The Cult of Loving Kindness (26 page)

“What was her crime?” asked Karan Mang from the other side of the tent. “It was sexual imperfection, was it not?”

The priest’s voice was guttural and dry. “Chrism Demiurge had her sequestered in the Temple of Kindness and Repair. But there was a boy from one of the persecuted sects. An antinomial. He found his way to her tower. He climbed up by the drainpipe. He tried to kill her, but of course he couldn’t. She seduced him. She kept him hidden in her room. Chrism Demiurge—he had them burnt for witchcraft.”

The priest talked in odd breathy gasps, swallowing air after each phrase. Now he swallowed a small belch. “That was his excuse. He had them burned in Kindness and Repair. My great-uncle saw it done.”

As he was speaking, Miss Azimuth had put her hand to Cassia’s head again, to stroke the hair out of her face. She stirred; she cried out softly and rolled onto her back. Miss Azimuth stroked the girl’s hair away and Longo Starbridge chewed his lip. Cassia’s face was the same as the face in the photograph.

She still had some silicon dust from the road stuck to her cheek, and she still lay in the torn dress that she had taken from the village in the trees. Her hair was dirty, and in her posture there was no Starbridge grace—her skirt had pulled up above her knees. But in a sense that too increased the similarity, because the photograph was taken on the day when the bishop had left all of her wealth, all of her power behind for the last time. Perhaps it was just an imperfection in the print, but she too had a black stain under her eye, and for her execution she was dressed in a simple white shift. Her legs and feet were bare.

“Look,” said Miss Azimuth. She brought Cassia’s hand up from her side and stroked back the fingers. The birthmark on her palm, which had been gathering shape all through that week, seemed to be clearer now. It was as if during that time it had been rising to the surface of her skin, and now it was obscured by just a few thin layers. The six points of the bishop’s crown were clear now. The face of Paradise was clear.

“But she didn’t go, you see,” said the old woman, and her high voice was barely audible. Yet it was all around them, diffused and filtered, like the light from the klieg lanterns which was making a blue pattern on the bed. “She didn’t go to Paradise. When she stepped onto the pyre, she disappeared. Instead there was a tree, a tangerine tree, flowering and bearing fruit. Though of course it was not the season,” she said, and the bulimic priest was nodding. His arm was tired. He had let the lantern slip, so that it was darker now. Most of the light came from the klieg light through the wall.

“Chrism Demiurge made a show of burying her bones,” Miss Azimuth continued. “But when the place was dug up, there was nothing there. And the graverobbers, they found a message. ‘Look for me,’ it said. ‘Look for me among the days to come.’ ”

“I know the story,” murmured Brother Longo.

“And I knew it too!” exulted the old woman. “I knew it when I saw her. It is the lily on the stump—it is the sign, which Freedom Love predicted. This is our hour, you see. This is our hour of need.”

“The resemblance is certainly extraordinary,” said Karan Mang, examining his painted nails.

On the bed, Cassia was stirring. She moved her head back to one side, and rubbed her cheek upon the counterpane. “She’s waking up,” said the blind priest, who up to that moment had not spoken.

 

Now she could distinguish what they said to her. “She’s waking up”—she heard it clearly. In her dream she was sitting by the altar in her prison cell, and she was praying to the image of Beloved Angkhdt. She was moving incense underneath the brass nose of his statue. And she could hear the spirits close to her, conversing in low tones—the old woman, she was death. And then the men: the loud voice, the foreign voice, the rasping guttural voice. These must be the different aspects of Immortal Angkhdt, indicated by the four faces of the statue. Two human faces peeked out of the dog’s ears, and another was peering through the fur at the back of his head. Now these faces were conversing to decide her fate; they were arguing with death and with each other. “She’s waking up,” said the face behind the fur—the first time it had spoken. All-seeing, yet its eyes were blind, at least in this world. It looked into her heart to see that she was waking to a world of spirits and a world of miracles. It was telling her that her prayers were answered.

 

Rael called to her from the window of their prison cell. He was sitting on the windowsill with his cat in his lap, and he was looking out through the bars. “Come look,” he said, but she could see it all from where she sat by staring into the dog’s head of Angkhdt. She could see it reflected in his eye. She could see the courtyard below the prison tower. She could see the funeral pyre and the assembled monks. She could see the image she had put in all their minds: The great tree spread its boughs above the courtyard. The fire licked its leaves.

