The Magic Circle (11 page)

The truth was, I never
had
found Sam in those woods, he had found me. In the real story—not the dream—I got up above timber-line, where the air was too thin for trees to survive and where no animal, so they say, ever chooses to sleep. There was a full moon and I stood atop a rock, bathed in the bright white light. The sun had long gone, and the sky was a purple-black spangled with stars. Thick, dark forest circled me below on every side.

I don’t think I’ve ever known terror like that, standing alone in that milky white light, staring up at the whole universe. I was too terrified to remember my pangs of hunger. Too terrified to cry. I have no idea how long I stood unable to move, knowing that—whatever the danger to a small animal like me, being exposed and defenseless up here—any move I made would be a move closer to that black and impenetrable forest full of night sounds from which I’d just escaped.

Then he came through the wood, in the dead of night, to find me. At first, when I saw a movement at the forest fringe, I backed away in fear. But when I saw the flash of Sam’s white buckskins, I raced across the vast space and threw myself into his arms and wept with relief.

“Okay, hotshot,” Sam said, pulling me away to look at me with eyes turned a silvery grey by the moonlight. “You can tell me later what gave you the crazy idea to follow me like that. You were lucky I doubled back on my own trail and found your tracks. But I hope you realize you’ve interrupted my very important meeting tonight with the totem spirits. And here you are, above timberline, where I thought I taught you never to go at night. Didn’t my grandfather, Dark Bear, ever tell you why even the wolf and the cougar will never spend the night above timberline?”

I shook my head and gulped tears as he tossed one arm around my shoulders and picked up my backpack from the ground. We went back into the wood. Sam took my hand and I tried to act brave.

“It’s because the totem spirits themselves live above timberline,” said Sam. As we moved through the dense foliage I could hear the padding squish of his moccasins on the damp ground before me. “Animals sense that the spirits are there, even if they can’t see or smell them. That’s why if you
want
to meet the spirits, you must wait in a place where not even trees can live. But the place where I’m going is protected by great magic. Since it’s too late to take you back, you have to stay up there with me tonight. So I guess we’ll do our
tiwa-titmas
together, you and I. We’ll wait up there in the circle for the spirits to enter us.”

Although I was flooding over with relief at being rescued from a night alone on Bald Mountain, I wasn’t sure about this business with the totem spirits.

“Why do we want the spirits to …
enter
us?” I found it hard even to ask.

Sam didn’t reply, but pressed my hand to show he’d heard as we began again to climb through the dark forest. After what seemed a very long time, we came at last to the circle. It was still dark here within the woods, but up there a shower of white moonlight fell upon the place, lighting the bare, domed crest and the circle of rocks. It looked like the amphitheater where Jersey had once performed in Rome.

Side by side and hand in hand, Sam and I stepped out of the wood. Something strange happened as we entered the circle. The moonlight had a different quality here: sparkling and shimmery, as if bits of silver were hung suspended in the air. And a slight breeze sprang up, bringing with it a chill. But I was no longer afraid; I was truly fascinated by this magical place. I felt that, somehow, I belonged here.

Sam, still holding me by the hand, led me to the center of the circle and knelt before me. He untied the satchel on his belt, and from it he pulled out things I knew must be talismans—brightly colored beads and “lucky” feathers—and, one by one, he tied them into my hair. Then he arranged logs and branches at the center of the circle and swiftly built a fire. As I stood there warming my hands, I suddenly realized how horribly cold I was—wet and chilled to the bone. Hot flames licked the sky as sparks leapt into the blackened night, mingling with the stars. I heard autumn crickets in the brush, and above I could make out the Big and Little Dippers.

“We call them the Large and the Small Bears,” said Sam, following my gaze. He sat cross-legged beside me on the ground and stirred the fire. “I believe the bear may wind up being my own totem spirit—though I’ve never seen her face to face.”

“Her?” I said, surprised.

“The bear is a great
female
totem,” said Sam. “Like the lioness, the female protects the young—sometimes even from threats by the father—and she gets their food.”

