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

seemed the light had dimmed in the room and his nephew’s eyes had taken on an odd gleam while describing this unappealing procedure. He had another swallow.

“This was Gaius Cassius Longinus’s first crucifixion,” Caligula went on, “so when it was time to dispatch the bodies he simply rode up on his horse and stabbed the one in the middle to get it over with. But once done, Gaius noticed something odd about the spear in his hand. One of the troops must have handed it to him just before they went to the execution site, for it wasn’t his. It was old and battered and seemed made of some primitive metal. He remembers that the hilt was hand-tied to the blade with something like fox gut. He thought little of it until the bodies were hauled away and he returned to Pilate’s headquarters before heading back to Antioch. Pilate asked Gaius if he had the spear, suggesting it was some bit of official regalia he needed back—though I doubt that was likely. Only then did Gaius realize it had vanished.”

“You think this was one of the objects?” said Claudius. His eyes had begun to ache, perhaps from the wine or the sudden odd darkness in the room. “But it hardly sounds precious or mysterious to me, and where did it come from?”

“What tells me it’s mysterious is that it has disappeared, never to be found,” said Caligula. “What tells me it’s precious is that Pontius Pilate wanted it several years before that massacre on the mountain—which also means he believed at least some of those objects had already surfaced from the ground. As to where it came from or where it’s gone, I suspect my grandfather was trying to find that out just when he died, as he was hastening home to Capreae and stopped at Misenum. And I’ve every cause to believe that he had the answer within his grasp right before his death.”

“Tiberius?” said Claudius. Setting down his goblet at last, he peered at his nephew in the oppressively gloomy light. “But he possessed twenty-seven million in gold. Why should he go to such lengths for greater wealth?”

“When I said I believed these objects were valuable,” said Caligula, “I didn’t mean mere material wealth but something far more—something I’ve not shared with anyone, even Drusilla. It was no accident, you see, that I was at Misenum when Tiberius arrived the night of his death: I’d been waiting there to meet him. Though he rarely left Capreae, he’d been away this time for months, but no one could learn exactly where. I discovered Tiberius had gone to those isles called Paxi, the very ones where the Egyptian pilot heard that eerie cry. And I think I know what he hoped to find there.

“On the isles of Paxi, near the Grecian coast, stands an enormous stone like those in the Celtic lands. On it are writings in a lost tongue which it was believed no one could decipher. But Tiberius thought he knew someone who could—someone who might have as deep an interest in doing so as he himself, and who owed him a great favor. You know who it is, Uncle Claudius. You yourself brought him to Capreae some years back to ask that favor: that Grandfather overturn the Sejanus decree and permit the Jews to return to Rome.”

“Joseph of Arimathea! The wealthy Jewish merchant and friend of Herod Agrippa? What does he know of any of this?” cried Claudius.

“Joseph of Arimathea seems to have known enough to meet Tiberius on Paxi and spend these past few months deciphering those codes in stone,” Caligula replied. “When Grandfather took ill at dinner that night, I stayed in his room to look after him, and I heard what he said in his sleep—or rather what surfaced from his nightmares in those last feverish throes of misery. Shall I say? For I wrote it all down. I’ve been the only one in the world who knows—until now.”

When Caligula smiled, Claudius tried to smile back, but his lips felt numb. He had few illusions at this moment about the cause of Tiberius’s death. He only prayed that at least the wine he himself had just guzzled wasn’t also poisoned. He felt truly ill.

As Caligula took his uncle by the hand, the room seemed to Claudius to grow ever darker. The only light he could focus on any longer was the strange gleam that emerged from the depths of Caligula’s eyes.

“By all means,” Claudius managed to whisper as the darkness descended.

THE THIRTEEN SACRED HALLOWS

Each aeon, when during the vernal equinox the sun starts to rise against the backdrop of a new astral constellation, a god descends to earth and is born into the flesh of a mortal. The god lives to maturity among mortals, then permits himself to be sacrificed, shedding his prison of flesh to return to the universe. Before his death, the god passes on universal wisdom to only one chosen mortal being.

But in order for the divine wisdom to become manifest within chronological time on earth, it must be woven into a fabric of knots representing the intersections of spirit and matter throughout the universe. Only the true initiate, the one indoctrinated by the god, will know how to do this.

To make this connection, thirteen sacred objects must be brought together in one place. Each object fulfills a specific purpose in the ritual rebirth of the new age, and each of these objects must be anointed in the divine fluid before it is put into use. The objects for the next age are these:

The Spear

The Platter

The Sword

The Garment

The Nail

The Loom

The Goblet

The Harness

The Stone

The Wheel

The Box

The Gaming Board

The Cauldron

He who unites these objects without possessing the eternal wisdom may bring forth, not an age of cosmic unity, but one instead of savagery and terror.

“You see?” said Caligula when he’d finished this diatribe. “What I told you about the spear at the crucifixion in Judea—why, a spear was the very first