The Divining

by Wood, Barbara

  Ulrika was brought out of her thoughts by the voice of Gaius Vatinius.

  "The Germans need to be taken in hand," he was saying to his table companions. "We signed peace treaties with the Barbarians during the reign of Tiberius, and now they are breaking them. I shall quell the unrest once and for all."

  The guests in Lady Paulina's dining room reclined on couches, supporting themselves with their left arms while helping themselves to food with their right hands. The place of honor at Ulrika's table went to Commander Vatinius. Her mother, acting as hostess, lay on the couch to his left. Ulrika was opposite. In between were a couple named Maximus and Juno, a retired accountant named Horatius, and an elderly widow named Lady Aurelia. They reached for mushrooms fried in garlic and onions, crispy anchovies, plump sparrows stuffed with pine nuts.

  When he saw how Ulrika stared at him, Commander Gaius Vatinius, a lifelong bachelor, fell silent and stared in turn. He could not fail to appreciate her unusual beauty—the ivory skin and hair the color of dark honey. Blue eyes were a rarity, too, among Rome's ladies. A glance at her left hand told him she was unmarried, which surprised him, as he guessed she was past the age.

  He smiled charmingly and said, "I am boring you with military talk."

  "Not at all, Commander," Ulrika said. "I have always been interested in the Rhineland."

  Lady Aurelia said fretfully, "Why can't they settle down and be civilized? Look what we have done for the rest of the world. Our aqueducts, our roads."

  Vatinius turned to the older woman. "What has the Barbarians so upset is that, four years ago, Emperor Claudius elevated a settlement on the Rhine from the status of garrison to colony, naming it Colonia Agrippinensis in honor of his wife, Agrippina, who was born there. That was when the new raids truly began. Apparently the Romanization of an old Germanic territory has stirred up feelings of some outmoded tribal patriotism and racial pride." Vatinius waved a long-fingered hand laden with rings. "Claudius has given me the honored duty of seeing to it that Colonia is defended at all costs."

  Ulrika reached for her wine, but could not drink. The wolf ... and now talk of renewed fighting in Germania.

  "The Barbarians have been peaceful for such a long time," said Maximus, the rich and fat lawyer. He held up his hand and his personal slave stepped forward to wipe his greasy fingers. "I hear the tribes are being incited by one particular rebel leader. Do you know who he is?"

  A dark look rippled across Vatinius's handsome face. "We do not know who he is, or even his name. We've never seen him. According to intelligence, he came from nowhere, all of a sudden, and is now leading Germanic tribes in fresh uprisings. They strike when we least expect it, and then vanish into the forest."

  Vatinius sipped his wine, paused while a slave wiped his lips for him, then added with confidence, "But I shall find that rebel leader, and when I do I shall make an example of him by public execution as a warning to others who might have rebellious thoughts."

  Ulrika said, "What makes you so certain, Commander, that you will be successful? I have read that the Germans are cunning, Commander Vatinius. What could you possibly have in mind that would assure you of such a certain victory?"

  "A plan that cannot fail," he said with a confident smile. "Because it hinges upon the element of surprise."

  Ulrika's heart raced. She reached for an olive with a trembling hand and said, "I would think by now that the Germans are wise to every form of strategy the legions use, even those intended for surprise."

  "This plan will be different."

  "How so?"

  He shook his handsome head. "You wouldn't understand."

  But she persisted. "Military talk does not bore me, Commander. I have read the memoirs of Julius Caesar. For instance, do you intend to use military engines in your campaign?"

  He regarded her for a moment, appreciating the honey-brown hair, the delicately oval face, her frank expression—the girl was neither coy nor shy!—and then, flattered by her interest in his plan, and impressed with her ability to comprehend it, Vatinius could not resist saying, "That is precisely what the Barbarians will be expecting. And so I have a different plan in mind. This time I shall fight fire with fire."

