King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre once marched their armies to opposite banks of a river. Tension rose. Solomon, worried his soldiers would collapse in the sun, summoned birds to hover over them and cast shade across the lines.
Hiram came to the riverbank to see the wonder. Solomon received him peaceably. They ate together. They made peace where battle had seemed inevitable.
While they spoke, an eagle suddenly removed his wing from over Solomon's head. Solomon asked why. The eagle explained that his wife — eagles, in these tales, hear things no one else hears — had told him a prophecy. The High Priest Yehoshua would die. And then Solomon's own daughter would marry a mamzer, a bastard with no tribal lineage.
Solomon, famous for his wisdom and for always preferring action to resignation, built a high tower. He put his daughter at the top. He stationed guards. She would not marry a bastard. She would not marry anyone at all.
One day an eagle — perhaps the same one — picked up a bastard child abandoned on the road and dropped him, for reasons the bird understood, into the tower. The boy grew up there. The daughter grew up there. The only human face she saw was his. They fell in love. They married.
When Solomon eventually visited the tower and discovered what had happened — the husband was the very bastard the prophecy had warned him about — he sat down, the legend says, and admitted that his wisdom was unavailing.
Gaster's Exempla #336 preserves this fable. The wisest king in the world could not build a tower high enough to stop a bird. Some verses of the future do not bend, no matter how clever the man who reads them.