The Magic Circle (70 page)

Conquerors wrote history, as was often pointed out. But history was what had already happened, what was past and finished, thought Joseph. What of the future? That was precisely what he was about to return north to find out. For though, in these past thirty years, the Druids had helped Joseph spread the Master’s philosophy here in Britannia as well as across the straits in Eire and even in Gaul, today the Druids themselves were hunted to earth like wild beasts by the Romans.

But with their deeply religious feeling for life and the land, their ancient Celtic culture, and that peculiar strain of mysticism they chose to nurture in themselves and in others, Joseph was inspired to hope perhaps they could put him in touch once more with the mission the Master had set him upon so many years ago. Maybe even with the Master himself. That’s why he had offered himself as the messenger.

For the first time in thirty years, Joseph knew with certainty that something of great importance was about to happen—though whether for good or ill, he couldn’t foresee.

Black Lake, Britannia: Beltaine, A.D. 61

SENDING THE MESSENGER

All good things, my dear Klea, sensible men must ask from the gods
.

—Plutarch,
Isis
&
Osiris
, to Klea, priestess of Delphi

It was midnight when the Roman sentries finally departed the area and it was safe to build the fire. The rest of the tribe stood at a distance, sheltered by the dark woods.

Joseph, with the three other men who’d been chosen, stood beside the fire and watched in silence as Lovernios, his skin bronzed by the flame, mixed some lake water with the flour of five grains they’d brought and prepared the pancake, then wrapped it in damp leaves and cooked it in the ashes. When the pancake was done, he unfolded it and burned one corner a bit; then he broke it into five pieces, four cooked and one burned, and placed them in the bowl.

He held the bowl before each man, and each pulled out one piece. Lovernios accepted the last. When Joseph opened his hand, he found he had not chosen the blackened fragment of the pancake. He glanced at the others with a mixture of relief and discomfort as, one by one, each man looked up from his hand. Then the tall, handsome young man with russet hair and beard, Lovernios’s own son Belinus, smiled broadly in the firelight. He held open his hand containing the blackened fragment and displayed it for all to see. His smile was so radiant that, for just that fleeting instant, he reminded Joseph of the Master. Though Joseph hadn’t meant to disturb the ceremony no matter what might happen, he’d never expected Belinus to be the one.

“No!” Joseph heard himself say aloud.

Lovernios quietly put his hand on Joseph’s arm, then threw his other arm around his son’s shoulders and squeezed him, almost with a look of pride.

“Let it be me,” Joseph protested quietly to Lovernios. “Not your son: he’s only thirty-three with his entire life ahead of him. I’m nearly seventy, and a failure.”

Lovernios threw back his head and laughed aloud—which hardly seemed appropriate to Joseph under the circumstance.

“If that’s the case, my friend,” he told Joseph, “then why do you volunteer? What possible good could you be even to
us
, much less to the gods? Belinus is the perfect specimen—strong, healthy, unblemished. And he knows how to be the perfect servant, to submit to God’s will. Ask him if he isn’t happy to serve as our messenger.”

Joseph was suddenly flooded with the memory of the Master’s last meal, when he’d washed the others’ feet. He wondered why, whenever he thought of anything profoundly moving, instead of feeling inspiration he only wanted to cry. Belinus smiled almost beatifically at Joseph as he opened his mouth and happily popped in the blackened pancake. When he’d swallowed it, he came to Joseph and took him in his broad arms, rocking him gently just as Lovernios had once done, so many years ago.

“Joseph, Joseph,” he said. “I won’t be dying, you know. I’m going to eternal life. You must be happy for me. When I see your Esus on the other side, I shall bring him your loving thoughts.”

Joseph put a hand over his eyes and sobbed, but Belinus only glanced at Lovernios with a bemused shrug. His expression said: All these years living among the Druids and he still thinks like a pagan or a Roman.

They motioned for the others to come out of the woods as Joseph tried to collect himself. One by one, the people of the Celtic tribes moved from the shadowy thickets, came before the fire to be blessed, then carried their treasures of gold or copper to the lakeside and committed them to the waters. When all the vessels, torques, even slave chains had vanished, they moved in single file behind Lovernios away from the fire, around the lake’s edge, to the lowlands where the darkened peat bogs lay. Clouds whispered over the moon, sifting an eerie half-light across the surface of the land.

