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

on Ortygia, Quail Mountain, in the outskirts of the city: perhaps you recall it from your travels? I’m sure the Master did, for he selected the location himself and told his mother of it shortly before his death. It’s an odd choice of site: the house, I’m told, is only a stone’s throw from the sacred well the Greeks believe marks the spot where their goddess Artemis (or Diana, as the Romans call her) was born. But there is more.

Each year at their festival of Eostre—the spring equinox when the goddess’s birth is celebrated—Ortygia becomes the focus of pilgrimages from all over the Greek world. Small children tramp across this mountain searching for the fabled red Eostre eggs, symbols of luck and fertility, sacred to the goddess. Ironically, this celebration takes place just during our Pesach: the very week, two years ago, when the Master died. So this pagan goddess and her rites seem strangely linked with the memory of the Master’s death, and also with the one thing I told you was missing from all the other accounts: a story the Master told us up on the mountain, the same day you came to my house two years ago, just home from your year at sea.

“When I was young,” the Master told us that morning, high in the wildflower meadow, “I went abroad among many foreign peoples. I learned that the people of the far north have a word for something they hold true: ‘dru,’ which also means belief, and ‘troth’—a pledge. So just as in our Judaic tradition, truth, justice, and faith are one: priests are also lawgivers. When one of their priests dispenses justice, as our own ancestors did in ancient times, he stands beneath the duru, a tree we call oak. Their priest is therefore called d’rui or d’ruid in plural, meaning ‘giver of truth.’

“Also like the ancient Hebrews, these northerners hold most sacred the number thirteen, the number of months in a year of the lunar calendar. Because the thirteenth moon marks the end of the year, it’s the number we identify with change, the number of a new cycle, the number of rebirth and of hope. This number itself is the kernel of truth in the story of Jacob, who wrestled with the angel of God and was transformed into ‘Isra’el.’ As everyone tends to forget, our forefather, Jacob, did not have twelve children—he had thirteen.”

Then, as if he’d explained everything clearly and the session were at an end, the Master seemed to drift back toward an inner realm, and turned from us as if to depart.

“But, Master!” cried Simon Peter. “Surely there’s some mistake? I admit I know nothing of these oak-men you speak of. But among our own people it’s an established fact of Torah that there are twelve tribes of Israel—not thirteen as you said. Such a thing has never been questioned!”

“Peter, Peter, God gave you ears. You should pay Him back by using them!” said the Master, laughing as he squeezed Peter’s shoulder. When Peter looked crestfallen, the Master added, “I didn’t say thirteen tribes but thirteen children. Listen to the story with new ears: ask yourself why this fact should represent the kernel of truth I was seeking.”

The Master came over to where I sat with the others in the broad ring of grassy meadow, and he placed his hand on my hair and smiled down at me.

“One day Miriam may find the answer,” the Master told Peter. “I’ve always thought of Miriam as my thirteenth disciple. But one day she’ll also be my first apostle: thirteen and one, the completion of a cycle. Alpha and omega, the first and last.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “Jacob’s forgotten child that I spoke of was named Dinah. As I see it, Dinah herself embodies the kernel of truth in the story. Her name, like that of her brother Dan, means judge.”

Smiling that strange smile, the Master turned away again and went off down the mountain, leaving all of us to follow in his wake.

Joseph, you know as well as I that the Master never used parable or paradox to confuse, or merely to titillate: there was motive behind his method. He thought that only if we quested after truth, and arrived at it ourselves, would the truth we found be completely understood, thoroughly absorbed, and become a part of us.

That morning the Master made clear the number thirteen was related to the Hebrew lunar calendar, therefore to the concept of seasonal change. But why didn’t he also mention what he must have known: that the Roman name for Dinah is Diana? And why didn’t he tell us the plan I’ve just spoken of: that he intended one day for his own mother to live in a famous oak grove in Ortygia? That her house was to be built beside a well on the very spot where the moon goddess Artemis—also called Diana of the Ephesians, patroness of springs and wells, whose rites are conducted in oak groves throughout the Greek world—was born? No, it could be no accident that this was the last story the Master told his flock, on what proved to be the last day we were all together. The only mistake was mine, in not seeing it before.

Joseph, I know that this story and the reports I’ve sent will give rich fodder to your mind, and that before we meet again, you’ll have digested them fully. I myself, meanwhile, shall strive to learn more about the Master’s private motives—for such, I’m convinced, they were—in sending his mother to the home of this famous Ephesian goddess. Perhaps, together, you and I can find the missing link that will knot together all these seemingly diverse and scattered events of the Master’s last days.

For now, Joseph, I pray that you walk with God; and I send you my eyes, my ears, my heart, and my blessing—that you may see, hear, love, and believe as the Master wished us