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  "Emperor Claudius has granted me complete freedom in this campaign. I have the authority to call up as many legionaries as I require, as much siege machinery as I will need. And this is what the Barbarians will see. Catapults and movable towers, mounted troops and infantry units. All very organized and very Roman. What they will not see," he paused to taste his wine and to hold the delightful young lady captive a moment longer, "are the guerrilla units, trained and led by Barbarians themselves, deployed throughout the forests behind them."

  Ulrika stared at Gaius Vatinius and she felt a cold fist squeeze her heart. He was going to use the Germans' own form of warfare against them.

  She looked down at her hands, where she felt her pulse throbbing in her fingertips. And she thought: It will be a slaughter.

  4

  U

  LRIKA COULD NOT SLEEP.

  She pulled her woolen cloak over her nightdress and left the bedroom. The house was dark and silent, but she knew her mother would not be asleep. This quiet time was when Selene wrote in her journal, studied medical texts, concocted medicines. And when Ulrika knocked on her mother's door, she saw that her mother was not surprised by the visit. "I thought you might come," Selene said, closing the door behind her daughter. Coals burned in a brazier, and two chairs with footstools were positioned close to it.

  Ulrika had left Aunt Paulina's dinner party anxious and troubled, but she was somewhat comforted in this small room where her mother mixed healing potions, elixirs, powders, and ointments. It was a room filled with scrolls and books, ancient texts, papyrus sheets—all containing spells and prayers and incantations and words of magic for healing the sick. For that was what Ulrika's mother did—she healed people.

  And now, for the first time, Ulrika wanted to tell her mother about the visions and dreams and premonitions of her childhood, tell her about the wolf vision at dinner this evening, and ask her what it meant, what cure was there for her sickness.

  Instead, as she took a seat, she said, "Mother, at dinner tonight, you barely ate. You were pale and didn't speak. The way you stared at Commander Vatinius—why does he upset you so?"

  Selene took the seat opposite and, picking up a long black poker, stirred the coals in the brazier. "It was Gaius Vatinius who burned your father's village to the ground many years ago, and took your father away in chains. In the years that Wulf and I were together, he spoke of returning to Germania and taking revenge upon Gaius Vatinius."

  Selene released a weary sigh. She had known this day was coming, had dreaded it. And now that the moment had arrived, she felt courage abandon her. She recalled the day when Ulrika was nine and had run into the house crying because a neighborhood bully had called her a bastard. "He said bastards don't have fathers, and I don't have a father." Selene had consoled her by saying, "Do not listen to others. They speak out of ignorance. You do have a father, but he died and now he is with the Goddess."

  Ulrika had started asking questions then, and Selene had taught her what she knew of Wulf's people, had told her about the World Tree, and the Land of the Frost Giants, and Middle Earth where Odin dwelt. She told Ulrika that she had been named for her German grandmother, the seeress of the tribe, whose name, Wulf had said, was Ulrika, which meant "wolf power." Selene had also told Ulrika that her father was a prince of his tribe, a son of the hero Arminius. (But Selene had not told her that Wulf had been a love-child, that he was a secret son of Arminius, for what good would come of that?)

  Ulrika had created an imaginary father after that, playing games with wooden spoons that stood in for pine trees and a trench in the garden that, filled with water, made a perfect Rhine River. Ulrika had told herself stories of Prince Wulf and how, after many adventures and battles and romances, he always saved the day. "Tell
me again, Mama," Ulrika would say, "what my father looked like," and Selene would describe the warrior Wulf with the long blond hair and beautiful muscled body. When Ulrika turned twelve and had outgrown dolls and games of the imagination, she had turned to books, devouring every tome and text on Germania to learn the truth and facts of her father's people and their land.

  Ulrika now studied her mother's face in the amber glow of the coals. "There is something else, isn't there, Mother? There is something you are not telling me."

