The Magic Circle (6 page)

SATURDAY

It was just after midnight when it happened. Caiaphas would never forget the moment when they came to awaken him, the knock on his chamber door as he stirred beneath the bedclothes, wondering what time it was. The sensation he felt then was one he’d heard of but had never before experienced: the hair actually rose up on the back of his spine! He knew something dangerous and exciting was about to happen. He knew, without being able to name it, that it was what he had been waiting for all along.

The temple police, who guarded the high priest’s palace and his person, too, stood outside his chamber door and told him that a man had come to the palace gates—here, in a secured quarter of the town, and now, in the dead of night, hours after the Roman curfew was in effect—asking to see him. It was a darkly handsome man, they said, strong, with a craggy face and heavy brow. He refused to speak with any but the high priest Caiaphas, on a very private matter of utmost urgency. He had no credentials, no appointment, and no explanation for his visit, and the temple police knew that it was their duty to arrest and interrogate the man or send him away. Yet they somehow hesitated to do either.

Caiaphas knew, deep in his soul, that he need not ask further questions. As one betrayer understands another, Joseph Caiaphas understood that he had known this man always, perhaps through all eternity.

His servant wrapped him in the cocoonlike folds of his lush green dressing gown and, followed by the temple guard, he padded along the stone corridors in silence toward the chamber where the stranger awaited him. Caiaphas knew in his private thoughts that this was the moment of destiny. He knew that his hour had come.

But later, when he was asked about that night—interrogated, really, by the Romans and the Sanhedrin—it was odd, for that was all he could recall. His awakening in the dead of night, that march down the long hall—and the sense of personal destiny, which he never mentioned, of course, for it was nobody’s affair but his own. The stranger himself, the encounter, was just a blur to Caiaphas, as though his mind had been clouded with drink.

After all, why
should
he recall him, when they’d met only for a moment, just that one night? The police took care of the rest: they paid out thirty pieces of silver for the job. How could Caiaphas be expected, so long afterward, to remember his name? Some fellow from Dar-es-Keriot, he believed, though he wasn’t even sure of that. In the larger perspective, thought Caiaphas, in the great tapestry that was history, what difference did it make? Only the moment was important.

Two thousand years from now, their names would be like specks of dust blowing across a vast plain. In two thousand years, no one would remember any of this at all.

SUNDAY

Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar could see in the dark.

Now, as he stood in the black night on the parapet, a night without moon or stars, he could still see clearly the clean lines and veins of his own strong hands resting on the parapet wall. His large dark eyes surveyed the sea; he could make out whitecaps all the way to the Bay of Napoli, where the coastline lay in inky darkness.

He had been able to do so practically since infancy, and was thus able to help his mother escape, across meadows and mountains and through a raging forest fire that licked so close it singed her hair, when the troops of Gaius Octavian were pursuing her, trying to catch her so that Octavian could seduce her. Then Octavian became Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. So Tiberius’s mother divorced his father, a
quaestor
who had been commander of Julius Caesar’s triumphant Alexandrian fleet. And she became Rome’s first empress.

That was Livia, a remarkable woman, key sponsor of the
pax romana
, honored by the vestal virgins and thought of as a treasure by nearly everyone in the empire. Herod Antipas built a city named for her up in Galilee, and it had been proposed several times that she receive the status of an immortal, as had been decreed for Augustus.

But Livia, at last, was dead. And thanks to her, Tiberius was emperor—since, to further her son’s ambitions, she’d poisoned every legitimate heir standing between himself and the throne. Including, it was privately rumored, even the divine Augustus. Or perhaps one should say, to further
her
ambitions, which had been plentiful. Tiberius wondered whether Livia—wherever she happened to be now—could also see in the dark.

He remembered when he’d stood here at this very spot, only last year, through most of the night, awaiting the bonfires he’d arranged for them to light at Vesuvius on the mainland as soon as it was certain in Rome that Sejanus was dead.

He smiled to himself, a bitter smile full of deep and unending hatred for the one who’d pretended to be his best and only friend. The one who had betrayed him in the end, just as all the others had done.

It seemed a thousand years ago that Tiberius had stood on that other parapet of his first self-imposed exile—in Rhodes, where he’d fled from his slut of a wife Julia, Augustus’s daughter, whom he’d been forced to divorce his beloved Vipsania to marry. The week Augustus banished Julia herself and wrote to beg his son-in-law to return to Rome, an omen was seen: an eagle, a bird never previously sighted at Rhodes, perched on the roof of his house. By this, the astrologer Thrasyllus correctly predicted Tiberius would succeed to the throne.

