The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  We walked around the curved space so I could really see it. There was a raised platform for a bed on one side, a seating area with wardrobes and dressing space on the other, and between them a large brass telescope pointed toward the sky.

  The stone wall of the tower flared outward from waist level, laced with machicolations—those slits common in the turrets of medieval fortifications, from which the besieged could rain down heavy stones on their besiegers. These machicolations had been fitted by Wolfgang with windowpanes that opened inward and could be locked in place like shutters.

  The suite had a much higher ceiling than the other rooms, placed as it was up under the heavy angular beams crisscrossing the dome of beveled skylights. As Wolfgang had pointed out, by day the massive skylight-roof would provide additional light throughout the tower. Now the dazzling stellar array of the night sky fanned out like a giant bowl of light through which shone the whole star-spangled universe. It was a truly wonderful space.

  “Sometimes when I am here,” Wolfgang said, “I lie in bed at night and try to imagine what Odysseus must have felt—lost and wandering all those years, with sometimes his only companions the silence of deep space and the cold, immobile indifference of the stars.”

  “But in a room like this,” I said, “I would think, if you were very quiet, you could hear the constellations singing: the music of the spheres.”

  “I prefer human voices,” said Wolfgang.

  He took me by the hand and drew me across the room. In the outer wall he opened one of the windows to let in the fresh, cool air from the river below. Then he switched off the outdoor lights still illuminating the ramparts and outer courtyard, so we could see the countryside. We stood side by side and looked down on the twinkling lights pouring across the rolling hills and, farther out, the double serpent path of lights outlining the undulating Danube. On the river, the moon’s circular reflection was broken into ribbons of silver, all that illuminated the surface of the deep, dark water. In this magical place, for the first time in weeks I began to feel at peace.

  Wolfgang turned to me in silence and set his hands on my shoulders. Against the glittering night glow, his eyes refracted light like translucent crystals of aquamarine. Between us a wave was slowly building; I could hear its rumble moving toward a roar. Wolfgang finally spoke.

  “Often, it’s hard for me even to look at you,” he said. “You’re so astonishingly like her, it can be devastating.”

  Like her? What was that supposed to mean?

  “My father took me to see her when I was only a small child,” he went on. Though his hands still rested lightly on my shoulders, he was gazing down at the river, as if lost in a dream. “I remember she sang ‘Das himmlische Leben’ by Mahler. Later, when my father took me backstage to present to her the small flower I’d brought, she looked at me with those eyes.” He said in a strange, choked voice, “Your eyes. The first instant I saw you in Idaho, even though you were wrapped up like a polar bear and all I could see were your eyes; they riveted me.”

  Holy shit! Could this be happening? Was this man I was so obsessed with in love with my grandmother? What with the week I’d just been through, all I could think of to remedy the way I felt was to catapult myself through that open machicolation like a medieval cannonball. To make matters worse—though I hardly needed help in that department—my damned tempestuous Irish-Gypsy blood was gushing its way to my telltale face again. I abruptly turned away from Wolfgang, and his hands dropped from my shoulders.

  “What have I said?” he asked in surprise, swinging me back to face him before I could get control. When he saw my expression, he looked at me in confusion.

  “It isn’t what you’re thinking, you know,” he said seriously. “I was only a small boy at the time. How could I have felt, back then, the way I feel now as a grown man?” He ran his fingers through his hair and added in a frustrated voice, “Ariel, I never seem able to explain myself properly to you. If I could only—”

  But he’d grasped both my arms above the elbow, and I gasped as the scorching pain shot up my arm. I felt my face contort.

  Wolfgang quickly released me. “What is it?!” he said in alarm.

  I gingerly touched my arm and smiled through a glaze of tears.

  “Good lord!” he exclaimed. “You don’t still have those stitches?”

  “My appointment with the doctor to remove them was yesterday morning,” I told him as I took a deep breath to help quell the throbbing ache. “But we were already in Utah by then.”

