Free The Divining by Barbara Wood

their talons. Squawking and fighting over exposed testicles, ripping and devouring the tender flesh. Wolves chewing on bones.
         Nausea swept over her as she staggered among the dead. She sobbed to find men impaled on trees, their arms hacked off, blood that had run in rivers now congealed black. She heard groaning. Some were still alive!
         She followed the soft groans and came upon a German warrior lying in an unnatural position. His legs were twisted in an impossible way, as if his torso had snapped. The upper half of his body lay supine while his legs were almost prone. His eyes were open. Ulrika couldn't move. She stood over the dying warrior, frozen, not breathing, her eyes wide with shock and horror.
         His lips parted. Bearded chin moved. He whispered something. He wanted her to kill him, to end his misery.
         Unsheathing her dagger and clasping it tightly in both hands, Ulrika raised the weapon above her head and, with a strangled cry, drove the blade into his breast. His eyes remained open, but she saw the light fade and he stopped breathing.
         Sobbing, blinded by tears, Ulrika fell back and looked around the battlefield. At the thousands of dead. Was her father among them?
         She desperately searched for the hero named Wulf. But she saw only decomposing bodies nailed to trees. The remains of women who had been raped—women who had joined their husbands and sons in battle and suffered terrible fates.
         Ulrika stood frozen to the spot. She had misunderstood the boatman who had carried her across the Rhine. He had not warned of a battle about to be fought, but one that had already been fought. Vatinius had not just arrived in Colonia with his legions! He had already marched into battle—and won.
         I could have saved them! I came too late!
         She sobbed, tears rolling down her cheeks as she staggered among the butchered dead. "I am sorry," she whispered to the slain warriors. "I am so sorry. Please forgive me."
         The sun dipped behind the tall pines, casting the battlefield in gloomy shadow. Ulrika was suddenly engulfed in an eerie silence. She turned in a slow circle, her eyes sweeping over the corpses, and felt a strange chill invade her bones. It was death, she thought, coming to steal her soul.
         The silence was suddenly broken by a loud snap. Ulrika spun around. Her eyes widened as she saw movement in the forest. She could not move as shapes shifted among the pines. Cold sweat sprouted between her shoulder blades. The ghosts of the dead!
         Finally, white apparitions came voicelessly through the trees—tall figures with long, flowing hair. Ulrika felt her heart rise to her throat. Terror gripped her. When the figures emerged from the trees and into the clearing, Ulrika's eyes widened. Not ghosts—women. Stepping silently among the corpses, bending, retrieving, gesturing to the sky. What were they doing?
         Ulrika watched as two stunningly beautiful women paused in their queer posturing, looked at Ulrika, and then, straightening, walked toward her—tall women, long-limbed and robust in full skirts and colorful blouses,

thick blond tresses draped over generous bosoms. Ulrika knew who they were: "victory women," or "shield maidens." In the local dialect, they were Valkyries, handmaidens of Odin who singled out those heroes slain in battle to take them to sit in the great Val Hall and drink mead for eternity.
         As the two approached, stepping over severed limbs, bending to touch cold foreheads, murmuring, chanting softly, moving among the fallen dead to whisper—what?—their images shifted and changed until Ulrika realized they were not young and robust at all, but old women, their heads crowned with white braids, their aged bodies draped in belted tunics and long skirts, coarse shawls around bony shoulders. Despite advanced years, however, they walked with erect spines, straight shoulders. Years had aged them, she