Juliana The Diviner

The fabric of Juliana’s delicate robes scraped against the hard floor as she kneeled. She shuffled on her knees towards the light, facing the only window in her otherwise dim and damp living quarters. She took a deep breath, letting the warmth of the morning sun flood her face.

She couldn’t stand it. Listening to the morning birds twitter and not being able to see them, smelling the lush grass, steps away from her, and not being able to feel the dirt beneath her feet. All reminders that the world was still there, that it had not waited for her. It was a harsh betrayal to only hear that the earth still turned, and to see it in visions, not in real life.

It hadn’t always been like this, but in the midst of a war, her village was in a precarious position. All the fighting men had been given as sacrifice to a hungry enemy.

Juliana’s own father and brothers were not exempt from this. In their absence, a silence had begun to settle over her life. There was no news as to how they were faring. She saw other families get sent back swords, meaning their men had died with a vigour, and had torn down many enemies in the heat of battle. Or plain letters meaning your man had died a coward and received an unmarked grave. Although it meant they were gone, Juliana would’ve preferred it over not knowing.

Juliana got to work with the other village women, trying to keep up crop yields to feed their dwindling population. She had always had a sixth sense about harvests. At first, she had thought it a strange case of deja vu, but no. Visions would come to her in dreams. She would tell her mother when dawn broke. She knew when the best time was to plant seeds, and she knew when it would rain. She knew when the trees would start bearing fruit and which plants would only flower. There was no rhyme or reason to these dreams; she did not know yet how well she could drag these visions of the future back into the present. But they were always right, and through this divination, the one thing Juliana could control was that the village would get fed, even when times were difficult.

Her mother had never taught her daughter the dangers of her talent. Word was only just beginning to reach them from the bigger towns. Hushed whispers of the men who invaded bountiful villages in the middle of the night, stealing away daughters with what they called “the gift”. Juliana didn’t know how they anchored them to the town church, or how they were stuck there forever for those who sought to know their fate, or change it. It was a practice kept quiet by the king's army. A shameful splotch on their shining armour, but a sacrifice that had to be made for the prosperity of their country.

So when they finally came for Juliana, she had no warning.

In the middle of the night, Juliana was ripped from her bed. They bound her wrists with rope and covered her eyes. They took her by horseback on a days-long journey. The way back to her village would become an indecipherable mystery without her eyes to guide her. She eventually arrived at a church in an army-stationed town she did not know well. The church, while grand, was slate grey and looked miserably dim, casting a long shadow in the afternoon sun on the outskirts of town. A big willow tree stood resolute, hanging over Juliana’s head. The first thing she noticed when they unbound her was the rustling of the leaves in the wind. She was greeted by an old bishop and a lady shrouded in dark cloth, not a sister from the church, but by the markings on her robes, from some other obscure order entirely. With a sweet smile Juliana would take for granted, the woman promised she would teach Juliana how to harness her foresight for the good of the nation. She would be a beacon of truth for all who wished to know it, and, informally, for all who could pay the tithe.

The Bishop showed her to her room; he seemed an old, supercilious man, with a long, greying beard that hung over his vestments. He was unburdened by any moral objection to locking a girl up in his church, and not like any of the men of the cloth she had ever known. The room was devoid of any comforts; he waved his cloaked hand around, pointing out her amenities with a gold-ringed finger. It was a single bed, a table and chair, and in the corner a chamberpot and bath. Against the wall opposite her bed, there was a fireplace, and a tower of old religious texts piled high. There was no door leading to the outside world and only one solitary, barred window. Instead, there was a weighty plum curtain draped against the outside wall. Behind it were two small holes with retracting covers on each side; they were barely big enough to fit one arm in each.

The lady, whom she was now to refer to as Madame, began to explain the significance of the gift that had brought Juliana here. As a daughter of foresight, she said, Juliana would be tasked with reading and interpreting the future of the many men of the king's army that came through town. Through Juliana’s divination, they would know where in their military campaigns to course-correct, foresee when enemy threats would arise, and even cheat their own gruesome deaths. Madame reiterated that it was a sacrifice she would have to make for the good of the nation.

