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

his mother’s breasts and flicked his tongue over them, serpentlike, until her nipples became aroused. He let her touch him under his toga, as he loved. Mother was the only one who really knew how to excite him. But after a moment, he drew her hand gently away.

“Not tonight, darling,” he said. “At least not yet. We’re having supper at the tower of Maecenas, just you and me in the upper room. I’ve prepared a spectacle that’s about to start soon—just after dark, you know—and we’ll miss the first part if we dally.”

Nero was enraptured by the beauty of the flames. When he’d first come up with the idea of getting rid of those rickety wooden houses scattered all over Rome that were cluttering up the view from his new palace, he’d never imagined the actual fire would be so lovely. He’d have to remember to record his feelings about it in his diary. But the diary recalled something he’d planned to speak of with Agrippina:

“Mother, I was going over some of Claudius’s copious piles of papers yesterday, and imagine what I found?” he said. “The old goat kept a diary! It’s true, all sorts of libidinous thoughts—if very few actual deeds. I stayed up all night reading it, and I learned something of enormous interest. It seems your brother Caligula, before his untimely death, was on the trail of some powerful objects. Caligula had kept this even from your sister Drusilla, though they were so close. But he told Claudius about them, so he says in the diary. Though you and Julia were in exile—as you’d say, you were hardly Caligula’s confidantes—still I thought you might’ve learned something from Claudius.”

“Not this time,” Nero’s mother said calmly, sipping her wine as she looked down over the city of seven hills that lay in a darkness spangled by many little bonfires that were growing steadily brighter.

“But in fact,” she added, “I heard something of it from Drusilla’s husband, Lucius, when I came back to Rome to bury my brother. Lucius’s own brother Gaius had been a centurion in Roman Judea under Tiberius, more than twenty years ago, and he presided over the execution of one of these annoying Jewish religious fanatics you’ve lately been tossing to the lions. It seems already back then they were rabble-rousers, and their original ringleader was the very chap Gaius crucified. But the interesting part is, it seems he didn’t die by crucifixion, but was killed by a stab of Gaius’s javelin, which then inexplicably disappeared. Apparently the Jews believed the javelin held some mysterious power of a religious nature. I was never quite clear on the rest, so I’m afraid that’s really all I can say.”

Agrippina set down her wineglass and came over to sit on Nero’s lap—just as she used to do with Claudius whenever she wanted to have her way or wangle something important. Nero grew instantly suspicious. But as his mother rubbed her hands over his private parts and sucked his neck, he also felt himself growing stiff.

Damn: just when he most wanted to pay attention, not only to the wonderful spectacle he’d arranged outside but, more important, to the topic of conversation that had been so unceremoniously abandoned by her ploy for sex. But Agrippina had loosened the front of her gown and popped her golden apples tantalizingly out of the basket once more. They were practically in his face. He took a deep breath, swallowed air, and got to his feet, spilling the witch to the floor in a pile of her own silks.

“I don’t believe that’s all you know,” Nero told her. Tossing his long blond mane over his shoulder, he gazed down at her petulantly with icy blue eyes. “Claudius says in his diary that Caligula had all this information not only from that brother-in-law of yours, as you said, but some more from Tiberius, too. He lists what the items are—there are thirteen of them—and says that though they aren’t exactly treasures, they possess some kind of powerful force instead. Claudius even invaded Britain years ago, trying to get his hands on them! You must know about them—maybe what their value is, too.”

He bent down and grabbed Agrippina by the arms, pulling her up off the floor to face him. He tried to keep his eyes on her face and away from the beautiful curves of her golden, half-naked skin—her warm, sensual flesh that even now was being licked with light from the sweeping roar of flame washing the hills of Rome outside beneath the window. Agrippina smiled like a cat—then pulled his thumb into her mouth and sucked on it erotically, as she used to do when he was still a child. He felt his knees growing weak, but he remained determined and yanked his thumb out.

“I need a new ship, so I can come and go easily from my estate at Bauli,” Agrippina mentioned, picking up her wineglass as if nothing had occurred since her last sip.

“It’s yours,” Nero told her, privately wondering how he might quickly find someone who knew how to build a collapsible boat.

The woman held too much power over him—and she knew it. But if he could dispatch Claudius as he had, why not Agrippina too? Then he’d finally be free, while possessing more power than anyone else in the world. Which brought him back to the topic.

“What kind of power ‘of a religious nature’ did Lucius say the Jews believe the javelin possessed?” he asked his mother.

“Oh, Lucius had done quite a study of it,” she replied. “It involved a number of items the Jews had brought with them out of Babylon or Egypt, and some of the secrets of their mystery religion, as well. It all had something to do with rebirth, I believe—if these objects were held together in the right hands.”

“Do these Jews really believe that?” Nero demanded. “Or how did Lucius think it could take place?”

“It seems they must be put in the right spot,”