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

thick, intricately wrought gold torques he always wore, which marked the status of a prince or a priest: as a drui, he was considered both.

He was Lovernios, Prince of Foxes, a man Joseph had trusted all his life—and, except for the Master, the wisest man he’d ever known. Joseph prayed that his great wisdom would bring them through the crisis he felt impending.

“It is nearly over, Lovern,” Joseph said.

“Over—perhaps,” Lovernios replied. “But each ending is a new beginning, as Esus of Nazareth told me when you brought him to live among us when he was but a boy. He said during his travels with you he’d learned everyone resists change.” Lovernios added with a questioning smile, “I wonder if you understand exactly what that means?”

“I’m afraid it means,” said Joseph, “that just like Miriam of Magdali you believe the Master is really alive: that he went through the transformation of death, yet somehow he still walks among us.”

The drui shrugged. “Recall his statement: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’”

“In spirit, yes, that’s possible,” agreed Joseph, “but hardly by taking off and putting on flesh like a cloak, as some would have it! No, my wise friend, it wasn’t primitive superstition that brought me here. I’m after the truth.”

“What you seek, my friend,” Lovernios said, shaking his head, “you’ll never find in these clay vessels at your feet: they contain only words.”

“But it’s you yourself,” objected Joseph, “who first told me of the magic with which the druid invest words. You said words alone have the power to kill or to heal. I pray some of these memories will reveal the Master’s last message to us—just as he prayed his words would not be forgotten.”

“Writing does not aid memory but destroys it,” said Lovernios. “That is why our people restrict the use of our written language to sacramental functions: to protect or sanctify a spot, destroy an enemy, raise the elements, work magic. Great truths cannot be put into writing, nor ideas be set in stone. You may open your clay vessels, my friend, but you’ll find only memories of memories, shadows of shadows.”

“Even from boyhood the Master had the memory of a drui,” said Joseph. “He knew Torah by heart and could recite from it hour after hour. During long sea voyages I used to read him stories, and he committed those to memory too. His favorite was the Pythian Odes of Pindar—especially the phrase ‘Kairos and tide wait for no man.’ In the Greek tongue, there are two words for ‘time’: chronos and kairos. The first means time as the sun passes through the heavens. But kairos means the ‘necessary moment’—the critical instant when one must catch the tide or be swept under and utterly destroyed. It was this second meaning that was so important to the Master.

“The very last occasion when I saw him—when I went to tell him I’d arranged for the white ass he’d requested to ride on his entry into Jerusalem the next Sunday—he said to me, ‘Then all is done, Joseph, and I go to meet my kairos.’ Those were the last words he spoke to me before he died.” Joseph blinked tears from his eyes and swallowed hard. “I miss him so much, Lovernios,” he whispered.

The Celtic prince turned to Joseph. Though the two were of the same age and of nearly equal height, he put his arms around Joseph and rocked him like a child, as the Master used to do when words seemed inadequate.

“Then we can only hope,” Lovernios said at last, “that these glimpses of words, even if they are not all of them true, will at least take some pain from your heart.”

Joseph looked at his friend and nodded. Then he stooped to the net and extracted the amphora that bore Miriam’s mark as the first of the series. Breaking the seal of the clay container, he pulled out and opened the scroll, and he began to read aloud:

To: Joseph of Arimathea

at Glastonbury, Britannia

From: Miriam of Magdali

at Bethany, Judea

Dearly beloved Joseph,

Many thanks for your letter, which James Zebedee brought after his visit with you. I regret it’s taken one whole year to fulfill your request, but as you’ve no doubt learned from James by now, everything here has changed—everything.

Oh, Joseph, how I miss you! And how grateful I am that you’ve asked me to carry out this undertaking. It seems you alone recall how much the Master relied upon women. Who but women financed his mission, provided him shelter, traveled and taught and healed and ministered by his side? With his mother Miriam we followed his path to Golgotha; we stood weeping beneath the cross until he died and we went to the sepulchre to wash his body, to prepare it with rare herbs and fine Magdali linen. In short, we women were the ones who stayed with the Master from beginning to end. Even beyond the end, until his spirit ascended to heaven.

Joseph, forgive my pouring out these turbulent feelings. But when you reached across the waters through your letter, I felt like a drowning woman rescued at the final hour. I agree that something significant happened in the Master’s last days, and I’m the more frustrated since I can’t come at once to Britannia as you wish. But this delay could prove a blessing—for I myself may have discovered something that hasn’t been hinted at in any of the memoirs I’ve collected for you: it’s related to Ephesus.

The Master’s mother, who’s been like a mother to me, is as disturbed as the rest of us at what’s become of her son’s legacy in so short a time. She’s determined to move to Ephesus on the Ionian coast, and has asked me to accompany her there and to stay out the year until she’s fully settled.

Her protector, young Johan Zebedee, whom the Master used to call parthenos, or ‘blushing virgin,’ now seems a grown man. He’s built us a little stone house