The Magic Circle Read online

  For a reason unclear to Pontius Pilate, the Jews, unlike other colonized peoples, remained all but exempt from Roman law—from service in the Roman armies and from nearly all forms of taxation, including those paid by Samaritans and even Roman citizens within these provinces. Under legislation by the Roman senate, a full Roman citizen could be put to death just for trespassing on the Jewish Temple Mount.

  And when Pilate had to raise funds to complete the aqueduct, to bring lifeblood to these hinterlands, what had the damnable Jews done? They’d refused to pay the aqueduct levy, claiming it was the job of the Romans to provide for the people they’d conquered and enslaved. (Enslaved—that was amusing. How quickly they’d forgotten their sojourns in Egypt and Babylon.) So he’d “borrowed” the required funds from the temple tithe, finished the aqueduct, and that was the end of the whining. It was not the end of the Jews and their missives to Rome, but he’d prevailed. Of course, that was while Sejanus was still alive.

  Now a new event was on the horizon. It was something that might save him, and turn the wrath of Tiberius, whose arm was long and grasp viselike when it came to retaliation against subordinates who’d lost his favor.

  Pilate stood up and paced the terrace restlessly.

  He had it on good advice from his authorities—that nest of spies and informers essential to the colonial governor of any subject people—that there was a Jew who was wandering about in the wilderness claiming, as so many of them did, to be the inunctus—the anointed one. This was the one the Greeks called christos, meaning covered with chrism, or oil, and whom the Jews called mashiah, which meant the same, as he understood it. This was a very ancient thing, he was told, in the history of their faith: that a person was coming, would suddenly arrive, that they believed fervently would deliver them from whatever bondage they thought they were in, and turn the entire world into a Jewish-ruled paradise. Of late, the desire to see this potential king anointed seemed to have reached fever pitch—and to Pontius Pilate, it was the blessing he’d been hoping for. It was the Jews themselves who would save him!

  As the situation stood, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, supported this new candidate, as did a vast discipleship from among the Essene colony, followers of that madman a few years back who’d gone about dipping people in water. Rumor had it he’d gotten himself executed by Herod Antipas, Jewish tetrarch of Galilee, for calling Antipas’s wife Herodias a whore—that Antipas had beheaded the fellow at the request of his stepdaughter, Salome. Was there no end to the perfidy of these people? Antipas feared this new anointed one; he believed he was the reincarnation of the water-dipper he’d beheaded, returned to exact revenge against the tetrarch.

  But there was a third contender in the game, placing Pilate in an even better position: the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, a puppet of Rome with a larger police force in Jerusalem than Pilate’s, quite as dedicated to getting rid of rabble-rousers who were out to topple the Roman Empire and civilized governance. So Caiaphas and Antipas hated and feared this Jew, and the Sanhedrin and the bathers supported him. Better and better. When the fellow went, he would take them all down with him.

  Pilate looked out over the plain beyond the western wall where the sun just now was setting. He heard the new troops assembling in the courtyard, as they did each festival. They would handle the overflow of pilgrims here to celebrate the spring equinox, which, as usual, the Jews insisted upon equating with their own unique experiences: in this case, the passing over of their houses by some spirit in Egypt more than a thousand years ago.

  Pilate listened to the commands of the drill officer calling the new troops to order and putting them through their paces. He heard the sounds of their leather soles moving across the marble tiles of the courtyard below. At last Pilate turned to look over the terrace wall at the troops beneath, who squinted up at him—directly into the western sun blazing behind him like a fiery aura, so they could see only the vaguest outline of his form. He always chose this hour and this location for that very reason.

  “Soldiers of Rome,” he said, “you must be prepared for the week ahead, for the crowds that will enter this city on pilgrimage. You must be prepared to deal with any events that might place an undue burden on the empire. There are rumors of rabble-rousers whose goals are to turn what should be a peaceful festival into a riot, to bring down law and order. Soldiers of Rome, the week ahead may be a time when the actions of each of us will change the course of empire, perhaps even the course of history. Let us not forget that our first obligation is to prevent any act against the state or the status quo by those who wish, for reasons of religious fervor or for personal glory, to alter the fate of the Roman Empire—to change the course of our destiny.”

