The Magic Circle (78 page)

There was only one person who could have given me such training, with or without my knowing it. That was Sam. The two people who held the other pieces of the puzzle, Lafcadio and Zoe, had sent copies of their own chunks of Pandora’s estate, which they’d entrusted Bambi to deliver when she came to warn me about Wolfgang. With these now in my possession as well, I felt equipped to begin my attack.

Dark Bear had come up with an ingenious plan so Sam and I wouldn’t have to spend our time in lean-tos and remote mountain sheds while completing our project—a plan he’d already set in motion weeks ago, as soon as Sam had returned from Salt Lake with his own goods on the family. We had all the provisions prepared that we’d need to spend at least six months “up-country,” enabling us to begin and finish the project in relative secrecy.

We took four sturdy pack horses, a decent supply of dried food and herbal home remedies, a teepee and plenty of waterproof thermal gear, and two laptop computers with battery packs, complete with the best software on the market in multiple languages, ancient and modern, to aid in our translation. Our campsite was a charming private plot watered by a fast freshwater creek, just a day’s pack trip from Pend’Oreille Lake and the Kootenai wilderness up in the Idaho panhandle close to the border of British Columbia and therefore, in a pinch, within drumbeat distance of plenty of Indian tribes. The only real town within thirty miles of us was a little place (Pop.: 800) that bore the improbable name of Troy.

My dark, green-eyed saviour Jason accompanied us into the wilderness—albeit somewhat reluctantly, until he got a load of his own private fast-water creek. At the end of each week, Dark Bear sent a nameless courier to us on a dappled Appaloosa to drop off a few staples and pick up whatever documents we’d finished transcribing and translating, wafting them away to parts unknown—or at least, if known, known only to Dark Bear himself.

“If I’d ever heard about this Indian underground railway,” Sam said, “it would sure have saved me plenty of hassle and headaches when I first inherited these things!”

I had forgotten what it was like to live outdoors on the land, where fresh water, food, and air are provided by the earth itself—with no middlemen to dilute or pollute them. It was an exhilarating experience, from the first moment we pegged down our teepee and stepped inside. Though Sam and I planted the few short-season crops that would grow up here, so deep into the high country, and though we had to fish and forage each day in order to eat, we were able to spend most of our time translating manuscripts. And the more we translated, the more fascinating it became.

Here was a procession of histories and mysteries that seemed to pour forth from the deep, silent voice of an unknown, and until now unheard-of, past. This past slowly began to emerge from the concealing fog of a smoke machine that I soon understood had been cranked for millennia by historians and biographers.

“Something’s occurred to me,” I told Sam late one night beside the fire after we’d been at work for about a month. “In these tales, we rarely see some kind of truly superior society invading and subjugating an inferior one—it’s more often the reverse, whether you compare the two in terms of scientific or artistic skills. Basically, history is a record of the conquerors’ stupendous deeds of valor. But their ‘superiority’ is often based on the fact they succeeded in beating and enslaving others.”

“You’re getting the message,” said Sam. “Too bad you aren’t an Indian—you’d have gotten it the day you were born. As a child, you know, Hitler’s favorite author was a guy named Karl May: he wrote cowboy-and-Indian tales for young German boys. At the end of these stories, guess who usually won?”

It was the only hint of bitterness I’d ever heard from Sam about a part of his heritage that I, as a non-Native American, could likely never completely understand.

“You saved Wolfgang’s life,” I pointed out. “But now you know, from what Bambi has told us, that he hated you, that he planted the bomb that nearly killed you. If you’d known it then, do you think you would still have tried so hard to rescue him?”

“You mean, am I so altruistic I could forgive someone who enjoyed eradicating people like me? Like, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’?” said Sam. Then he smiled, got up from where he’d been leaning back on a saddle beside the fire, came over, and pulled me to my feet to face him.

“I knew,” he said.

“You knew it was Wolfgang who tried to kill you?” I said in amazement.

“I guess you think I’m pretty goddamned noble right now, don’t you?” said Sam. “So let me clarify. I don’t think people as evil as
he
is should get off with just a broken leg and a quick, painless drowning. I think his fine Aryan name should be dragged through the mud—and that he should go to jail for the rest of a long life.”