  “If you’d spoken today, we might have done something about it earlier in Vienna,” he said. “But you understand, those stitches must come out. Even if they dissolve, your arm may become infected, or worse. Our schedule is so close before we leave for Russia—shall I do it myself? Right now?”

  “You?” I said, staring at Wolfgang in genuine horror.

  “Please—if you could see your face,” he said, laughing. “I have all the supplies right here, disinfectant and ointment and forceps and scissors. It’s really a simple procedure. I worked in the clinic in boarding school, and young boys are always having stitches put in and taken out. So I assure you I’ve done it hundreds of times. But first, I’ll bring our things in from the car so we needn’t worry about them later. It will take me a bit of time to collect the rest from the kitchen.”

  He yanked open the door of a nearby wardrobe and pulled out a thick, soft bathrobe. “Why don’t you get undressed here and put this on so you don’t ruin your clothes,” he said. “Then just go down and wait for me in the library—it should be warm there by now. Also, it’s closer to the kitchen and the light is far better there than anywhere else.” Then he was gone.

  I didn’t know what I’d had in mind for the evening—but I’m in love with your grandmother followed by Shall I remove your stitches? wasn’t exactly the direction I’d thought it might take.

  On the other hand, it would be good to get rid of the itching and throbbing of the past week. Furthermore, the stitch removal might provide time and space to come to terms with the fact that this man I was so attracted to myself seemed to have more intimate relations with everyone connected to my family than he had, so far, with me.

  I went into Wolfgang’s bathroom, took off my warm wool challis dress, and studied in the mirror the purplish gash that ran from elbow to shoulder, track-marked with fourteen spiderlike black stitches. My eyelids were puffy and the tip of my nose was red from those unexpected tears. I was a wreck. I picked up a wood-handled brush, ran it through my hair a few times, splashed water on my face, pulled on the fleecy bathrobe, and went downstairs.

  When I came into the library, the fire was crackling cheerfully and the room smelled of pinecones. I walked over to the open Biedermeier desk and ran my fingers over the pile of books stacked there. I noticed one that looked rare and old, embossed in gold with a beautiful soft leather cover, nearly the same buttery shade as the nearby sofa. It had a bookmark in it. I pulled it from the stack and opened it.

  The first page was illuminated with the title

  Legenda Aurea

  The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints

  by Jacobus de Voraigne

  A.D. 1260

  It was scattered with gruesome gilded paintings of men and women in various stages of torture or crucifixion. I turned to the place of the marker: saint number 146, Saint Jerome. I was surprised to learn that his name in Latin was Hieronymus, like the man who, until today, I’d thought was my father’s father.

  Apart from his renown for revising the church liturgy fifteen hundred years ago in the reign of the emperor Theodosius, Saint Hieronymus—like Androcles, his predecessor in the famous Roman tale—had healed the paw of a wounded lion. That seemed to ring a bell with respect to something Dacian said earlier today. But I couldn’t put my finger on it at the moment.

  Just then Wolfgang arrived bearing his tray laden with tubes of medicaments, a pot of surgical implements soaking in disinfectant, a bottle of cognac, and a sn
ifter. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his tie hanging loose around his open collar. Over his arm was a stack of towels. He set the tray on the low table before the sofa where I’d taken a seat. I put the book beside it. When Wolfgang saw it, he smiled and said, “A little light reading in preparation for your martyrdom, I see.”

  He trained a nearby floor lamp over the sofa, spread a few towels on the cushions, and took a seat beside me. Then with one swift tug, my sash came loose and the robe—all I was wearing over skimpy undies—fell open. After a glance at my face, he smiled wryly. “Shall I shut my eyes as we proceed, then?” he asked in mock politeness as he extracted my arm from the robe and drew it discreetly closed again.

  “Now let Professor Hauser have a closer look.” He lifted my arm to the light and carefully examined the wound. He was so close I could smell the aroma of pine and citron—but then I saw the expression on his face.

  “I’m sorry to say that this looks really awful,” he said. “You’ve healed too quickly—the skin is overgrown in many places. It will only become worse unless these stitches come out now. But unfortunately it will take a bit more time than I’d first thought, and it may hurt more than I thought, too. I must remove them carefully to be sure the wound doesn’t reopen. Drink some cognac. If it hurts too much, bite on a towel.”

