The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  Martha beamed upon the Master with familiar affection, and seemed to notice nothing amiss. In surprise Joseph glanced at him too, and indeed the former feeling of otherworldliness had vanished. In its place was that warm compassion that Joseph had always felt went far to explain the powerful and tremendous following the Master had acquired within the very short period of his ministry. The Master seemed to possess a knowledge of every dark secret buried within one’s bosom, but with it the ability to forgive and absolve all.

  “Dear Joseph,” the Master was saying, smiling as if about to share some private jest, “please do not believe a word this woman has told you! It was her own faith and that of her sister that brought young Lazarus from the earth. I assisted in the delivery as a midwife might, but God alone performs the miracles of birth and rebirth, whether from womb or tomb. And only for those who have true faith.”

  “Our brother Lazarus can share his experience with you himself,” Martha assured Joseph. “He is out on the terrace now, with the other guests.”

  “And Miriam?” asked Joseph.

  “You really should do something about her, Master,” Martha said, working herself into a small fit. “She’s been cavorting all morning on the mountain with you and the others; and now she’s in the orchard with the disciples and their families from out of town. She’s only interested in philosophical chitchat, while life goes on and reality is tossed like a saddle over the shoulders of us beasts of burden. She needs your reprimand.”

  The Master held Martha away to look at her, and when he spoke it was with an urgency, a passionate intensity, that Joseph found positively dizzying.

  “I love Miriam,” the Master told her sister in a tone that sounded more angry than loving. “I love her more than my mother, more than I love Joseph here, who raised me. I love her more than any of my brothers, even those who’ve been with me from the very beginning. There is a bond, a knot, that links the understanding of Miriam and myself, which must be strong enough to transcend anything—even death. Do you imagine that Miriam’s importance will be increased by helping you cook a meal, even if for a thousand, rather than by sitting at my feet for one more hour while you have me with you?”

  Joseph was astounded at the Master’s cruelty. How could he upbraid a woman who’d just exalted him to the skies for saving her brother’s life, and who’d spent three days cooking for him, his disciples, and a hundred uninvited guests?

  Joseph saw Martha’s chin tremble and her face begin to crumple. But as he started forward to intercede, the Master changed again. As Martha was trying to cover her teary face with her hands, the Master seized her wrists, bowed his head, and kissed her upturned palms, which were still covered with pastry dough and flour. Then, folding her once again into his arms, he kissed Martha’s head and rocked her gently, until she seemed to relax and the tears subsided. Then the Master held her away and looked at her.

  “Miriam has chosen the right path, Martha,” he said softly. “Let each of us give according to our own capacity. Never ask that anyone be chastised for doing the Father’s will.” Then, before Joseph knew what was happening, the Master took him by the arm and slipped outside to the terrace.

  Below in the walled gardens, the invited guests were milling about where tables, carpets, and other arrangements had been set up for them beneath the grape arbors that led to the orchard. Beyond the gardens were weathered stone walls upon which uninvited but welcome guests could dine in shade beside a small creek.

  Beneath the grape bowers where the first vine shoots were just unfurling, Joseph saw the fishermen down from Galilee: Andrew and his brother Simon huddled whispering together with their partners, Johan and James Zebedee, whom he called “thunder and lightning” for their impetuous, stormy personalities. Nearby was young John Mark, who’d come out for today’s feast from his mother’s house at Jerusalem.

  It frightened Joseph to see so many of the important disciples and their families gathered together in one place. Especially here in Judea, where they were now under Roman jurisdiction and within reach of Caiaphas. If they intended to stay longer, he must move them to his estate of Gethsemane, where he always had servants securing his property.

  Shaking these thoughts aside, he stopped the Master and drew him within the shelter of the grape trellises before the others beneath could notice them.

  “My beloved son,” said Joseph softly, “you’ve altered so in the one short year of my absence that I don’t know you anymore.”

  The Master turned his gaze to Joseph. His opalescent eyes, that strange mixture of brown and green and gold, had always been unreal to Joseph. They were the eyes of one accustomed to other, fantastical worlds.

  “I have not changed,” the Master said sadly, with a smile. “It is the world itself that’s changing, Joseph. In such times of change, though, we must all focus upon the one thing that’s unchanging and imperishable. The day is now dawning that has been foretold since the time of Enoch, Elijah, Jeremiah. And just as I helped bring young Lazarus from the grave, it’s now our task to deliver the world into this new age: that’s why I’m here. I hope you will join me, all of you. I hope you will stay with me. Though you needn’t all follow me to where I must go.”

  Joseph didn’t understand this last remark, but he pressed on.

  “We’re all concerned about you, Jesua. Please listen. My fellow Sanhedrin members told me of your coming down from Galilee during the festival last fall. Jesua, you know that the Sanhedrin is your strongest supporter. I thought it was all arranged when I departed last year, that they would anoint you at the festival this coming autumn. They planned to anoint you themselves as mashiah—as our chosen king and spiritual leader! Why have you changed it all? Why are you trying to overturn all that was planned by so many wise men for so long?”

  The Master rubbed his hand across his eyes. “The Sanhedrin is not my strongest supporter, Joseph,” he said. His voice sounded weary. “My Father in heaven is my strongest supporter; I do His bidding alone. If His ideas happen to conflict with those of the Sanhedrin, I’m afraid they’ll have to take the matter up with Him.” Then he gave Joseph that same wry smile and added, “And as for what’s unchanging and imperishable—it’s a knotty problem.”

  The Master liked to hide secrets in riddles, and Joseph had noticed his constant reference to knots. Joseph was about to pursue that topic when the veil of vine tendrils surrounding them parted and Miriam was there before them, smiling the warm, sensual smile that always made Joseph weak with emotion.

