The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  Yes, it was true. He was actually beginning to resemble Phoebus Apollo, as everyone claimed. His facial features were so sharply chiseled as to be almost pretty. He dabbed a bit of rouge on his lips to heighten their voluptuous appearance. This explained his appeal, practically since infancy, to both women and men.

  After shaking his hair loose—it fell in abundance nearly to his waist—he stood up, the better to admire his remarkable physique in the glass: those hard, sinewy muscles toned by several years of competing in wrestling at the Olympiad in Greece—where in fact he’d just won several first-class medals. Ah yes, that shouldn’t be overlooked. As a reminder to himself, he leaned forward and jotted a note: Give province of Olympia its freedom.

  To think, he had still several years before twenty, and already ruler of the largest empire in world history—and surely the only emperor ever who possessed the voice of an angel and the body of a god. All this had fallen into his lap, only because his beautiful mother Agrippina had been clever enough to marry her uncle Claudius, who then conveniently died from eating that batch of fortuitously poisonous mushrooms. Nero had Claudius deified soon afterward, explaining as part of the eulogy that it was appropriate since, after all, mushrooms were known to be the food of the gods.

  The servants had just pulled his purple silk toga over his head, arranged his curls, and finished draping the gold-star-spangled cape over his shoulders, when his mother herself arrived in Nero’s private chambers. She looked beautiful, as always, so he took her into his arms for a warm hug and a warmer kiss on the lips.

  “Darling, you won’t believe what I’ve planned for us for this evening,” Nero announced, drawing her away the better to look at her.

  Then he undid the sash that closed the bosom of her toga and pulled the fabric away to expose her beautiful breasts. Truly, the twin golden globes of a goddess, he thought—but after all, she was only yet in her thirties, wasn’t she? As the servants and slaves cast their eyes discreetly elsewhere, Nero bent his blond head over his mother’s breasts and flicked his tongue over them, serpentlike, until her nipples became aroused. He let her touch him under his toga, as he loved. Mother was the only one who really knew how to excite him. But after a moment, he drew her hand gently away.

  “Not tonight, darling,” he said. “At least not yet. We’re having supper at the tower of Maecenas, just you and me in the upper room. I’ve prepared a spectacle that’s about to start soon—just after dark, you know—and we’ll miss the first part if we dally.”

  Nero was enraptured by the beauty of the flames. When he’d first come up with the idea of getting rid of those rickety wooden houses scattered all over Rome that were cluttering up the view from his new palace, he’d never imagined the actual fire would be so lovely. He’d have to remember to record his feelings about it in his diary. But the diary recalled something he’d planned to speak of with Agrippina:

  “Mother, I was going over some of Claudius’s copious piles of papers yesterday, and imagine what I found?” he said. “The old goat kept a diary! It’s true, all sorts of libidinous thoughts—if very few actual deeds. I stayed up all night reading it, and I learned something of enormous interest. It seems your brother Caligula, before his untimely death, was on the trail of some powerful objects. Caligula had kept this even from your sister Drusilla, though they were so close. But he told Claudius about them, so he says in the diary. Though you and Julia were in exile—as you’d say, you were hardly Caligula’s confidantes—still I thought you might’ve learned something from Claudius.”

  “Not this time,” Nero’s mother said calmly, sipping her wine as she looked down over the city of seven hills that lay in a darkness spangled by many little bonfires that were growing steadily brighter.

  “But in fact,” she added, “I heard something of it from Drusilla’s husband, Lucius, when I came back to Rome to bury my brother. Lucius’s own brother Gaius had been a centurion in Roman Judea under Tiberius, more than twenty years ago, and he presided over the execution of one of these annoying Jewish religious fanatics you’ve lately been tossing to the lions. It seems already back then they were rabble-rousers, and their original ringleader was the very chap Gaius crucified. But the interesting part is, it seems he didn’t die by crucifixion, but was killed by a stab of Gaius’s javelin, which then inexplicably disappeared. Apparently the Jews believed the javelin held some mysterious power of a religious nature. I was never quite clear on the rest, so I’m afraid that’s really all I can say.”

