The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    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.
    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