The Magic Circle (31 page)

“When I said I believed these objects were valuable,” said Caligula, “I didn’t mean mere material wealth but something far more—something I’ve not shared with anyone, even Drusilla. It was no accident, you see, that I was at Misenum when Tiberius arrived the night of his death: I’d been waiting there to meet him. Though he rarely left Capreae, he’d been away this time for months, but no one could learn exactly where. I discovered Tiberius had gone to those isles called Paxi, the very ones where the Egyptian pilot heard that eerie cry. And I think I know what he hoped to find there.

“On the isles of Paxi, near the Grecian coast, stands an enormous stone like those in the Celtic lands. On it are writings in a lost tongue which it was believed no one could decipher. But Tiberius thought he knew someone who could—someone who might have as deep an interest in doing so as he himself, and who owed him a great favor. You know who it is, Uncle Claudius. You yourself brought him to Capreae some years back to ask that favor: that Grandfather overturn the Sejanus decree and permit the Jews to return to Rome.”

“Joseph of Arimathea! The wealthy Jewish merchant and friend of Herod Agrippa? What does he know of any of this?” cried Claudius.

“Joseph of Arimathea seems to have known enough to meet Tiberius on Paxi and spend these past few months deciphering those codes in stone,” Caligula replied. “When Grandfather took ill at dinner that night, I stayed in his room to look after him, and I heard what he said in his sleep—or rather what surfaced from his nightmares in those last feverish throes of misery. Shall I say? For I wrote it all down. I’ve been the only one in the world who knows—until now.”

When Caligula smiled, Claudius tried to smile back, but his lips felt numb. He had few illusions at this moment about the cause of Tiberius’s death. He only prayed that at least the wine he himself had just guzzled wasn’t also poisoned. He felt truly ill.

As Caligula took his uncle by the hand, the room seemed to Claudius to grow ever darker. The only light he could focus on any longer was the strange gleam that emerged from the depths of Caligula’s eyes.

“By all means,” Claudius managed to whisper as the darkness descended.

THE THIRTEEN SACRED HALLOWS

Each aeon, when during the vernal equinox the sun starts to rise against the backdrop of a new astral constellation, a god descends to earth and is born into the flesh of a mortal. The god lives to maturity among mortals, then permits himself to be sacrificed, shedding his prison of flesh to return to the universe. Before his death, the god passes on universal wisdom to only one chosen mortal being.

But in order for the divine wisdom to become manifest within chronological time on earth, it must be woven into a fabric of knots representing the intersections of spirit and matter throughout the universe. Only the true initiate, the one indoctrinated by the god, will know how to do this.

To make this connection, thirteen sacred objects must be brought together in one place. Each object fulfills a specific purpose in the ritual rebirth of the new age, and each of these objects must be anointed in the divine fluid before it is put into use. The objects for the next age are these:

He who unites these objects without possessing the eternal wisdom may bring forth, not an age of cosmic unity, but one instead of savagery and terror.

“You see?” said Caligula when he’d finished this diatribe. “What I told you about the spear at the crucifixion in Judea—why, a spear was the very first object on that list. Do you see what it means? Tiberius thought
Pan
was the god who’d permitted himself to be sacrificed in order to bring about the new aeon: the goat-god, the god most closely identified with the isle of Capreae, or with himself.

“But when that stone at Paxi had been translated, it proved it was the Jews, my dear, who’d provided the necessary fleshly cadaver for this transition. Isn’t it the Jews who are running all over the world studying ancient languages so they can translate the mysteries? And maybe also collecting these objects of infinite power. Do you think for one moment your Joseph of Arimathea didn’t know what he was doing when he begged Tiberius for the return of his people to Rome? Do you imagine he didn’t know what he’d done when he stole the body of that crucified Jew in Judea? For that’s what he did—and took the spear Gaius Cassius Longinus had plunged into it, as well.”

“Good heaven, Gaius! Please desist!” cried Claudius, dropping his spinning head to his lap as his stomach churned with too much emotion and wine. “Bring me a feather. I need to be sick.”

“Can’t you concentrate for one tiny moment on anything?” said his nephew, getting up and bringing him a bowl and an ostrich plume from a nearby stand.

Claudius lifted his head and waved the plume through the air to loosen its tendrils. Then he opened his mouth and tickled the back of his throat until he retched and the wine from his stomach splashed out into the bowl.

“That’s better. Now I’m clearheaded,” he told Caligula. “But in the name of Bacchus, tell me what all this means.”

“It means,” said Caligula, “that while Herod Agrippa goes to Judea to find out where the other objects may be, you and I are going to Britannia to find Joseph of Arimathea—and get that spear!”

THE RETURN

Fu/Return: The Turning Point

Hexagram 24

The time of darkness is past. The winter solstice brings the victory of light. After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.…

The idea of return is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic and the course completes itself.… Everything comes of itself at the appointed time
.

—Richard Wilhelm,
The I Ching

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle
.

—Johann Wolfgang Goethe

I was still jangled, despite steeping myself in the steaming hot pool for more than an hour. What with Uncle Laf’s informative report on the Nazi collaborationist storm troopers and Boer rapists ornamenting my genealogical tree—not to mention my adorable grey-haired Auntie Zoe in Paris, who’d danced her way right into Adolf Hitler’s heart—my family history was starting to look more and more like the stuff of my chosen career: a mess that was plowed under and kept buried for half a century, and just starting to ooze out of containment.