  Agrippina set down her wineglass and came over to sit on Nero’s lap—just as she used to do with Claudius whenever she wanted to have her way or wangle something important. Nero grew instantly suspicious. But as his mother rubbed her hands over his private parts and sucked his neck, he also felt himself growing stiff.

  Damn: just when he most wanted to pay attention, not only to the wonderful spectacle he’d arranged outside but, more important, to the topic of conversation that had been so unceremoniously abandoned by her ploy for sex. But Agrippina had loosened the front of her gown and popped her golden apples tantalizingly out of the basket once more. They were practically in his face. He took a deep breath, swallowed air, and got to his feet, spilling the witch to the floor in a pile of her own silks.

  “I don’t believe that’s all you know,” Nero told her. Tossing his long blond mane over his shoulder, he gazed down at her petulantly with icy blue eyes. “Claudius says in his diary that Caligula had all this information not only from that brother-in-law of yours, as you said, but some more from Tiberius, too. He lists what the items are—there are thirteen of them—and says that though they aren’t exactly treasures, they possess some kind of powerful force instead. Claudius even invaded Britain years ago, trying to get his hands on them! You must know about them—maybe what their value is, too.”

  He bent down and grabbed Agrippina by the arms, pulling her up off the floor to face him. He tried to keep his eyes on her face and away from the beautiful curves of her golden, half-naked skin—her warm, sensual flesh that even now was being licked with light from the sweeping roar of flame washing the hills of Rome outside beneath the window. Agrippina smiled like a cat—then pulled his thumb into her mouth and sucked on it erotically, as she used to do when he was still a child. He felt his knees growing weak, but he remained determined and yanked his thumb out.

  “I need a new ship, so I can come and go easily from my estate at Bauli,” Agrippina mentioned, picking up her wineglass as if nothing had occurred since her last sip.

  “It’s yours,” Nero told her, privately wondering how he might quickly find someone who knew how to build a collapsible boat.

  The woman held too much power over him—and she knew it. But if he could dispatch Claudius as he had, why not Agrippina too? Then he’d finally be free, while possessing more power than anyone else in the world. Which brought him back to the topic.

  “What kind of power ‘of a religious nature’ did Lucius say the Jews believe the javelin possessed?” he asked his mother.

  “Oh, Lucius had done quite a study of it,” she replied. “It involved a number of items the Jews had brought with them out of Babylon or Egypt, and some of the secrets of their mystery religion, as well. It all had something to do with rebirth, I believe—if these objects were held together in the right hands.”

  “Do these Jews really believe that?” Nero demanded. “Or how did Lucius think it could take place?”

  “It seems they must be put in the right spot,” she said. “A place of power, like the caves at Eleusis, or that one at Subaico just outside Rome, opposite where you’re building your summer palace. And of course, the time must be right too.”

  “The time?” said Nero. “You mean morning, afternoon, or midnight? Or the time of year—spring or fall?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Agrippina said. “Lucius said it was a Persian or Egyptian concept.” She stroked his arm and added with a smile, “I mean, the idea that it must be done while the aeon is cha
nging—at the cusp between one celestial age and another.”

  “But then,” said Nero, gazing out on the raging fires that were now devouring his eternal city, “that would mean these objects must be collected together right now!”

  THE LOST DOMAIN

  Such moments, such particular glimpses down long vistas of the unattainable … phrases like the domaine perdu and the pays sans nom [describe] far more than a certain kind of archetypal landscape or emotional perspective on it.… We first grasp the black paradox at the heart of the human condition [when we realize] that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire.

  —John Fowles, afterword to Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier

  Only after Wolfgang and I had completed the two-hour drive to the airport at the far side of Vienna, got through parking, check-in, and customs, and boarded our plane for the flight to Leningrad did I have a real chance to try to organize all my mental notes on what I actually knew so far about Pandora’s mystery.

