The Cult of Loving Kindness (37 page)

“Get something,” he shouted. “Go and help.” And it was as if the words were spoken by another person. They seemed so out of place in that small tent. In the outside world, people were standing, waiting, moving—he could see some legs outside the entrance, and he could see the shadows of some other people move across the side of the tent, cast by the rising sun.

“Don’t worry about them,” she said, close to his ear. “Be with me now.”

 

Part 14:
Sweet Rangriver
E
arly that morning, Enver Shaw died in Carbontown hospital from the whipping he’d received. A candlelight vigil, organized by the miners’ wives, turned violent when the news came. At seven o’clock the executive committee of the UGM announced a four-day protest; by midmorning, the blast furnaces were silent for the first time since the mine had been reopened. The cog railway was silent, the pit was silent, the mountain and the town were muffled by a new cloud of silence in which individual human voices could acquire a new stridency. Four thousand people stood silent on the maidan when Nanda Dev read the petition and the list of grievances. They were still there at three o’clock when rumors of the bishop’s death began to seep in through the fence.

 

All that day, a pressure had been building in the forest. Brother Longo had erected his branding iron by the bishop’s tent. By dusk his voice was hoarse with constant preaching, and he had managed to baptize more than a thousand new converts to the Cult of Loving Kindness. Only he had changed the ceremony so that the temperature of the brand was lower, and so that the initiates did not receive the brand upon their dominant hand; he wanted them for fighting.

At nightfall he lit bonfires, and still the converts came. Miss Azimuth had laid out the bishop’s body on a plastic tarpaulin, and for nine hours she labored over it. She drained out the blood. She cut small holes through the back of the bishop’s nostrils and her mouth, and with a long silver hook she pulled out the heart, the brain, the lungs, the viscera. These she set aside for relics. Then she packed the body’s empty case with cotton wadding soaked in tincture of formaldehyde: She rubbed the bishop’s skin with a bicarbonate of soda, which she had mixed with perfume and with many astringent herbs. She worked far into the night, and pilgrims from every village in that sector of the forest came to watch her, came to admire the bishop’s placid beauty. Many of them would not have crossed a rice field to see her when she was alive. Her dead body had a more compelling power than her words or her ambiguous self.

Rael had slept most of the morning. But in the afternoon he sat with the others, watching Miss Azimuth. He sat in the first circle, his face alternating between concentration and abstraction, and he watched the old woman stitch up Cassia’s body under the bright sun. Occasionally he would wrinkle his nostrils as Miss Azimuth applied some new spice or herb or compress; he didn’t speak. He seemed taken by a peculiar lethargy. Nor did he seem to notice that he also had excited some attention, and that the pilgrims were staring at him and whispering to each other.

In the evening Longo Starbridge came to sit beside him. He had been talking all day in his deep public voice, and it was all used up. Even though pilgrims sat close by, he spoke to Rael in a thin private tone. He put his curved palm up to Rael’s ear and whispered into it. But he couldn’t tell whether Rael understood; after a few minutes the boy raised up his hand. He made a brushing motion by his ear.

It was Longo Starbridge’s intention to attack the sweet potato fields at the perimeter of Carbontown. All day he had been preaching to his soldiers. And as the hours wore on he had been preaching also to a growing crowd of pilgrims. They were unarmed but they were hopeful. All together they made an impressive sight—impressive enough, thought Longo Starbridge, who didn’t anticipate much actual fighting.

It was his intention to attack the fence at dawn. He imagined the soldiers of Paradise led by two men carrying a bier, on which in awful splendor lay the body of the last bishop of Charn. For this reason he had asked Miss Azimuth to hurry with the process of embalming; though the old woman had been eager to start, she had been grumbling and complaining all day because her fingers were so stiff, because she did not have the correct tools, because she did not have the time to do a perfect job. Her small voice had buzzed around her as she worked, and by the time the lanterns and the bonfires were lit, she was almost finished. The plastic tarpaulin had disappeared under a bed of flowers, on which Cassia lay in state. She wore a golden wedding dress which had been donated by a rich shopkeeper from Cochinoor. Her skin was painted and her hair was carefully arranged. Two local cosmeticians had helped Miss Azimuth at the end, and they had combed out Cassia’s tangled curls, and had arranged them in the latest style around a rhinestone tiara. She wore a garter belt, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes.