  Selene faced her daughter with a direct gaze, and looked for a long moment at this child who had been surrounded by magic and mystery from the moment of her conception in faraway Persia. Selene thought again of the gift she suspected Ulrika might have inherited from her German bloodline—a form of clairvoyance that Selene had observed in her daughter as a child. Little Ulrika had known where lost objects could be found, would brace herself for surprising events as if she had known they were coming, would speak of another person's sadness when not even Selene herself sensed that sadness. Selene knew that Ulrika believed she had kept it a secret, and Selene had respected that, expecting her daughter to come to her one day to ask for an explanation, to talk about the special perceptions that visited her. Selene had thought that dialogue had finally arrived seven years ago on a day when they were having a picnic in the countryside and Ulrika had said she saw a frightened woman running through the trees. But there was no woman. Selene had known it was another of Ulrika's psychic visions. And then, curiously, the gift seemed to have gone away after that, as if the onset of womanhood had overwhelmed the tender, sensitive perceptive ability and covered it completely.

  Releasing another sigh, Selene said, "It is something I should have told you long ago. I meant to. I didn't think I could explain it to you when you were little, so I kept telling myself: when Ulrika is older. But the right moment never came. Ulrika, I told you that your father was killed in a hunting accident before you were born, during the time he and I were living in Persia. That was a lie. He left Persia. Wulf went back to Germania."

  Ulrika stared at her mother while distant sounds floated on the night—wheels creaking by in the deserted lane beyond the villa's high wall, the clip-clop of horse's hooves on the cobblestones, the lonely call of a nocturnal bird.

  "He left at my insistence," Selene continued softly. "We had been in Persia only a short while when we heard that Gaius Vatinius had been there before us. We were told that he was on his way to the Rhineland. I urged your father to go, to hurry after him while I stayed behind in Persia."

  "And he went? Knowing you were pregnant?"

  "He did not know I was with child. I did not tell him. I knew he would have stayed with me then, because your father was a man of honor. And after the baby was born, I knew he would never leave us. I had no right to interfere with his life, Ulrika."

  "No right! You were his wife!"

  Selene shook her head. "I was not. We were never married."

  Ulrika stared at her mother.

  "Wulf already had a wife," Selene said quietly, not meeting her daughter's eyes. "He had a wife and son back in Germania. Oh Ulrika, your father and I were never meant to spend the rest of our lives together. He had his destiny in the Rhineland, and you know that I was on my own personal quest. We had to go our separate ways."

  "He left Persia," Ulrika said slowly, "not knowing you were pregnant. He didn't know about me."

  "No."

  Ulrika was suddenly filled with wonder. "And he doesn't know about me now! My father doesn't know I exist!"

  "He is not alive, Ulrika."

  "How can you say that?"

  "Because if he had reached Germania, your father would have found Gaius Vatinius and carried out his revenge."

  Horror filled Ulrika's eyes. She said softly, "And Gaius Vatinius is alive. Which can only mean that my father is dead."

  Selene reached for her daughter's hand, but Ulrika pulled away. "You had no right to keep it from me," she cried. "All these years have been a lie!"

  "It was for your own sake, Ulrika. As a child, you wouldn't have been able to understand. You wouldn't have understood why I let your father leave."

  "I haven't been a child for a long time, Mother," Ulrika said in a tight voice. "You could have told me before this, instead of letting me find out this way." Ulrika stood up. "You robbed me of my father. And tonight, Mother, you sat there while I shared bread with that monster."

  "Ulrika—"

  But she was out the door and gone.

  5

  U

  LRIKA STARED UP AT the ceiling as she listened to the distant rumble of night traffic in the city streets. Her head throbbed. She had cried for a short time, and then she had started to think. Now, as she lay on her back, her eyes peering into the darkness, she tried to sort out her emotions. She was filled with remorse over the terrible way she had treated her mother, walking out the way she had, disrespecting her.

  I will apologize first thing in the morning. And perhaps we can talk about Father, perhaps it will help mend this rift that should not have happened between us.

  Father ...

  How could her mother be so certain that he was in fact dead? How was Gaius Vatinius proof of it? Just because the general was still alive did not mean Wulf had not made it back to the Rhineland.

