Empty in Course

by Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Natan took the altitude of the sun in the courtyard while the woman was still at the door, unwinding the end of her veil from her mouth. He called it up to me through the lattice: thirty-one degrees and a half, east. I had the plate for the latitude of the City of Peace already in the astrolabe, and I laid the rete over it and turned it until the sun's degree in the Bull stood on the altitude he had given me. The Twins were rising. Their lord is Mercury, and Mercury that month ran a little ahead of the sun, in the Bull, which from the Twins is the twelfth sign: the house of enemies one does not see, of captivity, of the man who is shut in.

The Moon, by the Shāh's tables, was in the last degrees of the Fishes, in the tenth from the ascendant, the house of the king. An hour before dawn she had passed the opposition of Saturn, who was in the Virgin, under the earth. After him she touched nobody. She would cross the remaining degrees of the Fishes alone and come into the Ram with nothing in her hands.

The woman came up the stairs. She was perhaps thirty, a Christian by the cross stitched at the neck of her shift, and she carried a roll of paper tied with a red thread. She looked at the astrolabe in my lap and then at me, and she had opened her mouth when I spoke first, for this is how it must be done, or it is worth nothing.

"You have come about a man who is held," I said. "The Sultan's hand has him, and it is a cold hand. Am I wrong?"

She shut her mouth. Natan, at the top of the stairs, grinned at the floor, because he is fifteen and thinks this is a trick. It is not a trick. Before a man speaks, the thing he is carrying has already risen with the hour he chose to come. I take nothing from his face. I take it from the lord of the ascendant and where it stands.

"My husband," she said. "Īshōʿyahb, the son of Ḥnānīshōʿ. He kept the accounts of the estates of the house of Barmak on the canal of the Ṣarāt. They took him the week after they cut off Jaʿfar's head. He has been in the Muṭbaq since the end of the second Kānūn."

That was three months and some days. I have been in the Muṭbaq once, to cast for a man who wished to know whether his brother was still alive in it, and the gaoler took me down eleven steps before the ceiling came low enough to touch. The name means the covered place. It is in the Round City, not far from the Green Dome, inside the walls whose birth I chose.

"Sit," I said, and she sat on the cushion Natan pushed toward her, and put the roll of paper across her knees.

"I have not come to ask whether he will be freed," she said. "A priest at my church told me you would say yes or no and take a dirham for it, and I do not want yes or no. I want an hour." She untied the thread. "The Catholicos's deacon wrote this for me. It shows every account my husband kept for four years, and that every dirham of the Barmakid estates on the Ṣarāt went to the dīwān when al-Sindī's men came for it. Al-Sindī ibn Shāhak hears petitions at the gate of his house. I mean to put this into his hand. I want you to tell me the hour to do it."

So it was an election. She wished to begin an act, and she wanted the act to have a fair birth. I looked at her and thought of al-Sindī, whom I have seen twice: a heavy man, very still, who came from the Sind as somebody's property and was now the property of nobody except the Commander of the Faithful. The house of the king. The Moon in it, empty.

"Natan," I said. "The book of the Moon's course for this month, and the Shāh's tables, and the slate."

---

There are three ways to begin a matter with a man of power, and the Persians, the Indians and Dorotheus the Egyptian agree on all three, which is rare. The Moon must be increasing in light and out from under the sun's beams. She must be applying, not separating, and what she applies to must be a fortune, not a malefic. And the ascendant of the hour, which is the one who begins, must be free of Saturn and of Mars, so that the beginning does not rise with its own ruin in its arms.

Today failed all three, and failed them badly. I did not tell her that at once. I worked it on the slate where she could see the chalk and not read it, and Natan, who could read it, kept his face still, as I have taught him to do.

"This afternoon," Natan said, under his breath, as if I might have missed it, "the Virgin rises."

"With Saturn in her," I said. "Yes. The afternoon is lost. Tomorrow the Moon is in the Ram and applies to nothing she would wish to touch. Then she goes toward the sun."