  TUESDAY

  It was not yet dawn when Joseph of Arimathea, bleary-eyed and exhausted from his journey, arrived at the edge of Jerusalem. In the darkness of his mind he could still hear the sounds of last night—the water lapping against the sides of the large ships, the oars dipped into water, the whispers across the surface of the moonless sea—as the small boat approached his merchant fleet that lay moored outside the port of Joppa, awaiting first light to enter the harbor.

  Even before Nicodemus’s messenger identified himself and boarded the ship, even before Joseph saw the note he had come all this way to deliver, he felt a sense of impending doom. It came as no surprise that the note was cryptic, to protect against its contents being seen and understood by others. But for Joseph it raised a thousand specters merely by what it did not say. Even now he could see the words before him:

  Make haste. The hour is come. Nicodemus

  The hour had come, it said. But how could it have come? Joseph had thought in anguish. It wasn’t time!

  Throwing judgment and caution to the winds, Joseph had roused his sleeping crew and given the command to cut his flagship loose from the others—right now, in the dead of night—and to bring this one ship, alone, into the port of Joppa.

  His men had argued hotly against it, no doubt thinking him mad. And upon docking in port, Joseph had demonstrated further madness. Leaving the crew to secure his precious cargoes—an unheard-of act for the owner of so large a merchant fleet—he’d violated Roman curfew, storming through the streets, having servants awakened and his horses brought out and harnessed, and he’d headed off alone into the night. For the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council of elders, would meet at dawn. And when they did, he must be there.

  On the dangerous roads of the backcountry—in the black silence broken only by the sounds of horses’ hooves on broken stone, their hot lathered breathing, the cicadas’ chirping in the distant groves—Joseph heard the silent thought whispered over and over in the depths of his own mind:

  What had the Master done?

  As Joseph of Arimathea entered the city, the first faint haze of red was bleeding into the sky above the Mount of Olives, picking out in silhouette the twisted shapes of the ancient olive trees. Hammering with his fists to rouse the stableman from bed, Joseph left his horses to be watered and groomed. Then he quickly went on foot, two steps at a time, up the flights of stone stairs to the upper city.

  In the damp predawn darkness around him, he noticed the stirrings of the acacia trees in the early morning breeze. Their fragile boughs laden with blooms, these trees drowned Jerusalem each spring in a sea of rich gold. Arising from alcoves and archways, they seemed to permeate each pore of this labyrinthine city. Even now, as Joseph moved through the crooked alleyways and ascended the hill, he inhaled their dark perfume, like incense wafting from a censer, soaking into the shadowy crevices of the sleeping city and swirling in drunken pools around the base of Mount Zion.

  Acacia: the sacred tree.

  “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,” Joseph recited aloud.

  Suddenly there was the tall, regal Nicodemus standing before him, and Joseph realized he had arrived already at the familiar gates of the park surrounding Nicodemus’s palace. A servant was locking the gates behind him
as Nicodemus, his mass of unbound hair swinging round his broad shoulders, threw open his arms to welcome his friend. Joseph warmly returned the embrace.

  “When I was a boy in Arimathea,” said Joseph, looking out over the sea of golden boughs, “all along the river there were embankments of chittah, which the Romans call acacia for their sharp thorns—the tree of which Yahweh instructed us to build his first tabernacle, the lattices and altar, the Holy of Holies, even the sacred ark itself. The Keltoi and Greeks hold it sacred just as we do. They call it ‘the golden bough.’”

  “You’ve remained far too long among pagans, my friend,” Nicodemus said, shaking his head. “Even your appearance is nearly blasphemy in the eyes of God.”

  It was hard to deny, thought Joseph ruefully. With his short toga and high-laced sandals, his muscular, tanned limbs, his shaven face—the skin crackled and leathery from the burn of salt sea air—and his hair uncut in the prescribed fashion but braided up off his neck like a Norseman’s, he knew he must look a good deal more like a Hyperborean Celt than what he actually was: a distinguished and respected Judean merchant and, like Nicodemus, an official council member of “the seventy,” the common name for the Sanhedrin.