  Her richly abundant hair, in a rainbow of colors, tumbled loose about her shoulders with the suggestion of wild wantonness that had driven the elders—and even many of the disciples—to consider her a politically costly and unnecessarily dangerous bauble within the Master’s entourage. Joseph thought there was something primal about her, like a force of nature. She was like that ancient Lilith whom the oldest of Hebrew texts called Adam’s first wife: a ripe fruit that spilled forth life, withholding nothing.

  “Joseph of Arimathea!” she cried, and flung herself into his arms in an enthusiastic embrace. “We’ve all missed you, but I have longed for you most of all.” She drew back to look at him gravely with those large grey eyes beneath a thick canopy of lashes. “The Master and I have discussed it often. When you’re here, there’s never any bickering or whining or complaining. You sweep it all away and make everything seem so simple.”

  “I wish I understood what it is that’s changed since my departure, for something surely has,” Joseph told her. “There was never any bickering in the past.”

  “No doubt he has told you that nothing has changed?” Miriam asked Joseph, glancing at the Master in mock irritation. “Everything’s going along nicely, thank you—was that what he said? Not so; he’s been in hiding for months, even from his own followers. And all so that he can make a triumphant entry into the city at Pesach next Sunday, surrounded by—”

  “You’ll not go into Jerusalem now, as things stand?” Joseph asked the Mast
er, alarmed. “I don’t think it’s wise. The Sanhedrin will surely refuse to anoint you next autumn if you stir things up more now at the Passover.”

  The Master put one arm around Joseph and the other around Miriam, and drew them close to him as if they were his children.

  “I cannot wait until autumn. My time has come,” the Master said simply. Then, pressing Joseph lightly, he whispered in his ear, “Stay with me, Joseph.”

  As the sun was setting, the mobs of followers went over the hill peaceably, leaving behind in the gardens and orchards a snowy carpet of strewn flower petals.

  As darkness descended, Martha lit fires in the clay oil lamps on the terrace and the servants set out a light supper before retiring for the night. The twelve were there, and young Lazarus, who looked pale and wan and had hardly spoken all day, and a few older women, and the sisters themselves. The Master’s mother had sent her regrets, saying she could only come down from Galilee at the end of the Pesach.

  When this small group was seated in the flickering light, the Master had given thanks, and all were breaking bread over generous helpings of hot soup, Miriam stood and picked up a beautifully carved stone box that rested beside her at the table. She went to where Joseph sat near the Master and asked him to hold the box for her. Then without a word she opened the lid and dug both her hands deep inside as the others at the table stopped speaking and looked up at her form where she hovered there, like an angel of doom or prophecy, in the firelight.

  As she withdrew her full hands, at once the terrace and vineyard and gardens were saturated with a cloud of the overwhelmingly voluptuous aroma of spikenard. The ointment, as Joseph knew, was extravagantly dear. Hefting fistfuls of rubies and gold would have been less prodigal.

  One by one the diners understood what was about to happen. Simon pushed away his meal and struggled to rise from his place; James and Johan Zebedee reached out to try to stop her; Judas leapt to his feet—but they were all too late.

  Joseph held the alabaster box and watched in amazement as Miriam, her face almost beatifically beautiful in this light, let the liquid ointment pour from her cupped hands over the Master’s head, where it trickled down his face and neck into his robes: the traditional, sacred rite of anointing a king. Then she knelt before the Master. She gestured to Joseph for the box and, pulling free the Master’s sandals, she took another double handful, again worth a king’s bejeweled crown, and poured the liquid over his naked feet. In a gesture of complete submission and adoration, she tossed forward her magnificent silken tresses and, using them as a cloth, she wiped the Master’s feet.

  Joseph and the others sat frozen in shock at this strange and horrid travesty—an almost sexual inversion of the time-honored ritual of anointment, but here conducted without the authority of priest or state, and on profane ground. And by a woman!

  Judas, the first to speak, expressed a mild version of what was felt by all: that above and beyond the rest, there was the horror of throwing away, with such abandon, a complete fortune in rare ointment. “We might have sold that ointment to aid the poor!” he cried, his face black with anger.

  Joseph turned to the Master, trying to understand.

  In the firelight, the Master’s eyes glittered dark green. He was looking at Miriam, who knelt on the ground just beside Joseph’s knee. He was looking at her as if he would never have the chance to regard her again, as if he were committing her features to memory.

  “Why are you so concerned about the poor, Judas?” the Master said, never taking his eyes from Miriam. “The poor, you will always have with you. But me—you have not always.”

  Again Joseph felt that awful chill. He felt helpless sitting beside the Master, ineffectually holding the ointment box. But as if he’d read Joseph’s thoughts, the Master turned to him.

  “Miriam will explain later what you need to know,” he told Joseph in a low voice, his lips hardly moving. “But for now, I want you to procure an animal for me to ride into Jerusalem next Sunday.”

  “I beg of you, do not go forward with this ill-advised scheme,” Joseph whispered urgently. “It is dangerous—and not only that, it’s downright unholy. You profane the prophecies. Though I love Miriam, I must point out that no king of Judea has ever been anointed on profane ground, nor by the hand of a woman!”

  “I am not come here to be king of Judea, my beloved Joseph. I have another kingdom—and, as you’ve seen, I’ve another method of anointment as well. But I have also another request of you, my friend. By the time of the Pesach supper, many will be searching for me. It is dangerous to reveal where we will meet for that night’s meal. You must come to the temple, and bring the others with you. There, near the marketplace, you will see a man bearing a pitcher of water. Follow him.”

  “Those are your only instructions? That we come to a place and follow an unknown person?” said Joseph.

  “Follow the water-bearer,” said the Master, “and all will happen as planned.”

  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.r />
  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.