At the edge of the expanse of bottomless peat bog, Belinus got down on his knees and held his hands aloft. The two younger men who’d volunteered for this role, along with Joseph and Lovernios, removed his robes and other garments. Lovernios waited until his son was completely naked, then handed him the band made of fox fur. Belinus slipped it onto his arm, then lowered his head and folded his hands behind his back to be tied with leather thongs. The men also slipped a leather noose around the young man’s neck. Belinus, his head still bowed toward the bog, said softly,

“Mother, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Joseph felt these words cut like ice into his very soul. He watched, not breathing, as Lovernios reached for the soft leather sack and extracted the razor-sharp hunting axe. Holding it high above his head, he raised his eyes to the sky. Just then the moon appeared from behind the clouds and flooded the landscape with light. The Celts stood in silence at the bog’s edge; to Joseph they resembled a forest of praying trees. Lovernios intoned in his deep voice,

“This is the death by fire. By the god’s thunderbolt we commend thee to Taranis.”

Belinus did not flinch as the axe swept down behind him, swift and sure—though Joseph thought he heard him gasp once as the sharp metal blade struck the back of his skull with a brittle crunch. Belinus fell forward on his face.

The two younger men moved forward swiftly and tightened the noose as Lovernios, with one hard yank, pulled the axe free from his son’s head.

“This is the death by air,” said Lovernios. “We commend thee to Esus.”

Joseph heard the loud crack in the silence: the sound of the windpipe snapping.

The two men, now joined by Joseph, lifted the limp but beautiful body of Belinus from the earth and held it face down over the brackish waters. Then Lovernios spoke the last words that would be spoken that night:

“This is the death by water. We commend thee to Teutates.”

Joseph watched as the body was sucked down into the bog, disappearing without a trace, swallowed by the earth.

But just before it vanished Joseph thought—only for an instant—that he saw something move in the thick black waters. He thought he saw God, with open arms, receiving the body of Belinus. And God was smiling.

UTOPIA

Whoever feels that he is the carrier of the best blood and has consciously used this blood to guide the nation will keep this leadership and will not renounce it
…

Its fatal image … will be like a Holy Order. It is our wish that this state shall endure for thousands of years. We are happy to know that the future belongs to us
.

—Adolf Hitler, sixth Party Congress,
   “Thousand-Year-Reich” speech

I have felt it my duty to my fellow-men to place on record these forewarnings of the Coming Race
.

—Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,
The Coming Race

The Closerie des Lilas remains one of the loveliest restaurants in Paris, lavish with flowers at all seasons. It seemed an incredibly inappropriate setting for today’s romp through Nazi Germany and Austria, caught in the viperlike embrace of my blue-eyed grandmother Zoe. Heaps of white lilacs greeted us as we arrived. We had a table beside the terrace, where outdoor trellises were laden with dripping vines.

Zoe told us that she’d ordered our meal in advance. So when the sommelier had brought the wine, and she’d sipped and we’d been served, she returned to the topic we’d come to discuss: our family.

“As I mentioned earlier,” she began, “high in the Swiss Alps four rivers rise near the San Bernardino Pass. There existed at that place a century ago a Utopian community. My grandmother Clio, a woman of no fame but of enormous importance to our story, lived there for a number of years with my grandfather Erasmus Behn, one of the community’s principal founders.”

I suddenly heard that bell go off, as I flashed on what Dacian Bassarides had said about Utopias when we’d stood together just outside the doors of the Hofburg in Vienna: that idealists who begin by wanting to improve civilization often wind up trying to create a better breed of human.

“A perfect world high atop a mountain, the return to a Golden Age,” said Zoe. “Everyone sought such things in the past century—and many still do, even today. But as I also said, life is neither simple nor black-and-white. It may well be that my grandfather’s desire for Utopia was, at heart, the cause of all the unhappiness that followed.”