I guess when you finally uncorked Sam’s bitterness, you found there was a pretty decent jugful there, after all. Sam’s hands still rested on my shoulders. He was watching me with a strange expression as we stood there at the center of the teepee, facing each other beside the fire.

I closed my eyes. I remembered another fire in another man’s castle, and the unquenchable fire that had been created inside
me
by the touch and smell of that man, the man we’d just discussed and so irrevocably dismissed. A man so filled with hatred that he would try to blow his own brother to bits—the same brother who wound up saving his life, in spite of knowing all that. For all his protestations that he loved me, I wondered if Wolfgang ever really had. I wondered if I’d loved him.

When I opened my eyes, Sam’s silvery eyes were searching me deeply, as if seeking some hidden answer to an unspoken question. I remembered his words up on the mountain that morning: “Ariel, have you any idea just how dangerous this untimely friendship of yours might prove to us both?” Had he known even then? Well, I’d bloody well found out for myself by now, hadn’t I?

“I really did try to warn you,” said Sam. “I didn’t consciously suspect anything until I got to Salt Lake. But when I began to put two and two together from family documents and understand the situation—when I realized the person you’d let me know you were involved with, Wolfgang Hauser, might well be the same man who murdered Theron Vane—I wasn’t really sure what to do. I knew how dangerous it might prove for
me:
I knew it was me he was after. But I couldn’t believe he’d harm you. I sent you that note to be careful around him. At the same time, you aren’t a little girl anymore, sweetheart. I truly wanted you to do what was best for
you.
”

“That was awfully bloody magnanimous of you,” I snapped, with more than a little anger and frustration. “You thought it was ‘best for me’ to let me go on making love with someone, to fall in love with someone, who might have destroyed us both?”

Sam flinched as if I’d struck him a physical blow, and I realized how he must have tried to close his eyes to what had actually happened between Wolfgang and me. Finally he took a deep breath and spoke very quietly.

“If you wanted to glut yourself with liquor or some dangerous drug, I’d let you do that too, Ariel. You’re surely responsible for your own decisions and actions. But that isn’t love, and you know it: love isn’t something you want to
do
with someone.”

“I’m not at all sure I know what love is,” I told him, meaning it. I recalled Dark Bear’s comment that Sam’s father Earnest had believed himself incapable of the feeling. So maybe for the Nez Percé, I’d be a dead person, too.

“I think I know. Shall I tell you?” Sam asked, still watching me.

I felt so empty—but I nodded for him to go on.

“I think love is when you know that a part of you
is
the person you love, and a part of him or her is inside of
you
,” Sam said. “You can’t use or manipulate or deceive someone you truly love, because you’d be using or manipulating or lying to yourself. Does that make sense?”

“Are you saying that if Wolfgang lied to me,” I said with no small irony, “he was really only lying to
himself?
”

“No—it wasn’t necessary for him to deceive himself, was it?” Sam snapped back. “Aren’t you forgetting a little something? You slept with him and lied to him, too.”

I was truly dumbstruck, but I knew it was true. I’d had the most intimate relation one can have, with a man I’d never trusted. A man I’d never opened up with enough, of my own volition, to tell him the complete truth about anything. It was a bitter pill to swallow, that deep inside I’d known what Wolfgang was, all along.

“I’ve long ago given you part of my heart, and part of my soul, Ariel. I’m sure you know that.” Sam smiled mischievously and added, “But there
are
a few strings attached before I can let you have part of my body.”

“Your … body?” I said, my head throbbing. “But I thought you were … attracted to Bambi.”

“I know you did,” said Sam with a grin. “When I saw that look on your face as I lifted Bettina down beside the waterfall—well, it was the first time I thought there might be real hope for you and me, Wolfgang or no Wolfgang.” He ruffled my hair and said simply, “I love you, hotshot. I guess I always have.”

I admit, I was thunderstruck. I stood there in a daze, not knowing what to do. Was I ready for this?

