The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

Sam was a codebreaker, one of the best in the world. If Sam knew about these manuscripts of Granny’s, it would have been far too hard for him to resist having a look, especially if his father wanted to determine their value. He must have seen them—perhaps broken them—long before Earnest died. Of that I was certain. So where were they now?

But there was a question more crucial to me at this moment, given my own unique situation:

What was in my grandmother’s diaries, which I had now technically inherited, that was so dangerous it had gotten Sam killed?

THE KNOT

Alexander, finding himself unable to untie the [Gordian] knot, the ends of which were secretly twisted round and folded up within it, cut it asunder with his sword.

—Plutarch

The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious one, probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot-cipher tied in the rawhide thong.…

Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot, when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Greater Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mysteries.

—Robert Graves,

The Greek Myths

It was nearly three A.M. when I turned on the taps of the big claw-footed tub, praying that the pipes hadn’t frozen, and watched with relief as the hot water splashed into the bath. I dumped in some salts and liquid bubbles, stripped, and climbed in. The tub was so deep, the water went up to my nose, and I blew the bubbles away. Lathering up my road-wrecked hair, I knew I had lots of thinking to do. But my brain was engaged in fuzzy logic—not surprising, given the week’s events and the trauma of my trip home.

As I soaked there, the bathroom door swung open on squeaky hinges and Jason came strolling in unannounced—which probably meant Olivier, my landlord, had also returned. Jason barely gave me a glance with those penetrating green eyes. He sauntered over and regarded with disdain my soggy silk undergarments on the floor. He started to paw at them, as though he thought my long johns would make a nice litter box, but I reached over and yanked them out from under him.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” I said firmly.

Jason jumped up on the wooden rim of the tub, stuck out his paw, and batted at the bubbles. He looked at me inquisitively. This was my hint to douse him. Jason was the only cat I knew that loved water—any kind of water. It was normal for him to turn on a sink tap to fetch himself a drink; he preferred a toilet to a litter box; and he was known to jump into the Snake River below the falls to retrieve his favorite little red rubber ball. He could swim in current as well as any dog.

But tonight—this morning, rather—I was too tired to dry him, so I flicked him off the side of the tub, got out, and toweled myself instead. In my big fluffy bathrobe, my hair wrapped in a towel, I padded to the kitchen and heated some water to make myself a hot buttered rum before bed. I picked up a broom and banged on the ceiling to let Olivier know I was back—though my car abandoned on the road should have been his first clue.

“Dearest one,” Olivier’s voice soon came floating down the stairway, with his recognizable thick québecois accent. “I snowshoed in from my Jeep, but I wasn’t sure it was proper to send the little argonaut down to you yet—you might already be sleeping. And what about me?”

“Okay, come down and join me in a quick buttered rum before I crash,” I called back up. “And let me know what’s been going on at work.”

Olivier Maxfield and I had met some five years back, when we were assigned to a project together. He was a strange amalgam: nuclear engineer and gourmet chef, devotee of Yankee slang and cowboy bars, and unrepentant “Jack” Mormon. He’d been born a French Canadian Catholic in a household devoted to la cuisine française, and now as a latter-day culinary genius himself, those no-alcohol-no-caffeine dietary restrictions of the Latter-day Saints hardly mixed with Olivier’s nouvelle persona.

The first time he met me, Olivier told me he’d already known I would soon enter his life, for I’d just appeared as the Blessed Virgin in a dream involving a pinball competition between myself and the prophet Moroni. By the end of the first week that we’d worked together, Olivier received a sign that I should be offered cheap rent to move into his downstairs apartment. The actual pinball machine upon which I, as the Virgin Mary, had beaten the prophet had miraculously appeared as a new acquisition of the cowboy bar down the road from our very office.

Perhaps it was the result of my kooky upbringing, but I found Olivier refreshing at a nuclear site stacked with engineers and physicists, all of whom brown-bagged their lunches and went home by five o’clock so they could watch wholesome TV reruns with their children. I went all the time to parties at the homes of “site families.” In summers they barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs in the backyard; in winters it was spaghetti, salad, and prefab garlic bread in the family room. It was as if no one here in this remote high desert had ever heard of any other manner of dining.

Olivier, by contrast, had lived in Montreal and Paris and had passed a summer workshop in the south of France with Cordon Bleu. Though perhaps a tightwad about providing landlordly services such as heat and driveway clearing, he did have assets. While mincing, dicing, mouli-ing, and clarifying butter in his enormous industrial kitchen upstairs to prepare the designer meals he cooked for Jason and me at least once a week, he regaled me with tales of the great chefs of Europe, interspersed with the latest fads on the cowboy bar scene. He