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

paralyzed by that band of howling harpies that seemed straight from Hades. Suetonius ran down the lines between them as the crazed women rushed onward; he screamed commands and imprecations to the troops above the deafening racket of the Druids, until at last his officers collected themselves and began to follow his example.

“Cut them down!” the command ran down the ranks. Those shrieking women with flaming torches bore down upon them still, with the screams of the mad Druid priests resounding in their ears. At the last possible instant, the soldiers charged.

Joseph of Arimathea stood beside Lovernios at the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t help but recall that other sunset when he’d stood on another cliff beside his friend and watched the sea turn to blood—a sunset twenty-five years ago, on another coast of another country, when it had all begun. When perhaps it could have been stopped. But now, as the screams from the beach below filled his ears, he turned to Lovernios in horror.

“We must intervene!” Joseph cried, grasping his friend by the arm. “We must help them! We must do something to make it stop! They’re not even defending themselves! The Romans have turned their own torches upon them—they’ve set fire to their hair and clothes! They’re cutting them to bits!”

The Druid stood immobile. He only flinched slightly when, over the terrible clamor and screams, he heard the sound of the axes ringing back from the rocks and realized for the first time what the Romans were really bent upon: they were going to obliterate the sacred grove.

Lovernios didn’t look at Joseph. Nor did he glance at the carnage on the beach below that represented not only the massacre of his people but the destruction of everything they believed in and cherished—the twilight of their whole way of life, even of their gods. Instead he gazed out to sea as if in that western twilight he could see another place, another time in the distant past or far more distant future. When at last he spoke, to Joseph the words sounded remote and strange, like echoes from some dank and bottomless well.

“When Esus died, you had the strength of your wisdom,” he reminded Joseph. “You knew what to do and you did it. You tried to comprehend the meaning of his life and death, and you have never ceased to do so these nearly thirty years. True wisdom, however, lies not only in understanding what can or cannot be done, but in knowing what must be done. And also in knowing—how did you say it to me then, so long ago?—the kairos: the critical moment.”

“Please, Lovern, this is the critical moment. My God!” Joseph cried.

But it was clear, even in his despair, that the situation was utterly hopeless. He dropped to his knees there on the cliff, face buried in hands, and he prayed as the crash of felled trees below mingled with the horrifying screams of death. He heard these sounds together, drifting like wraiths across the silent waters. After a moment Joseph felt Lovernios’s comforting hand resting on his hair, his voice strangely tranquil, as if he’d found a hidden core of hope that he alone could see.

“There are two things the gods demand,” he told Joseph. “We must go at once, tonight, and sacrifice all the potent objects we possess, cast them into the holy waters of the Llyn Cerrig Bach, the lake of small stones.”

“What then?” whispered Joseph.

“If that does not turn the tide,” said Lovernios gravely, “it may come to pass we will have to send the messenger.…”

The messenger from the south had arrived at the far side of the island just after dawn, as Suetonius Paulinus was watching the last tree fall. It was an ancient tree, the oldest of literally thousands in a wood that had taken all night for his legion to reduced to complete devestation.

The tree had a girth of more than sixty feet: his garrison engineers had calculated that it was the size of a galley under full oar. Lying on its side, as now, it was the height of one of those three-story buildings they’d constructed along the African coast when he was governor of Mauretania. How old could a tree grow to become, Suetonius wondered? Would its rings, if he could take the time to count them, number as many as those lives his troops had obliterated last night? Would the death of this tree, as with other holy trees, in the end mark the death of the Druids—as they seemed themselves to believe?

Erasing these thoughts for more practical matters, Suetonius set his men to work stacking up the dark-clad corpses of the dead Druids and building bonfires for their cremation. Then, recalling the emperor Nero’s chief request, he sent a posse of soldiers off to explore the island. For Nero had written he had cause to believe from his late stepfather (and great-uncle) Claudius that the Druids held many valuable treasures in strongholds exactly like this one at Mona. Nero wished to be informed of any such findings at once.

This important business under way, Suetonius Paulinus remembered the messenger and beckoned to have him brought from where he’d been waiting. The soldier looked rather the worse for wear after his lengthy journey. Further, Suetonius was informed, the fellow’s wet and bedraggled appearance was the result of his plunge into water to cross the narrow strait to the island, along with his horse, only moments before. The frothing horse, still lathered despite its dip in the channel, was led away as the messenger was brought to the governor’s side.

“Take your time; catch some breath, man,” Suetonius reassured the messenger. “However important your news, don’t expire before delivering it.”

“Camulodunum—” gasped the messenger.

Suetonius realized for the first time how ill the man seemed: his parched lips caked with blood and dust, his eyes drifting aimlessly, his short-cropped hair as disheveled as those Druid cadavers that littered the ground around them.

Suetonius snapped his fingers for