The Lost Sisterhood (48 page)

I had often come across the Battle of Teutoburger Wald in Roman history books, but had never thought I would visit the site in person,
nor that the trail of Granny’s jackal would lead me to such haunted hinterland.

According to history, in the year
A.D.
9 three Roman legions plus auxiliary forces—altogether as many as twenty thousand soldiers—had perished in the woods of northern Germania, and the Roman Empire had never successfully expanded beyond this point. Latin historians referred to the event as “the Varus disaster,” implicitly blaming the Roman commander Varus for the shocking annihilation of his entire army.

What I had never fully appreciated was that the battle had been a brilliantly executed ambush by local tribesmen, in which the Roman legions had been tricked into terrain that rendered their superior weapons useless and made battle formations impossible. Marching along a narrow forest path, the army had been stretched to a point where there was no strength in numbers, and the soldiers—no doubt unnerved by the immensity of the German wilderness—must have felt unusually small and exposed even before the attack began.

Not only had the Roman legionnaires found themselves wedged between a treacherous swamp and a densely forested ridge, they were also pummeled by a rainstorm and blinded by fog. Waterlogged and disoriented, they became easy targets for the tribesmen, who attacked them from the woods above in order to drive them into the great bog below.

After touring the park, I finally entered the museum—an oblong rust-colored building with a tall tower at one end. I could have spent all day there, but was so anxious to find the Amazon bracelet and see what the local archaeologists had to say about it that I hurried through the exhibition in twenty minutes. After that, I spent another twenty minutes going through it again the other way, only to confirm my depressing conclusion.

The bracelet wasn’t there.

Walking back through the archaeological site, I noticed the weather had taken a sinister turn. The sky was dark as lead, and the trees were swaying violently in the rising wind. In my agitated state, I almost got the impression they had sensed the presence of someone more threatening
than me, and that they were now—in their ghostly, wordless way—trying to warn me.

Racing the first raindrops through the door of the welcome center, I was happy to see that Felix was still on duty, and still not too busy to chat. “This may sound a little strange,” I said, pulling up my sleeve discreetly, “but someone told me you had a bracelet just like this on display in the museum.”

“Really?” Felix studied my jackal without recognition. “I’m sure I have never seen anything like that before. Interesting.”

“I understand there is a woman here”—I looked at him hopefully—”by the name of Dr. Jäger.”

Felix brightened. “Kyme? She used to work here. She still comes in sometimes.” Mumbling to himself, he checked a laminated list of telephone numbers lying by the cash register. “Jäger … Jäger.”

A quick phone call later, all in German, Felix put down the receiver and beamed at me. “She has invited you for coffee this afternoon at three o’clock, and she looks forward to telling you all about the bracelet.”

A
FTER LEAVING THE MUSEUM
I passed a few rainy hours in downtown Bramsche, shopping for clothes and other essentials. When I eventually returned to the hotel I made a point of entering through a side door, just in case someone was keeping an eye on the comings and goings of guests.

My room had been cleaned in my absence, and I quickly checked that my little all was where I had left it. Granny’s notebook and the
Historia Amazonum
I now carried around everywhere I went, of course, but the envelope I had stolen from Nick I had left in a bedside drawer, and yes, it was still there. Only … I was sure I had put a tourist brochure on top of it, in order to conceal it a bit. The brochure was still there, but now it was lying underneath the envelope.

Jittery with nerves, I quickly went through the documents but found nothing missing. Was it possible, I thought, that the maid had
moved things around? Or did I misremember how I had left the envelope?

Walking into the bathroom, I made sure everything was still there, and apart from the fact that the maid had turned my toothpaste upside down in the glass, I saw nothing to suggest a break-in.

Angry with myself for being so fanciful, I decided not to do anything too hasty. My appointment with Dr. Jäger was only an hour away; if I still felt uncertain about the room when I came back, I could always move out then.

As I drove my rental car away from the hotel, I kept checking the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following. But in the grime and gloom of this rainy November afternoon, all the vehicles seemed to blend together, and the Mercedes that worried me one moment was gone the next.

