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

of Adam and Eve, was located—the spot where the first blood had been shed by mankind.

The Hebrew peoples had always wrestled with the paradox of blood, for had not their God forbidden the shedding of all blood with the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”? Antipas might be only the converted Jewish son of a Samaritan mother, but commandment or no, this injunction had proven to be both his personal test and his private curse. And he was about to be tested or cursed once again.

Herod Antipas well knew the poison of power lust still working in the veins of his ambitious relations, not least of all his wife. Humiliated that her brother was made a king when her husband was yet a mere tetrarch, Herodias nagged until Antipas sent a deputation from Galilee to Rome with gifts for the greedy boy emperor, an attempt to bribe him for equal treatment. But this approach had worked against them. Caligula’s messenger, just arrived from Baiae, was bearing a list of further contributions expected from the tetrarch. On this list was something that made Antipas’s heart contract, for it was an object that, apart from its surface value, held deep meaning for him and him alone.

It went back to that time when they’d gone to the palace built by Herod the Great at Machareus, east of the Dead Sea, to celebrate Antipas’s birthday. Herodias’s lovely daughter Salome was with them. Still a young girl, Salome had danced in honor of the event. But of course, as Herodias surely knew when choosing Machareus as a birthday site, it was also the very fortress where her hated enemy had long been held in prison. So after her charming dance, Salome had asked the favor.

The hideous scene still haunted Antipas’s nightmares. Even now, after so many years, he felt sick to think of it. In her fury, unassuaged by this gruesome death, Herodias had sought further triumph. She’d ordered the severed head of her victim brought into the great hall where they were dining—my God, it was arrayed like a boar’s head on a platter! But despite his horror and revulsion, there’d been something deeper, something hidden within that scene that Antipas had never spoken of in all these years, though he’d thought of it many times. It was the platter itself.

Antipas recognized that platter from his youth. It was a relic unearthed from beneath the Temple Mount during the costly eight-year expansion and reconstruction of the second temple by architects of his father, Herod the Great. It was thought to be part of the original treasure of King Solomon, perhaps hastily buried during the destruction of the original temple. But his father Herod had always joked—Antipas got a chill whenever he thought of it—that it was really the shield Perseus had used against the snake-headed Medusa, to turn her to stone.

It was this dreadful object that was now forever coupled in his mind with the severed head of his wife’s victim—that gauntly ecstatic face, the open eyes, the hair still drenched with blood.

He wondered how Caligula had learned of the golden platter. And why in God’s name had this boy who now considered himself a god decided to demand it as part of his tribute?

Rome: Noon, January 24, A.D. 41

SPIRIT AND MATTER

It is no paradox but a great truth borne out by all history that human culture advances only through the clash of opposites

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—J. J. Bachofen

It is difference of opinion that makes horse races

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—Mark Twain

Herod Agrippa struggled uphill, his breath labored, his heart pounding against his ribs, his brow drenched in sweat—and with only a single soldier of the Praetorian Guard to share his burden. He was terrified they might be recognized. After all, it had been done in broad daylight. And he was even more afraid someone might guess exactly what the burden was they carried beneath this blanket.

Who could imagine, thought Agrippa, that someone so lithe and graceful, a dancer, a youth who’d actually been acclaimed a spirit or a god, would be as heavy as a sackful of stones? But those thirty knife wounds through the face, stomach, and genitalia of the late Gaius Caesar—who only twenty minutes earlier had been alive and well in the colonnade—should have convinced anyone the emperor Caligula had been anything but a god.

The flesh was still warm as they lugged his corpse up the Esquiline Hill to the shelter of the Lamian Gardens, but the blood-soaked toga, already stiffening in the cold January air, adhered to the blanket. Agrippa realized that under the circumstances of the emperor’s violent death a state funeral was hardly possible, but he prayed at least they might accomplish a swift and covert burial before the maddened mobs found the body and indulged in the favorite Roman sport: desecration of the dead.

This brutal assassination had taken place before Agrippa’s very eyes. He’d just left the auditorium with Claudius and Caligula where they’d been watching the Palatine Games. Caligula paused to watch some boys rehearsing the Trojan war dance, to be performed for those returning after lunch. It was then that the attack came.

A large group of men—a group that, to Agrippa’s amazement, included the emperor’s own personally chosen German and Thracian bodyguards—fell en masse upon Caligula with spears and javelins, yelling blasphemies and, while he yet continued to live and breathe, hacking him to bits. Claudius, who fled and hid behind a curtain in the Hermaeum, was discovered there and whisked outside the city gates, for his own protection, by the Praetorian Guard.

In the pandemonium that ensued, a splinter group hurried off to dispatch Caligula’s wife and son, while those of the Roman senate who were among the conspirators scurried to convene an emergency session, calling for a vote to bring back the Republic. It had all happened so fast—in a matter of moments—that Agrippa’s head was still spinning as he puffed uphill, finally reaching the leafy obscurity of the gardens so they could lay down their burden. He