When Laf went off for his afternoon siesta, I went back to my room to be alone and do some thinking. I sure had plenty to think about.

I knew my cousin and blood brother had faked his own assassination and set me up as the public patsy, but it now seemed he’d done it using the very manuscript that was so zealously guarded by his own father, Earnest, and my grandma Pandora too—a manuscript my father and stepmother, aided and abetted by the world press, were conniving to snatch and publish for profit. And though I still wasn’t clear what this mysterious manuscript was all about, it
did
seem beyond the shadow of a doubt that the document I’d interspersed throughout the DOD Standard last night must have been sent by Sam.

I’d thrown away the brown paper wrapping, so I couldn’t examine the postmark. But the moment Laf mentioned it, a vivid image flashed before my eyes: that yellow postal slip Jason had retrieved from the snow, with a sender’s zip code that began with 941, meaning it was mailed from San Francisco. So Wolfgang Hauser’s claim that he’d mailed it to me from Idaho was a myth, like maybe everything else he’d told me.

I kicked myself for falling for just another gorgeous face, and I vowed that even with the aid of an avalanche he’d never catch me off balance again. It might already be too late to undo the damage, now that I knew the document was sent by Sam. Wolfgang had been with it all night, and since I was asleep I had no way of knowing if he’d examined it, or even microfilmed it or made some other kind of copy. So basically I’d come full circle to where I had been a week ago—between Scylla and Charybdis, a rock and a hard place.

As I unlocked the door to my hotel room, I realized I’d forgotten completely about Jason. He was sitting in the middle of the king-sized bed looking angry as hell.

“Yow!” he said in a tone that packed a wallop of feline fury.

Of course I knew exactly why he was furious. Though he had plenty of food, I’d gone swimming without him! The telltale scent of chlorine gave me away.

“Okay, Jason, what about a nice bath instead?” I suggested.

Instead of dashing into the bathroom to turn on the tap, as he usually did when he heard “bath,” he trotted past me and plucked from the floor a slip of pink paper I had nearly stepped on—he was really good now at the paper-fetching trick—and, planting his paws on my knee, he presented it to me: a phone message that had been shoved under the door. When I read it, my heart sank.

To: Ariel Behn

From: Mr. Solomon

Sorry, can’t make lunch at noon as planned. To book again, please phone (214) 178–0217.

Terrific. Sam was suddenly changing our noon agenda. And this bogus phone number—as I assumed it was—would fill me in on how.

This was Sam’s third mention of King Solomon, whose biblical verses I still hadn’t had time to scan closely for hidden meaning. But this note seemed a hasty last-minute change rather than a major decoding job. And Sam could safely assume that the name—after my little deciphering job of last night—meant something to me that no one else would grasp at first glance: that is, that the “phone number” for Mr. Solomon pointed to the Song of Songs.

With a sigh I opened my bag, hauled out the Bible I’d brought along, and took it into the bathroom, where I plugged up the tub and started the water running for Jason. As I waited for the tub to fill, I looked at the note again and flipped open the book. The Song of Solomon has only eight chapters, so “area code” 214 referred to Chapter 2, Verse 14:

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places

of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice
,

for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely
.

Sam would never get to hear my sweet voice or see my comely countenance unless he got a mite more specific in his instructions. He did—in Chapter 1, Verses 7–8. There the young woman I recalled, the one with the attractive belly button, asks her lover where he’ll be lunching at noon the next day, and he explains how to find him:

Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest
,

where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I

be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?

If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way

forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the

shepherds’ tents
.

Now, there was no place up on the mountain that had a name relating to shepherds, goats, or other flocks. But there was a pastureland down the road from here called the Sheep Meadow where, in summer, music and art tents were set up. In winter, it was a popular area for Nordic skiing: a flat open field with easy access from the road. So this must be the new locus of my rendezvous with Sam.

But it seemed more than strange that Sam would opt to change his former complex, trail-covering scenario to a high-visibility spot along the main road. It seemed odd, that is, until I read Chapter 2, Verse 17, saying
when
we were going to meet.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved
,

and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains.…

Daybreak? Like, before
dawn?
I could certainly see why Sam might consider a meeting at high noon too conspicuous. And ski lifts up to the mountain, to reach the spot of our original assignation, wouldn’t even open until nine. But how could I
in
conspicuously drive three miles to the Sheep Meadow before sunrise, haul my cross-country skis from the car, and go for a spin all by myself in the predawn darkness? I thought Sam had gone completely out of his mind.

Luckily for me, everyone in my ménage wanted to make it an early night too. Apparently Olivier, once he’d seen how well Bambi could ski, had outdone himself trying to impress her, dragging her onto black-diamond slopes all over the mountain. He returned exhausted, unaccustomed himself to such intensive
Sturm und Drang
.

Since Bambi had been away skiing all day, the only time she and Laf had for the daily practice that musicians compulsively need was a two-hour break before dinner. The management loaned us the Sun Room and its piano. I muddled through what little Schubert and Mozart accompaniment I could still play, with Olivier staring at Bambi, and Volga Dragonoff turning pages. Though Laf often winced at my rusty technique, he played as beautifully as ever—while Bambi astounded us with the kind of virtuosity one rarely hears off a concert stage. I gave her points for more than just a good grip with her thighs. It made me wonder if my first impression had been correct.