Dr. Jäger lived more or less across the road from the archaeological site I had visited that morning. Apparently, she had spent her entire life in the same small house in the woods, and it was a great and unusual honor to be invited inside. “Look out for a long driveway belonging to an abandoned farm,” Felix had explained. “Continue all the way to the end and park there. That is where the path begins. I’ve never seen it, but that’s what she told me.”

I parked my car as instructed and continued on foot into the forest beyond. As I walked up the steep dirt path, squinting against the spitting rain and striding over the little rivulets of water winding down through the uneven gravel, it occurred to me that this forested ridge must have been a key part of the woodlands from where the German tribesmen had launched their attack on the Roman legionnaires trapped on the edge of the great bog below.

Some historical sources held that a few years after their disastrous defeat the Romans had sent yet another army to the area to recover the sacred eagle standards of the lost legions and, if possible, patch together a realistic account of what had actually happened. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, even the hardened soldiers of the recovery party were horrified by what they found, for the forest surrounding the old battlefield had been turned into a gruesome monument for death
and destruction. Heaps of human bones lay unburied, and severed skulls had been nailed to trees, perhaps as part of religious rituals, or perhaps as a warning to future invaders.

Walking through the forest now, still unable to shake a feeling of being watched, I could easily sympathize with the apprehension the Roman soldiers must have felt so long ago. Down by the museum the fir trees had seemed dense and looming, but up here the woods were mature and majestic—intimidating in quite a different way. Colossal centuries-old pines stood just meters apart, shrouded in fog; despite the vicious weather there was a silent solemnity about them that made me feel they had witnessed much violence in their time and had long since learned to keep their silence. Even at three in the afternoon the place had an otherworldly feel to it that was even more chilling than the rain.

When I finally found Dr. Jäger’s house—a modest fieldstone cottage set in a small clearing and surrounded by a thicket of tall weeds—it was a quarter past three. What was supposed to have been a five-minute walk through the forest had taken me more than twenty minutes, and before knocking on the rough-hewn wooden door, I resolved to leave well before sunset, to avoid having to make my way back to the car in complete darkness.

“Welcome, welcome!” A petite elderly woman greeted me with smiling enthusiasm before the door was even fully open. “Come in! I am making pfefferkuchen!” Wiping her hands on her brown corduroy trousers, she closed the door behind me and ran back to the kitchen as if something was on fire. “Keep your shoes on. The floor is cold.”

Until that moment I had been mindful of Mr. Telemakhos’s assertion that the woman I was about to meet “knew more than she let on.” As a consequence, I had half-imagined Dr. Jäger to be a closet Amazon and had even managed to worry myself with visions of a six-foot battle-ax determined to stop me at last. Now I felt like laughing at my own fears. Although trim and seemingly energetic, Dr. Jäger did not strike me as someone who would round up the likes of Alex Reznik in her spare time.

After hanging my soaking jacket on a coatrack made out of deer antlers, I stepped into the living room and looked around. It really was
a very old house, with uneven stone walls and a sagging whitewashed ceiling held up by wooden beams. Every available surface was dominated by some part of an animal; the walls were covered in hunting trophies—heads of stags, wild boars, and even bears were staring at me with alert glass eyes—and every chair was lined with skins and pelts. One of the armchairs facing the open fireplace had a deep-brown bearskin draped over it, with the paws and claws still attached.

“Who’s the hunter?” I asked, when Dr. Jäger returned with a coffee tray.

She laughed delightedly and put down the tray on the stone edge of the fireplace. “Hunting runs in the family. At least, it used to. There aren’t bears here anymore.” She straightened and looked up at the wall. “Some of those are ancient. I should probably throw them out. But”—she shrugged and poured the coffee—”they keep me company.”

Grateful for the open fire, I followed her example and sat down in one of the armchairs facing the burning logs, my feet up on the brick.

“Try one of my pfefferkuchen,” insisted Dr. Jäger, offering me a bowl with cookies. “They are a traditional Christmas treat, and I am baking them now so they can ripen to perfection before the holidays.” She smiled conspiratorially, a pair of girlish dimples emerging. “To tell you the truth, I bake them all year round. But don’t say that to anyone.”

We talked a bit more about the pepper cookies before my hostess finally clasped her hands and said, “So, you have come to Kalkriese because of the bracelet. Tell me, where did you hear about it?”

