Zodiac

[tamaranth]

Whenever he can find a newspaper, he reads all thirteen horoscope predictions every day. None of them feels right for him. Of course he doesn't know the day on which he was born, much less the time: but he must have been born, mustn't he? So one of the signs must be the one he was born under. Sea-goat, virgin (ha, no), mutton or beef or fish. "You will go on a journey," the paper advises everybody born under the sign of the cat. Twins are promised that "an unexpected meeting could offer new opportunities."
Well, he *will* go on a journey. He will hope for an unexpected meeting, so much more mysterious than an expected meeting -- the encounters with marks, with gangmasters, with people he owes, with people who owe him. He would like some new opportunities. He's fed up with the old ones.
There's a woman who dresses up in flowing robes and heavy kohl, and calls herself Madame Urania. She has a stall down by the riverside, on the part of the walkway that's an inch deep at high tide. Urania's real name, he knows, is Susan: which is a sensible name, an English name, a name of commonplace and everyday and plainspeaking. He never calls her Susan, always "Madame". Sometimes she gives him her leftovers, or tips him off to a rich mark slumming it on the South Bank. As long as he doesn't get in the way of business, she'll be his friend. She doesn't know what his star sign is either: it was one of the first questions he asked her, before they got to know each other.
"Where were you born? What day, what year? What do you remember?" And to each weighted, targetted question he'd shrugged. "I don't know, Madame," he'd told her. "I don't remember anything before here. I don't know who I am."
She called him Lethe, which was better than no name at all and made her smile every time she said it. She told him she couldn't draw his birth chart without knowing where and when he was born. "Or reborn," she said. "Or made."
It would be like a family, thinks Lethe, who has no family. A tribe of those born under a single sign: the water-seller, or the balance. He wants to know. "Then pick a sign," says Urania, offering him a fanned hand of cards that aren't spades or diamonds or hearts.
"Those aren't signs," he says, feeling stupid. She often makes him feel stupid. No: he often feels stupid.
"They're maps to signs," says Madame Urania. "Go on. Choose one."
He picks a card. It's watery. There's some sort of sea creature at the bottom of the picture.
"The crab," she says, pleased. "Sweet summer child."
But the horoscopes for the crab don't fit. "Money is coming your way," says the newspaper, but there is never any money, unless he follows one of the marks Madame has pointed out to him. (Even then, they don't always pay him, after. And he doesn't like to take their money from them without earning it, because sometimes they get hurt.) So money does not come his way. He goes after it.
[I started with the zodiac, honest!]
"The river's rising," says Madame Urania when he seeks her out. "See?" She shows him pictures on her cards -- that watery card is there again -- and spreads out coloured glass and silvery charms and a sheet of densely-printed text that he cannot read. "The water is coming for us."
Above the river there's a pale late-afternoon moon, huge and full, hanging there like a tossed coin. He points at it, but he can't find the words to ask what he wants to ask. Something about the moon and the water, the river, the high tides, the water washing at his bare, twisted feet and at the base of Madame Urania's piled crates. His horoscope this morning did not say that he would drown. Nobody's horoscope ever says that: but every day there are bloated bodies in the river as it runs out towards the sea.
"The city will drown," says Urania when he tries to talk to her about all the pale corpses in the water. "I drew up its chart. It was founded under a bad sign, and the signs come around and around and around and --"
There is somebody coming towards her stall, eyes fixed on the bright tattered blue-and-gold banner that's shifting sluggishly as the late breeze stirs it. A man, thinks Lethe: or is it a woman in a man's clothes, or something neither one nor the other? He hunkers down to watch and listen.
"Madame Urania? I want you to read for me. I have silver."
The person's voice is low and resonant, like the wind in the cables of the bridge. Their mouth is painted and their eyelids are gilded. Their swirling coat is made up of silken scraps of many colours: beneath it they wear trousers of dark blue, heavy boots that look to be keeping out the rising river-water, a shirt that might once have been as white as their teeth.
"Silver first," says Madame Urania, not meeting the other's eyes.