The Divining (7 page)

S
TAND ASIDE IN THE NAME OF
I
MPERIAL
R
OME
!"

     Ulrika did not recognize the stranger demanding to be let in. "Who are you?"

     "Agents of Claudius Caesar. You are hiding someone in there."

     "I am hiding no one. We are a simple trade caravan, taking grain to the northern outposts. You must speak with Sebastianus Gallus, he is the leader of this caravan. You cannot mistake him. He is tall, with hair the color of bronze, and a deep commanding voice, and a way about him that makes one notice. He is unmarried, although I do not understand why, for he is very attractive, quite handsome, in fact—"

     Ulrika opened her eyes to darkness and found herself in bed. Where was she? To whom had she been speaking?

     
It was another dream
...

     She held her breath and listened, and heard, beyond the cloth walls of her small tent, horses galloping through the encampment. Men shouting. Women crying out.

     Ulrika frowned. It was barely dawn. The camp wasn't due to break up for another two hours.

     Clutching her shawl at her throat, her long hair streaming over her shoulders, she stepped out and peered through the atmosphere thick with mist and smoke. Eerie figures were marching through the camp, brandishing swords and barking orders. Roman legionaries, rousing people from sleep, disrupting breakfasts, interrupting prayers.

     As Ulrika watched the commotion in the pale morning light, Timonides appeared from around the side of the tent. "What's going on?" the astrologer asked with his mouth full. He held a greasy lamb chop with a bite taken out; his tunic was stained down the front where honey had dripped from wheat cakes. It was the first of several meals of the day for the corpulent Greek who had discovered the joy of eating again.

     "I do not know," Ulrika murmured.

     Timonides wrinkled his nose as he watched the red-caped legionaries stride through the crowded encampment, entering tents and covered wagons, kicking over hay bales, jabbing swords into barrels and bundles of merchandise. "They appear to be searching for something," he observed as he sank his teeth into the spicy chop.

     Or some
one,
Ulrika thought.

     "Where is your master?" she asked as she watched the legionaries brusquely pull people from tents, bringing torches close to their faces, to examine them and then push them away.

     "Sebastianus will come soon. Mistress, go back inside. With your fair hair and that symbol you wear about your neck..."

     Ulrika's hand went to her breast, where she wore the Germanic Cross of Odin. She turned and looked out over the Rhine—a wide, flat, silver river that, in the early morning mist, looked unreal. Roman naval vessels patrolled the waters, great ships moving under the power of sail or rhythmic oars, a constant reminder of Rome's imperial and mighty presence in this northern land. On the other side of the river, dark green forests holding ancient secrets stretched to the horizon.

     Ulrika brought herself back to the camp and the intruders. The caravan of Sebastianus Gallus had stopped, along with several smaller caravans and
groups of traders and travelers, at a garrison called Fort Bonna, one day's journey south of Colonia, birthplace of Empress Agrippina and the cause of the new outbreak of war in the region. Since leaving Lugdunum in Gaul and following the eastward road that skirted alpine foothills, the mood of the caravan had become one of nervousness and anxiety. Lugdunum was a major trading hub in Europe, a cosmopolitan city of marble towers and fortress walls and roads that stretched away like the spokes of a wagon wheel. And along those roads, men traveled, bringing with them word of fighting in the east, rumors and unconfirmed reports but no one saying for certain what was happening—or was going to happen, or had already happened—in Germania Inferior.

     Now, after days of rising apprehension, they had come to a halt fifteen miles from Ulrika's destination. Her heart raced. Where was Gaius Vatinius and his legions? Everyone said that he was leading his troops directly across the Alps, a more hazardous route than the one caravans took, but a more direct one—thousands of men pushing northward like a deadly tide, bringing horses and weapons and war machines into the pristine forests of Ulrika's people. How far behind were the legions? How much time was left to her to find her father and warn him?

     As she kept her eye on the soldiers, their armor clanking as they pushed their way into people's privacy, stamping the ground with their thick, hobnailed sandals, Ulrika wondered where Sebastianus was. She glanced at his tent. It was dark and deserted as usual. Once again, he had not slept in his own bed.

     
Where does he go every night?

     As they had followed the busy trade route from Rome to Masilia, from Lugdunum to the Rhine, Ulrika had seen Sebastianus Gallus interact with merchants, traders, and travelers, inviting them to share his fire and a meal. Trade and commerce were conducted at each stopping point, with the abacus coming out, coins being counted, baskets and bundles of merchandise changing hands, and Gallus overseeing it all. When business was concluded, he would bathe in his tent, change into a fresh tunic and cloak, and leave the camp, usually bearing gifts, to head into the village or town, and return the next morning.

     While Ulrika wondered what he did away from camp—while she wondered about many things concerning the master of her caravan—she did know one thing: his passion for the stars.

     Ulrika had learned that Sebastianus Gallus was not a religious man in the traditional sense. He did not erect a small altar each time they camped, nor did he make a sacrifice of food and wine to the gods. Instead, he consulted the stars, making use of Timonides and his star-charts.

     Ulrika thought about the gold bracelet on Sebastianus's wrist. It was a beautiful piece, finely molded with intricate designs. The surprising feature was a rather homely chunk of rock in the center, neither pleasing to the eye nor seeming to be of any value—a prosaic stone easily found in any street. She wondered at its significance.

     As she watched the legionaries move through the camp, coming her way while a nervous Timonides stood at her side, Ulrika thought about the local people the caravan had encountered along the route, Germans who were not slaves, as Ulrika was used to seeing, but free men and women working their own farms, engaged in cultural arts and crafts and who came to the caravan to trade. She would stare at them, marveling at seeing this race in their own environment of forests and rolling hills and green, misty valleys. Women in long skirts and blouses, their hair worn in braids; men in leggings and tunics, hair worn long and nearly all of them bearded, reminding Ulrika that the term "barbarian" literally meant "bearded one," but that in recent years had come to mean any uncivilized person.