  “Perhaps we should reconsider doing this tonight?” I suggested hopefully.

  Wolfgang shook his head. He set my arm down gently and poured a stiff cognac from the decanter on the tray beside us, handing it to me.

  “Look here, I’ve brought plenty of towels to wrap you, but you must lie on your side of the sofa in order for me to get the proper angle of attack. Drink some of that first; it will help.”

  My stomach was all butterflies, but I drank as he asked. Then I lay on the towel-draped leather sofa, as soft as cradling arms enfolding me, and let Wolfgang cover me with more of the towels. He placed my arm carefully on top. I closed my eyes; the fire was so warm, I could feel the flames licking my eyelids. I tried to relax.

  At first the pain was distant and cold as the antiseptic dripped on my skin—but it quickly turned hot. When I felt the slight tug of the forceps against the first stitch, I wondered if this was what a fish might feel when it sensed the first jab of the barbed hook puncturing flesh—no deep pain or fear yet, only the dim sense that something might be terribly, terribly wrong.

  From the first tug, it was like scraping a pin against glass. The pain crawled deeply into the bone with a slow, nagging ache. I tried not to flinch and make it worse, but the dull, rhythmic throbs were almost more than I could bear. Though my eyes were shut, I could feel hot tears welling behind my lids. I tried to steel myself with a deep breath for each new assault.

  After what seemed forever, the tugging stopped. When I opened my eyes, the dammed-back tears trickled in rivulets down my cheeks and onto the towel-draped sofa. My teeth were still gritted against the pain; my stomach was in knots. I knew if I tried to speak, I’d burst into sobs. I took another breath, and let it out slowly.

  “That first one was difficult—but I was able to remove it cleanly,” Wolfgang said.

  “The first one!” I protested, struggling to prop myself on my good elbow. “Couldn’t we just chop my arm off with one quick whack and have it done?”

  “I don’t like to hurt you, my dear,” he assured me. “But these must come out. It’s been too long, as it is.”

  Wolfgang held the brandy to my lips. I took a big slug and choked a little. He wiped a tear away with his finger and watched in silence as I drank some more. Then I handed the glass back to him.

  “You know, when Bettina and I were small, our mother had a saying if she had to do something unpleasant,” he told me. “She said, ‘A kiss makes everything better.’”

  He leaned over and touched his lips to the place where he’d pulled out the stitch. I shut my eyes as I felt the warm glow spread through my arm.

  “And does it?” he asked softly. When I nodded mutely, he said, “Then the others must be kissed as well. Now let’s have this finished, shall we?”

  I lay back on the sofa in preparation for the renewed assault. With each stitch, there was that grinding pain as he pulled carefully with the forceps to release the suture from the skin—then the sharp incisive clip of the scissors that heralded the last tug. After each clip, Wolfgang bent to kiss the place where the stitch had come out. I tried to keep count, but after five or ten minutes I was sure he’d pried out thirty, or three hundred, instead of only the remaining thirteen. Still, the kisses mysteriously did seem to help.

  When at last the ordeal was over, Wolfgang gently massaged my arm until the blood returned to wash the pain away. Then he wiped the area with a disinfectant that smelled faintly of fresh wintergreen. When he was through, I pushed myself to a sitting position beside him. He helped me slip my bare arm back into the sleeve, then he sashed up the robe again.

  “I’m sure that wasn’t pleasant. You’ve been very brave this past week, my dear, but it’s all over now,” he told me, hugging me lightly around my good shoulder. “It’s only just past seven, so you’ve plenty of time to bathe and have a rest if you’d like, before we need to think about supper. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay—just tired,” I said. But though the will was there, I didn’t actually seem to be moving.

  Wolfgang looked at me with what seemed concern—and another expression I couldn’t quite decipher. It was true I was dizzy from the wallops of cognac mixed with the megadose of natural endorphins that had been released by nearly half an hour of slow, grinding pain. I leaned back against the cushions and tried to pull myself together. Wolfgang reached over and twirled a strand of my hair in his fingertips meditatively. After a moment he spoke, as if he’d arrived at some private conclusion.

