“Should be very wise, then. Is he an honest scholar or a faker?”
“Honest. That is why he is so poor. But elsewhere there are—”
“Gorolot will do. We’ll see him tonight.”
“Tonight! He is already asleep.”
“We’ll have to wake him.”
“We have no money for his fee.”
“Do you want to help or don’t you?”
“Will you leave Tyre after you see him?”
“Sleeping Beauty, I may leave this world after I see him!”
She twisted the paddle until the craft was in position for the return voyage.
“What I have in mind for payment,” Ivo said, “is service. If Gorolot is old and poor and honest, he has no servants, right? A strong young woman could do marvels for his household, and perhaps encourage business too. And—”
“I am no household slave!” she exclaimed.
“And Mattan would never suspect that the household slave of an aged astrologer could be an unsuccessful counterspy or potential bride of Melqart.”
She paddled silently.
Gorolot, once roused by strenuous clamor, had the aspect of a sleepy old fraud. His eyes were sunken, his beard straggly and white, his clothing unkempt. He agreed to consider Ivo’s case once the terms had been clarified.
“I wish I had a better offer to make,” Ivo said regretfully. “But I may not be in these parts long. Aia — you’ll have to change her name — isn’t too reliable and will need a lot of supervision—”
“I will not!” she exclaimed angrily. “I can do the job as well as any girl in the city.”
“And you dare not entrust the daily marketing for staples to her, because she can’t bargain well—”
“I bargain very well! I’ll show you!”
“And she’ll probably run away within a week or two, but at least—”
“I will not!”
“But she may be all right, if she doesn’t fall asleep on the job.”
“I—” She shot him a dirty look and twitched her hip, conscious at last of the needling.
The two men sat down at Gorolot’s official table. Ivo saw that there were no flashy pictures of stars, planets or other symbols in evidence, and the man had donned no special robe. Probably the soiled tunic on his back was all he owned. The effect was unimpressive, even though such things had no inherent validity.
“What is your date of birth?” Gorolot inquired.
Ivo hesitated, but found after reflection that he was able to express it in local chronology, except for the year. That he solved by taking his age and figuring back to the year he would have been born, had he been born into this world and age. It came to the fifteenth year of the reign of Hiram the Great.
Gorolot brought out a scroll of stripped camel hide together with several clay tablets. “Do not expect too much,” he warned. “The meanings of the motions of the planets are not yet well known to us, and many times have I made mistakes. Often the Babylonian interpretations differ from the Egyptian, and I do not know the truth of it. I offer only the portents; I do not vouch for their authenticity.”
Ivo nodded. An honest man, yes, and a humble one. How many potentially well-paying customers did he alienate by his candor?
For almost an hour the astrologer pored over his records and assessed the imperatives of the seven planets — Uranus, Neptune and Pluto being unknown to Phoenician astronomy — questioning Ivo occasionally, while Aia showed her mounting impatience. “Others give instant readings,” she whispered.
“Others are charlatans,” Ivo replied. Gorolot labored on, unheeding.
At last he looked up. “Is there some event in your life that—”
Ivo gave him the same event he had given Groton, modified slightly in detail.
Still the astrologer was not satisfied. He mumbled and shook his head and rechecked his texts and runes fretfully. “I cannot help you,” he said abruptly.
Aia started to object, but Ivo gestured her to silence. “You have already helped me considerably,” he said. “I know you see something. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You have spent all this time contemplating nothing?” Aia demanded.
“The signs are contradictory, as I warned you they might be,” Gorolot said to Ivo. “But more than that, and it disturbs me deeply, some aspects are sure, yet they are the least credible of all. Either you have never been born, or you come from so far away that you are not truly under any of the signs I know.” He shrugged. “You must have been born, for I see you here, and I do not credit genii. Yet the signs are all-inclusive. So there is error — but not one it is in me to fathom. I am old and tired, and perhaps my brain is weakening. Take your servant-girl and go.”
“You admit you are a charlatan!” Aia exclaimed.
“No,” Ivo said firmly. “He is right. I have never been born — but I will be born thousands of years hence. And in my time the constellations have moved, and there are newly discovered planets; some of their meanings have — er, developed with the march of time.”
Gorolot peered at him over the flickering pewter lamp. “My charts suggest that this is so, but still it is a thing beyond my experience. I deem myself a sensible man, and all my life I have denied the supposed impact of the supernatural on the affairs of men. Yet here you are, real but inexplicable. Surely you mock me?”
Aia was silent now, looking at Ivo intently. The red in her hair was stronger, her features almost familiar in a non-Phoenician sense. She was extremely lovely.
“Do you speak other languages?” Ivo asked the astrologer. The man nodded. “I will show you that I am not of this world. I have the gift of tongues.”
“Are you familiar with this one?” Gorolot said in a foreign language, smiling.
“Egyptian, southern dialect,” Ivo said in the same language.
“And this?”
“Phrygian — as a Lydian tribesman would speak it.”
“No one in Tyre knows this one but me, and I know it only from my texts,” Gorolot said carefully.
“No wonder. It is parent-stock Etruscan. If I may — here is a correction on your phrasing.” He gave it.
Gorolot stared at him. “You are right. I remember now. You speak it far better than I.” He had lapsed into Phoenician. “You do have the gift of tongues, and you are far too young to have mastered it here. You are—”
“I don’t believe it,” Aia said, half believing it.
“So you come from Ugarit — peasant stock,” Ivo told her. She looked dismayed, and he turned back to Gorolot.
The man’s features changed. The white beard faded, leaving him clean-shaven. His face filled out. Behind him the mud-plaster wall metamorphosed into metal.
Groton was opposite him, a look of incredulous hope on his face. To the side stood Afra, weeping silently.
“I’m back,” Ivo said.
“It was Schön’s doing,” Ivo explained. Afra obviously had caught on to his secret, so no further pretense was in order. “It took me a long time to catch on to that, possibly because he tried to hide the evidence from me, more likely because I didn’t really want to believe it. But even a genius can’t convince an ordinary person that white is purple. Not always. Not when the purple stinks.” But he hadn’t told them about the dye yet. “And that gift of tongues was the unmistakable key. Schön has it, and he had to make it available to me in order to have me participate properly in that world; otherwise I would have popped out again quickly. When I realized that, I was on the way to victory, because I knew he was behind it all.”
“Why?” Groton wanted to know.
“Why did he do it? Easy. Because he wants to take over, and he can’t do it unless I abdicate. He tried to drive me into a situation that only he could save me from, hoping that I would capitulate. Maybe he forgot how stubborn I was.”