It was pandemonium in the Senate: the sages of the realm had gathered for the sexing of the child. Wise men jostled for position before of the honourable Members of the House. Some experts swerved to the left; others ducked to the right. The Members of the House craned their necks this way and flung their heads that way to follow the proceedings as barbs and ripostes flew across the floor. As one, the mages of the realm and the Members of the House studiously avoided the doctor sitting in the witness stand, waiting to testify.
Through these verbal onslaughts, the Members of the House kept their eyes on the augurs and mages and sages as they in turn watched their chickens shit. The entire room gasped in audible appreciation as those most qualified among the assembled sages scratched through the feces for clues. Several Members glanced at the television cameras at appropriate moments. The protocols of reality television demanded that they engage with their audience, and this was prime viewing material.
As the sages went about their work, acolytes from among the Members of the House hovered near them. A novice among the pullarii declared that the chicken had not eaten the grain that had been left out overnight. [1] He replayed footage from the night before to prove his point. One honourable Member asked whether proper procedure had been followed to determine whether such surveillance was legitimate. Another threatened a lawsuit to suppress the evidence.
The novice pullarius continued his divination undeterred by these distractions. Not eating the grain signified a time of peace, he declared, a period in which subjects of the realm would not have to fight each other for a share of the abundance. If the omens did not advocate for war, it would be a girl. Everyone knew that more boys were born when the omens predicted war. The honourable Members gasped at the wisdom flowing from such a keen young mind.
The oldest and wisest of the pullarii riffled through the shit with his forefinger, then waved it in the air to the awe and astonishment of the wizened onlookers from the backbenches. “The youth is wrong,” he intoned. “The chicken ate the grain. It ate the grain and then regurgitated it. That is why there is no evidence of consumption in the fruits of its divination.”
The honourable Members gasped at the wisdom flowing from such a sagacious elder and disregarded the prognostications of the novice.
The doctor in the witness stand raised her hand to interject, but the chief pullarius pushed it down onto the railing and said with barely a twitch in his voice, “There will be war.” He looked disapprovingly at the doctor before turning once again to address the Members: “There will be heavy losses. We shall sacrifice many, and therefore I say it is a boy. We will need boys for the war that is to come.”
As he spoke, an auspex[2] threw a raven into the air. His acolytes followed suit. They all shuffled and turned to better follow their individual ravens, watching intently the joint manoeuvres of the birds as they avoided the arrows of the belomancers.[3] They yelled their commentary at the cameras and at the studio audience, comprised mainly of Members of the House and their staff. Some Members did not trust the pullarii, they knew, and this was their moment to capture the confidence of the House and escape the stench of shit that filled the room.
“The birds flew upside down,” thundered the leading auspex.
“Indeed,” a chorus of acolytes harmonized in a deep bass that was redolent of nightingales in full musth. As their harmony broke from a lack of breath, the frogs in their throats began to croak. The handful of batrachomancers[4] among the ranks of the mages scrambled to draw the House’s attention to the amphibious chorus sounding divinations from within the throats of even these most seasoned ornithomancers.[5] In a panic, the chief auspex silenced them with the flourish of an over-zealous conductor.
The House was caught unaware by the silence that descended. The auspex used this pause to full advantage. “The flight path of the birds confirms it. It must be a girl. Only a girl could dance so effortlessly among the lethal arrows of the belomancers.”
The belomancers objected. It was the careful aim of their arrows that had avoided the death of the flighted ones, not the skill of the birds themselves. It was their predictions that that should confirm the sex of the child.
The pontifex maximus[6] raised his finger and the room fell silent again. He had felt a tingling in his left testicle, he said, and needed a moment’s silence while he contemplated its significance. No one doubted the credibility of the most powerful of mages. The House waited with bated breath. The pontifex lowered his hand to his crotch as he considered scratching the itch but then decided against interfering with the communication from the gods. The itch was most sinister, he declared eventually, and it being sinister, and in the left testicle, his loins had declared with conviction that the child was a girl.
Then those gathered for the sexing of the child listened to the mother describe the fluttering of the foetus. Based on her excitement and the movements she described, the poets declared it had to be a boy, for only a boy could generate such words of beauty and allow the mother to speak with such passion even before the child had been born. He would be an orator and a conjurer with words. The realm needed the likes of such a child.
The doctor folded her hands and waited. It was going to be a long day.
A haruspex[7] palpated the entrails of the chicken carefully. “This chicken did not digest the stones,” he remarked. “If the chicken had eaten the stones that mark all boys, the signs would be evident. I tell you it is a girl.”
“The chicken was bribed.”
“The stones were fake.”
Calls from the backbenches threatened to derail proceedings and the Speaker of the House floundered. In desperation, he turned to the witness box.
“The photographs of the embryo . . . ” the doctor began. She was the one who had treated the mother throughout her pregnancy and who had personally analyzed the photographs with an authority bestowed on her by years of study and experience.
The pontifex maximus moved in behind the witness stand and towered over her, his long shadow casting a pall that obscured her from the cameras. He cleared his throat.
The moneylenders and bookies worked the backbenches.
No one paid attention to the Member of the House who suggested that it could be an alien. He based this conclusion on the photographic evidence the doctor had flashed onto the screen before the technicians removed it. They feared repercussions from their superiors if they agreed with such nonsense. “No one trusts science anymore,” the lone Member of the Alien Party muttered.