     She trembled to think that she was near her father's territory. It filled her with pride to know that, not far from here, forty-five years ago, three legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus had been defeated by the German hero Arminius, Ulrika's grandfather! But sadness also filled her—leaving her mother without a proper good-bye. Fear was in her heart as well, that the childhood sickness that frightened her might never be cured, that she was going to be plagued forever with dreams that were too real and vivid to be mere dreams.

     As two legionaries strode up to her tent, she braced herself.

     Ulrika was familiar with the political climate of this region. Under the empire's
pax romana
, several important Germanic tribes worked peacefully
with Rome, and seemed to have no problem with the presence of imperial forts and garrisons in their ancestral territory. So peaceful was this region, in fact, that Claudius had needed to pull idle troops from the Rhine and give them something to do: invade Britain. But now there was a new problem: an unnamed German warrior was firing up the tribes and uniting them against Rome for the first time in forty years.

     And Ulrika was certain it was her father.

     As the two legionaries approached, she tightened the shawl about her shoulders and drew herself up tall, ready to stand up to them. She would not let them search her tent. She had nothing to hide, but it was the principle.

     O
N THE FAR SIDE
of the camp, at the edge of the clearing where the western forest began, a leather-faced centurion scratched his testicles as he watched the proceedings with a jaded eye. A twenty-five-year veteran of foreign campaigns, the middle-aged soldier was looking forward to retiring with his fat wife to a vineyard in southern Italia, where he hoped to live out his days idling in the sunlight and telling war stories to his grandchildren. This search for insurgent Barbarians—in a trade caravan!—was useless. The whole military thrust north of the Alps was futile, in his seasoned mind. Germania was too big and its people too proud to ever be conquered. But the centurion never questioned orders. He did as told and drew his monthly pay.

     He stiffened. His trained eye told him that trouble had just arrived.

     "What is going on here?" boomed Sebastianus Gallus, riding through the trees at a gallop. Jumping down from his mare, he strode up to the centurion. "What are these soldiers doing here?"

     "We're searching for rebels, sir," the officer said, recognizing the bronze-haired young man, in a fine white tunic and handsome blue cloak, as someone of rank and importance.

     Sebastianus scowled as he surveyed the chaotic scene. It would be an hour before he could restore order and another hour to break camp and get the caravan underway. He had to reach Colonia before dark. "Upon whose orders?" he snapped. "And why wasn't I informed?"

     "General Vatinius, sir," the centurion said wearily, reminding himself of the vineyard and warm Italian days. "He ordered a surprise search, the better to find the fugitives. No forewarning, no chance to get away."

     "We are hiding no one here," Sebastianus growled and marched off.

     Sebastianus's ill humor was due only in part to this unexpected upheaval of his camp. He had spent the night at a nearby farm, the guest of a Roman farmer he had known for years, but he had not slept well. It was because of the girl, Ulrika. The day before, she had announced her intention to leave the company of the caravan the moment they arrived in Colonia, to go off on her own in search of her father's people. Sebastianus had not expected that. He had thought he would help her put together a party that consisted of local Germanic guides, bodyguards, slaves. As safe an escort as he could muster.

     But to go
alone?
Was she out of her mind? Was she so ignorant of the dangers she risked?

     He wished he had never agreed to take her as a passenger. But Timonides had insisted that the stars showed her path aligning with his. And with each daily horoscope, there she was, still intertwined with Sebastianus's destiny. "When do our paths diverge?" he had asked in their camp outside of Lugdunum. Timonides had only shrugged and said, "The gods will let us know."

     Although he had worried that a girl on her own in a caravan might be a problem, Ulrika had turned out to be no trouble at all. She had kept to herself, quiet, reading, going for walks—always modestly draped in the
palla
that covered her coiled hair and bare arms. She had traveled without complaint in an enclosed box-wagon drawn by two horses, a rocky carriage ride that always elicited grumbles from passengers when they stepped out at the end of the day. But Ulrika never spoke as she sought a place at the campfire while Sebastianus's slaves erected a tent for her privacy.

     In a small way, she had even been an asset. Sebastianus had watched her heal people. A mere girl with a calming, quiet presence and a curious box filled with medicinal magic. She would listen to someone's problem and she would either say, "This is beyond my skill," or, "I can help."

     She had said that she had learned healing arts from her mother, but
Sebastianus suspected her talent went beyond a mere apprenticeship, for those she had helped declared that she had somehow known exactly what ailed them, had known even without them being able to adequately describe their ills.

     As he walked through his disordered camp, calming people down, assuring them that the soldiers would soon be gone, he squinted through the smoke and mist and saw her on the other side, standing outside her own small tent, talking to Timonides. Sebastianus was startled to see long hair flowing over her shoulders and down her back. She normally wore her tawny hair bound up in a Grecian knot and hidden beneath her veil.

     He was further startled to feel a stab of sexual desire.

     Pushing the girl from his thoughts—they were parting company tomorrow, after all—he strode through the camp bringing reassurances to his slaves and workers, and to those traveling under his protection, stopping to set hay bales aright, to soothe frazzled nerves, to restore order as he went. But his mind raced. It normally took him sixty days to reach Fort Bonna, yet he had arrived in a record forty-five. He had pushed to cover the miles, and had not conducted his usual extensive commerce in the towns and cities they had visited. By his calculations, if he could execute a swift turnaround in Colonia, he could have the caravan back in Rome in perhaps another forty-two days, with an excellent chance of beating the other four traders to the finish, which was the Imperial Palace and an audience with Emperor Claudius.