  “You encouraged the Master, when he was still a boy, to follow these foreign ways that can only lead to destruction,” Nicodemus pointed out as they started downhill. “Even so, the last few weeks I’ve prayed for your arrival before it’s too late. For perhaps only you can undo the damage that’s been done this past year in your absence.”

  It was true that Joseph had raised the young Master as his own child, ever since the boy’s father—a carpenter also named Joseph—had died. He’d taken him abroad on many voyages to learn the ancient wisdom of the diverse cultures. Despite this parental role, Joseph of Arimathea, having by now attained the forty years required to sit in the Sanhedrin, was only seven years older than his surrogate son, whom he could not help but think of as the Master. Not just a rabbi, meaning my master or teacher, but as the great spiritual leader he’d become. Yet Nicodemus’s comment was still unclear.

  “Something I could undo? I came as soon as I could, upon receiving your note,” Joseph assured him, dismissing the risks to his fortune and his neck. “But I assumed a political crisis—an emergency—some unforeseen incident that caused our plan to change.…”

  Nicodemus stopped on the trail and regarded Joseph with his sad dark eyes that seemed to penetrate to the very depths—though today they were ringed red from exhaustion, perhaps from weeping. Joseph suddenly saw how much his friend had aged in the one short year of his absence. He put his hands on Nicodemus’s shoulders and waited gravely, feeling the chill creeping upon him again, though the air was warming and balmy and the sky had turned from lavender to peach as the sun approached the rim. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “There is no political crisis,” said Nicodemus, “at least, not yet. But something perhaps far worse has taken place; I suppose one might call it a crisis of faith. He himself is the crisis, you see. He has changed until you’d scarcely recognize him. Even his own mother doesn’t understand it. No more do his closest disciples—the twelve he calls ‘the magic circle.’”

  “He has changed? Changed how?” said Joseph.

  As Nicodemus searched for words, Joseph looked down over the city where the acacias stirred in the breeze like fingers, stroking him with rustling sighs. And he prayed—prayed for some kind of belief, for faith to brace him against what he sensed was about to come. Just as he felt a glimmer of hope, the sun burst over the Mount of Olives in an explosion of light, glittering from the facades of the villas and palaces that rose above them high on the hill of Mount Zion, penetrating even the twisted puzzlelike passageways of the lower city. Beyond, in the distance, lay the majestic outcropping of the Temple of Solomon and, beneath it, the Chamber of Hewn Stone where the Sanhedrin would meet this morning.

  The temple had been conceived in a dream by Solomon’s father, David, the first true king of Israel. Rebuilt or restored after any kind of disaster, embellished from the treasuries of many great kings, it was the soul of the Jewish people. Rising from a sea of open courtyards, its white marble pillars glowing like forests of ghost trees in the morning light, the temple shone from the valley like the sun. The shimmering roofs of pure gold tiles—the gift of Herod the Great—dazzled the eye at dawn, as now, and nearly blinded one with refracted light at high noon.

  As this radiance filled Joseph’s heart, though, he heard the voice of Nicodemus murmur in his ear.

  “My dear Joseph, I can think of no other way to explain it. I think—we all fear—it seems likely that the Master has gone completely mad.”

  The Chamber of Hewn Stone was always cold and damp. Water oozed from the walls and fed the lichen that grew there in iridescent colors. Carved from the very rock of the Temple Mount, the chamber formed an egg-shaped vault beneath the court of priests and the high altar, once the threshing floor of David. It was reached by a spiral stairway of thirty-three steps carved from the ancient rock. Joseph had always felt that entering this chamber was in itself a form of ritual initiation. In the days of summer its clammy chill came as a relief. But today, it only added to the presentiment of doom that had already settled in Joseph’s spine at Nicodemus’s words.

  Though the council was commonly called “the seventy,” there were actually seventy-one members when the high priest was counted, in keeping with the number of such councils since the time of Moses.