  I felt like a player in a millennial scavenger hunt, chasing scattered clues across continents and through aeons. But what had begun as a dizzying pile of unrelated facts was now a clearer path that connected geographical spots on the map with animal totems, animals with constellations in the night sky, constellations with gods, and the names for these providing the key. So as I looked out my plane window at Leningrad, that watery city of inland canals just beneath our wings, it seemed appropriate that this land into which we were descending had as its own symbol, mascot, and animal totem the Russian Bear.

  For the first time I realized in just how many cities I’d sojourned without seeing them as the residents did—or even as tourists might. Because of Jersey’s and Laf’s status as world-class performers, even inside Russia at the height of the now waning Cold War, their lives on the road had remained an endless procession of chauffeured limousines and champagne.

  My father, too, on the rare occasions I’d joined him abroad, preferred to cloister himself within the walled fortresses of hotels for a privacy only money could buy—just like that week in San Francisco. So although I’d experienced the glittering facades woven by the history and mystery and magic of many spots on the planet, I’d missed most of the dirt and drudgery and inconvenience—a portrait very likely far more real.

  Tonight, as Wolfgang and I stood on the granite steps outside the Leningrad airport along with a steaming mass of a hundred or more shadowy Eastern-bloc types, waiting in the dark drizzle to be cleared, one by one, through the single glass-walled immigration station open within the airport, I began to see for the first time a wholly different picture.

  This was the USSR depicted in State Department statistics books like those Wolfgang had loaned me—a land with a population thirty percent larger than that of the U.S., inhabiting more than double the land mass, yet living on only a quarter of our per capita annual income, producing only a third of our per capita gross national product, and experiencing a significantly higher birth rate and lower life expectancy.

  And Leningrad, the sparkling city of Catherine the Great and Peter the First which had shimmered upon the waters like a northern Venice, now seemed to be sinking back into the pestilent marshland from which it had once been reclaimed. As with most Russian cities, the occupants of Leningrad spent their time queuing up and waiting, in what appeared to Western eyes an inexplicably contagious mass atrophy.

  It had been nearly seventy-five years since the Russian Revolution. I wondered how long a people so weary of their own existence could endure the stranglehold of beliefs and methods of enforcement they didn’t agree with. Maybe our invitation and presence here today would provide part of the answer to that question.

  Wolfgang and I were collected at the airport by an officious-looking uniformed young woman from Intourist—a group rumored to be the hospitality branch of the KGB—and taken to our hotel. En route, Wolfgang cryptically intimated that the Soviet government wouldn’t approve of unmarried male and female colleagues practicing on their premises what he and I had practiced, and nearly perfected, in his castle all last night. I got the message, but not the whole picture—until I got a load of the place.

  The barrackslike “hotel” that our hosts, the Soviet nuke establishment, had graciously arranged for the duration of our stay had all the charm of your average U.S. federal penitentiary. There were many floors that all looked identical, long halls paved in grey linoleum illuminated by fluorescent lights that, to judge by the humming and flicker level, hadn’t had their tubes replaced since they’d been installed.

  After quickly arranging tomorrow’s schedule, Wolfgang and I were parted and I was led to my own wing by a hefty female storm trooper I imagined was named Svetlana. Arriving at my boudoir du soir, she assured me in broken English that she would remain posted downstairs for the night, then showed me three times how to lock myself in, and waited outside my door until she heard me do so.

  It was only then I suddenly realized I was starving, having eaten nothing since the croissants and chocolate that morning. I rummaged through my bag until I found some trail mix and a bottle of water, wolfed down enough to silence my ravenous stomach, undressed in those damp, unheated, unappealing quarters, unpacked a few items, and turned in for the night.

  There was a soft tap at the door. I glanced at my travel clock on the bureau of the cold, sparsely furnished room. I hadn’t reset it yet from Vienna time, so ten-thirty meant it was after midnight in Leningrad. Wolfgang had made it quite clear that tiptoeing about with the intention of hanky-panky was strictly off limits according to Soviet etiquette. So at this time of night, who on earth could it possibly be?

