The Divining

     She could not breathe. Her lungs fought for air but the hand was clasped too tightly over her nose and mouth.

     In horror Ulrika saw darkness roll toward her until it swallowed her up and dropped her into oblivion.

22

WHY WAS THE RIDE so rough? Could the driver not have found a smoother road? And when would they reach Babylon? The trip was becoming more and more uncomfortable. Her wrists hurt. Why would her wrists hurt?

     Ulrika opened her eyes. She blinked. It was night and she didn't seem to be in a wagon at all but looking down at the ground. And it was passing beneath her.

     When she realized that her hands were tied behind her back and that she was being carried on someone's shoulder, like a sack of grain, she tried to cry out, only to discover that a cloth had been tied over her mouth.

     She struggled against her abductor's hold. His grip tightened. She tried to kick. He pi

     "Enough!" she heard a voice snap in Farsi. "Be still!" he then hissed in Greek.

     It only made her struggle all the more until her kidnapper came to a halt and dumped her unceremoniously to the ground. Realizing that her feet were not bound, Ulrika scrambled backward over the leaf-strew forest floor, her eyes on a tall, forbidding mountain man garbed in furs. He seemed disinterested in her attempt to escape, but merely turned his back as he lowered travel packs, and Ulrika's medicine box, to the ground.

     She did not get far. Her feet became entangled in her long cloak. And when her head and shoulders came against something hard, Ulrika looked up and saw in the moonlight a massive pine tree towering over her. She looked frantically to her left and right, but all was dense woodland.

     As she wriggled against her bonds, she kept an eye on her abductor. He was using a long stick to dig a hole.

     Her grave!

     Fresh fear and determination empowered Ulrika so that she was able to push the gag from her mouth, the cloth slipping down to her chin. "Who are you?" she cried. "Why have you kidnapped me?"

     In an instant he was at her side, knife unsheathed, the blade pressed to her throat. "I told you to be still," he growled. "Do you understand me?" he said in Greek.

     She nodded mutely.

     "Not another word," he said, "or I will silence you myself."

     She watched in terror as he returned to his task, digging a hole that was wide and deep enough to hold a body, and then he sat down and proceeded to sharpen tree branches into lethal points.

     Trembling beneath her cloak, Ulrika tried to twist her hands free of their bonds. She kept her eyes on the stranger, taking the measure of him in the moonlight that filtered through the canopy of leafy treetops. From his voice she judged he was young. His hair looked black. He was tall and slender, and deceptively strong. He wore a fur tunic and leather leggings. His arms were bare, despite the night coldness in the mountains, so that Ulrika saw sculpted muscles and pale skin smudged with dirt.

     In as calm a tone as she could manage, she said, "What is your name?"

     He didn't look up from his labor. "You do not want to know my name, and I do not want to know yours. For the last time, be silent."

     She bit her lip and, watching him as he sharpened sticks, kept silent.

     He sat cross-legged on the ground facing her, his head bent over his task, to look up every now and then to listen to the forest, which was alive with nocturnal sounds. He never looked at Ulrika, never spoke until finally he stood up and climbed into the freshly dug hole where, as far as Ulrika could discern in the light from the moon, he planted the sharp stakes into the ground. When he was finished and all stakes were in place, he climbed out and covered the pit with loose grass and shrubbery.

     Ulrika realized he had set a trap.

     As he came up to her and reached for her mouth gag, Ulrika shook her head. He studied her for a moment—in the moonlight Ulrika saw black eyes framed by black lashes and brows—then he murmured, "As long as you keep quiet."

     He lifted her to her feet. He did not remove her wrist bonds but gestured that she was to walk with him. Then he picked up the travel packs and medicine box and, without another word, resumed his trek through the night.

     WHEN DAWN BROKE THROUGH THE TREES, and Ulrika thought she would drop from exhaustion, the stranger came to a halt. Gesturing to her to sit, he vanished through the trees and returned with a goatskin filled with fresh, crisp water. Holding it to her lips, he let Ulrika drink her fill, then he slaked his own thirst.

     "Please," Ulrika whispered. "My arms hurt ..."

     He paused, looked down at her. As sunlight crept across the forest floor, illuminating mossy trees and gnarled trunks, Ulrika got a better look at her captor.

     He was slender and wiry, with lanky arms and legs—a young man in his twenties, she realized. His hair was ink-black and fell to his shoulders in curls. His eyes were dark, his nose long and thin, but his lips were voluptuous, almost feminine, and his jaw was smooth and beardless. He looked, in fact, surprisingly well groomed for a wild mountain man. Stranger still was his unusually pale skin. Ulrika would have thought that a man so otherwisedark would be olive-complexioned, but he seemed to be in fact whiter than Ulrika herself, and she wondered from what strange race he had sprung.

     Unsheathing his dagger, he reached behind her and cut the bonds. As Ulrika felt sensation, and then pain, return to her hands, she watched him cross to their travel packs and open one of his own. He returned and held out a small cloth bag. Ulrika saw that it contained nuts and dried berries and she discovered that she was ravenous.

     "I ca

     And then he did a curious thing. While Ulrika watched, and the woodland came alive with birdsong and the whisper of a morning breeze, the mountain man gathered twigs and leaves and created kindling for a good campfire. He even brought out a flint and held it over the small mound, but did not strike a spark. He chanted as he did so, a prayer in a dialect Ulrika could not identify. And when he was done, he reached for the corded belt at his waist and removed an object that hung there.

     As he placed the object next to the unlit fire, Ulrika saw that it was cornet-shaped and the color of old ivory, perhaps half a cubit long, and straight. An animal horn of some kind, she thought, with a gold seal at the wider end, as if something were contained within.

     "Please tell me where you are taking me."

     He ignored her as he busied himself with a long rope, which he threw over a tree branch, anchoring one end to the trunk and laying the other on the ground in a knotted coil. Ulrika realized he was creating another trap, and while he worked, once again kept lifting his head to listen, his body tense and alert.

     "You would travel much faster without me," Ulrika said, guessing that he was evading someone who was in pursuit.