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

his mind he could still hear the sounds of last night—the water lapping against the sides of the large ships, the oars dipped into water, the whispers across the surface of the moonless sea—as the small boat approached his merchant fleet that lay moored outside the port of Joppa, awaiting first light to enter the harbor.

Even before Nicodemus’s messenger identified himself and boarded the ship, even before Joseph saw the note he had come all this way to deliver, he felt a sense of impending doom. It came as no surprise that the note was cryptic, to protect against its contents being seen and understood by others. But for Joseph it raised a thousand specters merely by what it did not say. Even now he could see the words before him:

Make haste. The hour is come.  Nicodemus

The hour had come, it said. But how could it have come? Joseph had thought in anguish. It wasn’t time!

Throwing judgment and caution to the winds, Joseph had roused his sleeping crew and given the command to cut his flagship loose from the others—right now, in the dead of night—and to bring this one ship, alone, into the port of Joppa.

His men had argued hotly against it, no doubt thinking him mad. And upon docking in port, Joseph had demonstrated further madness. Leaving the crew to secure his precious cargoes—an unheard-of act for the owner of so large a merchant fleet—he’d violated Roman curfew, storming through the streets, having servants awakened and his horses brought out and harnessed, and he’d headed off alone into the night. For the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, would meet at dawn. And when they did, he must be there.

On the dangerous roads of the backcountry—in the black silence broken only by the sounds of horses’ hooves on broken stone, their hot lathered breathing, the cicadas’ chirping in the distant groves—Joseph heard the silent thought whispered over and over in the depths of his own mind:

What had the Master done?

As Joseph of Arimathea entered the city, the first faint haze of red was bleeding into the sky above the Mount of Olives, picking out in silhouette the twisted shapes of the ancient olive trees. Hammering with his fists to rouse the stableman from bed, Joseph left his horses to be watered and groomed. Then he quickly went on foot, two steps at a time, up the flights of stone stairs to the upper city.

In the damp predawn darkness around him, he noticed the stirrings of the acacia trees in the early morning breeze. Their fragile boughs laden with blooms, these trees drowned Jerusalem each spring in a sea of rich gold. Arising from alcoves and archways, they seemed to permeate each pore of this labyrinthine city. Even now, as Joseph moved through the crooked alleyways and ascended the hill, he inhaled their dark perfume, like incense wafting from a censer, soaking into the shadowy crevices of the sleeping city and swirling in drunken pools around the base of Mount Zion.

Acacia: the sacred tree.

“Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,” Joseph recited aloud.

Suddenly there was the tall, regal Nicodemus standing before him, and Joseph realized he had arrived already at the familiar gates of the park surrounding Nicodemus’s palace. A servant was locking the gates behind him as Nicodemus, his mass of unbound hair swinging round his broad shoulders, threw open his arms to welcome his friend. Joseph warmly returned the embrace.

“When I was a boy in Arimathea,” said Joseph, looking out over the sea of golden boughs, “all along the river there were embankments of chittah, which the Romans call acacia for their sharp thorns—the tree of which Yahweh instructed us to build his first tabernacle, the lattices and altar, the Holy of Holies, even the sacred ark itself. The Keltoi and Greeks hold it sacred just as we do. They call it ‘the golden bough.’”

“You’ve remained far too long among pagans, my friend,” Nicodemus said, shaking his head. “Even your appearance is nearly blasphemy in the eyes of God.”

It was hard to deny, thought Joseph ruefully. With his short toga and high-laced sandals, his muscular, tanned limbs, his shaven face—the skin crackled and leathery from the burn of salt sea air—and his hair uncut in the prescribed fashion but braided up off his neck like a Norseman’s, he knew he must look a good deal more like a Hyperborean Celt than what he actually was: a distinguished and respected Judean merchant and, like Nicodemus, an official council member of “the seventy,” the common name for the Sanhedrin.

“You encouraged the Master, when he was still a boy, to follow these foreign ways that can only lead to destruction,” Nicodemus pointed out as they started downhill. “Even so, the last few weeks I’ve prayed for your arrival before it’s too late. For perhaps only you can undo the damage that’s been done this past year in your absence.”

It was true that Joseph had raised the young Master as his own child, ever since the boy’s father—a carpenter also named Joseph—had died. He’d taken him abroad on many voyages to learn the ancient wisdom of the diverse cultures. Despite this parental role, Joseph of Arimathea, having by now attained the forty years required to sit in the Sanhedrin, was only seven years older than his surrogate son, whom he could not help but think of as the Master. Not just a rabbi, meaning my master or teacher, but as the great spiritual leader he’d become. Yet Nicodemus’s comment was still unclear.

“Something I could undo? I came as soon as I could, upon receiving your note,” Joseph assured him, dismissing the risks to his fortune and his neck. “But I assumed a political crisis—an emergency—some unforeseen incident that caused our plan to change.…”

Nicodemus stopped on the trail and regarded Joseph with his sad dark eyes that seemed to penetrate to the very depths—though today they were ringed red from exhaustion, perhaps from weeping. Joseph suddenly saw