The Magic Circle (2 page)

“What does it say?” he whispered.

“In Greek, this one says ‘
En to pan
’,” she told him. “It means ‘One is all.’”

The Sibyl had foretold what would happen at each critical turning point in history—and, more important, how it was connected to each critical event of the past. It was said that she’d predicted the dawn of a new celestial age immediately following her own—the age of Pisces, the fish, whose avatar would be a virgin-born king. The Sibyl could see mysterious connections, like spider threads spanning thousands of years, connecting the age of Pisces with that of Aquarius, the water-bearer, an age that would not dawn until twenty centuries later—which would be just about now.

Clio slipped the leaves back into the vial. But as she and Aszi began their long trek through the caves, back toward the surface, she feared she knew what this moment really meant. It was as her father had always imagined. By unearthing a bottle like this, a bottle filled with time—by uncorking the long-mute voice of the past—she’d opened a door that perhaps should have remained closed. A Pandora’s box.

Tonight, the Sibyl’s song that had lain mute in darkness beneath the volcano had been reawakened, to be heard once more by humans for the first time in nearly two thousand years.

ENTERING THE CIRCLE

So [Jesus] told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and himself stood in the middle and said, “Answer Amen to me.” So he began to sing and to say …

Dance, all of you.…

To the universe belongs the dancer
.

He who does not dance does not know what happens.…

Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in me who am speaking
,

And when you have seen what I do, keep silence about my mysteries
.

I leaped: but do you understand the whole?

—Acts of John, New Testament Apocrypha

Jerusalem: Early Spring, A.D. 32

MONDAY

Pontius Pilate was in trouble, deep and serious trouble. But it seemed to him the most bitter of ironies that—for the first time in the seven years of his tenure as Roman
praefectus
, governor of Judea—the bloody Jews were not to blame.

He sat alone high above the city of Jerusalem, on the terrace of the palace built by Herod the Great, overlooking the western wall and the Jaffa Gate. Below, the setting sun turned the leaves of the pomegranate trees of the royal gardens to flame, highlighting Herod’s legacy of golden cages filled with doves. Beyond the gardens the slope of Mount Zion was thick with blossoming acacias. But Pilate couldn’t focus on his surroundings. In half an hour he would have to review the troops brought in to be quartered there in preparation for the week of the Jewish festival. Things always went wrong at these events, with so many pilgrims in town, and he dreaded a debacle like others they’d seen in the past. But that was far from the greatest of his problems.

For one holding so important a post, Pontius Pilate was a man of surprisingly humble beginnings. As his name implied, he was the descendant of former slaves, having somewhere an ancestor who’d been granted the
pileus
—the cap distinguishing a freed man who, through noble acts and personal endeavor, was made a citizen of the Roman Empire. Without education or advantage, but only through a combination of intelligence and hard work, Pontius Pilate had risen to join the ranks of the equestrian order in Rome, and was now a knight of the realm. But only when he’d had the great fortune to be discovered by Lucius Aelius Sejanus had Pilate’s star, along with his patron’s, soared like a meteor in the firmament.

These past six years—while the emperor Tiberius had been in resplendent retreat, diverting himself on the isle of Capri (rumor had it that his sexual appetites ran to young boys, unweaned infants, and an exotic zoo of imported beasts)—Sejanus had become the most powerful, hated, and feared man in Rome. In his capacity as coconsul, with Tiberius, of the Roman senate, Sejanus was free to govern as he chose, arresting his enemies on trumped-up charges and extending control abroad by furthering his own candidates for foreign assignment—such as Pontius Pilate’s appointment here in Judea. In a nutshell, that was Pontius Pilate’s problem, for Lucius Aelius Sejanus had been killed.

