The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

torques, even slave chains had vanished, they moved in single file behind Lovernios away from the fire, around the lake’s edge, to the lowlands where the darkened peat bogs lay. Clouds whispered over the moon, sifting an eerie half-light across the surface of the land.

At the edge of the expanse of bottomless peat bog, Belinus got down on his knees and held his hands aloft. The two younger men who’d volunteered for this role, along with Joseph and Lovernios, removed his robes and other garments. Lovernios waited until his son was completely naked, then handed him the band made of fox fur. Belinus slipped it onto his arm, then lowered his head and folded his hands behind his back to be tied with leather thongs. The men also slipped a leather noose around the young man’s neck. Belinus, his head still bowed toward the bog, said softly,

“Mother, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Joseph felt these words cut like ice into his very soul. He watched, not breathing, as Lovernios reached for the soft leather sack and extracted the razor-sharp hunting axe. Holding it high above his head, he raised his eyes to the sky. Just then the moon appeared from behind the clouds and flooded the landscape with light. The Celts stood in silence at the bog’s edge; to Joseph they resembled a forest of praying trees. Lovernios intoned in his deep voice,

“This is the death by fire. By the god’s thunderbolt we commend thee to Taranis.”

Belinus did not flinch as the axe swept down behind him, swift and sure—though Joseph thought he heard him gasp once as the sharp metal blade struck the back of his skull with a brittle crunch. Belinus fell forward on his face.

The two younger men moved forward swiftly and tightened the noose as Lovernios, with one hard yank, pulled the axe free from his son’s head.

“This is the death by air,” said Lovernios. “We commend thee to Esus.”

Joseph heard the loud crack in the silence: the sound of the windpipe snapping.

The two men, now joined by Joseph, lifted the limp but beautiful body of Belinus from the earth and held it face down over the brackish waters. Then Lovernios spoke the last words that would be spoken that night:

“This is the death by water. We commend thee to Teutates.”

Joseph watched as the body was sucked down into the bog, disappearing without a trace, swallowed by the earth.

But just before it vanished Joseph thought—only for an instant—that he saw something move in the thick black waters. He thought he saw God, with open arms, receiving the body of Belinus. And God was smiling.

UTOPIA

Whoever feels that he is the carrier of the best blood and has consciously used this blood to guide the nation will keep this leadership and will not renounce it …

Its fatal image … will be like a Holy Order. It is our wish that this state shall endure for thousands of years. We are happy to know that the future belongs to us.

—Adolf Hitler, sixth Party Congress,

   “Thousand-Year-Reich” speech

I have felt it my duty to my fellow-men to place on record these forewarnings of the Coming Race.

—Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,

The Coming Race

The Closerie des Lilas remains one of the loveliest restaurants in Paris, lavish with flowers at all seasons. It seemed an incredibly inappropriate setting for today’s romp through Nazi Germany and Austria, caught in the viperlike embrace of my blue-eyed grandmother Zoe. Heaps of white lilacs greeted us as we arrived. We had a table beside the terrace, where outdoor trellises were laden with dripping vines.

Zoe told us that she’d ordered our meal in advance. So when the sommelier had brought the wine, and she’d sipped and we’d been served, she returned to the topic we’d come to discuss: our family.

“As I mentioned earlier,” she began, “high in the Swiss Alps four rivers rise near the San Bernardino Pass. There existed at that place a century ago a Utopian community. My grandmother Clio, a woman of no fame but of enormous importance to our story, lived there for a number of years with my grandfather Erasmus Behn, one of the community’s principal founders.”

I suddenly heard that bell go off, as I flashed on what Dacian Bassarides had said about Utopias when we’d stood together just outside the doors of the Hofburg in Vienna: that idealists who begin by wanting to improve civilization often wind up trying to create a better breed of human.

“A perfect world high atop a mountain, the return to a Golden Age,” said Zoe. “Everyone sought such things in the past century—and many still do, even today. But as I also said, life is neither simple nor black-and-white. It may well be that my grandfather’s desire for Utopia was, at heart, the cause of all the unhappiness that followed.”

I don’t recall what we had for lunch that afternoon. But I do recall every detail of Zoe’s story. As the pieces fell into place, I began to see how one small family’s role could actually be that hinge or axis Dacian had spoken of, around which things turn as animals do on a carousel, as the zodiac seems to revolve around that star at the tip of the small bear’s tail.

I listened with interest as Zoe began her story of our family’s personal Garden of Eden. That is, before the Fall.

My grandmother Clio, said Zoe, was the only child of a Swiss family that, like many wealthy families of the day, held broad interests in scholarly pursuits. These included travel, and investigation into the lost kingdoms and cultures of many lands. Clio too possessed a deep interest in researches into antiquity. She not only leafed through dusty books but she had a passionate interest in a discipline only recently invented: field archaeology.

By the age of twenty, Clio had already engaged in numerous such trips with her father to exotic and far-flung regions of the world. She joined the adventurer Heinrich