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

father still had the original copy, Earnest later advised Jersey to save her copy to give to me when I was grown, just as he’d saved his own part of Pandora’s legacy for Sam.

That brought me to the second set, inherited by Earnest and left by him to Sam. These were the rare and crumbly scrolls, boards, and cloths we’d rescued at so much peril from the crystal cave, the set everybody was so hot to get that they’d even plunged after them down the dark path of murder and mayhem. It wasn’t hard to guess Wolfgang’s private motive, of course, given what seemed his obsessive preoccupation: that his father had abandoned him and left his entire estate—including these relics—to his younger, and Native American, son Sam.

As Dacian Bassarides had pointed out in Vienna, one quarter of a jigsaw puzzle, even half, was of little value without the other parts. And as Volga Dragonoff had explained during our midnight chat in an icy Soviet dormitory, even with all the pieces heaped together in a pile, you’d still need someone who was initiated into the right way of thinking—as he’d claimed he believed I was—to assemble the whole puzzle.

There was only one person who could have given me such training, with or without my knowing it. That was Sam. The two people who held the other pieces of the puzzle, Lafcadio and Zoe, had sent copies of their own chunks of Pandora’s estate, which they’d entrusted Bambi to deliver when she came to warn me about Wolfgang. With these now in my possession as well, I felt equipped to begin my attack.

Dark Bear had come up with an ingenious plan so Sam and I wouldn’t have to spend our time in lean-tos and remote mountain sheds while completing our project—a plan he’d already set in motion weeks ago, as soon as Sam had returned from Salt Lake with his own goods on the family. We had all the provisions prepared that we’d need to spend at least six months “up-country,” enabling us to begin and finish the project in relative secrecy.

We took four sturdy pack horses, a decent supply of dried food and herbal home remedies, a teepee and plenty of waterproof thermal gear, and two laptop computers with battery packs, complete with the best software on the market in multiple languages, ancient and modern, to aid in our translation. Our campsite was a charming private plot watered by a fast freshwater creek, just a day’s pack trip from Pend’Oreille Lake and the Kootenai wilderness up in the Idaho panhandle close to the border of British Columbia and therefore, in a pinch, within drumbeat distance of plenty of Indian tribes. The only real town within thirty miles of us was a little place (Pop.: 800) that bore the improbable name of Troy.

My dark, green-eyed saviour Jason accompanied us into the wilderness—albeit somewhat reluctantly, until he got a load of his own private fast-water creek. At the end of each week, Dark Bear sent a nameless courier to us on a dappled Appaloosa to drop off a few staples and pick up whatever documents we’d finished transcribing and translating, wafting them away to parts unknown—or at least, if known, known only to Dark Bear himself.

“If I’d ever heard about this Indian underground railway,” Sam said, “it would sure have saved me plenty of hassle and headaches when I first inherited these things!”

I had forgotten what it was like to live outdoors on the land, where fresh water, food, and air are provided by the earth itself—with no middlemen to dilute or pollute them. It was an exhilarating experience, from the first moment we pegged down our teepee and stepped inside. Though Sam and I planted the few short-season crops that would grow up here, so deep into the high country, and though we had to fish and forage each day in order to eat, we were able to spend most of our time translating manuscripts. And the more we translated, the more fascinating it became.

Here was a procession of histories and mysteries that seemed to pour forth from the deep, silent voice of an unknown, and until now unheard-of, past. This past slowly began to emerge from the concealing fog of a smoke machine that I soon understood had been cranked for millennia by historians and biographers.

“Something’s occurred to me,” I told Sam late one night beside the fire after we’d been at work for about a month. “In these tales, we rarely see some kind of truly superior society invading and subjugating an inferior one—it’s more often the reverse, whether you compare the two in terms of scientific or artistic skills. Basically, history is a record of the conquerors’ stupendous deeds of valor. But their ‘superiority’ is often based on the fact they succeeded in beating and enslaving others.”

“You’re getting the message,” said Sam. “Too bad you aren’t an Indian—you’d have gotten it the day you were born. As a child, you know, Hitler’s favorite author was a guy named Karl May: he wrote cowboy-and-Indian tales for young German boys. At the end of these stories, guess who usually won?”

It was the only hint of bitterness I’d ever heard from Sam about a part of his heritage that I, as a non-Native American, could likely never completely understand.

“You saved Wolfgang’s life,” I pointed out. “But now you know, from what Bambi has told us, that he hated you, that he planted the bomb that nearly killed you. If you’d known it then, do you think you would still have tried so hard to rescue him?”

“You mean, am I so altruistic I could forgive someone who enjoyed eradicating people like me? Like, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’?” said Sam. Then he smiled, got up from where he’d been leaning back on a saddle beside the fire, came over, and pulled me to my feet to face him.

“I knew,” he said.

“You knew it was Wolfgang who tried to kill you?” I