The Fourth Circle by Zoran Zivkovic, Mary Popović

hear no more.
    I did indeed experience enlightenment, such as would not shame even the noble Pythagoras, but I mention it now unwillingly. Unwillingly, for the ascent to enlightenment was not by way of trance, as it certainly must have been with Pythagoras, but as a petty incident hardly worthy of mention, let alone connected with the Great Secret accessible only to the chosen.
    Kiane, my housekeeper, whose clumsy figure in no way matched that glorious name, a woman advanced in years, fat and coarse, though clean and a good cook, but superstitious and overwhelmed by fear, for days endeavored to convince me that we should retreat before the Roman invasion, as we had done before, back into the hills of Sicily, where those hordes, even if victorious, would hesitate to venture. But reassured by Marcellus's guarantee and otherwise unwilling to leave the comforts of Syracuse—even when I planned to go to famed Alexandria—I rejected this proposal. This set her to grumbling, at first under her breath, but then, as the barbarian army began to gather around the walls of our city, with increasing bad temper.
Inclined to look for omens in everything, from the most commonplace to the celestial, from the intestines of the animals she prepared so skillfully for our meals to the flight of birds presaging nothing but the coming of autumn, Kiane flung her dark forebodings at me. Since I failed to respond with the requisite apprehension to all these omens of imminent disaster she saw everywhere, she took to fortune-telling, convinced she would thus bend me to her intent. For if I were—as she firmly held—already mad enough not to believe in the undisputed Pythian art, then I should at least trust my own art, mathematics.
    How else but as a sure harbinger of doom could one interpret the fall of the round, minted coins she used for prophesying? Why otherwise would all nine fall at every throw with the face of our ruler upwards? Was not this, for anyone with a spark of intelligence, a sure sign that ill-fortune was upon us?
    All nine to fall on the same side each time? What nonsense! Why, the probability of it happening even twice in a row was so small that Kiane might spend an entire lifetime throwing her coins without ever seeing all nine heads of the ruler one time after another. I could not endure this prattle. If no reasoning could shake her superstitious belief that the flight of birds or the position of stars in the heavens had a meaning other than the most ordinary and basic, the story of the nine coins that always fell face upwards could be proven wrong by a simple experiment.
    I had become accustomed to human stupidity a long time ago, and it no longer surprised me. But her attempt to make use of an evident lie, though driven to it by great fear, angered me, and so I told her to show me an example of what she claimed.
    She interpreted my readiness to watch her fortune-telling with relief, as a sign that I was once more of sound mind, albeit late in the day, for from the ramparts of Syracuse the terrible sound of the Romans' bloodthirsty advance could already be heard. Hurriedly reaching into the pocket under her apron, the only garment this otherwise neat woman wore that was always ragged, she took out the worn coins, acquired long ago in some Delphic place in defiance of the edict that banned fortune-telling as a trade in a society that prided itself on its orderliness.
    Well, not everything can be ordered....
    She held them for a moment in her greasy palm and was about to throw them before the threshold of our home, where we happened to be standing, but then she changed her mind and gave them to me to do it, so that there should be no suspicion of trickery, an expression of superior knowledge on her face. I shrugged, satisfied that I would easily, more easily than I had anticipated, free myself from Kiane's nagging. I could endure most things, but a choleric woman,
never. I took the coins from her and dropped them gently on the