The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

“You must ask your mother,” he repeated whenever I pressed him. “It is for her to say what she wishes. Perhaps she’s had reasons for not speaking before now.”

When my patience and stamina were nearly at an end, my warden Svetlana returned, motioning with those frantic, frightened gestures, desperate to lock me back in my room before someone caught us all dallying there in the dining hall. Before we parted, I thanked Volga for what he’d revealed. Then I took a quick moment to scribble a note to Uncle Laf, saying I’d surely try to check in with him as I passed back through Vienna. I added by way of explanation that the tightness of my schedule and the distance between the IAEA and Melk had prevented me from keeping my earlier promise.

Back in my room, though, I couldn’t get to sleep—and not just because of my empty stomach, icy bedchamber, or mental exhaustion. To the contrary, I knew that my insomnia resulted from a hyperenergized brain. I had some serious thinking to do about this pattern of errors, omissions, myths, and lies that seemed to make up my life. At the crack of dawn, I’d surely be roused back to action by life’s little importunities rapping once more at my door. But I wouldn’t be ready to field anything new until I’d regrouped and figured out where I stood right now.

From the moment Volga mentioned my mother as a possible contender in the game, it had occurred to me that, just like Hermione, Jersey was not only a name but a place—a place, if memory served, with enough Celtic standing stones to qualify as a key point on the mysterious power grid. And it had finally registered that all this time I might’ve been looking in the wrong direction: down, instead of up.

Those ancient builders who’d designed Egypt’s pyramids or Solomon’s temple didn’t need maps and calipers to site their structures. They had used the same tool kit over a span of thousands of years, whether to navigate a desert or an ocean. It was also the single reference they’d have needed in order to pinpoint precise spots on earth—that is, the canopy of stars painted across the night sky. So once again, all that history and mystery and mythology seemed to drive home a key point, at the same time pointing me in the right direction. Toward the stars.

Before turning in, I rummaged for a bottle of mineral water to brush my teeth, and noticed at the bottom of the bag the Bible still there from Sun Valley. Seeing it triggered the memory of a conversation with Sam, out under the stars one evening before I went away to school. Though I couldn’t have known it then, that would be the last time I would see Sam until just this past weekend, on another Idaho mountaintop.

I pulled the Bible from the bag, rested it on the chipped porcelain rim of the bathroom sink, and flipped through the pages until I came to the Book of Job, as I heard Sam’s voice in my mind.…

“Do you remember the story of Job?” he asked as we stood there together looking up at the night sky.

It seemed an odd remark for someone who didn’t read the Bible. All I could recall was that Yahweh had cut poor Job a pretty one-sided deal, giving Satan carte blanche to torture “God’s servant” as he pleased; it seemed awfully cruel. I said as much to Sam.

“And yet, interestingly enough, despite the suffering he underwent,” said Sam, “in the end Job had only one real confrontation with God. He asked a famous question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?’ Do you recall what God’s reply was to Job’s simple plea for understanding?”

When I shook my head in the negative, Sam took my hand in his, lifted his other hand, and swept it wide to encompass the entire night sky—that sparkling stellar array that had remained so remote and unchanged over billions of years.

“That was the answer to Job,” Sam told me. “God arrives in the midst of a terrifying whirlwind, and for page after page he enumerates all He’s accomplished. He’s created everything from hail to horses to ostrich eggs—not to mention the universe itself. Job can’t get a word in edgewise with all the bombast, nor should I imagine he’d want to at this point, what with all he’s just been through. God’s behavior on the occasion seems incomprehensible, and philosophers have wondered about it for thousands of years. But I believe I’ve found an interesting clue.…”

Sam looked down at me in the starlight with clear grey eyes and quoted: “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?… Who hath laid the measures thereof … or who hath stretched the line upon it?… Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?’”

When I made no comment, he said, “That’s a pretty specific answer to a pretty specific question, don’t you agree?”

“But you told me Job’s question was, ‘Where is wisdom to be found?’” I pointed out. “How does showing off over creating the universe answer that?”

“Precisely what’s been puzzling the sages philosophes all these aeons: What was God’s point?” Sam agreed with a smile. “But as my favorite poet-philosopher said, ‘In the end the philosophers always go out by the same door that in they came.’ On the other hand, for those who can read a road map, I suggest God’s reply is an answer. Think about it. God seems to be saying that the coordinates mapped out in the heavens are the guide to wisdom here on earth—‘as above, so below’—do you see?”

Maybe I hadn’t seen it then, but I thought I did now. If the placement of holy sites in relation to one another was truly patterned after the constellations themselves, it was even possible to visualize how, over time, that heavenly