Juliana had not taken to the imprisonment well. Madame had refused to explain anything more about her predicament, other than that the isolation was supposed to remove distraction. She was to devote her entire concentration to divination and was allowed no capacity for anything else. For three days, she had sat, refusing their teachings and the pitifully bland bowls of slop they had given her to eat. Finally, they had resorted to beating. That duty they gave to the bishop. His face twisted in a cruel, awful grin, he came at her with a cane. It did not matter where he struck; no one would see her, so he bruised her face. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the back of a spoon that night when Madame had dropped off her dinner. A large purple welt bloomed beneath her eye.

The next morning, she sat dutifully on the end of her bed awaiting Madame’s instruction. She swanned into the room, shrouded in her heavy black dresses and cloaks. She reached out and asked Juliana to take her hands and close her eyes.

“What do you see?” She said.

Before Juliana could respond, Madame began to sing, in a low, whining voice, old hymns in a tongue unknown to her. The melody she had recognised from the simple rhymes they said back home in her village church, but the language was foreign. She followed along, trying to match the sounds with her own voice. After a while, it was as though Juliana’s world began to tip and tumble as she felt herself falling into a trance-like state. At once, the noise of Madame’s incantations stopped, and she saw a scene appearing before her, opening up like a spring flower. She saw Madame, even older than she looked now, lying in a bed, and a younger, newer Bishop sat at its end, reading aloud. She saw a room of people surrounding her, a little girl holding her hand. She felt an immense love, a final breath, and then a wailing cry, and suddenly she was back in her little church annex. Madame was in front of her, holding her hands and staring at her in anticipation.

Juliana had felt a rush unlike anything she had known before. It was like nothing that had come to her in her dreams of crop harvests and farming weather. Juliana shared all she had seen, and the Madame nodded as if she had known her own fate all along.

From that day, Juliana had agreed to fulfil her duties; the burly hands of war-tired men would thrust into the holes in the side of her wall, she would remove the plum curtain and hold them. Sometimes they would squeeze her hands hard, or pull at her through the wall, telling her what she’d found could not be true. They would hurl abuses at her and the church until someone came to remove them.

Sometimes she would get slender, or frail hands; inquisitive hands that would ask about a child's health, hands that would pass Juliana whatever coin or notes they could gather as a tithe. Sometimes there were hands that had the same questions she had, about the outcome of the war, about if a knight would come home, about what the world would look like on the other side. These divinations were less specific and therefore harder to discern. They had a cloudiness to them that worried Juliana. Her gut told her that the country's fate was not sealed, and that there were many more factors at play than just her divinations.

Day in and day out, she fulfilled these duties, all the while wondering how many other girls found themselves in a similar position. How did they deal with the loneliness, the bad food, and the hard bed? How did they pursue a calling they did not ask for, but were made to fulfil anyway?

One day, coming up from her knees after her morning devotion to the sun, she would wipe the dust off her long white robes, and she would be given an answer.

From behind the plum-coloured curtain, two big, worn and calloused hands appeared. They were not unlike any of the other brutes she had divined for before. A large slash up the forearm, however, told her this was a knight. Despite the heavy armour, they often came to her with a slash or three. They were usually brash and bold, a trait Juliana had come to find out lent itself well to cuts and bruises. The way this knight behaved was not the usual image of valour and fearlessness. He approached the wall with an overwhelming fear. He stuck his hands through the holes, and Juliana removed the curtain. The hands were hard and rough, but shaking nonetheless. She gently took them in her hands. They did not squeeze down hard, but sat gently atop her own, as if he were petting an easily startled animal.

“What was your question?” Juliana asked the trembling hands.

“My sister.” The voice finally spoke after a long silence. “She has been trapped in a situation much like yours.”

Juliana froze, but didn’t dare let go.

“I must know where she is, if she is okay.” The hands began to bear down now on Juliana’s, willing her to give them an answer.

Juliana thought for a bit. She did not need divination to tell the man outside exactly what it was like to be stuck here. For all the excitement of her talents, his sister probably missed him dearly, as well as the sight of a blue sky or a warm meal.

“Please,” the man begged. “Will she be alright?”

Juliana sighed and began her hymns.

