The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

will be searching for me. It is dangerous to reveal where we will meet for that night’s meal. You must come to the temple, and bring the others with you. There, near the marketplace, you will see a man bearing a pitcher of water. Follow him.”

“Those are your only instructions? That we come to a place and follow an unknown person?” said Joseph.

“Follow the water-bearer,” said the Master, “and all will happen as planned.”

SATURDAY

It was just after midnight when it happened. Caiaphas would never forget the moment when they came to awaken him, the knock on his chamber door as he stirred beneath the bedclothes, wondering what time it was. The sensation he felt then was one he’d heard of but had never before experienced: the hair actually rose up on the back of his spine! He knew something dangerous and exciting was about to happen. He knew, without being able to name it, that it was what he had been waiting for all along.

The temple police, who guarded the high priest’s palace and his person, too, stood outside his chamber door and told him that a man had come to the palace gates—here, in a secured quarter of the town, and now, in the dead of night, hours after the Roman curfew was in effect—asking to see him. It was a darkly handsome man, they said, strong, with a craggy face and heavy brow. He refused to speak with any but the high priest Caiaphas, on a very private matter of utmost urgency. He had no credentials, no appointment, and no explanation for his visit, and the temple police knew that it was their duty to arrest and interrogate the man or send him away. Yet they somehow hesitated to do either.

Caiaphas knew, deep in his soul, that he need not ask further questions. As one betrayer understands another, Joseph Caiaphas understood that he had known this man always, perhaps through all eternity.

His servant wrapped him in the cocoonlike folds of his lush green dressing gown and, followed by the temple guard, he padded along the stone corridors in silence toward the chamber where the stranger awaited him. Caiaphas knew in his private thoughts that this was the moment of destiny. He knew that his hour had come.

But later, when he was asked about that night—interrogated, really, by the Romans and the Sanhedrin—it was odd, for that was all he could recall. His awakening in the dead of night, that march down the long hall—and the sense of personal destiny, which he never mentioned, of course, for it was nobody’s affair but his own. The stranger himself, the encounter, was just a blur to Caiaphas, as though his mind had been clouded with drink.

After all, why should he recall him, when they’d met only for a moment, just that one night? The police took care of the rest: they paid out thirty pieces of silver for the job. How could Caiaphas be expected, so long afterward, to remember his name? Some fellow from Dar-es-Keriot, he believed, though he wasn’t even sure of that. In the larger perspective, thought Caiaphas, in the great tapestry that was history, what difference did it make? Only the moment was important.

Two thousand years from now, their names would be like specks of dust blowing across a vast plain. In two thousand years, no one would remember any of this at all.

SUNDAY

Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar could see in the dark.

Now, as he stood in the black night on the parapet, a night without moon or stars, he could still see clearly the clean lines and veins of his own strong hands resting on the parapet wall. His large dark eyes surveyed the sea; he could make out whitecaps all the way to the Bay of Napoli, where the coastline lay in inky darkness.

He had been able to do so practically since infancy, and was thus able to help his mother escape, across meadows and mountains and through a raging forest fire that licked so close it singed her hair, when the troops of Gaius Octavian were pursuing her, trying to catch her so that Octavian could seduce her. Then Octavian became Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. So Tiberius’s mother divorced his father, a quaestor who had been commander of Julius Caesar’s triumphant Alexandrian fleet. And she became Rome’s first empress.

That was Livia, a remarkable woman, key sponsor of the pax romana, honored by the vestal virgins and thought of as a treasure by nearly everyone in the empire. Herod Antipas built a city named for her up in Galilee, and it had been proposed several times that she receive the status of an immortal, as had been decreed for Augustus.

But Livia, at last, was dead. And thanks to her, Tiberius was emperor—since, to further her son’s ambitions, she’d poisoned every legitimate heir standing between himself and the throne. Including, it was privately rumored, even the divine Augustus. Or perhaps one should say, to further her ambitions, which had been plentiful. Tiberius wondered whether Livia—wherever she happened to be now—could also see in the dark.

He remembered when he’d stood here at this very spot, only last year, through most of the night, awaiting the bonfires he’d arranged for them to light at Vesuvius on the mainland as soon as it was certain in Rome that Sejanus was dead.

He smiled to himself, a bitter smile full of deep and unending hatred for the one who’d pretended to be his best and only friend. The one who had betrayed him in the end, just as all the others had done.

It seemed a thousand years ago that Tiberius had stood on that other parapet of his first self-imposed exile—in Rhodes, where he’d fled from his slut of a wife Julia, Augustus’s daughter, whom he’d been forced to divorce his beloved Vipsania to marry. The week Augustus banished Julia herself and wrote to beg his son-in-law to return to Rome, an omen was seen: an eagle, a