Clio slipped the leaves back into the vial. But as she and Aszi began their long trek through the caves, back toward the surface, she feared she knew what this moment really meant. It was as her father had always imagined. By unearthing a bottle like this, a bottle filled with time—by uncorking the long-mute voice of the past—she’d opened a door that perhaps should have remained closed. A Pandora’s box.
Tonight, the Sibyl’s song that had lain mute in darkness beneath the volcano had been reawakened, to be heard once more by humans for the first time in nearly two thousand years.
ENTERING THE CIRCLE
So [Jesus] told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and himself stood in the middle and said, “Answer Amen to me.” So he began to sing and to say …
Dance, all of you.…
To the universe belongs the dancer
.
He who does not dance does not know what happens.…
Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in me who am speaking
,
And when you have seen what I do, keep silence about my mysteries
.
I leaped: but do you understand the whole?
—Acts of John, New Testament Apocrypha
Jerusalem: Early Spring, A.D. 32
MONDAY
Pontius Pilate was in trouble, deep and serious trouble. But it seemed to him the most bitter of ironies that—for the first time in the seven years of his tenure as Roman praefectus, governor of Judea—the bloody Jews were not to blame.
He sat alone high above the city of Jerusalem, on the terrace of the palace built by Herod the Great, overlooking the western wall and the Jaffa Gate. Below, the setting sun turned the leaves of the pomegranate trees of the royal gardens to flame, highlighting Herod’s legacy of golden cages filled with doves. Beyond the gardens the slope of Mount Zion was thick with blossoming acacias. But Pilate couldn’t focus on his surroundings. In half an hour he would have to review the troops brought in to be quartered there in preparation for the week of the Jewish festival. Things always went wrong at these events, with so many pilgrims in town, and he dreaded a debacle like others they’d seen in the past. But that was far from the greatest of his problems.
For one holding so important a post, Pontius Pilate was a man of surprisingly humble beginnings. As his name implied, he was the descendant of former slaves, having somewhere an ancestor who’d been granted the pileus—the cap distinguishing a freed man who, through noble acts and personal endeavor, was made a citizen of the Roman Empire. Without education or advantage, but only through a combination of intelligence and hard work, Pontius Pilate had risen to join the ranks of the equestrian order in Rome, and was now a knight of the realm. But only when he’d had the great fortune to be discovered by Lucius Aelius Sejanus had Pilate’s star, along with his patron’s, soared like a meteor in the firmament.
These past six years—while the emperor Tiberius had been in resplendent retreat, diverting himself on the isle of Capri (rumor had it that his sexual appetites ran to young boys, unweaned infants, and an exotic zoo of imported beasts)—Sejanus had become the most powerful, hated, and feared man in Rome. In his capacity as coconsul, with Tiberius, of the Roman senate, Sejanus was free to govern as he chose, arresting his enemies on trumped-up charges and extending control abroad by furthering his own candidates for foreign assignment—such as Pontius Pilate’s appointment here in Judea. In a nutshell, that was Pontius Pilate’s problem, for Lucius Aelius Sejanus had been killed.
Not only was Sejanus dead, he’d been executed for treason and conspiracy by order of Tiberius himself. He was accused of seducing the emperor’s daughter-in-law, Livilla, who’d helped him poison her husband, Tiberius’s only son. When the document from the emperor in Capri had been read aloud before the Roman senate last autumn, the ruthless, cold-blooded Sejanus—taken completely off guard by the betrayal—had crumpled and had to be helped from the chamber. That same night, by command of the Roman senate, Lucius Aelius Sejanus was strangled in prison. His lifeless body was stripped naked and tossed on the Capitol steps, where it remained three days for the amusement or retaliation of the Roman citizenry, who spat, urinated, and defecated upon it, stabbed it, turned their animals loose upon it, and finally threw it into the Tiber for the fish to finish whatever was left. But the end of Sejanus was not the end of the story.
All members of the Sejanus family were hunted down and destroyed—even his little daughter who, as a virgin, couldn’t be put to death under Roman law. So the soldiers raped her first, then slashed her throat. Sejanus’s estranged wife committed suicide; the complicitous Livilla was locked in a room and left to starve by her own family. And now, less than half a year after his death, any allies or colleagues of Sejanus not yet executed had committed suicide by taking poison or falling on their swords.
Pontius Pilate was not horrified by such acts. He knew the Romans intimately, though he would never be one of them. That was the error Sejanus had made: he’d wanted to be a noble Roman, to marry into the imperial family itself, to supplant their rule. Sejanus had believed his blood would enrich the blood of kings. Instead, it was enriching the silt of the river.
Pilate had no such delusions about his own immediate situation. However qualified he might be for his position, however remote from Rome was this provincial outpost of Judea, he was deeply
