The Year of Confusion(38)

“Anything unusual about her navel?”

“She had a huge ruby or garnet in it. Wherever she comes from, they must artificially stretch a girl’s navel, the way some people stretch the earlobes or lips to wear jewelry.”

“So it’s safe to say that she’s not some runaway Greek slave woman. I suppose that would have been too simple.”

“Servilia introduced us and told her what we wanted. Ashthuva led us into a quite spacious room lit by what seemed hundreds of lamps and candles. Its walls and ceiling were painted all over with constellations, marvelous to see.”

“What was the style of painting?” I asked her.

“That’s an odd question. Well, the treatment of the familiar figures, the lion, the Capricorn, and so forth, looked rather Greek.”

“Were these paintings new or had they been there for a while?”

She thought about it. “Now that you mention it they looked rather fresh. I could still smell the paint, and the ceiling wasn’t smudged with lamp soot. But then the whole house looked new, as well as the plantings in the garden.”

“Very good. What next?”

“On one wall she had a bookcase. It was in the honeycomb style, but much larger than usual because it held star charts instead of ordinary scrolls. She asked us the birth dates of those whose horoscopes we wanted cast, and she went to the case and drew out several of the charts and took them to a broad table. She unrolled some of them and weighted their corners with little linen sandbags.”

I started to say something but she hurried on. “And before you ask, the charts gave every appearance of being quite ancient. They weren’t made of papyrus or parchment, and they were in a style that was not Greek or Roman or Egyptian. In fact, they resembled no style of art I have ever seen. And the writing was utterly incomprehensible, just tiny squiggles attached to long, straight lines. Yet the constellations were perfectly recognizable, once you understood the stylization of the art.”

“Who went first?”

“Atia. She gave Ashthuva young Octavius’s birth date and time and Ashthuva went over a sheet that seemed to be some sort of conversion table. I could make out a column that listed the Roman consuls of the past fifty or so years, and next to it a list in Greek of the Olympiads and the successive archons of Athens and next to that a column of writing in that odd language from the charts. It was pretty clear that this was her way of translating Roman and Greek dates into her own system. It was not ancient like the charts and it was written on very fine parchment.”

“Quite clear,” I commended. “There was no nonsense with braziers and arcane things burning? No purification ritual or mysterious libations?”

“None of that, and what if there were? We have plenty of those things in our own religion.”

“Yes, but it seems to make more sense when we do it.”

“Anyway, astrology is not a religion. How could it be? It makes no provision for the will of the gods, nor of their mutability. It involves no sacrifices or appeals to higher powers. It simply deals with human destiny as it is determined by the positions of the stars and planets at the moment of birth and their relations and juxtapositions as they change throughout life.”

“You sound very taken with this business,” I noted with more than a bit of alarm.

“I find something very satisfying in it. It is as rigorous as the study of Sosigenes, it merely applies these things to human life, while the astronomers simply study celestial phenomena without regard to the doings of humanity, as if the stars were above such things.”

“I suppose so. Still, it seems unnatural. No taking of omens, no sacrifices, no prayers. Why are these stars telling us about our destiny when we’re doing nothing for them?”

She rolled her eyes upward in a long-suffering gesture. “Why do I bother?” She took a deep breath. “To continue, and please try not to interrupt unless you have a truly pertinent question.”

“I promise.”

“Ashthuva told us that what she would do that night constituted only a preliminary casting, that each horoscope would require much longer study and detailed analysis.”

And cost more, I thought without saying it.

“She explained how the sign of Octavius’s birth was affected by the planets of that moment, which was ascendant, which was actually within the sign, how the phase of the moon affected all these things. It was quite fascinating.”

I hoped the woman foretold an early death for the brat, but I was disappointed.

“She said that Octavius had a most remarkable congregation of signs at his birth, that he would rise unprecedentedly high in the world and would be served by the best and most loyal people.” She caught my expression. “All right, go ahead.”