  The corpulent high priest Joseph Caiaphas, swathed in his purple prayer shawl and yellow robe, descended the stairs first. Upon his staff was an opulent pineapple of pure gold, symbolizing life, fertility, and the rejuvenation of the people. As all high priests before him, Caiaphas was official president of the Sanhedrin by virtue of his religious stature, which meant his legal stature as well, for law and Torah were one.

  From ancient times, high priests had descended from the line of Sadducees—Sons of Zadok, the original high priest of King Solomon. But after Roman occupation, the first act of the Roman-appointed puppet king Herod the Great had been to execute the scions of many princely families, replacing them in the Sanhedrin with his own appointees. This house-sweeping had significantly improved the situation of the Pharisees, the more liberal and populist party comprised of Torah scholars and scribes, the party of both Nicodemus and Joseph.

  The Pharisees controlled the majority vote, so the leader of their party, Gamaliel, grandson of the legendary rabh Hillel, was effectively leader of the Sanhedrin, a bitter thorn to Joseph Caiaphas. The Pharisees couldn’t refrain from pointing out that Caiaphas had attained his position neither by birth, like the Sadducee aristocracy, nor by learning, like the Pharisees, but by marrying the daughter of a nasi, a prince.

  There was one individual the high priest hated more than a Pharisee, thought Joseph with foreboding as he followed his companions down the stone stairway into the chamber. That person was the Master himself. These past three years Caiaphas had kept his temple police busy, like a dog pack, sniffing out the Master’s every move. He’d tried to have the Master arrested for agitation, after that business of overturning the tables in the temple courtyard where, for generations, the family of Joseph Caiaphas had held the lucrative dove concession. Indeed, it was the wealth he’d raked in from the sale of sacrifices during holy days and pilgrimages that had paid for Caiaphas’s current sinecure and the dowry of the Jewish princess he’d married.

  When all the seventy-one had filed down the spiral stair and taken their seats, the high priest Caiaphas gave the blessing and stepped aside as the noble rabh Gamaliel, his long hair and rich robes billowing about him, came forward to open the council meeting.

  “A grave assignment has been given us by God,” Gamaliel intoned in his dramatic voice, rich with the resonance of a bell. “Whatever our mission, whatever our desire, and whatever the outcome of today’s gathering, I feel I speak for all of us when I say that no one will leave this room with a feel
ing of complete satisfaction, in this sorry case of Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth. Because our burden is a heavy one, I should like to begin with a more inspiring topic. There has just returned to us, as you see, the most wandering of all our nomadic brethren—Joseph of Arimathea.”

  The men at the table turned to gaze at Joseph. Many nodded in his direction.

  Gamaliel continued, “One year ago today Joseph of Arimathea agreed, upon private assignment from the tetrarch of Galilee, Herod Antipas, and myself, to attempt a secret mission to Rome in behalf of the descendants of Israel. This mission was to be embedded within his ordinary travel plans, his merchant fleet engaging in trade as usual in Britannia, Iberia, and Greece. But when the order was given for the expulsion of Jews from Rome, we asked Joseph instead to go directly to Capri—”

  No sooner had Gamaliel mentioned Capri than a buzzing of whispers was set up, as the council members turned with excitement to their neighbors.

  “I will not keep you in suspense, for most of you have guessed what I am about to say. Through the instrumental assistance of the emperor’s nephew Claudius, who’s known the Herods well from early times, Joseph of Arimathea secured a meeting with the emperor Tiberius at his palace on Capri. During this meeting, and aided greatly by the timely death of Lucius Sejanus, Joseph of Arimathea was able to persuade the emperor of the wisdom of approving the return of the Jews to Rome.”

  There was an unusual outburst of pounding on the table, and a few hearty squeezes of Joseph’s arms from those seated nearby, including Nicodemus. All the council members had heard months ago of the favorable Roman edict. But until now, with Joseph returned safely from his voyages, his personal involvement had remained a closely held secret.

  “I realize my request will seem rather unusual,” Gamaliel continued, “but as Joseph of Arimathea has performed us so great a service, and in view of the unique nature of his relationship with Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth, I should like to begin by asking how he would like this meeting to proceed. Joseph is the only one among us here today who may be unaware of all the circumstances that have led up to the crisis.”