The blind priest clapped his hands. In her dream, Cassia heard a crack come from behind her in the dark. It was the breaking of the lock upon her prison door, the breaking of the lock that held her to this world and to this time. Beside her lay the bag that she had packed for their journey—no warm clothes, for it was hot where they were going. Just a little fruit from her garden, just a cotton blanket, and wrapped inside of it, the earliest codex of the Holy Song, together with the holy skull of Angkhdt.

“The locks are broken,” she said. In the silk tent, Miss Azimuth bent as low as her dry bones would permit, to try to decipher Cassia’s sleepy mumbling. She could not. But Rael heard her and Rael understood her; he was lying on his stomach in another tent a half a mile away, and when Cassia spoke he was instantly awake, his eyes open, his mind clear.

An oil lamp was burning a few inches from his face. He lifted his cheek up from the mat and then turned to the other side, away from the light. Now in front of him he saw a low, narrow table, and it had a statue on it, and several brimming bowls of water.

He heard a woman’s voice. “It is Angkhdt,” she said. He squinted in the uncertain light and saw a small, potbellied, animal-headed figure with seven hands. It sat surrounded by plastic and wooden models of machines. Rael recognized a few—a bicycle, a gun.

He raised himself up onto his elbows. The woman spoke out of the shadow behind the lamp. From his raised position he could see her sitting there. He could see something of her face.

“It is Angkhdt,” she repeated, responding to his baffled expression and mistaking its cause. He cared nothing for the statue. He was trying to remember where he was.

“It is an incarnation you might not have seen. But an important one. Especially now. He is surrounded by the gifts he brought to humankind. To all of us, although the rich have stolen them away. There you see—a motorcar, a camera, a radio, a freezer, an electric range.”

Rael was lying in a canvas tent. It had a peaked ceiling, supported by two poles. The woman sat next to the zippered entrance, the ceiling only a few feet above her head. It was too low for her to stand upright.

“Angkhdt teaches us to share ourselves,” she continued. “If the poor don’t help each other, who will help us? Not the factory owners and the bureaucrats.” In a sweet low voice she quoted:

“I was lost; you found me.
I was hungry, so you fed me.
I was empty and you filled me.
Then you kissed me on the lips.”

To Rael she looked both old and young. Her body was supple, her face was smooth and unlined. But her eyes were ancient, and her hair, which hung in a long braid over her shoulder, was coarse and white. Her hands upon her knees were wrinkled, and the veins on them were thick and knotted.

“I saw you wandering in the crowd,” she said. “This is the festival of loving kindness—no one should look like you. No one should have a face like yours. You have lost a precious thing. Is it not so?”

Now he remembered. A string of firecrackers exploded outside the tent, and he remembered. Somewhere he could hear Enid’s laughter, and his world, which had seemed so dark and cramped when he awoke, now expanded to include the entire unseen festival outside. “Yes,” he said.

Smells and noises filtered through the canvas walls. And part of it was the smell of his own body. He lay naked on the mat, and his skin was sensitive and fresh, as if several unnecessary layers of skin had been scraped away. He raised himself to his knees, searching for his shorts.

“Take these,” said the woman. She put her hand upon a pile of clothing by her knee. “They belong to my husband, yet he will share them. Great Angkhdt tells us to share everything we have.”

A pair of baggy trousers and a grey cotton shirt—Rael fumbled the shirt over his head. The woman sat watching him. He struggled with the trousers in the tight space, saved from embarrassment by the gravity of her expression, which nevertheless could not conceal a certain soft amusement. “My husband is a smaller man,” she said. “Smaller than you. But these are large for him.”

Outside, Enid shrieked with laughter. “You’ve been asleep two hours,” the woman said. “Now it is time. Paradise is rising now. I can feel it rising in my heart.”

“Something gone,” said Rael carefully. “Now lost.” He was on his knees, with his head close to the mildewed ceiling. He too could feel something in his heart; he raised his fingers to his breast and tested the flesh there experimentally. He looked into the woman’s face and he saw something. Her eyes were brimming over with tears.

“Hush,” she said. “Hush.”