I don’t recall what we had for lunch that afternoon. But I do recall every detail of Zoe’s story. As the pieces fell into place, I began to see how one small family’s role could actually be that hinge or axis Dacian had spoken of, around which things turn as animals do on a carousel, as the zodiac seems to revolve around that star at the tip of the small bear’s tail.

I listened with interest as Zoe began her story of our family’s personal Garden of Eden. That is, before the Fall.

My grandmother Clio, said Zoe, was the only child of a Swiss family that, like many wealthy families of the day, held broad interests in scholarly pursuits. These included travel, and investigation into the lost kingdoms and cultures of many lands. Clio too possessed a deep interest in researches into antiquity. She not only leafed through dusty books but she had a passionate interest in a discipline only recently invented: field archaeology.

By the age of twenty, Clio had already engaged in numerous such trips with her father to exotic and far-flung regions of the world. She joined the adventurer Heinrich Schliemann, who’d made his early fortune in the supply of military armaments during the Crimean War and was spending it lavishly in highly publicized and opportunistic quests for the lost kingdoms of Mycenae and Troy.

Clio had spent her young life studying ancient tongues, and tracing the origins of many objects she’d learned of in decaying documents she’d found in tombs, gravesites, and caves. She used this knowledge with some success in locating lost sites of power and grandeur, and in hunting down physical objects of great value—just as Schliemann, only by his careful reading of the classics, had at length found the tombs of Mycenae, containing the richest hoard of ancient treasure in the world.

In the year 1866, at age twenty-one, Clio met and married a Dutchman who, like Schliemann, was rich from the spoils of war. This man, Erasmus Behn, who’d invested in Schliemann’s archaeological projects, was a widower with one small son, Hieronymus, who would one day be my father. If the large fortune made by Heinrich Schliemann in armaments was used almost exclusively for the rape and pillage of mankind’s past, the fortune of my grandfather Erasmus Behn was earmarked for nothing short of a complete transformation of man’s future, all to be molded to
his
image. And something a bit more.

Among Erasmus Behn’s interests was the Utopian community he’d helped finance in Switzerland. It was based on many new theories abroad, including “triage,” the genetic culling and sorting that played a large role in the main field of scientific interest of his day: selective breeding. Techniques to accomplish improved strains of crops and livestock were experimented with in such Utopias, and Erasmus spent each summer in the Alps, visiting the site of his investment.

All this was anathema to Clio. Though raised a Swiss Protestant, she’d received a liberal upbringing, broad in taste and quite unusual for a girl of her day. Though the man she’d married was wealthy, intelligent, and handsome, it didn’t take long after their marriage for her to become disenchanted with everything about Erasmus Behn—especially his views on perfecting the world. She quickly realized she’d been yoked to a dour, strict-principled Calvinist who regarded women and children as little better than chattel, while holding himself and his kind superior to nearly everyone on earth.

Clio soon discovered, too, that Erasmus hadn’t married her only for her tawny blond beauty, healthy body, or clever mind, but rather to secure for himself the large financial estate that she, as an only child, would possess upon her father’s death—and, more important, the historically valuable collection of artifacts, talismans, and scrolls she’d helped collect, and would also inherit from her family.

Erasmus seemed mesmerized to the point of obsession with knowing more about the secrets of the past, as well as powers that might be garnered in the future, while remaining practically oblivious to the demands of the present. When Clio gave birth to their daughter, just two years after their marriage, Erasmus left her bed altogether, having exercised his genetic duties. After all, if you counted the son he’d produced by his earlier marriage, he’d fulfilled this duty not only once but twice! Though this was a situation common in upper-class marriages of the past century, our family’s progress was soon to take a very strange and different twist.

In summers, Erasmus took Clio to visit his utopian project in the Alps. It soon became clear he could ill afford to go on pouring money into the project so lavishly, year after year. But that was not all that attracted his interest in the region. In the vicinity was something that might prove of great value: the pagan shrines I mentioned, as well as caves, some dating back to Neanderthal times, that due to their inaccessibility were largely unknown and unexplored, except by a band of migrant Gypsies that sometimes summered nearby. With visions of gold artifacts and sugarplums dancing in his head—most of them planted by Schliemann’s recent splashy successes—Erasmus hoped to find something of value, even of great power. Interestingly, Clio agreed.