  “Ariel, I know this is probably the wrong time, but I don’t know when the right time will be. If not now, perhaps never.…” He stopped and shut his eyes for a moment. “My god, I don’t know how to do this at all. Give me a sip of that cognac.”

  He leaned across me, plucked my half-full glass from the table, and tossed down a swallow. Then he set the glass down, turned back to me with those fathomless turquoise eyes, and said,

  “The first time I saw you in the Technical Science Annex at the nuclear site—did you hear the word I said as I passed?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t quite,” I told him, though I vividly recalled what I’d hoped he’d said—“enchanting” or “exquisite”—a far cry from what I looked or felt like right now. But I was hardly expecting what came next.

  “What I said was ‘ecstasy.’ At that moment, I really thought of abandoning the entire mission. And I assure you, there are those who’d prefer me to do so, even now. My reaction to you has been so—I’m not really sure how to say it—so immediate. I suppose you can see now where this awkward confession is proceeding.”

  He stopped, for I’d abruptly stood up, completely flustered. Here I was—a girl who balked at dipping her skis into deep powder—being invited once more to leap willy-nilly from yet another dangerous height. I could feel the panic surging, even as I struggled against it. Fuzzy I might be, but it didn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out what I wanted Wolfgang to do right now—and what he certainly seemed to want as well.

  I tried to be rational about it. What other man would bring me halfway around the world, and invite me home for the night to his very own castle? What other man would look at me, as Wolfgang was looking at me right now—in my dishevelled state, grubby and battered from my travels and travails—and even want me? What other man exuded that heady aroma of pine and citron and leather that made me want to drink him in and drown? What in God’s name was my problem, anyway?

  But deep within, of course, I knew exactly what it was.

  Wolfgang stood to face me without touching me. He looked at me with those X-ray eyes that affected me with the same results kryptonite had on Superman: weak knees and an empty mind. Our lips were inches
apart.

  Without another word, he folded me into his arms and buried his hands in my hair. My lips touched his; then his mouth was on mine as if he were drinking my soul, washing everything from my mind but the warmth of his lips moving down my throat. The robe slipped from my shoulders and fell in a pool around my bare feet. His teeth grazed my shoulder, his hands moved over my body where he’d slid my underthings away. I couldn’t breathe.

  I pulled back. “I’m frightened,” I whispered.

  Taking me by the wrist, Wolfgang kissed my palm. “And you think I’m not?” he asked, regarding me seriously. “But there’s only one thing we need to remember, Ariel: Don’t look back.”

  Don’t look back—the single rule the gods gave Orpheus before he plunged into the underworld to rescue his great love, Eurydice, I thought with a chill.

  “I’m not looking back at anything,” I lied. Then I lowered my eyes—too late.

  “Oh, yes, you are, my love,” said Wolfgang, tilting my face up to his. “You’re looking at a shadow that has stood between us ever since the moment we met—the shadow of your late cousin, Sam. But after tonight is over, I hope you will never—not even once—look back again.”

  Okay, call me crazy. Indeed, that night I myself thought I might’ve gone more than a little mad. Wolfgang had opened a different kind of wound from the one patched together by those stitches in my arm, a wound that ran deep and bled silently within, so I couldn’t be sure exactly how much damage had been done. This unhealed trauma, which I’d managed thus far to hide even from myself, was the fact that I might be more than a little in love with my cousin Sam. So what did the situation make me? A pretty confused girl nuke.

  But those conflicting emotions playing war games in my chest were at least partially obliterated that night—along with everything else—by something Wolfgang unlocked that I’d never known or even imagined existed within me. When our two bodies met and melted together, in the heat of passion, there arose in me a mixture of pain and yearning and desire that worked in my veins like a drug, with each new taste only making my craving for him increase. We fed each other’s fires with a hungry obsession until every muscle in my body quivered in exhaustion.