“What happens when your totem spirit … enters you?” I asked him, still worried about the process. “I mean, does it
do
anything to you?”

Sam smiled his ironic smile. “I’m not sure, hotshot. I’ve never been ‘entered’ myself—but I think we’ll know if it happens to us. My grandfather, Dark Bear, has told me that the totem spirit approaches you softly, sometimes in human form and sometimes as an animal. Then the spirit determines whether you’re ready. And when you are, it speaks to you and gives you your very own secret, sacred name—a name that no one else will ever know but you yourself, unless you decide to share it with somebody else. This name, my grandfather says, is each brave’s own spiritual power, separate from, and in many ways more important than, our eternal soul.”

“Why hasn’t your totem spirit ever entered you and given you your name?” I asked him. “You’ve been trying so hard, and for so long.”

Sam’s jet black hair, hanging in a shimmering fall to his shoulders, shaded his eyes as he stirred the fire, so that I could only make out his profile: dark lashes, strong cheekbones, straight nose, and cleft chin. All at once, in this light, he seemed much older to me than just my twelve-year-old big stepbrother. All at once, Sam himself seemed like an ancient totem spirit. Then he turned to me. His eyes in the firelight were as clear and deep as diamonds, and he was smiling.

“Do you know why I always call you ‘hotshot,’ Ariel?” he asked me, and when I shook my head, he said, “It’s because, even though you’re only eight years old, the age that I was when I went on my first
tiwa-titmas
, you’re much smarter than I was then. Maybe you’re
still
smarter than I am now. And that’s not all; I think you’re braver than I am, too. The first time I came to these woods by myself without a guide, I already knew every stick and stone on the path. But you weren’t afraid just to launch out all alone today, to trust blindly in what would happen to you. That’s what my grandfather calls the necessary faith.”

“I was following
you,
” I pointed out. “And
I
think maybe I’m just
stupid!
”

Sam threw back his head and laughed. “No, no. You’re not stupid,” he said. “But maybe, hotshot,” he added with his wonderful smile, “just maybe your getting yourself lost in the woods and nearly killed will be some kind of a talisman to me—my lucky rabbit’s foot.” He yanked my pigtail. “Maybe finding you will change my luck.”

And it did. That was how Sam became Grey Cloud, and how our totem spirit blessed us with the light, and how I became part Indian, by the mixing of our blood. From that night forward, it was as if a knot had been untied inside me, and my path through life would be forever straight and clear.

From that night until now, that is.

The U.S. government has been accused of wasting taxpayer dollars, but never on lavish work facilities for its employees. Especially not out here in the provinces, where every nickel that might have provided comfort in the work environment was squeezed tightly or, better yet, put back into the till. As a result, more cash had been spent on paving the six acres of parking lots surrounding our work site, where government workers parked their cars, than on constructing, furnishing, repairing, cleaning, or heating the buildings where actual humans had to work.

As I pulled into the vast parking lot just after lunchtime, patches of snow still clinging to my car, I surveyed the lots as far as the eye could see. As I’d suspected, by this late in the day the only slots left in the official employee parking areas seemed to be located in western Wyoming. And at this time of year and after a melt like this morning’s, the late afternoon wind chill could drop to sixty below; ice pebbles were already kicking against my windshield. I decided to risk a penalty and leave my car at the front of the main complex, where a small strip of official visitor parking was located. Employees were forbidden to park there, or to enter through the guest lobby. But I could usually talk a security guard there into letting me sign the logbook instead of making me hike outside all the way around the vast complex to enter through the official mantraps for employees at the rear.

I slid into one of the open spaces, pulled up my sheepskin coat, wrapped the long fringed cashmere scarf around my face, and pulled my wool ski cap down over my ears. Then I leapt from the car, locked it up, and made a dash for the glass front doors. Not a moment too soon, for the gust that came through as I stepped in nearly ripped the door off its hinges. I managed to yank it shut, then went through the next set of doors into the lobby.

