The Magic Circle (49 page)

Sam and I were absolutely silent for the next half hour until the sky began to turn pale. He stirred at last and squeezed my hand, and he whispered,

“I guess you’ve had your
tiwa-titmas
too, tonight, hotshot. Whoever that lion was hunting for, he sure found the right human—Ariel the Lionhearted.”

“And they came for you, too—your totem bears!” I whispered back in excitement.

Getting up and pulling me to my feet, Sam gave me a big bear hug.

“We entered the magic circle together, Ariel, and we saw them—the Lion and the Big and Small Bears. You understand what it means? Our totems have come to show us they’re really ours. At dawn, we’ll tie the bond by mixing our juices together as blood brothers. After that, everything will be different for both of us,” he assured me. “You’ll see.”

And everything truly had changed, just as Sam promised. But that was nearly eighteen years ago, and tonight in Wolfgang’s bed, beneath the rotating circle of sky, was the first time since childhood that my totem had come to me in a dream.

Then just before slipping back into predawn sleep, I thought I glimpsed the connection I’d been hunting last night, with Saint Hieronymus and his wounded lion. As Dacian had pointed out yesterday, the zodiac sign opposite the “ruler” of each new aeon was considered by the ancients as the symbolic coruler of each coming age—just as the Virgin Mary had wielded equal symbolic clout along with the school of Christian fish. Since I knew that the sign in the zodiac opposite Aquarius was Leo the lion, maybe my dream signified that my totem lioness had come to me to draw me back once more into the magic circle.

When I awoke in the morning, it didn’t take long to figure out I was no longer on a mountaintop with Sam watching the sun rise. I was alone in bed on the top floor of Wolfgang’s castle surrounded by pillows and down comforters—but the sun was already flooding into the room. What time was it? I sat up in panic.

Wolfgang arrived just then, dressed in slacks and a soft grey cashmere turtleneck, bearing last night’s tray, now laden with cups and plates, a steaming pot of chocolate, a basket of rolls and hot croissants. I helped myself to a dark, crusty roll as Wolfgang sat on the bed and poured the cocoa.

“So what’s today’s agenda?” I asked him. “We never actually got around to discussing it as we’d planned last night.”

“Our flight to Leningrad departs at five this afternoon, and the monastery at Melk will open at ten
A.M
.—a bit more than an hour from now—which leaves us several hours of study there before we must head for the airport.”

“Did Zoe give any clues about what we should be looking for?” I asked him.

“A connection that will link the documents that were rescued and hoarded by your grandmother all those years,” said Wolfgang. “The monastery of Melk houses a large medieval collection that could provide us that missing thread.”

“But if this monastery’s library has as many books as the one we visited yesterday, how will we ever find anything in just a few hours?” I asked.

“Like your relatives, I’m hoping that
you
will find what we’re looking for.”

That cryptic reply was all Wolfgang had time for, if I was to shower, dress, and get moving before the monastery opened. I was ready to leave when I suddenly recalled something: I asked if I could use the machine in his office to answer yesterday’s fax from the States.

When I went down to the small office I tried to organize my thoughts. I wanted to communicate to Sam yesterday’s more important events, but I knew there was something I had to confront first. I felt pretty awkward even thinking of Sam, much less writing, given my surroundings and my recent activities. It might seem ridiculous, but I knew if anyone could pick up on my vibes, torrid or otherwise—even separated by thousands of miles of fiber-optics—it was Sam. It occurred to me that maybe he already
had
. It hadn’t been lost on me that that lioness wasn’t the only one who’d visited my dreams last night. Walking beside my moccasin tracks through the dream world were Sam and his animal totems too.

Pushing these thoughts to the back of my mind, I tried to come up with a double-entendre note—something short, sweet, and to the point, yet conveying as much as possible. Recalling that Sam was calling himself Sir Richard Francis Burton these days, I came up with the following:

Dear Dr. Burton,

Thanks for your memo. Your team seems on target. I too am ahead of schedule established as of our last meeting: a whale of a job accomplished. If problems arise in my absence, contact me directly via IAEA. I depart for Russia, 5pm Vienna time today.

Best regards, Ariel Behn

Most of this should be pretty clear to Sam, I thought: I’d received his fax and had understood it. The only thing we’d “established” at our last meeting—since we didn’t know yet where Pandora’s papers were—was that I would personally try to reach Dacian Bassarides and pump him for information. So the statement that I was ahead of schedule would convey that I’d managed to do so. The whale reference—the whale being the floating repository of clan totem memory—should tell Sam I’d safely stashed the “gift” that my last fax said I was now in possession of.

Much as I’d have liked to share more, when I contemplated trying to encode in this brief time the complexities of what I’d learned about the rest of my family—not to mention sacred hallows and vanished cities and zodiacal constellations—I confess I foundered. But at least now Sam would know this much: that the game was afoot. After shredding and burning my original memo in the fireplace and scattering it among the cold ashes—better to be safe than sorry—I went outside and found Wolfgang just coming across the lawn to find me.

“We’re ready to go,” he told me. “I’ve put our luggage in the car, so we needn’t come back to the castle. We can leave directly from Melk for the airport. Claus has a key and will tidy up here when we’ve gone.”

“Who’s Claus?” I asked.

“My groundskeeper,” Wolfgang replied, opening the passenger door and handing me in. He went around back and locked the trunk, then got behind the wheel.

“I thought his name was Hans,” I said as he turned the key in the ignition and adjusted the choke.

“Whose name?” said Wolfgang. He pulled the car out from beneath the tree and crossed the lawn, navigating the drawbridge carefully.

“The guy you just called Claus,” I said. “Last night, when your groundskeeper followed us up the hill in the dark, you told me his name was Hans.” I didn’t feel it necessary to mention that all along I’d felt there was something suspicious about the fellow, anyway.

“That’s right: Hans Claus,” Wolfgang said. “It’s more customary in these parts to call such people by their family names. But perhaps last night I did otherwise.”

“You’re sure it’s not Claus
Hans?
” I suggested.

Wolfgang glanced over at me with one lifted eyebrow and a puzzled smile. “Is this an interrogation? I’m afraid I’m not used to that, though I may safely assure you I do know the names of my own servants.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Then what about your own name? You never mentioned to me that there was a real person named Kaspar Hauser.”

“But I thought you already knew of him,” he said as we navigated downhill through the vineyards. “The Wild Boy of Nürnberg, as they called him. The legend of Kaspar Hauser has been a very famous one in Germany.”

“I know about it now; I’ve read up on him,” I said. “Instead, you implied you were named for one of the biblical Magi. Maybe you know more about this Kaspar Hauser than I do, but it appears his main claims to fame were his shadowy past and his unexplained murder. It seems strange that anyone would want to saddle a child with either of those associations.”

Wolfgang laughed. “But I’ve been thinking of him myself! I was astounded yesterday by Dacian Bassarides’s story of those seven hidden cities of Solomon. I suspect both Kaspar Hauser and the town of Nürnberg are related to those cities, as perhaps too are Adolf Hitler and the sacred hallows he researched at Melk. I was going to speak of it last night, but I was—somewhat distracted.” He smiled. “After listening to Dacian, what I think may connect all these things is the
Hagalrune.
”

“
Hagalrune?
” I said.

“
Hagal
in old German meant hail—you know, pellets of ice—one of the two important symbols of Aryan power: fire and ice,” said Wolfgang. “The swastika has since ancient times symbolized the power of fire. It was carved on many Eastern fire temples like the one Dacian mentioned. More important, Nürnberg, the town where Kaspar Hauser first appeared, is considered the absolute geomantic center of Germany: the three lines forming the
Hagal
rune cross from other parts of Europe and Asia, meeting at Nürnberg to form a cauldron of power.”

I felt a chill as Wolfgang, removing one hand from the steering wheel, drew a sign in the air with his finger—precisely the image that had formed across my computer screen the night Sam had begun to communicate with me in code:

My heart was pounding. I wished I could speak with Sam. I drew my coat collar up, more to still my hands than for warmth. Wolfgang didn’t seem to notice; he replaced his hand on the wheel and kept speaking as he drove.

“This placement of the
Hagal
rune at Nürnberg is central to everything Adolf Hitler ever said or did,” he told me. “As soon as Hitler became German chancellor, his first act was to form a college of
Rutengänger
—how you would say?—water diviners.”

“We call them dowsers,” I said. “It’s an old practice among Native Americans: they use Y-shaped willow or hazel switches balanced between their fingertips as they move over terrain to find underground water.”

“Yes, exactly,” Wolfgang said. “But these men of the German college didn’t only look for water, they were searching for sources of power within the earth, forces of energy the Führer could tap into, in order to increase his own powers. If you watch those old films of Hitler, you’ll see what I describe. He’ll be standing in his open car as it moves along the street, with the throngs cheering around him, but before the car completely comes to rest, it backs up and goes forward, adjusting until it settles on exactly the right spot.

“You see, Hitler’s dowsers went first to measure the forces, to locate the most propitious spot to stop the car—and find the right building or window or balcony for him to give a speech. These forces protected him against sabotage, and also increased his own energy. You know how many assassination attempts failed—even bombs planted beside him in an enclosed room—because of the power grid shielding him. And it was known from ancient times that there was nothing stronger than the forces that Adolf Hitler later tried to harness, there at Nürnberg.”

“Whatever Dacian may believe, you can’t imagine that Hitler actually survived multiple assassination attempts because of some weird force like a ‘hail rune’?” I said.

“I’m saying what
he
believed—and I’ve plenty of evidence to support it,” he assured me. And he began as we drove toward Melk.

THE HAIL RUNE

Even at so late a date as the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the upbringing in a cage of an abandoned boy like Kaspar Hauser was not unheard of. Many situations were known of children who’d been raised by wild beasts. But until Kaspar Hauser’s case, few had prompted scientific study.

A ritual was commonly practiced by many fraternal orders or secret groups, involving the spilling of royal blood. Three kinds of death were delivered at once, to propitiate the gods of three realms: fire, air, and water. These were symbolized by blows to the head, the chest, and the genitals. We only know that the first two of these blows were practiced on Kaspar Hauser.

It was widely believed after his death that the boy was descended from nobility or royalty, that he’d been kidnapped at birth and raised by peasants in bizarre conditions, confined in a space so low that he could not even stand up, and fed on a diet of barley bread and water—interestingly enough, the food anciently given an animal being prepared as a sacrifice. In other words, Kaspar Hauser was very likely the victim of an unexplained pagan ritual that suddenly surfaced in Nürnberg at the beginning of the modern era. One hundred years later, Adolf Hitler would be completely fascinated by the implications of this story.

Toward the end of the last century, around the time Hitler was born in 1889, there was a movement resurgent throughout Germany to delve into the
völkisch
roots of the Germanic people, the common folk or peasants, as they were pictured in Norse legends and German fairy tales—to renew traditional values and customs believed to comprise the very core of the Teutonic soul and bring back a golden age.

At the time, it was widely believed by German-speaking peoples that for thousands of years there had been a secret plot against them, rooted in a desire by the tribes of Mediterranean stock—for example, the Romans during the Empire, the Moors in medieval Spain—to conquer all the northern peoples, those of so-called Aryan blood, and perpetrate cultural genocide against them. It was also held that these Teutonic ancestors had a higher culture than those of the Mediterranean, and kept their blood purer and unsullied by any hybrid contact with other groups—much like today’s Brahman caste in India.