In town, Olivier scribbled on a clipboard resting against the side of Dark Bear’s Land Rover, filling out the required forms for transfer of both his captives. The Pod, due to his lofty position as head of the nuclear site, was moved first by the Feds to their armored vehicle for immediate transfer to a federal prison, for detention awaiting trial.
Meanwhile Wolfgang, bound and harmless but sitting up now on the backseat, requested a word alone with me inside the car. So the others got out and milled around as I turned over my shoulder to look into his face, a mass of cat-tracks, and Wolfgang glared back at me in barely suppressed pain. It seemed to run deeper than something triggered by a wounded hand or fractured leg. Those dark turquoise eyes, that had only recently left me weak in the knees, now left me feeling isolated and frightened by everything that had passed between us since we’d met.
“Ariel,” said Wolfgang, “can you even imagine the pain I feel when I look at you? I believed that you understood I loved you. Now, to suddenly discover that you’ve done nothing all along but tell me lies.”
I had told him lies? That, to say the very least, was something a bit more excessive than the proverbial pot calling the kettle black! Good Lord, for weeks, whatever rock I’d turned over, there was still another lie. I had confronted Wolfgang so often, only to hear more lies, only to swallow each and every one just as gullibly as the last, only to wind up back in his arms and his bed, again and again. But since his most recent point had been made over the barrel of a gun, I thought it might be the better part of valor to reserve comment.
“You knew Sam was alive, yet you concealed it!” Wolfgang spat out with great bitterness. “You lied to me all the while.”
“Wolfgang, you were trying to kill him!” I pointed out the seemingly obvious. “Would you have killed your sister, too? Were you going to kill me?”
“I love you,” he said between narrow lips, ignoring my question as another wave of pain passed over him. When he’d recovered, he said, “Of course I wasn’t going to kill any of you—don’t be mad. Do I seem like a homicidal maniac? I was only after those relics that are so important. Oh, Ariel, don’t you see? You and I could have used that information correctly. We could have accomplished so much. Through the use of those manuscripts, together, we could have created a better world.”
He paused and added carefully, “I know what you were thinking after Paris—after Zoe spoke to you. It was my question about the Gypsies, wasn’t it? I could feel it all the way back on the plane, and I should have said something then. But I was only surprised to learn of it, that’s all. Please believe it made no difference between us. It wouldn’t have mattered to me—”
“What wouldn’t have mattered to you?” I erupted in fury. “What on earth are you talking about? You mean you’d have condescended to go on sleeping with me, even though I have tainted blood? My God—what kind of person are you? Don’t you see how it makes me feel, to know it was you who tried to kill Sam with that bomb in San Francisco? You tried to murder him, Wolfgang. And all the while, you knew for a fact that Sam was your own brother!”
“No he’s not!!” Wolfgang practically screamed, his face ashen white with an agony that expressed, in one look, everything he’d left unsaid.
Olivier had glanced in alarm through the window, and he started to open the car door, but I waved my hand no. I was shaking all over with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to name. Hot tears were welling in my eyes as I turned back to Wolfgang and took a deep breath. I said, as calmly and distinctly as I could without going to pieces,
“Yes, Wolfgang. He is your brother.”
Then I turned, climbed out of the car, and closed the door behind me.
Dark Bear, one of the most astonishingly organized individuals on the planet, would have made a terrific CEO of a major corporation, if he hadn’t been so attached to the more important tasks of preserving the roots of his people and unraveling the mysteries of life. In the interim, he’d also managed to organize Sam’s and my project.
But Dark Bear considered it too dangerous to turn us loose—“go public,” as it were—until Olivier and his troops managed to round up a few more of the bad guys. Thanks once again to Dark Bear, they’d now have more ammunition to do so. Uncle Earnest’s private files—the unpleasant information Zoe said he’d ferreted out about the Behn family—had been found anonymously tucked amid a morass of old property claims from decades past, in a sturdy safe on the reservation at Lapwai.
Though Earnest might have purged the very existence of Halle and Wolfgang from his mind, as Dark Bear had told us, this new trove did include documentation on our family’s role—including my father’s—as long-hidden financiers backing their own concept of caste supremacy, and placing weapons of mass destruction in the service of their unpleasant view of the New World Order.
There were a few surprises from the more upbeat side of my family. As Sam had suspected and Dacian Bassarides now confirmed, there actually had been four parts to Pandora’s legacy, divided among the four “Behn children.” After meeting me in Vienna, it seems Dacian had arrived at a few of his own conclusions. He took it upon himself to forge a long-overdue reconciliation between Lafcadio and Zoe, sweeping aside all those decades of family bitterness that had essentially been spawned by just one man, now long dead.
Nor did Dacian have to convince Laf and Zoe that I was the one to pull all the pieces together as Pandora once had done—but that then by the terms of her will, twenty-five years ago, had again been torn apart. Uncle Laf shipped a case of Dacian’s estate-bottled wine to me, with a note from Dacian detailing that other estate, Pandora’s, which had attracted so much interest all these years. Following up on this input myself with a pertinent call to my mother and several chats with Dark Bear, I found the picture growing crystal clear.
First, there was the rune manuscript my mother had sent from San Francisco, which Olivier had then retrieved from where I’d hidden it in the DOD Standard at the nuclear site. Laf, I recalled, told me early on that Pandora had made a practice of copying runes in her own hand from standing stones all over Europe: these runes became her bequest to my father. When Jersey discovered Augustus’s involvement with her sister, she’d made her own clandestine copy of this manuscript. Though my father still had the original copy, Earnest later advised Jersey to save her copy to give to me when I was grown, just as he’d saved his own part of Pandora’s legacy for Sam.
That brought me to the second set, inherited by Earnest and left by him to Sam. These were the rare and crumbly scrolls, boards, and cloths we’d rescued at so much peril from the crystal cave, the set everybody was so hot to get that they’d even plunged after them down the dark path of murder and mayhem. It wasn’t hard to guess Wolfgang’s private motive, of course, given what seemed his obsessive preoccupation: that his father had abandoned him and left his entire estate—including these relics—to his younger, and Native American, son Sam.
As Dacian Bassarides had pointed out in Vienna, one quarter of a jigsaw puzzle, even half, was of little value without the other parts. And as Volga Dragonoff had explained during our midnight chat in an icy Soviet dormitory, even with all the pieces heaped together in a pile, you’d still need someone who was initiated into the right way of thinking—as he’d claimed he believed I was—to assemble the whole puzzle.
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.
The Magic Circle Page 59