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

stained by his indebtedness to his late benefactor, and there were other associations linking them as well. Pilate’s actions regarding the Jews, for instance, might be seen as patterned after those of Sejanus, who’d begun his own political career with purges of the Roman Jews and had ended it by banning Jews from Rome altogether—an order recently rescinded by imperial command. Tiberius protested that he’d never wanted intolerance toward any of his subjects, that it was all Sejanus’s doing. This made Pontius Pilate extremely nervous, and with excellent cause. These past seven years, Pilate had often pitted himself against the Judean rabble he so loathed.

For a reason unclear to Pontius Pilate, the Jews, unlike other colonized peoples, remained all but exempt from Roman law—from service in the Roman armies and from nearly all forms of taxation, including those paid by Samaritans and even Roman citizens within these provinces. Under legislation by the Roman senate, a full Roman citizen could be put to death just for trespassing on the Jewish Temple Mount.

And when Pilate had to raise funds to complete the aqueduct, to bring lifeblood to these hinterlands, what had the damnable Jews done? They’d refused to pay the aqueduct levy, claiming it was the job of the Romans to provide for the people they’d conquered and enslaved. (Enslaved—that was amusing. How quickly they’d forgotten their sojourns in Egypt and Babylon.) So he’d “borrowed” the required funds from the temple tithe, finished the aqueduct, and that was the end of the whining. It was not the end of the Jews and their missives to Rome, but he’d prevailed. Of course, that was while Sejanus was still alive.

Now a new event was on the horizon. It was something that might save him, and turn the wrath of Tiberius, whose arm was long and grasp viselike when it came to retaliation against subordinates who’d lost his favor.

Pilate stood up and paced the terrace restlessly.

He had it on good advice from his authorities—that nest of spies and informers essential to the colonial governor of any subject people—that there was a Jew who was wandering about in the wilderness claiming, as so many of them did, to be the inunctus—the anointed one. This was the one the Greeks called christos, meaning covered with chrism, or oil, and whom the Jews called mashiah, which meant the same, as he understood it. This was a very ancient thing, he was told, in the history of their faith: that a person was coming, would suddenly arrive, that they believed fervently would deliver them from whatever bondage they thought they were in, and turn the entire world into a Jewish-ruled paradise. Of late, the desire to see this potential king anointed seemed to have reached fever pitch—and to Pontius Pilate, it was the blessing he’d been hoping for. It was the Jews themselves who would save him!

As the situation stood, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, supported this new candidate, as did a vast discipleship from among the Essene colony, followers of that madman a few years back who’d gone about dipping people in water. Rumor had it he’d gotten himself executed by Herod Antipas, Jewish tetrarch of Galilee, for calling Antipas’s wife Herodias a whore—that Antipas had beheaded the fellow at the request of his stepdaughter, Salome. Was there no end to the perfidy of these people? Antipas feared this new anointed one; he believed he was the reincarnation of the water-dipper he’d beheaded, returned to exact revenge against the tetrarch.

But there was a third contender in the game, placing Pilate in an even better position: the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, a puppet of Rome with a larger police force in Jerusalem than Pilate’s, quite as dedicated to getting rid of rabble-rousers who were out to topple the Roman Empire and civilized governance. So Caiaphas and Antipas hated and feared this Jew, and the Sanhedrin and the bathers supported him. Better and better. When the fellow went, he would take them all down with him.

Pilate looked out over the plain beyond the western wall where the sun just now was setting. He heard the new troops assembling in the courtyard, as they did each festival. They would handle the overflow of pilgrims here to celebrate the spring equinox, which, as usual, the Jews insisted upon equating with their own unique experiences: in this case, the passing over of their houses by some spirit in Egypt more than a thousand years ago.

Pilate listened to the commands of the drill officer calling the new troops to order and putting them through their paces. He heard the sounds of their leather soles moving across the marble tiles of the courtyard below. At last Pilate turned to look over the terrace wall at the troops beneath, who squinted up at him—directly into the western sun blazing behind him like a fiery aura, so they could see only the vaguest outline of his form. He always chose this hour and this location for that very reason.

“Soldiers of Rome,” he said, “you must be prepared for the week ahead, for the crowds that will enter this city on pilgrimage. You must be prepared to deal with any events that might place an undue burden on the empire. There are rumors of rabble-rousers whose goals are to turn what should be a peaceful festival into a riot, to bring down law and order. Soldiers of Rome, the week ahead may be a time when the actions of each of us will change the course of empire, perhaps even the course of history. Let us not forget that our first obligation is to prevent any act against the state or the status quo by those who wish, for reasons of religious fervor or for personal glory, to alter the fate of the Roman Empire—to change the course of our destiny.”

TUESDAY

It was not yet dawn when Joseph of Arimathea, bleary-eyed and exhausted from his journey, arrived at the edge of Jerusalem. In the darkness of