"Under the beams," he said.

"For four days. Dark of the month. A man who begins under the beams begins blind." I turned the rete forward through the days, the sun creeping on through the Bull a degree a day, the Moon running thirteen ahead of it. On the sixth day she came out of the beams. On the seventh she came into the Crab, which is her own house. On the eighth, in the morning, she stood about ten degrees into the Crab with a thin edge of light on her, and she was going by trine to Jupiter. And the Crab is where Jupiter is exalted, so that when the Moon stands there Jupiter receives her; she comes to him in a house where he is honoured, and he has no reason to refuse her. The Crab would be rising in the third hour of the day. The Moon would be in the ascendant, the lord of the ascendant in her own house, increasing, applying, received.

I looked at that for some time. One does not often get to write such an hour on a slate.

"The eighth day," I said to the woman. "In the third hour after sunrise. Be at al-Sindī's gate before it and put the paper in his hand, or his secretary's, when the hour is in. Natan will come to the gate a little before and tell you when."

She did not thank me. She looked at the slate.

"Eight days."

"Seven and a part."

"He coughs," she said. "He was coughing when they took him, and they took him in the winter, and the water comes into the Muṭbaq from the moat when the river is high. The river is high now. You have seen the river." She was not weeping. Christian women of good family in this city do not weep before Jews; they save it. "Why not today? You said yourself the man is held by a cold hand. Today the hand is cold. In eight days it will be cold."

I could have told her about the opposition of Saturn and about the beams of the sun, and she would have nodded and understood none of it, and I would have been a court astrologer showing his merchandise. Instead I told her the true thing, which was harder.

"Today the Moon is in the house of the king and she is empty," I said. "She has met her last planet and she will meet no other before she leaves the sign. My masters call this empty in her course. Whatever is begun with a king while she is so will come to nothing. It will not be refused. It will not be granted. It will lie on a table and be covered by other papers. I am not saying your husband will die. I am saying that a paper put into al-Sindī's hand today will lie under other papers."

"And on the eighth day it will not?"

"On the eighth day the matter has a fair birth. I can do no more for a matter than that."

She sat with the roll across her knees. Then she said something I have thought about every day since, and I am an old man and do not have so very many days.

"Then I will go home," she said, "and come back tomorrow, and ask you again, when your sky is kinder. The priest at my church says you teach that a question is born when it is asked. Let it be born again."

Natan looked at me. He had heard me tell the same thing to a merchant from Wāsiṭ, the day before the month began: a question asked a second time, to make it give another answer, is not a question; it is a bargain, and the sky does not bargain. The first asking is the true one. The rule is in Dorotheus, I believe, and if it is not there it is in the Persians, and if it is not in the Persians it is in me.

"The question of this morning," I said to her, "is the true question. You may come back tomorrow, and I will receive you, and I will not cast for you. It is not the sky that refuses. It is I."

She stood up. She looked, for a moment, at the astrolabe and not at me, as if it were the person who had answered. Then she gave Natan a dirham, which he did not want, and went down the stairs.

---

Natan wiped the slate. He wiped it the way he does when he wants to say something and has decided not to, with the side of his fist, in long strokes, too many of them.

"Say it," I said.

"If he dies on the seventh day," Natan said, "you killed him."

"If he dies on the seventh day, God willed it."

"Then why did you not let her go today?"

"Because today was empty."

"But if God has willed it," he said, and he went red, because he loves me and was afraid that I would be angry, "then the empty day and the full day are both the same day. It is already written whether al-Sindī lets him out. You read what is written. You don't write it. You always say that."

I always say that. I have said it to three caliphs. Mā shāʾa Allāh: it is my name, and it is the answer to every man who asks me whether the stars rule God or God the stars. The heavens are a script; I read it; the Almighty wrote it. I have never in my life told a man the stars compelled him. And I have spent my life telling men which day to set out, which hour to marry, when to lay the first brick of a city, as though the day and the hour were theirs to choose and the choosing could alter what came of it.

