It was a perfect night for stargazing, clear and moonless, and the astrologer hurried into the darkness of the fields where his view of the firmament would be untouched by the light of lamps and fires.

Pressing his spyglass to his eye, and not looking where he put his feet, he scoured the stars greedy for their secrets. He was not to be disappointed. He stopped suddenly and clasped his hands in delight. A tiny, inconspicuous pin-prick had flared and fizzed across the sky.

It was a sign. A calamity! The sign of a calamity! Now his task was to understand where and upon whom this misfortune would fall. But in his excitement he noticed he had dropped his spyglass. He stooped to retrieve it…

…and discovered he had been standing on the verge of a deep ditch. A fact he appreciated only in the moment of losing his balance and tumbling head first into the hole.

His cries woke the peasants in a nearby farmstead. They lit torches and hastened to the source of the disturbance, where they found an agitated old man lying in the bottom on a ditch. “Don’t worry,” they assured him. “We’ll soon have you out of there.”

But the old man did not want their aid. He wanted them to go away, or put out their torches, as they were obscuring his view. “I fell because the stars decreed,” he explained. “And I shall be rescued upon their command, not before.”

The peasants shrugged, but did not argue with the old man, leaving him to pursue his observations from the bottom of the ditch. An hour later, the astrologer’s work was done. He could now be rescued. He called to the peasants, but this time the peasants did not come.

© Richard Parkin, 2023