'You do indeed come from a superior place,' the priest enthused. 'What you have said has been a revelation to me. A divine force brought you amongst us and its purpose was to bring the wisdom of the sixth realm to those who have not received the full revelation of the divine truth ...'
Aaroen droned on in a way Tom found intensely boring. He decided to bring the conversation back on track.
'Why do you want to know about eclipses?'
Aaroen handed him a sheet of parchment.
'When we were at Karnak we used this to predict eclipses. That ignorant man, Grimwald, does not understand that the blessed lines require modification before they can be employed in this more northerly land.'
Tom examined the parchment and tried to make sense of it. He'd long held the view that some of the megalithic monuments of his old realm had functioned as analogue computers. He had seen learned papers that claimed the monuments mimicked the heavens and could be used to predict lunar eclipses and other celestial events.
'Grimwald thinks that there will be an eclipse of the moon in four days,' Aaroen said. 'If he is wrong, that will bring great shame on him.'
'It certainly would,' Tom agreed.
'Will you look at his prediction and see if it is correct?'
Tom leant forward.
The parchment was covered in lines and circles. It reminded him of a diagram in a book by a famous astronomer who believed Stonehenge was used to predict celestial events.
***
The problem was daunting. Tom looked up from his calculations. The whitewashed wall of the stable was covered in equations and calculations but his endeavours were leading nowhere. Without a calculator the task was beyond him. He didn't even have access to trigonometric tables. He'd lectured on them in his university courses. He'd told his students how important they had been for the advancement of learning. Now, he realised just how true that was. Without the tables, he wasn't capable of the simplest geometric calculations. In short, he was wasting his time.
The crowd of onlookers failed to notice the look of desperation on his face. They were greatly impressed by the diagrams and symbols he had drawn on the wall with a stick of charcoal. None doubted that his good spells were more than a match for the evil spells of the priests of the Duideth.
Their idiotic chatter irritated him. He needed somewhere quiet where he could think without being disturbed. The queen had talked about a gully with shrines and statues. It was a place of solitude and he resolved to go there. He put down the charcoal, dismissed his guard and set off across the frosty fields, giving orders to be left alone.