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

your pal Lucky was after them, why would he go on outings with all of you—like that merry-go-round ride in the Prater Laf told me about—or take you to the Hofburg to look at the sword and spear? Why would he be so chummy with Pandora and Dacian, if he knew they were Rom?”

“When Lucky ran into Pandora and Dacian the first time in Salzburg,” Zoe said, “he learned they were hunting for Hieronymus Behn—the very man who, twelve years earlier, had made an enormous splash with his revelations about the possible history and provenance of the platter of John the Baptist. Lucky himself, as a boy of only eleven, had gone with his grammar-school class to view that celebrated object. Like the other hallows, it was something he dreamed of possessing himself, ever afterward. By the time he lived in Vienna, he’d learned a good deal about the background of the Behn family. Though it’s never been proven, I’m quite certain that my father became one of Lucky’s earliest and strongest supporters. And as you say, Lucky surely knew a good deal about Pandora’s background. Dacian had to flee to the south of France, where, thanks to my own unusual brand of connections, I was able to assist him throughout the war. And while Lucky always kept a low profile about it, he would let no one touch Pandora, all through the war in Vienna—though of course he knew that she and Dacian were Rom—for he believed she alone held the key to a power that he himself sought.”

“You say Rom—but what exactly does it mean?” Wolfgang interrupted in a strange tone. He’d been unusually quiet in this last part of her story.

“Gypsies,” Zoe told him. To me, she explained, “The child that Clio adopted, Pandora, was actually the young niece of Aszi Atzingansi, a man of distinguished Romani blood who’d helped her recover many ancient texts, including the oracles of Cumae. Though there is no hard evidence, Pandora always believed that Aszi was also Clio’s great love. As I told Wolfgang last year when he first sought me out at a Heuriger in Vienna, it’s the oldest souls who preserve and keep alive the ancient wisdom. Pandora was such an old soul, as are most of the Romani people. Dacian very much wanted me to meet you, for he believes you are another—”

“Just a moment,” Wolfgang cut in again, a bit more firmly. “You don’t mean to tell me that Pandora and Dacian Bassarides—Augustus Behn’s parents, Ariel’s grandparents—were actually Gypsies?”

Zoe regarded him with a strange little smile, and lifted one brow.

But wasn’t it Wolfgang who’d introduced me to Dacian in the first place? Then I recalled with a certain uneasiness that Dacian had not mentioned any Gypsy ancestry in Wolfgang’s presence, and indeed had cautioned me not to mention it either. In retrospect, considering how candid Dacian had been on other topics—the sword and spear, and even where we’d hidden Pandora’s manuscripts—the fact that he’d made a point of sending Wolfgang away during the part of our chat dealing with the family suddenly seemed chillingly significant. And more so when Zoe added enigmatically, “Your mother would be proud of such a question.”

Wolfgang was clearly as exhausted as I, what with the weeks we’d spent running all over Europe and Soviet Russia, not to mention our combined data overload. He slipped off to sleep just after dinner on the first leg of our nearly twenty-four-hour return trip to Idaho.

Though I had a multitude of topics to discuss, I also knew I needed time on my own to think things through and figure out where I stood. So I ordered strong black coffee with refills from the steward, and tried to focus my mind on reviewing everything I’d learned.

One month ago, Zoe’s theory would have sounded completely insane: that Lucky, his niece, his dog, his friends, and their children had all been used—just as he himself had previously “used” millions of Gypsies, Jews, and others—in some kind of mass pagan sacrifice, a shamanistic “working,” to usher in the New Age. But Hitler had so many around him who believed, as he himself did, in utter nonsense. The magical Atlantis-like home of the Aryans at the North Pole; the final destruction of the world by Fire and Ice; the power of sacred hallows and “purified” blood to work terrestrial miracles. Not to forget, as Wolfgang had pointed out, his belief in a weapon of mass destruction that was known and repeatedly rediscovered since ancient times.

For those who wanted to turn back the clock to an earlier golden age that they believed had once existed in pagan times—a danger Dacian Bassarides had warned against—human sacrifice could be very much a part of the system. So, revolting as such an idea might be, viewed within the context of what we knew of the Nazi belief system it didn’t actually seem all that far-fetched.

But despite this possibly useful process of sorting and culling, I ran into a brick wall every time I returned to the frustrating topic of my family’s true relations with Adolf Hitler and his ilk. I had no idea where to begin. I thought of that jingle of William Blake’s:

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball:

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

If I could find the beginning of my own golden string—where and how the story had begun for me—that would certainly be a start.

I did know, in fact, where I had first fallen into this labyrinth: it was the night I’d returned from Sam’s funeral in a blizzard, when I’d nearly drowned in snow. Then I’d picked up the ringing phone to learn from my father, Augustus, that my “inheritance” might include something of great value I hadn’t expected: Pandora’s manuscripts.

But in hindsight, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe from that very first phone call, instead of pursuing the truth I constantly claimed I wanted, I might