The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  “What were they seeking?” I asked.

  “The knowledge of the eternal return—Pandora’s magic circle,” Zoe said. “It is, quite simply, the power of life after death.”

  THE MESSENGER

  The belief of [the Thracians] in their immortality takes the following form.… Every five years they choose one of their number by lot and send him to Zalmoxis as a messenger … to ask for whatever they want.… Some of them hold javelins with speartips pointed upward, while others take hold of the messenger’s hands and feet and swing him aloft onto the points. If he is killed they believe that the god regards them with favour, but if he lives they blame his own bad character, and send another messenger in [his] place.

  I’ve heard a different account from the Greeks:… Zalmoxis was a man and lived in Samos where he was a slave in the household of Pythagoras.… After gaining his freedom and amassing a fortune he returned to his native Thrace … where he entertained the leading men and taught them that neither he nor they, nor any of their descendants would ever die.

  —Herodotus, The Histories

  And those of the disciples who escaped the conflagration were Lydis and Archippos and Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras who is said to have taught the Pythagorean philosophy to the Druids among the Celts.

  —Hippolytus, Bishop of Romanus Porto, Philosophumena

  And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  —Job 1:15, 16, 17, 19

  Camulodunum, Britannia: Spring, A.D. 60

  FRACTIO

  Jesus took bread, and blessed it … and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. And he took the cup and gave thanks … saying, Drink ye all of it. For this is my blood.

  —Matthew 26:26–28

  And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death.

  —Isaiah 25:6–8

  The grass spread beneath her was a thick carpet of rich emerald green that soothed her soul after another long, hard winter under the Roman yoke. She stood tall and proud in the wicker chariot perched high on the grassy knoll, holding the reins lightly between her fingers, her wild red hair lifted from her broad shoulders and tumbling to billow about her waist in the early morning breeze.

  This past year had been far worse than the previous fifteen years since the Roman occupation, for the young emperor Nero had proved far greedier than his stepfather, Claudius, whom the rumors said Nero himself had poisoned.

  Now native Britons were being brutally dispossessed by floods of opportunistic Roman colonists backed up by garrisons of legionary troops. Only a few months ago, when her husband died, she herself—proud queen of royal blood of the house of Iceni, and her two young daughters—had been raped by Roman officers, dragged out of their home and publicly beaten with iron rods. Her vast holdings of land were seized on behalf of the emperor Nero and her family’s wealth and treasured possessions, as with those of so many others, carted off to Rome. But despite these tragedies, she knew she had fared better than many others: Britons were everywhere being captured and sold into chain gangs to build Roman towns, Roman garrisons, Roman aqueducts, Roman roads. What was the choice now left them, really, as Britons? Only liberty or death.

  With her daughters beside her in the chariot, as the horses stamped the turf and blew air through their nostrils, she stood in silence surveying the throngs below, all massed there in a broad circle around the borders of the vast open field, all gazing up at her—all waiting for what she would do.

  When at last they fell silent, she knotted the reins on the pommel and opened the folds of her multicolored tunic. She lifted out the rabbit and held the creature high above her head for all to see. It was a snow-white sacred hare, bred and raised by the Druids for precisely this purpose. From the eighty thousand men, women, and children thronged there on the green, not a single breath was heard. Only the whinnying of a horse broke the endless silence. Then she released the hare.

  At first the animal sat there on the grassy knoll in stunned confusion as thousands of humans stood below, planted like forests of stone, waiting in silence. Then it pelted in a wild burst down the knoll and made a beeline across the open field, a small white blur against a drop-cloth of green. The direction it ran was southwest—away from the sun—and when the crowds saw it, with one voice they burst into a warlike scream of cheers, tossing their tartans into the air like a blizzard of plaids from the sky.

  For they had seen that the prophetic hare had dashed straight in the direction of Camulodunum. Boudica’s armies that were gathered here could reach it, on fast march, by nightfall. And by dawn, sixteen years of abuses against the Britons and their land would be washed away in an orgy glutted on Roman blood.

  Mona Island, Britannia: Spring, A.D. 60

  CONSIGNATIO

  Here at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, defended by our remoteness and obscurity. Now the farthest reaches of Britain lie exposed … nothing but sea and rock and hostile Romans, whose arrogance you can’t fool by compliance or modest self-restraint. Predators of the world … [Neither] east nor west has satiated them … to plunder, butcher, steal—these things they falsely name empire. They’ve turned the world into a wasteland, and they call it peace.

  —Tacitus, Agricola, quoting British chieftain Calgacus on the Romans

  It is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

  —Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

  It wasn’t merely a question of achieving short-term control or submission among the natives, as Suetonius Paulinus well knew. He’d begun his career in the Atlas Mountains putting down uprisings by the Berbers against Roman occupation. Having weathered many such campaigns, Suetonius was well prepared to wage warfare over difficult terrain, or to meet fierce hot opposition in hand-to-hand combat.

