The Magic Circle Page 5

  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, wh
en 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.

  The emperor drew himself together, signaled for the guard to give the pilot some silver for his trouble, and turned away to signify that the audience was ended. But as the money was handed to Tammuz, Tiberius added: “Pilot, with so many passengers on your ship, there must be other witnesses available to confirm this strange story?”

  “Indeed, my lord,” agreed Tammuz, “there were many witnesses to what I heard and did.” Deep in the unfathomable black eyes Tiberius thought he saw a strange light. “Regardless of what we believe we know,” Tammuz continued, “there is one witness alone who can tell us whether that Great Pan was a mortal or a god, and whether he is alive or dead. But that sole witness is only a voice, a voice calling across the waters—”

  Tiberius waved him away impatiently and departed for the isolated parapet—his prison. But as he watched the pilot being led down the slope to the harbor, the emperor called his slave and handed him a gold coin, motioning toward the Egyptian on the trail below. On swift feet the slave descended the trail and handed the coin to the pilot, who looked up to the terrace where Tiberius stood.

  The emperor turned away without a sign and went into his empty quarters in the palace. Once there, he poured aromatic oil into the amphora on his altar and set it alight in the service of the gods.

  He knew he must find the voice—the voice crying in the wilderness. He must find it before he died. Or Rome itself would be destroyed.

  THE WITNESS

  I only am escaped alone to tell thee …

  My thought

  Darkened as by wind the water …

  There’s always

  Someone has to tell them, isn’t there?…

  Someone chosen by the chance of seeing,

  By the accident of sight,

  By the stumbling on the moment of it,

  Unprepared, unwarned, unready,

  Thinking of nothing … and it happens, and he sees it.

  Caught in that inextricable net

  Of having witnessed, having seen …

  It was I.

  I only. I alone. The moment

  Closed us together in its gaping grin

  Of horrible incredulity.

  I only. I alone, to tell thee …

  I who have understood nothing, have known

  Nothing, have been answered nothing.

  —Archibald MacLeish, J.B.

  God always wins.

  —Archibald MacLeish, J.B.

  Snake River, Idaho: Early Spring, 1989

  It was snowing. It had been snowing for days. It seemed the snow would never end.

  I had been driving through the thick of it since well before dawn. I stopped at midnight in Jackpot, Nevada, the only pink neon glow in the sky through at least a hundred miles of rocky wasteland in my long ascent from California back to Idaho, back to my job at the nuclear site. There in Jackpot, against the jangle of slot machines, I sat at a counter and ate blood-rare grilled steak with fries, chugged a glass of Scotch whiskey, and washed it down with a mug of hot black coffee—the multi-ingredient cure-all my uncle Earnest had always recommended for this kind of stress and heartache. Then I went back out into the cold black night and hit the road again.

  If I hadn’t stopped back in the Sierras, when the first fresh snow came down for the day of skiing I’d suddenly felt I needed to soothe my aching soul, I wouldn’t have been in this predicament now, sailing along on black ice in the middle of nowhere. At least this was a nowhere I knew well—every wrinkle of road along this trek from the Rockies to the coast. I’d crossed it often enough on business, for my job as a nuclear security expert. Ariel Behn, girl nuke. But the reason for this last jaunt was a business I’d as soon have missed.

  I could feel my body slipping into autopilot on that long, monotonous stretch of highway. The dark waters of my mind started pulling me back to a place I knew I didn’t want to go. The miles clicked away, the snow swirled around me. The studded tires crunched on the black ice that flowed beneath.

  I could not erase the dappled image of the grassy slope back there in California, the smoothly geometric pattern of those tombstones moving across it, those thin, thin layers of stone and grass. All that separated life from death—all that separated me from Sam—forever.

  The grass was electric green—that shimmering, wonderful green that only exists in San Francisco, and only at this time of year. Against the brilliant lawn, the chalk white gravestones marched in undulating rows across the hill. Dark eucalyptus trees towered over the cemetery between the rows of markers, their silver leaves dripping with water. I looked through the tinted windows of the limousine as we pulled from the main road and doubled back into the Presidio.

  I had driven this road so many times when in the Bay Area. It was the only route from the Golden Gate Bridge to the San Francisco Marina, and it passed directly by the military cemetery we were entering. Today, observed up close and in slow motion, it was all so beautiful, so ravishing to the eye.

  “Sam would have loved being here,” I said, speaking aloud for the first time during the ride.

  Jersey, sitting beside me in the limo, said curtly, “Well, after all, he is here, isn’t he? Or what’s all the hoopla about?”

  At these close quarters, I caught a whiff of her breath.

  “Mother, how much have you had to drink?” I said. “You smell like a brewery.”

  “Cutty Sark,” she said with a smile. “In honor of the Navy.”

  “For God’s sake, this is a funeral,” I said irritably.

  “I’m Irish,” she pointed out. “We call it a wake: drink the buggers on their merry way. In my opinion, a far more civilized tradition …”

  She was already having trouble with the three-syllable words. Inwardly I was cringing, hoping she wouldn’t try to give part of the eulogy that was to be delivered by the military at graveside. I wouldn’t put anything past her—especially in this state of incipient inebriation. And Augustus and Grace, my well-starched father and stepmother who disapproved of everything, were in the car just behind.

  The limousines pulled th
rough the iron gates of the Presidio cemetery and slid on past the funeral parlor. There would be no indoor service, and the coffin was already sealed for reasons pertaining, we’d been told, to national security. Besides, as we had also been told somewhat more discreetly, it might be hard to recognize Sam. Families of bombing victims usually preferred not to be afforded that opportunity.

  The cortege moved along Lincoln Avenue and pulled up the drive sheltered by brooding eucalyptus at the far end of the cemetery. Several cars were already parked there, all with the recognizable white license plates of the U.S. government. Atop the small knoll was a freshly dug open grave with a cluster of men standing around it. One was an army chaplain, and one with a long thick braid of hair looked like the shaman I’d asked for. Sam would have liked that.

  Our three limos pulled up in front of the government vehicles: Jersey and I in the family car, Augustus and Grace behind us, and Sam in the black limousine up front. In a lead-lined coffin. We all got out and started up the hill as they unloaded Sam from the hearse. Augustus and Grace stood quietly aside, not mingling—which I frankly appreciated, so Jersey’s breath wouldn’t be a problem. Unless someone lit a match near her.

  A man with dark glasses and a trenchcoat separated from the gaggle of government types and moved over to speak a few words to the other two family members. Then he approached Jersey and me.

  I suddenly realized we weren’t dressed for a funeral. I was wearing the only black dress I owned, one with purple and yellow hibiscus all over it. Jersey was in a chic French suit, that particular shade of ice blue that was her trademark when she was on the stage because it matched her eyes. I hoped no one would notice our lapse in protocol.

  “Mrs. Behn,” the man addressed Jersey, “I hope you don’t mind waiting a few more minutes? The president would like to be here for the ceremony.”

  He didn’t mean the president, of course, but a former president: the one Jersey called the Peanut Farmer, whom she’d performed for when he himself was in the White House.