At the sound of the pontifex maximus clearing his throat, the brontomancer[8] leapt up and declared the successive peals of thunder to be a sign of strength, and therefore it was undoubtedly a male child.
The Speaker of the House acknowledged the brontomancer’s contribution before imparting some wisdom of his own in a renewed effort to regain control of the proceedings. “Cut the child in half and we’ll know for sure which side of the room it belongs in,” declared the Speaker. He knew that after the earlier interruptions from the backbenchers, he would need to preside over proceedings with ruthless efficiency.
“Doves are circling the chamber,” declared yet another auspex. It was a time of their ascendency and the auspices were determined to keep the decisions of the House rooted firmly in the interpretation their divinations. “Doves are symbols of peace. It is a girl.”
The plague doctor, who had been wandering the aisles of the House in silence, as a wraith wanders the deserted streets of European cities, breathed an herbaceous plume through his beak and declared the gathering filled with the plague. “I fear the miasma that hangs among those gathered in this Chamber is putrid,” he declared to much cheering and waving of hands in support. “Verily I say unto thee, this air is a bearer of the plague.”
“But what of the child?” asked an upstart first term Member. A libanomancer[9] grabbed the roaming mic from him. The plague doctor had entered the territory he was most familiar with, that of smoke and mirrors. He lit a stick of incense with great aplomb and pored over the smoke that plumed before the plague doctor’s beak, interpreting the movement of the smoke as a message from the spirits that had been awakened within the good doctor, who was, after all, a close friend and confidant.
As the libanomancer read the smoke, the spodomancer[10] crawled on the floor between his legs, affirming his opinions in short myopic whimpers as he read the patterns left by the trails of the ashes gathered on the Moroccan leather shoes of good doctor.
At that very moment, the auspices twirled like dervishes in front of the plague doctor as they continued to investigate the flight of the ravens. The wind of their cloaks pulled the libanomancer’s ashes into the air in a spirited dance that matched their own exuberance. The ashes made the prophet of pestilence sneeze behind his mask.
An osteomancer[11] threw his bones, but the sneezing doctor of the plague stepped on them in his moment of blindness and tripped. The pontifex maximus stepped away from the witness stand and grabbed the plague doctor by the hand to steady his old friend. Confusion reigned in the Senate once more, and the osteomancer’s divinations remained unheard.
One particular diviner strutted like a bird in the heat of the season, crowing like a cock about to announce betrayal. For the child, he declared a career as healer, every bit as auspicious as those who had gathered here on this day to determine its sex. Since it would be a healer, he announced, it needs must be a boy.
Those gathered in the chamber applauded his remarks. From under his cloak, the young cock of a diviner seized the moment and pulled a raven from his pantaloons. The members of the studio audience drew a communal breath at such a brazen display of magic. The young cock threw the raven into the air just as a stray belomancer’s arrow whistled past.
The raven cawed its final caw as the consul rose to the podium. The cameraman zoomed in to capture the full effect for home viewers. The young cock retreated to his seat in a fluff of black feathers. The assembly had witnessed all the evidence they needed. The messenger of the gods had spoken its blessing upon the sagest of sages. The consul could speak now, uninterrupted. The House could reach a decision.
“We have agreed in this Chamber,” intoned the consul, “that there is a one hundred percent chance the child will be either a girl or a boy.”
The doctor in the witness stand raised her hand and said something about gender and sex, but her words were drowned out by the applause from the honourable Members as they praised the consul’s political acumen and his ability to divine such clarity from among the varied viewpoints presented to them.
With pomp and splendour appropriate to the gravity of the occasion, the Speaker of the House declared the proceedings over and senators fell in behind the procession of sages and mages and augurs as they left the room. Cameras flickered in frenzied gasps to capture the final moments of the sitting of the House. The Speaker used his sceptre to flick off the lights on his way out. In the darkness that descended, the audiences at home could hear a single forgotten live mic broadcast a scryer[12] explaining the nuances of his art to a companion.
The doctor sat quietly in the witness box as the microphone’s battery flickered red and then died.
Glossary
[1] The pullarii (sing. Pullarius) were responsible for keeping the sacred chickens that were used to make divinations. Readings involved feeding the chickens: if the chickens ate the grain they were offered, omens were favourable. If they didn’t, even Julius Caesar would reconsider engaging in battle.
[2] An auspex, or augur, was an interpreter of omens in ancient Rome.
[3] Belomancy is a kind of divination anciently practiced by means of marked arrows drawn at random from a bag or quiver, the marks on the arrows drawn being supposed to foreshow the future.
[4] Batrachomancers practice the art of batrachomancy, which is making predictions by observing the behaviour of frogs.
[5] Ornithomancy is a branch of augury that relies on reading omens from the actions of birds.
[6] The pontifex maximus was the chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs in ancient Rome.
[7] A haruspex was a diviner in ancient Rome who based his predictions on reading the entrails of sacrificial animals.
[8] Brontomancy is the art of divination by interpreting thunder or thunderstorms.
[9] Libanomancy is divination primarily through observing and interpreting burning incense smoke, but which may include the way incense ash falls.
[10] Spodomancy is divination by examining cinders, soot, or ashes, particularly from a ritual sacrifice.
[11] Osteomancy is an ancient form of predicting the future by tossing a set of animal bones onto the ground and interpreting their positions and orientations.
[12] A scryer divines, sees or predicts the future by means of a scrying tool, such as a crystal ball.