Never Is Our Always

Dumbledores Gone? 5

(Minnie pov) (April)

"Let us begin," Firenze said. He swished his long palomino tail, raised his hand towards the leafy canopy overhead, then lowered it slowly, and as he did so, the light in the room dimmed, so that they now seemed to be sitting in a forest clearing by twilight, and stars appeared on the ceiling.

"Lie back on the floor," Firenze said in his calm voice, "and observe the heavens. Here is written, for those who can see, the fortune of our races."

I stretched out on my back and gazed upwards at the ceiling. A twinkling red star winked at me from overhead.

"I know that you have learned the names of the planets and their moons in Astronomy," Firenze's calm voice said, "and that you have mapped the stars' progress through the heavens. Centaurs have unravelled the mysteries of these movements over centuries. Our findings teach us that the future may be glimpsed in the sky above us-"

"Professor Trelawney did astrology with us!" Jessica said excitedly, raising her hand in front of her so that it stuck up in the air as she lay on her back. "Mars causes accidents and burns and things like that, and when it makes an angle to Saturn, like now-" she drew a right-angle in the air above her "-that means people need to be extra careful when handling hot things-"

"That," Firenze said calmly, "is human nonsense."

Jessica's hand fell limply to her side.

"Trivial hurts, tiny human accidents," Firenze said, as his hooves thudded over the mossy floor, I snorted since he called us accidents. "These are of no more significance than the scurryings of ants to the wide universe, and are unaffected by planetary movements."

"Professor Trelawney-" Jessica began, in a hurt and indignant voice.

"-is a human," said Firenze simply. "And is therefore blinkered and fettered by the limitations of your kind."

I turned my head very slightly to look at Jessica. She looked very offended, as did several of the people surrounding her.

"Sybill Trelawney may have Seen, I do not know," Firenze continued, and I heard the swishing of his tail again as he walked up and down before them, "but she wastes her time, in the main, on the self-flattering nonsense humans call fortune-telling. I, however, am here to explain the wisdom of centaurs, which is impersonal and impartial. We watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there. It may take ten years to be sure of what we are seeing."

Firenze pointed to the red star directly above me.

"In the past decade, the indications have been that wizardkind is living through nothing more than a brief calm between two wars. Mars, bringer of battle, shines brightly above us, suggesting that the fight must soon break out again. How soon, centaurs may attempt to divine by the burning of certain herbs and leaves, by the observation of fume and flame..."

It was the most unusual lesson I had ever attended. We did indeed burn sage and mallowsweet there on the classroom floor, and Firenze told the class to look for certain shapes and symbols in the pungent fumes, but he seemed perfectly unconcerned that not one of us could see any of the signs he described, telling the class that humans were hardly ever good at this, that it took centaurs years and years to become competent, and finished by telling us that it was foolish to put too much faith in such things, anyway, because even centaurs sometimes read them wrongly.

He was nothing like any human teacher I had ever had. His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even centaurs' knowledge, was foolproof.

"He's not very definite on anything, is he?" Lee said in a low voice, as we put out their mallowsweet fire. "I mean, I could do with a few more details about this war we're about to have, couldn't you?"