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

bird never previously sighted at Rhodes, perched on the roof of his house. By this, the astrologer Thrasyllus correctly predicted Tiberius would succeed to the throne.

Tiberius believed that the world was ruled by fate, that destiny could be learned through astrology, omens, or the traditional methods of divination, reading bones or bowels. Since our destinies were fore-drawn, in vain were any supplications to the gods, appeasement by sacrifice or by the costly erection of public temples and monuments.

Of no avail were doctors, either. At the age of seventy-four, having received no treatment or medication since the age of thirty, Tiberius was strong as a bull, well proportioned and handsome, with the skin tone of a young athlete. He could poke through a fresh, crisp apple with any finger of either hand. And it was claimed that in his military days in Germany he’d actually killed men that way. He had been, indeed, a great soldier and a statesman par excellence—at least at first.

But those days were over. The omens had altered, and not in his favor. He could never return to Rome. Only a year before the Sejanus affair Tiberius had attempted to sail up the Tiber—but his small pet snake, Claudia, whom he carried in his bosom and fed from his own hand, had been found one morning on the deck, half eaten by ants. And the omens said: Beware the mob.

Now he stood each night on this high cliff of his palace, on the overgrown rock whose very history lay steeped in antiquity and mystery. It was named Capri: the goat. Some thought it was called so for Pan, half man, half goat, fathered on a water nymph by the god Hermes. Others believed it was named for the constellation of Capricorn, a goat that rose like a fish from the sea. And some, he was sure, said it was named for a goatlike emperor in rut, hoarding child concubines on an island, riddled with sexual depravity. He didn’t care what they said. The stars that guided his destiny had still been the same at his birth. There was no changing that.

Though Tiberius had been lawyer, soldier, statesman, emperor, he was, like his nephew Claudius, in his heart of hearts a lover of history. In the case of Tiberius, especially the history of the gods which most in these modern times regarded as myth. Best of all he loved the tales of the Greeks.

And now, after all these years of exile on this pile of stones—years when he’d heard of little but tragedy and betrayal in the day-to-day affairs of the outside world—now suddenly a new myth had surfaced at the far edge of the Roman Empire. It wasn’t really a new tale, as Tiberius knew. Rather it was a story of great antiquity—perhaps, indeed, the oldest myth in the world—and was found in each civilization since the dawn of recorded history. It was the myth of the “dying god,” a god who makes the ultimate sacrifice: to become a mortal. A god who, through the surrender of his own life as a mortal being, brings about the destruction of an old order and its rebirth as a new world order, a new aeon.

As Tiberius stood listening to the dark sea breaking against the rocks below, he looked across to the dim glowing outline of Vesuvius, where hot lava had churned and boiled from time immemorial, though it only erupted, so they said, one time at the end of each aeon.

But were they not entering a new age now? Was this not the new aeon the astrologers had been awaiting? Tiberius wondered if he himself would live to see the force of the vulcan god unleashed from the belly of the earth—soon now—the one time it would happen between the past and future aeons of two millennia each: only once in a span of four thousand years.

Just then, near the breakers at the mainland, he saw the flash of an oar, which must be the ship he was awaiting. He’d been watching half the night, and now, as it approached in the thinning darkness that spoke of imminent dawn, he gripped the wall before him. It was the ship bringing the witness to him. The witness who had been present at the death of the god.

He was tall and slender, with olive skin, almond eyes, and hair like a raven’s wing that hung in a straight glassy panel to his shoulders. He wore a white linen tunic, wrapped once and cinched loosely with a rope belt, and the bronze arm cuffs traditional with those from the South. Before him, across the terrace, Tiberius sat on his marble throne on an elevated marble dais overlooking the sea. Behind the man stood the imperial guard and the captain and crew who’d brought him there by sea. As he crossed the terrace and knelt on one knee before Tiberius, it was clear that he was afraid—but proud.

“Your name is Tammuz, you are Egyptian,” said the emperor, bidding the other to rise from his knee. “And yet, they say you are the pilot of a merchant ship that plies between Judea and Rome.” When the witness stood in silence, Tiberius added, “You may speak.”

“It is just as Your Excellency—Your Imperial Highness—states,” Tammuz replied. “My master owns a fleet of merchant sailing ships. I pilot one of his ships that carries not only freight but also many passengers.”

“Tell me what you saw, in your own words. Take your time.”

“It was late one night, after dinner,” said the Egyptian Tammuz. “No one was sleeping; most passengers were talking on deck and finishing their after-dinner wine. We were just along the coast of Roman Greece near the Echinades Isles. The wind had dropped, and the ship now drifted near the darkly forested outline of the camel-humped double isles of Paxi. Just then, a deep voice floated out across the waters—a voice from Paxi, calling my name.”

“The name of Tammuz,” murmured the emperor, as if