She saw a young girl with long, curling blonde hair in a room quite like the one Juliana was in. She had the same welts on her arms, but where Juliana resigned herself to her fate, this girl was a fighter.

The girl hacked at the cracks on the outside wall with a spoon. Behind her giant piles of books, she removed small bricks from the wall, put them back, and covered them up again. Juliana saw visions of the girl, at a time she felt was close at hand, sneaking out of her room in the middle of the night. Grabbing her things and running off into the dark with reckless abandon. Did she know where she was going? Juliana could not tell.

The final image she saw was the girl finally finding her way home, but upon her arrival, she found a sealed letter at her door. The girl looked older, with lines on her face and eyes that had been hardened by many untold journeys that had eventually carried her back home. She held her hands to her mouth and collapsed, crying in the street.

Juliana snapped back into reality. Her own hands now shaking.

“I’m sorry.”

The hands pleaded with her to explain more. What had happened? When? Where was she?

Juliana told him everything. She squeezed the hands tight in a final consolation, bracing for a shove or an outburst, but worse, he said nothing.

“The threads of fate can change if an action is big enough to change them,” She finally added.

It was the quiet implication that she was not meant to say out loud to customers. Their fates were sealed unless they were able to cause a large enough ripple to alter their course.

The hands slowly receded.

“Thank you.” He said, before she heard his footsteps retreating in the grass.

Juliana worked for days, using every spare moment to hack away at the bricks in the wall if this girl could do it, so could she. The knight kept coming back to her, asking her to read his fortune again and again, every time the pictures were the same. Juliana tried to discern as much detail as she could for him. The flowers outside the church walls, the weather, the sounds of the town she disappeared into. Maybe she could find out where they had hidden the girl from him. Maybe if he found her first, it would change his fate. She got used to the familiar warmth of his hands. The way they would give her a reassuring squeeze as a thank you for her help. She did not always get repeat customers; she never thought she would be able to make a friend she couldn’t even see. Once, he had brought his hands through the holes and concealed in one was a warm, crusty piece of bread. Juliana could’ve cried at the smell alone.

Finally, on a cold winter night, Juliana broke through a hole big enough that she could step into the darkness of the world she had left behind. She carefully removed the stones that made up the wall, one after another, as a bracing chill drafted into her small room. Finally, she stepped through the gap, sticking her feet into soft ground for the first time in months. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness and get her bearings. In the distance, the twinkling lights of candles in windows and the sound of people merrily drinking in taverns floated up to her. She took a deep breath in the cold night air. She heard a rustling and looked up. The willow tree was still there, hanging over the church above her. It had waited for her. She laughed, her voice carrying into the dark night sky. Peeking through the branches, she could glimpse the moonlight. She ran over and pressed her hands into the rough bark. Finally, something real, something rough and from the earth. She looked back at the church. She could not imagine going inside after a night like this.

Suddenly, with her hand pressed into the tree, a vision struck. The girl with long curls would reunite with her brother after all. Juliana was certain she knew the reason, and, emboldened by her plan, she resigned herself to go back inside, brick up the wall, and wait for the knight to return tomorrow.

The next morning, the knight listened to her story intently and came back to her at nightfall. She could hear he had returned and was pacing about under the tree just steps from her. Juliana was suddenly self-conscious. She smoothed back her dark hair that had grown long and wild in her time in the church. She washed her face in cold bathwater and prepared for a long journey, huddling herself up in her thickest clothes. Finally, she stepped out into the world to meet the knight she had come to know over the past few weeks.

She could make out his shadow sitting at the base of the tree, and upon raising his head, they had finally met in the darkness. He was fairer than she had expected. Not the burly oaf she had thought by his calloused and roughened hands. He was tall and only a few years older than she was. He had waxen-gold hair that parted in the middle and hung down over his eyes. She looked down at his hands, and well enough, they were the same.

He took her hands, eyes watering with an anxious, quiet burden and told her to check again.

In the calm, chilled night, she divined a clearer vision than she ever had before. Her village was liberated from war, growing crops, her family reunited, and then the knight in shining armour, welcoming his sister home with loving arms. Their futures were entwined, and it was up to them to make them come true.