"Put the tables away," I said. "And tomorrow, before the morning prayer, go and stand at the corner of the street where the Christians bake, and see whether she comes."

"To ask again?"

"To see whether she comes."

She did not come.

---

In the month of Tammūz, forty-one years ago, Naubakht the Persian and I and others sat in a tent on the west bank of the Tigris, with the cords of the foundation laid out in the dust in a circle, and chose the hour for the first brick of this city. Al-Manṣūr wanted it at once. We made him wait. I remember how he sat, with one leg drawn up, eating dates from a dish and dropping the stones into his hand, while we worked the tables. Then Naubakht said now, and the Commander of the Faithful stood up and laid the brick with his own hand and said the name of God over it. The Sagittarian rose with Jupiter in it. A fair birth. I have told that story so often that I have stopped hearing myself tell it.

On the second night after the woman came, Natan asked me, while we were taking the altitude of the Eagle, whether when we elected the hour of the city we elected the hour of the Muṭbaq.

"We elected the city," I said.

"The Muṭbaq is in the city."

"The Muṭbaq was built afterward."

"But it's in the city," he said, "so it was born with the city, so it has the same nativity," and I told him to read me the altitude again, because his hand had moved.

---

The sun went into the last degrees of the Bull. The Moon went under its beams and was not seen. On the fourth day the river came over the lower step of the landing at the bridge of boats and the boatmen tied up higher, and somebody's goat drowned and floated past my house with its legs in the air. On the fifth day a messenger came from the house of a qāḍī's son who wished to know the hour to send his betrothal gifts, and I chose one for him, a good one, and took his money.

On the sixth day the Moon came out of the beams, a thread in the west after sunset, so thin that I saw her only because I knew where to look.

On the seventh day Natan went to the Christians' church by the bakers' street and came back and said the woman had been at the morning office, and that her husband was still in the Muṭbaq, and that he was still alive. A deacon had told him so, and had asked him why a Jew's boy wanted to know.

On the eighth day I sent Natan to al-Sindī's gate an hour after sunrise, with the hour written on a slip of paper in case he forgot it, which he would not, and I went up onto the roof alone with the astrolabe.

I am old for the stairs. I sat on the parapet in the shade of the reed screen and waited for the sun to climb. The city below was doing what it does at that hour: the water-sellers, the smoke of the bakers, the river brown and high under its boats, the Green Dome to the north-west catching the light on its rider, who turns with the wind and is said to point toward whatever enemy is coming. No one has ever proved that. Somewhere under that light, eleven steps down, was the man whose name I had heard once and would not forget now, coughing in the water that comes in from the moat.

The woman would be at the gate. Or she would not be at the gate. She might have gone to al-Sindī's house on the morning she left me, out of anger, and put her paper into his hand with the Moon empty, and it might at this moment be lying under other papers. I had no way to know. I had sent Natan to tell her the hour and to come back, not to watch.

When the sun stood at the altitude I had computed I raised the astrolabe by its ring and let it hang still and sighted the sun along the alidade, the light coming through the two little holes and making one spot on my palm. I read the altitude. I turned the rete until the sun's degree lay on it. The Crab stood on the eastern line, ten degrees risen.

I looked for the Moon, and found her: low in the east, over the Khurāsān road, white on white, so faint that I lost her when I blinked and had to find her again. She was in her own house. She was coming to Jupiter. Nothing stood between them.

I sat with the instrument in my lap until the hour was out. Then I went down the stairs, one at a time, holding the wall, and opened my day-book, and wrote the date and the hour, the degree rising, the place of the Moon and the planet to which she applied, and the name: Īshōʿyahb, son of Ḥnānīshōʿ, in the Muṭbaq, petition to al-Sindī. Beneath it I left, as I always leave, three lines empty, where I write how a matter ended.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Messahalā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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