Not only was Sejanus dead, he’d been executed for treason and conspiracy by order of Tiberius himself. He was accused of seducing the emperor’s daughter-in-law, Livilla, who’d helped him poison her husband, Tiberius’s only son. When the document from the emperor in Capri had been read aloud before the Roman senate last autumn, the ruthless, cold-blooded Sejanus—taken completely off guard by the betrayal—had crumpled and had to be helped from the chamber. That same night, by command of the Roman senate, Lucius Aelius Sejanus was strangled in prison. His lifeless body was stripped naked and tossed on the Capitol steps, where it remained three days for the amusement or retaliation of the Roman citizenry, who spat, urinated, and defecated upon it, stabbed it, turned their animals loose upon it, and finally threw it into the Tiber for the fish to finish whatever was left. But the end of Sejanus was not the end of the story.

All members of the Sejanus family were hunted down and destroyed—even his little daughter who, as a virgin, couldn’t be put to death under Roman law. So the soldiers raped her first, then slashed her throat. Sejanus’s estranged wife committed suicide; the complicitous Livilla was locked in a room and left to starve by her own family. And now, less than half a year after his death, any allies or colleagues of Sejanus not yet executed had committed suicide by taking poison or falling on their swords.

Pontius Pilate was not horrified by such acts. He knew the Romans intimately, though he would never be one of them. That was the error Sejanus had made: he’d wanted to be a noble Roman, to marry into the imperial family itself, to supplant their rule. Sejanus had believed his blood would enrich the blood of kings. Instead, it was enriching the silt of the river.

Pilate had no such delusions about his own immediate situation. However qualified he might be for his position, however remote from Rome was this provincial outpost of Judea, he was deeply stained by his indebtedness to his late benefactor, and there were other associations linking them as well. Pilate’s actions regarding the Jews, for instance, might be seen as patterned after those of Sejanus, who’d begun his own political career with purges of the Roman Jews and had ended it by banning Jews from Rome altogether—an order recently rescinded by imperial command. Tiberius protested that he’d never wanted intolerance toward any of his subjects, that it was all Sejanus’s doing. This made Pontius Pilate extremely nervous, and with excellent cause. These past seven years, Pilate had often pitted himself against the Judean rabble he so loathed.

For a reason unclear to Pontius Pilate, the Jews, unlike other colonized peoples, remained all but exempt from Roman law—from service in the Roman armies and from nearly all forms of taxation, including those paid by Samaritans and even Roman citizens within these provinces. Under legislation by the Roman senate, a full Roman citizen could be put to death just for trespassing on the Jewish Temple Mount.

And when Pilate had to raise funds to complete the aqueduct, to bring lifeblood to these hinterlands, what had the damnable Jews done? They’d refused to pay the aqueduct levy, claiming it was the job of the Romans to provide for the people they’d conquered and enslaved. (Enslaved—that was amusing. How quickly they’d forgotten their sojourns in Egypt and Babylon.) So he’d “borrowed” the required funds from the temple tithe, finished the aqueduct, and that was the end of the whining. It was not the end of the Jews and their missives to Rome, but he’d prevailed. Of course, that was while Sejanus was still alive.

Now a new event was on the horizon. It was something that might save him, and turn the wrath of Tiberius, whose arm was long and grasp viselike when it came to retaliation against subordinates who’d lost his favor.

Pilate stood up and paced the terrace restlessly.

He had it on good advice from his authorities—that nest of spies and informers essential to the colonial governor of any subject people—that there was a Jew who was wandering about in the wilderness claiming, as so many of them did, to be the
inunctus
—the anointed one. This was the one the Greeks called
christos
, meaning covered with chrism, or oil, and whom the Jews called
mashiah
, which meant the same, as he understood it. This was a very ancient thing, he was told, in the history of their faith: that a person was coming, would suddenly arrive, that they believed fervently would deliver them from whatever bondage they thought they were in, and turn the entire world into a Jewish-ruled paradise. Of late, the desire to see this potential king anointed seemed to have reached fever pitch—and to Pontius Pilate, it was the blessing he’d been hoping for. It was the Jews themselves who would save him!