She was dressed in a loose tunic made of the same fabric as the clothing she had given him. Her sleeve fell away from her arm as she raised her hand to her cheek. “Ah,” she said—her face was full of pain, and then she smiled. And at that moment there was a noise outside the tent, a shouting and a whistling and a banging of pots and bells and fireworks—a sound so full of layers, so full of different tones and loudnesses that Rael wondered whether everyone on the entire mountain had found a noise to make, except for him and the old woman.

But then the zipper near her hand was torn open from the bottom to the top, and the quiet darkness in the tent was severed by an edge of light. First a single straight line, and then a triangle, and Enid’s face was in the burning gap; she had a sparkler in her hand. “Come out,” she cried, “it’s happening.”

She yanked back the flap to show them, and even from inside the tent they could see how the horizon above the eastern wall of the caldera was ablaze. There were strange patterns in the sky, shifting waves of iridescent light, streaks of orange that opened up the sky in the same way that their tent had been ripped open, to reveal some impossibly bright firmament.

The old woman was already scrambling out, and Rael followed her. “Grandma! Grandma!” shouted Enid and Jane, dancing up and down with sparklers in their hands. A whole group of men and women were with them—neighbors from other tents, perhaps, and they were laughing and embracing one another, and pointing at the sky. From all around came the noise of firecrackers, of shouts and screams that mingled with the smell of gunpowder and hashish. People were cheering and clapping, because at that moment, as Rael and the old woman stood side by side, the silver rim of Paradise showed above the eastern wall.

There was a cooking fire outside the tent, and a few men still squatted by it with bottles in their hands. One held a metal spatula, and he was covering over the embers with dirt. When he was finished, he came and shook Rael by the hand. “Welcome,” he said. “I’m glad to see they fit okay.” He reached out to brush some sand from Rael’s sleeve. “How was your trip?” he asked, indicating the scratch on Rael’s forearm. “Did you learn anything?”—words that were scarcely audible in the blare of the crowd. Rael smiled and nodded, not understanding, not listening, for he was staring toward the east, where Paradise was rising. “All of us are looking and not finding it,” the man continued. “I just want you to know, you’re among friends.”

He was a dense and compact man, with a strong handshake. His head was shaved on top, to commemorate the baldness of St. Abu Starbridge. “It is traditional tonight not to share names.” He smiled. “But you’ve met the girls. They told you—we’re from Cochinoor.”

“Thank you,” said Rael, shouting above the din, which every moment had grown louder.

“I’ve asked the girls to take you to the stage tonight. But remember, you’re free to come back here afterward to sleep.”

“Thank you,” repeated Rael. “Eating, sleeping in the darkness, and that sweet silver, that bright golden, and that orange light.”

For the first time the man’s frank gaze was complicated with a small trace of uncertainty. Then he smiled—“Exactly right,” he said. In his left hand he still held his spatula, while with the other he caressed Rael’s forearm. Now he let go to turn and face the sky.

Above them, the mists on the summit of Mt. Nyangongo had blown away, revealing red streams of lava dripping through the rocks. Now Paradise was rising, impossibly huge, almost too bright to tolerate. Rael lifted up his hand. He turned back to the mountain, where the silver light of Paradise was chasing its steep flanks. Now the darkness was cracked open, and Rael put his hand to his head.

“Snow,” he said, a word which Cassia had taught him, when she had told him about the north part of the world. “Snow,” he said again. For he saw the high mountain in the snow under the moon. The snow thick as the silver light of Paradise, and the light was catching at the mist upon Mt. Nyangongo, so that the sky was full of silver flecks.

Around him, the crowd, the clamor, and the bustling din fell silent. He took a few steps forward and almost fell. And with one part of his mind he was aware of the man’s hand upon his arm, and the old woman’s voice saying, “It’s the drug, don’t worry—it’s the drug.” In the other part he was alone in the bright snow, in that far northern land.

But not for long. Paradise was rising. The sound of the crowd rose up around him, and now another sound too, the stuttering of gunfire.

Slowly, laboriously, a helicopter struggled over the caldera’s rim. Painted silver, shining with the light of Paradise, it wobbled like a wounded insect in the sky. Something was wrong with its steering mechanism, and its tail was revolving slowly around its head. It was flying low. And it was firing rockets and flares out of its belly. They were hitting something; Rael could see the flames rise up nearby. Yet in the crowd around him no one seemed to be afraid. The helicopter was a magical and, for most of them, unprecedented sight—only a few had ever been imported.