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

object on that list. Do you see what it means? Tiberius thought Pan was the god who’d permitted himself to be sacrificed in order to bring about the new aeon: the goat-god, the god most closely identified with the isle of Capreae, or with himself.

“But when that stone at Paxi had been translated, it proved it was the Jews, my dear, who’d provided the necessary fleshly cadaver for this transition. Isn’t it the Jews who are running all over the world studying ancient languages so they can translate the mysteries? And maybe also collecting these objects of infinite power. Do you think for one moment your Joseph of Arimathea didn’t know what he was doing when he begged Tiberius for the return of his people to Rome? Do you imagine he didn’t know what he’d done when he stole the body of that crucified Jew in Judea? For that’s what he did—and took the spear Gaius Cassius Longinus had plunged into it, as well.”

“Good heaven, Gaius! Please desist!” cried Claudius, dropping his spinning head to his lap as his stomach churned with too much emotion and wine. “Bring me a feather. I need to be sick.”

“Can’t you concentrate for one tiny moment on anything?” said his nephew, getting up and bringing him a bowl and an ostrich plume from a nearby stand.

Claudius lifted his head and waved the plume through the air to loosen its tendrils. Then he opened his mouth and tickled the back of his throat until he retched and the wine from his stomach splashed out into the bowl.

“That’s better. Now I’m clearheaded,” he told Caligula. “But in the name of Bacchus, tell me what all this means.”

“It means,” said Caligula, “that while Herod Agrippa goes to Judea to find out where the other objects may be, you and I are going to Britannia to find Joseph of Arimathea—and get that spear!”

THE RETURN

Fu/Return: The Turning Point

Hexagram 24

The time of darkness is past. The winter solstice brings the victory of light. After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.…

The idea of return is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic and the course completes itself.… Everything comes of itself at the appointed time.

—Richard Wilhelm,

The I Ching

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle

.

—Johann Wolfgang Goethe

I was still jangled, despite steeping myself in the steaming hot pool for more than an hour. What with Uncle Laf’s informative report on the Nazi collaborationist storm troopers and Boer rapists ornamenting my genealogical tree—not to mention my adorable grey-haired Auntie Zoe in Paris, who’d danced her way right into Adolf Hitler’s heart—my family history was starting to look more and more like the stuff of my chosen career: a mess that was plowed under and kept buried for half a century, and just starting to ooze out of containment.

When Laf went off for his afternoon siesta, I went back to my room to be alone and do some thinking. I sure had plenty to think about.

I knew my cousin and blood brother had faked his own assassination and set me up as the public patsy, but it now seemed he’d done it using the very manuscript that was so zealously guarded by his own father, Earnest, and my grandma Pandora too—a manuscript my father and stepmother, aided and abetted by the world press, were conniving to snatch and publish for profit. And though I still wasn’t clear what this mysterious manuscript was all about, it did seem beyond the shadow of a doubt that the document I’d interspersed throughout the DOD Standard last night must have been sent by Sam.

I’d thrown away the brown paper wrapping, so I couldn’t examine the postmark. But the moment Laf mentioned it, a vivid image flashed before my eyes: that yellow postal slip Jason had retrieved from the snow, with a sender’s zip code that began with 941, meaning it was mailed from San Francisco. So Wolfgang Hauser’s claim that he’d mailed it to me from Idaho was a myth, like maybe everything else he’d told me.

I kicked myself for falling for just another gorgeous face, and I vowed that even with the aid of an avalanche he’d never catch me off balance again. It might already be too late to undo the damage, now that I knew the document was sent by Sam. Wolfgang had been with it all night, and since I was asleep I had no way of knowing if he’d examined it, or even microfilmed it or made some other kind of copy. So basically I’d come full circle to where I had been a week ago—between Scylla and Charybdis, a rock and a hard place.

As I unlocked the door to my hotel room, I realized I’d forgotten completely about Jason. He was sitting in the middle of the king-sized bed looking angry as hell.

“Yow!” he said in a tone that packed a wallop of feline fury.

Of course I knew exactly why he was furious. Though he had plenty of food, I’d gone swimming without him! The telltale scent of chlorine gave me away.

“Okay, Jason, what about a nice bath instead?” I suggested.

Instead of dashing into the bathroom to turn on the tap, as he usually did when he heard “bath,” he trotted past me and plucked from the floor a slip of pink paper I had nearly stepped on—he was really good now at the paper-fetching trick—and, planting his paws on my knee, he presented it to me: a phone message that had been shoved under the door. When I read it, my heart sank.

To: Ariel Behn

From: Mr. Solomon

Sorry, can’t make lunch at noon as planned. To book again, please phone (214) 178–0217.

Terrific. Sam was suddenly changing our noon agenda. And this bogus phone number—as I assumed it was—would fill me