  I sashed up my robe over my pajamas and went to unlock the door. “Svetlana” was standing outside, looking oddly shy and awkward compared with her former boot-camp persona. Her eyes flicked sideways and she shot me a purse-lipped look, which I supposed was the Soviet idea of a smile.

  “Pliss,” she said in a low voice, almost confidential. “Pliss—somevon vish spick viss you.” She was gesturing sideways with her hand, as if actually expecting me to step out the door, leave my uncomfortable but relatively secure icebox of a room, and follow her in the dead of night to some unspecified rendezvous.

  “What someone?” I pulled my robe more tightly up to my chin as I stepped back a pace, my hand still firmly on the door handle.

  “Somevon,” she insisted in a whisper, glancing around nervously. “Hiss wery oorgent, he must be spicking viss you now—at vonse. Pliss to come viss me—he iss down the sterrs—”

  “I’m not going downstairs, or anywhere else, unless you tell me who wants to speak with me,” I assured her, shaking my head firmly for emphasis. “Does Professor Hauser know about this?”

  “No! Must not to know nossing!” she said—in a tone that could only be interpreted, in any tongue, as real fear. What in God’s name was going on?

  Now Svetlana was digging in her pocket, and she pulled out a card on heavy paper, waving it under my nose for just a moment before quickly tucking it away again. I’d barely had time to read the two words printed on it: Volga Dragonoff.

  Good lord! Volga—my uncle Laf’s valet! Could something have happened to Laf in the few days since I’d seen them at Sun Valley? But what else could Volga be doing here, hunting me down at midnight in the north of Russia? How did he get so cozy with Ms. Keys-to-the-Kingdom that she’d toss her rule book out just for him?

  To make matters worse, my sturdy Soviet bodyguard was acting more than suspicious. Her anxious eyes darting everywhere, she made the pliss-to-follow gesture to me again, making me pretty damned nervous myself. But deciding I’d better learn exactly what was going on, I grabbed my fur-lined boots from beside the door, shoved them on my feet, yanked my heavy coat over my bathrobe, stepped out into the hall, and let Svetlana “officially” lock the door behind me. I could see my breath in the dim fluorescent light as I followed her along the corridor; I pulled on my gloves as we went down the two flights of stairs.
>
  Volga was waiting there in the lobby, bundled in a dark, heavy coat. As I went to greet him, and looked at his craggy, sober face that never smiled, I realized that in the twenty-odd years I’d known this valet, factotum, and inseparable companion of my uncle, we’d probably spoken fewer than two dozen words to each other—which made this unexpected late-night tryst even more bizarre.

  Volga bowed to me, glanced once at his watch, and spoke a few words in Russian to my escort. She crossed the lobby, unlocked a door, flicked on one dim bank of lights, and left us alone. Volga held the door for me to enter first, and we went inside. It proved to be a vast dining hall filled with long tables already set up for tomorrow’s breakfast. Volga pulled out a chair for me, then sat himself, took a flask from his pocket, and handed it to me.

  “Drink this. It is slivovitz mixed with hot water; it will keep you warm while we speak.”

  “Why are you here in the middle of the night, Volga?” I said, accepting the proffered flask, if only to warm my hands. “Nothing’s happened to Uncle Laf?”

  “When we did not hear from you yesterday, nor did you arrive last night at the maestro’s home in Vienna as expected, he became alarmed,” Volga said. “Today we thought to contact your colleague in Idaho, Mr. Olivier Maxfield, at your office. But due to the time difference—eight hours—it was too late when we learned that you had already left Vienna for Leningrad.”

  “So where’s Uncle Laf?” I asked, butterflies still hovering in my stomach. I unscrewed the flask and had a swig of the hot liquor; it did seem to warm me a bit.

  “The maestro wished to come himself to explain the urgency of the situation,” Volga assured me, “but his Soviet visa was not refreshed. I am Transylvanian, though; the Rumanian government has a ‘friendship pact’ with the Soviet Union making it possible to come here at brief notice. I arrived on the last airplane from Vienna, but the entry procedure causes further delay. I apologize—but the maestro insisted that I see you at once, tonight. He sends this note to confirm what I say.”