I wrestled briefly with the truth, which would have involved mentioning Mr. Telemakhos, who—by his own admission—was persona non grata in the German museum world … and ended up merely saying, “I can’t remember. Apparently, two similar bracelets were found in Turkey. And as it happens, I have one, too.” I showed her the jackal on my wrist.

Dr. Jäger leaned closer, clearly intrigued. “That looks like bronze. How interesting. The bracelet we had here was made of iron.” Seeing my surprise, she nodded cryptically and sat back in the chair, draping a shawl over her legs. “It was worn by a woman who fell into the great bog two thousand years ago. When we found her at the site, we suspected
she had fought in the Battle of Teutoburger Wald, but no one believed us. Women didn’t take part in the war, my fellow scholars said. Women are victims, not warriors. But it was clear to me her skull had been broken by a sharp blade. Also, her compressed spine and bent tailbone showed signs of a life on horseback, and seven arrowheads were clustered beneath her lower back”—Dr. Jäger demonstrated with her hands—”which to me suggested she had been carrying a quiver with arrows. Furthermore, she had stress fractures on her bones, which had healed up while she was still alive—fractures from fighting and strenuous physical training. Of course, everyone agreed with us about everything right until the moment we told them it was not a man, but a woman. Archaeologists always assume—or at least, they used to assume—that skeletons found with weapons were male. It would never even occur to them to ask the question, and admittedly, sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.”

“Well, how do you know it
was
a woman?” I asked.

Dr. Jäger leaned forward to stir the fire with a long poker. “Her pelvis. She had clear signs of what we call ‘diastasis symphysis pubis.’ She must have been in a lot of pain. It was a unique find. The only problem was, she disappeared. We sent her off to a forensic lab for further analysis, but she never arrived. It was quite a scandal at the time. All we had left was the bracelet. And two weeks after we put it on display at the museum, that disappeared, too.”

Getting up, Dr. Jäger went over to a brass cauldron in the corner to fetch more wood for the fire. “So, you see,” she continued, stretching to place the logs where she wanted them, “I know almost as little about it as you do. That is why”—she smiled an apology at me—”I was hoping you could tell me more.”

We sat for a while in silence, listening to the sap popping in the fresh logs. Then I said, “All I know is that some people claim to have seen quite a few of these bracelets—the bronze variety—scattered all over the ancient world. In fact, I have even heard a theory that they were worn by”—I cleared my throat and tried to sound casual—”the ancient Amazons.”

I suppose I could not blame Dr. Jäger for laughing out loud. “I am
sorry,” she said, “but that is too wonderful! Now I understand. You have been talking to that old
spinner
in Greece, Yanni Telemakhos.”

A little embarrassed by her ability to see right through me, I scrambled to come up with an explanation, only to have it waved aside. “Don’t worry,” she said, still chuckling. “I know it is not only crazy people who dream about the Amazons, but also people who love mystery and adventure.” She studied my face with a knowing smile. “Are you one of those people, Diana?”

Perhaps it was the cozy fire, or perhaps it was her kindness … whatever the reason, I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to tell Dr. Jäger everything. Right from the disappearance of my grandmother eighteen years earlier to my arrival in Germany the day before. Even if she was not an Amazon, and even if she did not know more than she let on, I still had a feeling it would be worthwhile to tell her about my tribulations and discoveries.

After talking nonstop for at least an hour, I finally sat back and shook my head. “Sorry to go on like this—”

“No, no, no,” said my hostess, her face full of sympathy. “You have been through a lot. Made important discoveries. And now you are wondering whether your grandmother was right after all. Whether she really was an Amazon.” Ignoring my halfhearted protests, Dr. Jäger went on, staring off into the fire, “You are thinking to yourself, ‘If I follow the Amazon trail to the end, will I find her again?’ It is only natural that you are thinking like that, Diana, because you loved her very much. But you know, it can be dangerous to live your life waiting for a summons from another world. You begin to see things, hear things … make something out of nothing.” She reached out absentmindedly to take another pepper cookie, only to find the bowl empty. “Tell me, this notebook of hers … does it mention any names? Places? Anything that could explain why all these different people seem to be so interested in it?”