Tiberius believed that the world was ruled by fate, that destiny could be learned through astrology, omens, or the traditional methods of divination, reading bones or bowels. Since our destinies were fore-drawn, in vain were any supplications to the gods, appeasement by sacrifice or by the costly erection of public temples and monuments.

Of no avail were doctors, either. At the age of seventy-four, having received no treatment or medication since the age of thirty, Tiberius was strong as a bull, well proportioned and handsome, with the skin tone of a young athlete. He could poke through a fresh, crisp apple with any finger of either hand. And it was claimed that in his military days in Germany he’d actually killed men that way. He had been, indeed, a great soldier and a statesman par excellence—at least at first.

But those days were over. The omens had altered, and not in his favor. He could never return to Rome. Only a year before the Sejanus affair Tiberius had attempted to sail up the Tiber—but his small pet snake, Claudia, whom he carried in his bosom and fed from his own hand, had been found one morning on the deck, half eaten by ants. And the omens said: Beware the mob.

Now he stood each night on this high cliff of his palace, on the overgrown rock whose very history lay steeped in antiquity and mystery. It was named Capri: the goat. Some thought it was called so for Pan, half man, half goat, fathered on a water nymph by the god Hermes. Others believed it was named for the constellation of Capricorn, a goat that rose like a fish from the sea. And some, he was sure, said it was named for a goatlike emperor in rut, hoarding child concubines on an island, riddled with sexual depravity. He didn’t care what they said. The stars that guided his destiny had still been the same at his birth. There was no changing that.

Though Tiberius had been lawyer, soldier, statesman, emperor, he was, like his nephew Claudius, in his heart of hearts a lover of history. In the case of Tiberius, especially the history of the gods which most in these modern times regarded as myth. Best of all he loved the tales of the Greeks.

And now, after all these years of exile on this pile of stones—years when he’d heard of little but tragedy and betrayal in the day-to-day affairs of the outside world—now suddenly a new myth had surfaced at the far edge of the Roman Empire. It wasn’t really a new tale, as Tiberius knew. Rather it was a story of great antiquity—perhaps, indeed, the oldest myth in the world—and was found in each civilization since the dawn of recorded history. It was the myth of the “dying god,” a god who makes the ultimate sacrifice: to become a mortal. A god who, through the surrender of his own life as a mortal being, brings about the destruction of an old order and its rebirth as a new world order, a new aeon.

As Tiberius stood listening to the dark sea breaking against the rocks below, he looked across to the dim glowing outline of Vesuvius, where hot lava had churned and boiled from time immemorial, though it only erupted, so they said, one time at the end of each aeon.

But were they not entering a new age now? Was this not the new aeon the astrologers had been awaiting? Tiberius wondered if he himself would live to see the force of the vulcan god unleashed from the belly of the earth—soon now—the one time it would happen between the past and future aeons of two millennia each: only once in a span of four thousand years.

Just then, near the breakers at the mainland, he saw the flash of an oar, which must be the ship he was awaiting. He’d been watching half the night, and now, as it approached in the thinning darkness that spoke of imminent dawn, he gripped the wall before him. It was the ship bringing the witness to him. The witness who had been present at the death of the god.

He was tall and slender, with olive skin, almond eyes, and hair like a raven’s wing that hung in a straight glassy panel to his shoulders. He wore a white linen tunic, wrapped once and cinched loosely with a rope belt, and the bronze arm cuffs traditional with those from the South. Before him, across the terrace, Tiberius sat on his marble throne on an elevated marble dais overlooking the sea. Behind the man stood the imperial guard and the captain and crew who’d brought him there by sea. As he crossed the terrace and knelt on one knee before Tiberius, it was clear that he was afraid—but proud.

“Your name is Tammuz, you are Egyptian,” said the emperor, bidding the other to rise from his knee. “And yet, they say you are the pilot of a merchant ship that plies between Judea and Rome.” When the witness stood in silence, Tiberius added, “You may speak.”

“It is just as Your Excellency—Your Imperial Highness—states,” Tammuz replied. “My master owns a fleet of merchant sailing ships. I pilot one of his ships that carries not only freight but also many passengers.”