As the situation stood, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, supported this new candidate, as did a vast discipleship from among the Essene colony, followers of that madman a few years back who’d gone about dipping people in water. Rumor had it he’d gotten himself executed by Herod Antipas, Jewish tetrarch of Galilee, for calling Antipas’s wife Herodias a whore—that Antipas had beheaded the fellow at the request of his stepdaughter, Salome. Was there no end to the perfidy of these people? Antipas feared this new anointed one; he believed he was the reincarnation of the water-dipper he’d beheaded, returned to exact revenge against the tetrarch.

But there was a third contender in the game, placing Pilate in an even better position: the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, a puppet of Rome with a larger police force in Jerusalem than Pilate’s, quite as dedicated to getting rid of rabble-rousers who were out to topple the Roman Empire and civilized governance. So Caiaphas and Antipas hated and feared this Jew, and the Sanhedrin and the bathers supported him. Better and better. When the fellow went, he would take them all down with him.

Pilate looked out over the plain beyond the western wall where the sun just now was setting. He heard the new troops assembling in the courtyard, as they did each festival. They would handle the overflow of pilgrims here to celebrate the spring equinox, which, as usual, the Jews insisted upon equating with their own unique experiences: in this case, the passing over of their houses by some spirit in Egypt more than a thousand years ago.

Pilate listened to the commands of the drill officer calling the new troops to order and putting them through their paces. He heard the sounds of their leather soles moving across the marble tiles of the courtyard below. At last Pilate turned to look over the terrace wall at the troops beneath, who squinted up at him—directly into the western sun blazing behind him like a fiery aura, so they could see only the vaguest outline of his form. He always chose this hour and this location for that very reason.

“Soldiers of Rome,” he said, “you must be prepared for the week ahead, for the crowds that will enter this city on pilgrimage. You must be prepared to deal with any events that might place an undue burden on the empire. There are rumors of rabble-rousers whose goals are to turn what should be a peaceful festival into a riot, to bring down law and order. Soldiers of Rome, the week ahead may be a time when the actions of each of us will change the course of empire, perhaps even the course of history. Let us not forget that our first obligation is to prevent any act against the state or the
status quo
by those who wish, for reasons of religious fervor or for personal glory, to alter the fate of the Roman Empire—to change the course of our destiny.”

TUESDAY

It was not yet dawn when Joseph of Arimathea, bleary-eyed and exhausted from his journey, arrived at the edge of Jerusalem. In the darkness of his mind he could still hear the sounds of last night—the water lapping against the sides of the large ships, the oars dipped into water, the whispers across the surface of the moonless sea—as the small boat approached his merchant fleet that lay moored outside the port of Joppa, awaiting first light to enter the harbor.

Even before Nicodemus’s messenger identified himself and boarded the ship, even before Joseph saw the note he had come all this way to deliver, he felt a sense of impending doom. It came as no surprise that the note was cryptic, to protect against its contents being seen and understood by others. But for Joseph it raised a thousand specters merely by what it did
not
say. Even now he could see the words before him:

Make haste. The hour is come.  Nicodemus

The hour had come, it said. But how
could
it have come? Joseph had thought in anguish. It wasn’t time!

Throwing judgment and caution to the winds, Joseph had roused his sleeping crew and given the command to cut his flagship loose from the others—right now, in the dead of night—and to bring this one ship, alone, into the port of Joppa.

His men had argued hotly against it, no doubt thinking him mad. And upon docking in port, Joseph had demonstrated further madness. Leaving the crew to secure his precious cargoes—an unheard-of act for the owner of so large a merchant fleet—he’d violated Roman curfew, storming through the streets, having servants awakened and his horses brought out and harnessed, and he’d headed off alone into the night. For the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, would meet at dawn. And when they did, he must be there.

On the dangerous roads of the backcountry—in the black silence broken only by the sounds of horses’ hooves on broken stone, their hot lathered breathing, the cicadas’ chirping in the distant groves—Joseph heard the silent thought whispered over and over in the depths of his own mind: