The Magic Circle (58 page)

“Several figures who played a part in my father’s childhood were later to cross paths with our family, at critical moments, over many years—and with yours as well. While still a child, my father began his studies at Alexandropol under the tutelage of a noted
ashokh
, father of a boy my father’s age. The son would one day become the famous esoteric Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Some years later, another boy came from Gori in Georgia to stay, along with my father, with the Gurdjieffs. This was the young Yusip Djugashvili, who was preparing himself for a path he soon rejected: the Orthodox priesthood. Yusip would also later become famous under his adopted name of ‘Steel-man’: Stalin.”

“Wait, Volga,” I said, putting my one gloved hand on his arm. “Your father grew up with Gurdjieff and Stalin?” To be frank, the way my life had been running of late, I was stunned that Volga’s ancestry could outclass my own, when it came to bizarre.

“Perhaps it’s hard to imagine,” Volga said. “But this small part of the world had a powerful mixture of—how one would say?—great fermentation. My father remained until nearly age forty. Then during the revolution in 1905, he crossed the Black Sea into Rumania, where he met my mother, and I was born—”

“But the Russian Revolution didn’t take place till 1917,” I pointed out. Even I knew that much about twentieth-century history—at least so I thought.

“You refer to the
second
Russian Revolution,” Volga said. “The first one, in January of 1905, began as an agrarian revolt and general strike and ended in ‘Bloody Sunday’ when the brutal tsarist program of Russification of all subject peoples touched off a massacre that was long building. My father was forced to flee Russia. However, as an
ashokh
, he never forgot his roots.

“When I was born in 1910 in Transylvania, I was given the name Volga, the Slavic name for the longest river in Russia or on the European continent. Its oldest name was Rha—like Ammon Ra the Egyptian sun god. But the Tatar name for this river, Attila, means iron—from which the Scourge of God also derived his name—”

“Your name is the same as Attila the Hun’s? Like in the
Nibelungenlied?
” I said.

I recalled this bit of data from only this afternoon. It was against Attila that the Merovingian-Nibelungs had fought over the same piece of turf later claimed by Heinrich Himmler’s SS—a connection that seemed important enough to follow up. My fingers were tingling, not just from the cold. Despite the extent of my hunger and fatigue, I was truly focused on where all this was leading.

“Precisely,” said Volga with a nod. “Your grandmother came from a part of the world that, from time immemorial, everyone wished to possess. Even today, this struggle is far from over. For the past hundred years, the Germans, French, and Turks, as well as the British and Russians, have vied for the lands that Genghis Khan, and before him my namesake Attila, had conquered centuries ago: Central Asia. It was a more recent version of this struggle that killed my father, and brought me together with your grandmother Pandora in Paris when I was only ten years old.”

“You mean the struggle for Central Asia?” I said, as the image I thought I could almost see coalesced a bit. Swallowing with dry throat, I decided to take a chance. Even if Volga didn’t know what I was talking about, at this point I had little to lose.

“Volga,” I said, “do
you
know how all this history, geography, myth, and legend relates to my grandmother? Do you know what her manuscripts are all about?”

Volga nodded, grimly. With his next words, I understood why.

“I myself was trained from infancy as an
ashokh,
” he told me. “I knew the unwritten history of our people. When my parents were killed in the First World War, during the so-called Balkan Crisis, the world was in flux. I was taken in by a band of Gypsies who were fleeing the region; I supported myself like other Gypsy children, begging for coins. The pre-Roman inhabitants of Transylvania were called Daci, or Wolves, so it was no surprise that the man in his twenties who adopted me into the tribe went by the name of Dacian. He proved a masterly violinist, and indeed later instructed a young fellow, by the name of Lafcadio Behn, whom we picked up in Salzburg toward the end of the war.”

I started to speak, but pressed my lips together and let him continue.

“When Dacian began to comprehend what I’d been trained for—that despite my youth, I might know an ancient legend that few had ever even heard of—he said we must journey to France and meet his ‘cousin’ Pandora. That I must tell her everything I knew, and she would understand what to do.”

“And did you tell her when you got there?” I asked, barely breathing.

“Indeed I did,” said Volga. “The world would be a vastly different place today, as you must realize, had I not met your grandmother when I did—or had we all not agreed to help her in her most important mission.”

It was a surprise when the sober Volga Dragonoff leaned forward and grasped my hands firmly in his, as Dacian had done in Vienna. His ungloved hands were warm and strong, and gave me for the first time in weeks a feeling of security and confidence.

“I shall now tell you something no one knows, perhaps not even your uncle,” he said. “My last name, Dragonoff—it wasn’t my father’s name, which was simply Ararat, after the mountain. Your grandmother gave it to me as a kind of honor or title. ‘Like King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon,’ she told me. ‘It means one who can harness and bring under control the all-powerful dragon forces lying beneath the earth’s surface.’”

“Why did she say that about you?” I asked in a hushed voice, almost a whisper.

Volga looked at me with dark eyes, as if thinking of something long ago and far away, too dim for me to see.

“Because I revealed to her what I am about to reveal to you,” he said at last, though not reluctantly. When I glanced quickly toward the door, he added, “You needn’t fear what it may mean to others: only an initiate will be able to truly fathom what it all means.”

“But
I’m
not an initiate of
anything
, Volga,” I assured him.

“Yes, you are,” he said with a partial smile. “You have certain qualities your grandmother once possessed. A moment ago, you found a common thread in patterns of antique history, medieval legend, and contemporary politics. The ability to form such connections is the one skill required of an
ashokh
. But innate ability is not enough—appropriate training is also required. I can see you have received such training to an advanced degree, although you yourself may yet be unaware of it. See if you don’t feel the power to detect another, hidden level in the story I’m about to tell you.”

THE SECRET HISTORY

There was a bluish wolf which was born having his destiny from Heaven above
.

His spouse was a fallow doe. They came, passing over the Tenggis.…

At the moment when [their descendant] was born, he was holding in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knuckle bone. [He was given] the name of Temujin [blacksmith]
.

—
The Secret History of the Mongols
, trans. Francis Woodman Cleaves

In nomadic cultures like those of the steppes, the sky itself is regarded as God. The axis on which the universe pivots is the Pole Star, at the tip of the small bear’s tail. It is held that a leader’s destiny is to subjugate and unite the “four corners”—the four quadrants of humanity on earth corresponding to the four quarters of the night sky.

The most important function in the nomad’s world is that of the blacksmith; his craft of creating the tools, weapons, and utensils so essential to this harsh existence is believed to be taught him directly by the gods. In such a belief system, all those born to be leaders were first born smiths; like the Greek Hephaestus, they’re considered partly magi and partly gods. The long rule of the Mongol dynasty was known to the Mongols themselves as the Blacksmith Monarchy.

In the year 1160, beside a freshwater spring near the river Onon in the grasslands of the Mongolian steppes, a mysterious figure was born. His ancestors, the legend says, were a blue wolf and a fallow doe. His name was Temujin, meaning blacksmith—as Attila’s, who came before him, had meant iron.

When Temujin was nine, his father arranged his betrothal to a girl of a neighboring tribe, but during the father’s return journey he paused to dine on the steppe with some Tatars, and was poisoned. Owing to their youth, Temujin and his brothers lost their father’s herds to their own tribe, who moved on, leaving the boys and their widowed mother destitute. The family removed to the sacred mountain Burqan Qaldun, at the source of the Onon River, where they foraged for food. Each day, Temujin prayed to this mountain:

O Eternal Tangri, I am armed to avenge the blood of my ancestors.…

If you approve what I do, lend me the aid of your strength
.

And Tangri spoke to him. By the time Temujin was grown and married to his betrothed, he had succeeded in rallying the Mongol tribes and reducing their enemies the Tatars to mere collections of bones decorating the battlefields he’d left behind. He conquered a third part of China, and much of the eastern steppe. The shaman Kokchu revealed to the Mongol peoples that it was Temujin’s destiny one day to rule the world, to become the great leader who would unite the four corners as had been foretold since the dawn of time.

And indeed, at the age of thirty-six, after many successful battles, Temujin the blacksmith was elected the first Great Khan to unite all the tribes under one
tuq
, or banner. His title as Khan was Chenggis, from the Uighur word
tengiz
—which, like the Tibetan
dalai
, means sea. His followers called themselves
Kok Mongol
, the Blue Mongols, after their powerful patron, the sky god Tangri. The magical White Banner they followed, with its nine yak tails, was believed to be imbued with shamanic powers, to possess a
sulde
—a soul or genie of its own—that led Genghis Khan and the Kok Mongol onward to their conquest of the sedentary civilized world.

It was later said that, from the moment of his birth, it had been ordained that under Genghis Khan, East and West would be woven together like the warp and woof of a complex tapestry, so inextricably knotted as to be inseparable in future. Before they were through, the Mongol Empire stretched from the inland waterways of central Europe all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Genghis Khan had truly lived up to his title Ruler of the Seas.

He’d conquered the lands of Hindus and Buddhists and Taoists, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but Genghis retained to the end his own animist faith and his worship of rivers and mountains. He rejected costly pilgrimages and religious struggles over places like Mecca and Jerusalem as foolishness, for the god Tangri existed everywhere. He illegalized baptism and ritual ablution as pollution of the sacrosanct source of all life: water. He demolished large stretches of China and Iran, razing all vestiges of earlier civilization, including animal and human life, art, architecture, and books. Loathing the soft decadence of city life, he burned vast tracts of cultivated soil, returning them to the appearance of those harsh, clean steppe lands he felt most comfortable living on.

Though illiterate, Genghis understood the power of writing. He had his own moral code written into law, and so rigidly enforced that it was said during his lifetime a virgin with a golden platter on her head could walk the length of the Silk Road unmolested. He had the history and genealogy of the Mongols encoded into sacred Blue Books and had these placed in caves for future generations to find. He also had the ancient wisdom of the shamans, magi, and priests of each land he conquered carefully examined and recorded, and he set these in the caves as well.

It is said that these documents, when combined, provide the key to ancient secrets of great power—secrets of a nature so organic that, when unearthed, they would demolish the pretensions of today’s “organized” religions, religions that have crystallized over the centuries, trapped within their own intractable dogma, their petrified rituals and rites.

What Genghis—the blacksmith who became an ocean—really hid in the caves, it is said, is a tradition transcending all faiths but containing the concentrated essence that provides the kernel of each. Down to our own century, those with an interest in harnessing such power have sought these caves and their contents.

Gurdjieff claimed to have found some of these documents before the turn of the century while traveling through Xinjiang and Tajikistan, somewhere in the Pamirs. There was also the famous British black magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, who was later evicted from Germany and Italy by Hitler and Mussolini, two men who feared the threat his own dark knowledge might pose to their plans. In the spring of 1901, Crowley was a principal in an Anglo-Austrian expedition for the first ascent of
Chogo-Ri
, or K2, on the China-Pakistan border—a failed attempt to locate these same caves.

After Red October, first Lenin and then Stalin would attempt to get back such territories once possessed by the tsars that were lost during the Russian Revolution. Then in the 1920s, between the First and Second World Wars, the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich learned of the documents while traveling through Mongolia, Tibet, and Kashmir. He was told they were scattered across Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Tibet, and that when they surfaced, the hidden cities of Shangri-La, Shambhala, and Agharthi would rise. But there was another hidden city that sank beneath a mysterious lake when the Mongols first invaded Russia—Kitezh, the Russian city of the Grail—which will also rise from the waters to usher forth the transition to a new age.…

Volga couldn’t have hit the button better when he’d said I might find a “hidden level” in the story he had to tell me. He must have noticed just now the effect of what he’d said, for he suddenly stopped speaking. He’d long ago released my hands, and was now watching me closely.