“Tell me what you saw, in your own words. Take your time.”

“It was late one night, after dinner,” said the Egyptian Tammuz. “No one was sleeping; most passengers were talking on deck and finishing their after-dinner wine. We were just along the coast of Roman Greece near the Echinades Isles. The wind had dropped, and the ship now drifted near the darkly forested outline of the camel-humped double isles of Paxi. Just then, a deep voice floated out across the waters—a voice from Paxi, calling my name.”

“The name of Tammuz,” murmured the emperor, as if recalling some half-forgotten melody.

“Yes, my lord,” replied Tammuz. “At first I was distracted, steering the ship, and did not realize at once that it was I who had been called. But upon the second call, I was surprised, for no living soul on that small Greek isle knew me; nor did even the ship’s passengers themselves know my name. By the third time my name was called, the passengers were looking about them, for ours was the only ship at all in this part of the dark sea. Therefore, collecting myself, upon the third call of my name I replied to the hidden voice that called out to me across the waters.”

“And what happened once you’d answered?” asked Tiberius, turning his face away from the first dawn light toward the shadow, so the sailors and guards standing nearby couldn’t read his thoughts when he heard the Egyptian’s reply.

Tammuz said, “The caller cried out: ‘Tammuz, when you come opposite to Palodes on the mainland, announce that Great Pan is dead!’”

Tiberius leapt to his feet, his height towering over all, and he looked Tammuz in the eye. “Pan?” he snapped. “Which Pan are you speaking of?”

“My lord, he is not one of the Egyptian deities, those in whom I was raised to believe. And though now, as a resident of the great Roman Empire, I have done with those pagan ideas, I fear that I’m not well schooled in my newly adopted faith. But it is my understanding that this lord Pan is the half-divine son of a god named Hermes, whom in Egypt we call Thoth. And therefore, as a half-divine, perhaps the lord Pan is available to death. I hope I do not commit a sacrilege by saying so.”

Available to death! thought Tiberius—the greatest god in thousands of years? What kind of absurd tale was this? With a masklike face, he rubbed his jaw as if nothing were unusual, resumed his seat, and nodded for Tammuz to continue, though he felt the first tingling presentiment that something might be very, very wrong.

“The passengers and crew were as astounded and confused as I,” Tammuz went on. “We debated among ourselves whether I should do as the voice had demanded, or whether I should refuse to be involved in this strange request. At last I resolved the problem thus: If, when we passed Palodes, a breeze was blowing, we would sail on by and do nothing. But if the sea was smooth, with no wind, I’d announce aloud what I had been told. When at last we came opposite Palodes, there was no wind and a smooth sea—so I called out, ‘Great Pan is dead!’”

“And then?” said Tiberius, leaning out from his shadow to look the pilot again in the eye.

“At once there was an outcry from the mainland,” said Tammuz. “Many voices, weeping, lamenting, and many loud wailings of amazement and astonishment. My lord, it seemed as if the whole coastline and the deep interior beyond were in mourning at some hideous family tragedy. They cried out that it was the end of the world: that it was the death of the sacred goat!”

Impossible! Tiberius nearly screamed aloud as he heard those phantom cries in the darkness echoing through his mind. It was completely mad! The first soothsayer had cast the first lot for Rome’s fate in the time of Remus and Romulus—who were raised by wolves, as was also prophesied. From that age down to the present moment, no dark event such as this had ever been hinted at by anyone. Tiberius felt his skin cold and clammy despite the warmth of the morning sun.

Wasn’t this era merely the dawning of the Roman Empire, which, after all, had just begun with Augustus? Everyone knew the “dying god” was a god in name only, for the gods themselves could never actually die. A surrogate was chosen: a new “god” to rejuvenate, regenerate the old myth. This time it was to be a poor shepherd, farmer, or fisherman—someone who drove a wagon or a plough—not one of the most ancient and powerful gods of Phrygia, Greece, and Rome. The great civilization of Rome, suckled at the teats of a she-wolf, would not be brought down by one old, heirless, hermit king ending his days in exile on an isle named for a goat. No, it must be a lie, a trick launched by one of his many enemies. Even the name of the pilot himself, Tammuz, smacked of myth, for this was the name of the oldest god who died—older than Orpheus, Adonis, or Osiris.