The Blood of Alexandria by Richard Blake

the current, very high prices. The lower the forward price drops from now on, the higher the value of those contracts. As it happens, there’s an excellent chance of a good harvest to come.’
    Martin gave me one of his funny looks. So far as he understood financial matters, he took the view that I was profiting from misery, and probably increasing it. But this blessed change in the weather had cheered me no end, so I decided in turn to give him one of my little lectures on the science of enrichment.
    ‘If you take the March price of corn in Alexandria during the past eight hundred years’ I began ‘– yes, I’ve had those dozen clerks I commandeered extracting this for months now from the tax records – there is a fairly stable cycle. What makes it hard to spot is the quite independent cycle that correlates with the timing of the flood.
    ‘But if you can separate these two cycles, and take account of plagues and other disturbances, you’ll then be able to guess the future price. I’m not so fast as I’d wish at brute calculations, and I’ve applied the method to any past year chosen by lot. In eight-elevenths of cases, the answer has been sufficiently close to the actual price.’
    Martin looked back at the image of Saint Mark. ‘That sounds rather like divination,’ he said still more disapprovingly, going now, for greater security, into Celtic.
    ‘Not at all,’ I said, warming to my theme. The flute and cymbal players were coming closer, so I raised my voice and went back into Greek, which is better for discussing these things. ‘Divination and astrology and all those other frauds rest on the claim that one class of future events can be known from the study of present or past events of another class. Since there is no proven connection between any of these classes, the predictions made are all worthless.
    ‘With the method I’m trying to develop, you can predict future events from the study of past events of the same class .
    ‘Have you noticed how lucky I am at all games of chance? Well, if you throw a single die a very large number of times, the ox will come up one-sixth of the time, and every other side one-sixth. That’s easy. But I’ve discovered that, if you throw two dice the same number of times, the chance of each combination will be—’
    Martin broke in: ‘The purpose of mathematics,’ he said primly, ‘is to supplement Revelation by letting us see – however darkly – the Mind of God. I don’t think it was ever intended to assist commercial speculation. And didn’t your Epicurus dismiss mathematics as useless?’
    He turned his mouth down into a very sour look. I knew, though, his mood had been improving by leaps and bounds ever since the potty man had slapped on the ointment. We’d had this argument and others like it more times than I could remember. It was Martin’s duty at this point to disapprove.
    ‘Martin,’ I said, trying to parry his attack on one of the few completely stupid things Epicurus had said, ‘I do believe that, the usual miracles aside, everything that happens in the world can be understood by the use of reason. And I further believe that understanding allows prediction and even control . . .’
    I trailed off. We were now on such familiar ground, words were hardly needed. Martin could have made his usual move: that Epicurus had been interested in rational understanding only as a way of diminishing fear of death, not at all of improving the comforts of life. But he wouldn’t make the move. Even he must have seen how nice the afternoon would surely turn out.
    We looked away from each other and crossed ourselves with varying piety as the image of some other saint was carried past. The procession would soon thin out, and we’d be able to continue back to the Palace. We could settle down after lunch to a long examination of how best to reapportion land in the Lower Thebaid region.
    For the moment, it was enough to know I really had stumbled on a method that