  But in the two years since the emperor Nero had appointed him governor of Britannia, Suetonius had come to understand that these Druids were something else. As both rulers and seers, whether male or female, they held the highest priestly offices in the land and were regarded by their people nearly as gods. Suetonius knew without question that in the long run there was only one way to deal with them: they had to be utterly destroyed.

  Their chief sanctuary was located just off the coast of Cambria on the isle of Mona—the cow, a nickname for Brighde, a Demeter-like moon goddess of fecundity. They believed they were protected by this goddess, and that their warriors who were slain in battle would be rejuvenated from her cauldron of rebirth. The underground passage to the cauldron was located beneath a lake that lay near Mona’s sacred grove.

  It had taken Suetonius Paulinus two years of stealth and trickery to determine exactly when was the most propitious moment to strike at this offshore stronghold, without chance of defense or retreat. At last he learned that all the principal druidical priests were present each year on the first day of the Roman month of May. This was the day the Celts called Beltaine for the taine or fires they lit the night before to cleanse and purify the sacred woods in preparation for the Great Mother’s yearly visit to usher in the month of fertility. This was the holiest day of the year, when the Druids neither worked nor bore arms—and therefore, Suetonius could hope, the day they would very least be anticipating an attack.

  He had a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats built to bring his troops across the narrow but often violent strait from the mainland. At dusk on May Eve they crept through the sea foam, rounding the coast along the southern tip of the island for a landing away from the mainland, in the west at Holy Head.

  There, as their boats slipped
soundlessly in toward shore, the ceremonies of the cleansing ritual were already under way, though it was not yet dark. Shadowy figures bearing flaming torches moved through the silent groves that ran the length of the strand. The sun was slowly sinking into the bloodred sea as the Roman troops beached their craft and splashed through the sweeping surf. But all at once they halted at the sight that confronted them.

  A mass of people, all in robes of deathly black, came onto the beach, advancing like an implacable black-clad wall of human flesh. The male priests moved with their arms raised to the heavens, screaming curses and oaths at the top of their lungs. The women, with wild, disheveled hair, flitted among them like insects, with torches held aloft. Then in a sudden wave, the women rushed shrieking like furies across the pebbled beach, directly toward the Roman soldiers.

  Suetonius’s officers looked on helplessly as their troops stood motionless on the beachhead, overawed, paralyzed by that band of howling harpies that seemed straight from Hades. Suetonius ran down the lines between them as the crazed women rushed onward; he screamed commands and imprecations to the troops above the deafening racket of the Druids, until at last his officers collected themselves and began to follow his example.

  “Cut them down!” the command ran down the ranks. Those shrieking women with flaming torches bore down upon them still, with the screams of the mad Druid priests resounding in their ears. At the last possible instant, the soldiers charged.

  Joseph of Arimathea stood beside Lovernios at the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t help but recall that other sunset when he’d stood on another cliff beside his friend and watched the sea turn to blood—a sunset twenty-five years ago, on another coast of another country, when it had all begun. When perhaps it could have been stopped. But now, as the screams from the beach below filled his ears, he turned to Lovernios in horror.

  “We must intervene!” Joseph cried, grasping his friend by the arm. “We must help them! We must do something to make it stop! They’re not even defending themselves! The Romans have turned their own torches upon them—they’ve set fire to their hair and clothes! They’re cutting them to bits!”

  The Druid stood immobile. He only flinched slightly when, over the terrible clamor and screams, he heard the sound of the axes ringing back from the rocks and realized for the first time what the Romans were really bent upon: they were going to obliterate the sacred grove.

  Lovernios didn’t look at Joseph. Nor did he glance at the carnage on the beach below that represented not only the massacre of his people but the destruction of everything they believed in and cherished—the twilight of their whole way of life, even of their gods. Instead he gazed out to sea as if in that western twilight he could see another place, another time in the distant past or far more distant future. When at last he spoke, to Joseph the words sounded remote and strange, like echoes from some dank and bottomless well.

  “When Esus died, you had the strength of your wisdom,” he reminded Joseph. “You knew what to do and you did it. You tried to comprehend the meaning of his life and death, and you have never ceased to do so these nearly thirty years. True wisdom, however, lies not only in understanding what can or cannot be done, but in knowing what must be done. And also in knowing—how did you say it to me then, so long ago?—the kairos: the critical moment.”

  “Please, Lovern, this is the critical moment. My God!” Joseph cried.

  But it was clear, even in his despair, that the situation was utterly hopeless. He dropped to his knees there on the cliff, face buried in hands, and he prayed as the crash of felled trees below mingled with the horrifying screams of death. He heard these sounds together, drifting like wraiths across the silent waters. After a moment Joseph felt Lovernios’s comforting hand resting on his hair, his voice strangely tranquil, as if he’d found a hidden core of hope that he alone could see.

  “There are two things the gods demand,” he told Joseph. “We must go at once, tonight, and sacrifice all the potent objects we possess, cast them into the holy waters of the Llyn Cerrig Bach, the lake of small stones.”

