The Divining

"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

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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.

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?"