  Ulrika rose from the bed and walked to the window, where she inhaled the springtime perfume on the night air. The ground was white, stretching away up the hill like a blanket of snow—petals from flowering fruit trees, pink and orange blossoms, dropped like snowflakes, looking white in the moonlight.

  She thought of the snow-blanketed Rhineland, pictured her warrior father as her mother had described him so many times—tall, muscular, with a fierce, proud brow. If he had left Persia twenty years ago, as her mother said, then he would have arrived in Germania after the peace treaties had been signed and the region was stable and no longer at war with Rome. Wulf would have had to settle down, as so many of his compatriots did, to occupations and farming. It was only because of Claudius's recent decree that Colonia be elevated in status, and that the forests surrounding the colony be cleared for settlement, that old wounds were opened, old hatreds flared anew, and fighting began again.

  Was it possible? Could her father be among those fighters? Was he perhaps the new hero leading his people in rebellion?

  Now she understood the meaning of her wolf dream. It had indeed been a sign that she was to go to the Rhineland.

  When Ulrika was younger and learning everything she could about her father's people, her mother had gone to one of Rome's many bookshops and purchased the latest map of Germania. Together, mother and daughter had analyzed the topographical features and, based upon how Wulf had described his home to Selene, down to the very curve of the tributary that fed the Rhine, they had been able to locate the place where his clan lived. There, Wulf had said, his mother was the clan caretaker of an ancient sacred site.

  Selene had marked the spot in ink: the sacred grove of the Goddess of the Red-Gold Tears, explaining to her daughter, "It is said that Freya so loved her husband that whenever he went on long journeys, she wept tears of red-gold."

  Hurrying to the mahogany storage chest that stood at the foot of her bed, Ulrika dropped to her knees and lifted the heavy lid to search through the linens and childhood clothes and precious mementoes from a life of wandering. She found the map and unrolled it with trembling hands. There was the place, still marked, indicating where Wulf's clan lived.

  She pressed the map to her bosom, feeling courage suddenly flood her veins, and a new sense of purpose. And urgency as well. Gaius Vatinius was mustering his legions at that very moment. They were to begin their northward march tomorrow.

  She reached for her robe. I must tell Mother. I must apologize for the selfish way I acted, ask forgiveness for my disrespect, and then ask her to help me plan my new journey.

  But Ulrika found her mother's apartment dark and silent, and she did not wish to wake
n her. Selene worked long days, tirelessly helping others.

  She would return in the morning.

  6

  U

  LRIKA WAS WAKENED BY her slaves as they brought breakfast and hot water for bathing. But she was anxious to make amends with her mother, and share the wonderful news.

  I will need money, Ulrika decided as she approached the closed door. I will take only a few slaves with me so that I can travel quickly. Mother will know which route is best to take, the quickest. Gaius Vatinius is leaving today with a legion of sixty centuries—six thousand men. I must reach Germania before they do. I must find my father's secret camp, warn them—

  "I am sorry, mistress," Erasmus, the old major domo, said as he opened Selene's bedroom door. "Your mother is not here. She was called away before dawn on an urgent errand. A difficult birth . . . she might be gone for two days."

  Two days! Ulrika wrung her hands. She dared not linger even one day.

  "Do you know where she went, to whose house?"

  But the old man did not know where in the city his mistress had gone.

  Ulrika tried to think. Rome was vast, its population huge. Her mother could be anywhere in the endless warren of streets and alleys.

  Hurrying back to her rooms, Ulrika altered her plans, thinking: I can do this on my own. Mother will understand. How many times did we leave a town or a village suddenly and under the cover of night? How often did we stay on the move because of Mother's personal quest?

  Retrieving a clean sheet of papyrus from her writing desk, moistening a cake of ink, softening it with the tip of a reed pen, Ulrika thought for a moment, and then wrote: "Mother, I am leaving Rome. I believe my father is still alive, and I must warn him of Gaius Vatinius's plan to ambush his warriors. I want to help in the fight. And then I want to learn about his people, my people."