I was unwrapping my scarf and wiping my windburned eyes when I saw him. He was standing at the reception desk, signing out. I froze.

I mean, how could I forget the lyrics of “Some Enchanted Evening”—“you will see a stranger …”—when Jersey used to play it over and over, that recording of herself singing it with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau onstage at the Salle Pleyel?

So here was the stranger. And while the setting was not exactly idyllic—the visitors’ lobby of the Technical Science Annex—I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was the one human being on earth who’d been created just for me. He was the gift the gods had sent me in consolation because my cousin Sam was dead. And to think I might have entered by another door instead. How subtle are the mysteries the fates have in store for us just around every corner.

He actually looked somewhat godlike—at least, like my picture-book image of a god. His dark hair swept back in abundance to his collar; he was tall and slender, with the chiseled Macedonian profile one always associates with heroes. The soft camel coat and tasseled white silk scarf he wore swung loose from his broad shoulders. He carried a pair of expensive Italian leather gloves lightly between long, graceful fingers. This was no cowboy engineer, that was for durned tootin’, as Olivier would say.

There was in his posture and demeanor something of aloof, regal composure that bordered upon arrogance. And when he turned from the security guard Bella—who was looking at him with her mouth open like a fish—and headed toward me, I saw that his eyes, beneath dark lashes, were the purest dark turquoise, and of an amazing depth. His eyes swept me, tightening for a moment, and I realized that in this getup I had the sex appeal of a polar bear.

He was coming toward me to the exit. He was leaving the building! I felt in a panic that I must do something—fall on the floor in a faint or hurl myself spread-eagled across the door. But instead I closed my eyes and inhaled him as he passed: a mixture of pine and leather and citron that left me a bit dizzy.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought he whispered something as he passed me: “enchanting,” or perhaps it was “exquisite.” Or maybe it was only “excuse me,” for it seemed I was partly blocking the exit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

I went to have a look at the logbook, but as I got to the reception desk, Bella, having recovered her composure, slapped a piece of paper over the open page. I looked up in surprise to find her glaring at me in non-security-guard fashion. It was more the look of an angry cat in heat.

“You’re to use the mantraps, Behn,” she informed me, pointing at the door that led back outside. “And the logbook is confidential to management.”

“All the other
visitors
can read the book and see who’s been here when they sign in,” I pointed out. “Why not the other employees? I’ve never heard that rule.”

“You’re in
nuclear
security, not premises security; that’s why you don’t know,” she retorted with a sneer, as if my field were some kind of primitive throwback compared with her own.

I yanked the paper out from beneath her mauve lacquered fingernails before she knew what was happening. She grabbed at it, but too late. I’d already read his name:

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser; IAEA; Krems, Österreich

I hadn’t the vaguest where Krems, Austria, was located. But IAEA was the International Atomic Energy Agency, the group that patroled this industry worldwide—not that it gave them very much to do in recent years. Austria itself was a nuclear-free country. Nevertheless, it trained some of the top nuclear experts in the world. I was more than interested in having a serious look at the
curriculum vitae
of Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser. And that wasn’t all.

I smiled at Bella and scratched my name on the log. “I have an emergency appointment with my boss, Pastor Dart. He asked me to get over from the other building as quickly as possible,” I told her as I took off my wraps and hung them on the lobby coatrack.

“That’s a lie. Dr. Dart’s still out to lunch with some visitors from Washington,” Bella informed me with a snotty expression on her face. “I know, because he signed out here with them over an hour ago. You can see for yourself—”

“Gee, so I guess the log isn’t confidential to management anymore,” I told her with a grin, and I swept through the inner doors.

Olivier was sitting in the office we shared in this building, playing with his computer terminal. We were the project directors in charge of locating, recovering, and managing “hot waste” such as fuel rods and other transuranic materials: that is, materials that had an atomic number higher than that of uranium. These were tracked by programs designed to our requirements and developed by our computer group.

“Who is Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser of the IAEA in Austria?” I asked when Olivier glanced up from his machine.