The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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 feeling of complete satisfaction, in this sorry case of Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth. Because our burden is a