  “What then?” whispered Joseph.

  “If that does not turn the tide,” said Lovernios gravely, “it may come to pass we will have to send the messenger.…”

  The messenger from the south had arrived at the far side of the island just after dawn, as Suetonius Paulinus was watching the last tree fall. It was an ancient tree, the oldest of literally thousands in a wood that had taken all night for his legion to reduced to complete devestation.

  The tree had a girth of more than sixty feet: his garrison engineers had calculated that it was the size of a galley under full oar. Lying on its side, as now, it was the height of one of those three-story buildings they’d constructed along the African coast when he was governor of Mauretania. How old could a tree grow to become, Suetonius wondered? Would its rings, if he could take the time to count them, number as many as those lives his troops had obliterated last night? Would the death of this tree, as with other holy trees, in the end mark the death of the Druids—as they seemed themselves to believe?

  Erasing these thoughts for more practical matters, Suetonius set his men to work stacking up the dark-clad corpses of the dead Druids and building bonfires for their cremation. Then, recalling the emperor Nero’s chief request, he sent a posse of soldiers off to explore the island. For Nero had written he had cause to believe from his late stepfather (and great-uncle) Claudius that the Druids held many valuable treasures in strongholds exactly like this one at Mona. Nero wished to be informed of any such findings at once.

  This important business under way, Suetonius Paulinus remembered the messenger and beckoned to have him brought from where he’d been waiting. The soldier looked rather the worse for wear after his lengthy journey. Further, Suetonius was informed, the fellow’s wet and bedraggled appearance was the result of his plunge into water to cross the narrow strait to the island, along with his horse, only moments before. The frothing horse, still lathered despite its dip in the channel, was led away as the messenger was brought to the governor’s side.

  “Take your time; catch some breath, man,” Suetonius reassured the messenger. “However important your news, don’t expire before delivering it.”

  “Camulodunum—” gasped the messenger.

  Suetonius realized for the first time how ill the man seemed: his parched lips caked with blood and dust, his eyes drifting aimlessly, his short-cropped hair as disheveled as those Druid cadavers that littered the ground around them.

  Suetonius snapped his fingers for a skin of fresh water and handed it to the messenger. When he’d drunk and cleared the dust from his throat, the governor nodded for him to continue. But the chap still seemed crazed. Though of course all his men were seasoned soldiers, he wondered if perhaps the sight of these corpses that they were practically wading in, male and female, might not have driven his senses momentarily from him.

  “Come now,” Suetonius said firmly. “You’ve traveled all this way—over two hundred miles at what was clearly a breakneck pace. You’ve something urgent to tell me about Camulodunum.”

  “All dead,” the messenger croaked. “Thousands—tens of thousands—all dead. And the city, the Claudian temple—all of it burned to the ground!” The man began weeping.

  Suetonius, at first astounded, quickly turned furious. He drew back his hand and slashed the fellow brutally across the face. “You’re a soldier, man!” he reminded him. “In the name of Jupiter, pull yourself together. What’s happened at Camulodunum? Has there been an earthquake? A fire?”

  “A native uprising, sire,” the messenger said, gulping for air. “The Iceni and Trinovantes—perhaps some tribes from the Corn Wall as well—we’re not yet sure—”

  “And where was the ninth legion Hispana all this while?” demanded Suetonius with ice in his voice. “Was the commander mending his toga while tribes of barefoot natives were burning the cities he’s supposed to be defending?”

  “These are no barefoot provi
ncials, sire, but fully armed troops—perhaps two hundred thousand or more,” the soldier told him. “It’s commander Petilius Cerialis himself who sent me to you, just as fast as I could traverse the country and get here. Half the ninth legion has been destroyed: twenty-five hundred of the men I was with, who went in to attempt a rescue of the town. The Roman procurator Decianus has fled with his officers to the mainland, and Petilius is barricaded within his own fortress awaiting the reinforcements he prays you will bring.”

  “Nonsense. How could a handful of uneducated, primitive Britons destroy half a Roman garrison and drive out the chief colonial administrator?” Suetonius said, not even trying to disguise his contempt for a people he’d come to loathe. He spat on the ground and added, “They don’t even make good slaves, much less good soldiers.”

  “Yet they possess many weapons, full horse and chariot,” the soldier told him. “Their women fight alongside the men, and are far more vicious. At Camulodunum, the atrocities I’ve witnessed, sire, are nearly beyond comprehension. They slaughtered old and young, civilian and soldier, mother and child alike, with no distinction, so long as those they were killing were Romans or our collaborators. I saw the corpses of Roman women with suckling babes pinioned to their breasts! And men who were crucified along the streets—the gods forgive me to say it—but they had their body parts cut off, and stitched to their lips while they were still breathing.…”

  The messenger fell silent, eyes glazed over with a look of terror that clearly his arduous journey had done little to assuage.