Oddly enough, Sam had started moving sleeping bags and saddlebags, clearing a space at the center of the teepee, around the little stone fireplace.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“There’s just one string, really,” Sam explained, piling blankets to one side. He stood up and shook back his long hair with impatience.

“How can you expect me to go on loving someone, Ariel,” he asked me, “who doesn’t know how to dance?”

As Dacian had told me, the process
was
more important than the product.

During this past month that Sam and I had lived our fraternal existence, until we danced, I would never have had the vaguest understanding of the manuscripts we were translating—that all the talk of world grid, warp and woof, yin and yang, alchemical marriage and Dionysian ritual, essentially boiled down to one thing: transformation. Indeed, that’s what the manuscripts were all about.

We danced all night. Sam had tapes of Native American dances and chants to play on a portable cassette player, but we danced to everything—Uncle Laf’s
Zigeuner
music, Hungarian rhapsodies, and Jersey’s favorite wild Celtic songs that were feverishly danced, so she used to tell Sam and me, at every Irish wedding and every wake—fast and slow, exciting and magical, powerful and mysterious.

We danced barefoot around the fire, then outside in the dark meadow atop the mountain that smelled of the first cornflowers of early summer. Sometimes we touched one another, held hands or danced in each other’s arms, but often we danced alone, a different and fascinating experience.

As I danced on and on, it seemed that I truly felt my own body for the first time—not only more centered and balanced within itself, though that was true too, but also completely connected in some mysterious fashion with the earth and sky. I felt parts of me dying, falling away in pieces, spinning out into the universe and turning into stars in the vast midnight space, a space spangled with galaxies that seemed to go on forever.

We danced into the morning, until the coals of our fire had flickered out, then we danced out into the wildflower meadow once more, to see the first grey light of dawn bleeding red into the morning sky. And still we kept on dancing.…

It was only after all this time that something strange began to happen—something frightening. And the moment it did, I stopped dancing on the spot. The music was still playing on our cassette, as Sam whirled round and saw me standing there, barefoot in the wild-flowers. He came over to me.

“Why have you stopped?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not dizzy or anything, it’s just …” I couldn’t say.

“Then dance with me,” he said.

Bending down to switch off the music, Sam took me in his arms there in the meadow and we moved slowly in a circle, almost floating. Sam held me lightly, just enough for support. His rugged face with straight nose and cleft chin, his lashes shadowing strong cheekbones, seemed as he leaned toward me like those of a strong protecting spirit. Then he pressed his lips to my hair.

“I learned something from Pandora’s manuscripts,” he said. “In an early version of a medieval alchemical text—the
Goethe
, the Magic Circle of Solomon the Magus—it says angels don’t make love like human beings. They don’t have bodies.”

“How do they do it?” I asked him.

“They have a much
better
way,” Sam said. “They mix themselves together, and actually become one for a very brief time, where before there were two. But angels, of course, have no substance. They’re made of moonbeams and stardust.”

“Do you think we’re angels?” I suggested, leaning back in his arms with a smile. Sam kissed me.

“I think we should mingle our Stardust, angel,” he said. Then he drew me down by the hand onto the grass, to lie on top of him among the wildflowers. “I want you to do whatever you feel like—or nothing at all,” he said with a smile. “I’m completely at your service. My body is your instrument.”

“Can it play
El Amor Brujo?
” I asked him, laughing.

“It can play whatever selection the virtuoso wishes to ripple out upon it,” he assured me. “What will it be?”

“All at once, I feel like I’m way above timberline,” I told him seriously.

“We’ve been there before, and we survived,” Sam said softly, taking my fingers and brushing them over his lips. “We entered the light once together, Ariel. Just after our totems found us—do you remember?”

I nodded slowly. Yes, I remembered.

When the cougar and two bears had vanished from that predawn mountaintop, we’d sat for a very long time, Sam and I—maybe hours—just touching each other’s fingertips, side by side, not moving. As darkness had faded to dawn, though, I had the uneasy feeling of something changing in my body, something shifting like restlessly sifting sands. Then all at once I’d found myself moving away from earth itself, floating through the air high up into space. I felt completely separate from my body, yet I still had form and shape—like a teardrop filled with helium, suspended in the night sky.