneath a scarlet veil.

  "Paulina said I would find you out here," Selene said as she approached her daughter with hands outstretched.

  Lady Paulina was a widowed noblewoman, and this was her house. Ulrika called her Aunt Paulina, as she was her mother's best friend, a woman who moved in Rome's highest circles. Paulina only invited the most elite citizens to her table, and Ulrika's mother, Selene, being a doctor and a close friend of Emperor Claudius, was one of them.

  Ulrika linked her arm with her mother's, and as they neared the house, they came upon three men of stiff, military bearing debating a point of battle strategy. They wore long white tunics, their bodies draped in purple-edged togas. Seeing the two women, the men paused to greet them and introduce themselves, and when one, an archly handsome man with white teeth set in a tanned face, identified himself as Gaius Vatinius, Ulrika felt her mother stiffen. "Commander Vatinius?" Selene said. "Have I heard of you, sir?"

  One of the other men laughed. "If you have not, dear lady, then you have ruined his day! Vatinius would be shattered to know that there was one beautiful woman in Rome who did not know who he was."

  Hearing the strain in her mother's voice, Ulrika looked more closely at the man Selene had addressed as "Commander." He was tall, in his early forties, with deep-set eyes and a large, straight nose. His handsomeness was severe, as if he had been chiseled from marble, his manner arrogant as the hint of a smug smile played around his lips.

  "Are you, by any chance," Ulrika heard her mother ask in a breathless voice, "the Gaius Vatinius who fought some years ago on the Rhine?"

  His smile deepened. "You have heard of me, then."

  Gaius Vatinius then looked at Ulrika. His eyes moved up and down her body, lingeringly, making her feel uncomfortable. In the next moment, a slave announced the serving of dinner, and the three men excused themselves and headed toward the house.

  Ulrika turned to her mother and saw that she had gone pale. "Gaius Vatinius upset you, mother. Who is he?"

  Selene avoided her daughter's eyes as she said, "He once commanded the legions on the Rhine. It was years ago, before you were born. Let us go in."

  Four banquet tables were set, each bordered on three sides by couches. The placement of guests followed strict protocol, with the honored ones reclining on the left edge of each couch. The fourth side of the table was open, to allow slaves to come and go with food and drink. Roasted pheasant, dressed in their feathers, dominated the tables, surrounded by a variety of dishes from which the guests were to help themselves. The conversation of thirty-six people filled the dining room as they took their places, nearly drowning out the solo performance of a musician playing panpipes.

  As Ulrika was about to take her place on a couch next to a lawyer named Maximus, she glanced across at Gaius Vatinius and stopped when she saw a peculiar sight.

  Sitting on the floor at the Commander's side was a large dog.

  Ulrika frowned. Why would a dinner guest bring his dog to the party? She looked around at the other guests, who were laughing and helping themselves to wine and delicacies. Did no one else think it odd?

  Ulrika brought her gaze back to the dog. Her lips parted. The breath stopped in her chest. No, not a dog. A wolf! Large and gray and shaggy, with keen eyes and sharp ears, like the one in her dream. And it was looking straight at her while Gaius Vatinius engaged in conversation with his fellow diners.

  Ulrika could not take her eyes off the handsome creature.

  But as she stood and watched, the wolf slowly vanished until he was completely gone. Ulrika blinked. He had not risen from his seated posture. He had not left the dining room. He had simply faded away, right before her eyes.

 
Ulrika felt the floor drop from under her. She reached for the couch and slumped down. Her throat tightened in fear. Now she understood why the ill-ease had plagued her all day.

  The sickness had returned.

  3

  U

  LRIKA HAD THOUGHT THE secret sickness that had clouded her childhood, and which she had told no one about, not even her mother, had ended when she was twelve.

  She could not recall the first time she had seen something that other children did not, or had dreamed of an event before it happened, or had brushed someone's hand and had felt that person's emotional pain. When she was eight years old, in a butcher shop with her mother, the butcher searching for a cleaver while customers waited impatiently, Ulrika speaking up, "It fell under a table in the back," the butcher disappearing into a room in the rear of the shop to return with the cleaver and a strange look on his face. Ulrika had seen enough of those strange looks to know that the things she saw or sensed, in dreams or in visions, were not normal. As she already felt like an outsider in every city she and her mother briefly lived in, Ulrika had learned to hold her tongue and let people hunt for missing cleavers.

  And then finally, on a summer day seven years ago, Ulrika and her mother had enjoyed a picnic in the countryside, and in the heat of that day, amid the drone of bees and the heady perfume of flowers, Ulrika had seen a young woman suddenly come running from the trees, her long hair flying behind her, mouth wide in a silent scream, arms stained with blood.

  "Mother, what is that woman running from?" Ulrika had said, thinking they should go to her aid. "Her hands are covered in blood."

  "What woman?" Selene had asked, looking around.

  When the woman faded before her eyes, Ulrika realized in shock that it had been one of her secret visions, but more vivid and lifelike than any she had seen before. "No one, mother, she is gone now."

  That was seven years ago, and no more hallucinations had visited Ulrika after that, no strange dreams of precognition or fantastical places, no sensing other people's emotions, no knowing where lost objects could be found. Ulrika had entered puberty and become at last like all other girls, normal and healthy. But now, at Aunt Paulina's dinner party, a vision like those of years ago had just visited her.