All the time that they were dressing her, Rael sat a few feet away, sometimes watching, sometimes not. Longo Starbridge, when he came to sit beside him, couldn’t tell whether he understood what he was supposed to do—that he was supposed to be one of the two men who carried the bishop’s bier in the attack.

Toward midnight when Miss Azimuth was finished, the Cult of Loving Kindness broke its camp. Carrying torches, they moved through the woods toward Carbontown, a disorganized and random crowd. In the middle of it moved Cassia’s body, and she was surrounded by a swell of voices and her litter moved like a small boat caught in a current—hesitating often, turning often to avoid small obstacles. A burly soldier carried the front end, and he was replaced every hour or so when he was tired. But Rael carried the back end; at the last moment he had come forward and had pushed aside the soldier—Longo Starbridge’s alternative—who was spitting on his palms. Rael picked up the burden and refused to surrender it. Glowering, his face set in a mask of anger, he carried it throughout the night and in the morning too.

At six o’clock, in small dazed groups, the crowd began to come out of the wood, and they moved through the fields to Carbontown. Many stopped to dig the sweet potatoes from the ground, and some lit fires for breakfast. They had met no one in the forest, no one in the fields. The security battalion had withdrawn to the fence, and as the morning progressed there was some shooting. There were casualties. But from his position near the gate, Longo Starbridge could see through his binoculars a crowd of miners on the ridge beyond the fence. He could see the company office building surrounded by a mass of miners. They had climbed up into the scaffolding and had hung the colors of the UGM from the main catwalk.

The security battalion could see this too. At ten o’clock they surrendered their weapons and opened the gate, in return for certain guarantees. They turned over Benjamin Cathartes to a delegation of the union, led by Nanda Dev.

At ten-thirty the first relief arrived, a detachment of riot police on horseback, sent from the lumber farm at Cochinoor. They were commanded by an adjunct from the school of forestry, a man who favored direct action. He came riding up the road, and when he saw the banners of the Cult of Loving Kindness grouped around the bishop’s bier, he gave an order to disperse the crowd. This order he rescinded as soon as he understood what was happening, but for about twenty minutes there was mayhem. A company of horsemen, carrying riot shields and dressed in plastic armor, charged across the field into a mass of unarmed pilgrims.

Longo Starbridge and the rest had already entered Carbontown. He had the skull of Angkhdt; at that moment he was standing in the guardhouse at the gate, the skull of Angkhdt between his big red hands. At that moment, only Miss Azimuth still accompanied the bishop’s body—Miss Azimuth, four soldiers, and about three dozen women, for everyone else had moved forward to the gate. When she saw the horsemen coming toward her, she screamed. She hobbled away over the uncertain ground. The women and the soldiers scattered also, dropping their flags. The dog’s head of Angkhdt, the shining sun of Abu Starbridge wafted to the ground, and over them rode the heavy horses, their hooves and claws impeded by the mud, impeded by the furrows. The riot police had nightsticks, and they chased the women back into the trees.

Rael watched them go. The soldier who had been supporting the front of the bier had fled with them, leaving him alone. The bier had collapsed forward, and Cassia’s body had slid down the wooden ramp, pushing a mound of lilies, orchids, and white hyacinth off onto the ground. Rael stood with his arms aching, his hands still clasped around the poles. He was looking down at his feet. He was not paying much attention; the air was cool. Sounds seemed muffled to him. Clouds had covered over the sun. There had been people around him; now he was alone. Through the morning ground mist, which seemed to have persisted in this corner of the sweet potato field, he could see traces of erratic movement. He could hear shouts, and even a little gunfire. His arms were cramped and weak.

But he raised his head when he heard a new kind of noise. In front of him, ten feet away, stood an animal. It was four-legged, black, and huge.

Mr. Sarnath had owned a donkey once, when Rael and Cassia were very young. They had ridden on its back. And Rael remembered horses from the towns where they had lived. But not like this. This one stood without moving. Its arched neck, its heavy head were higher than his own. Its horns, its beak were painted red, and the flesh around its eyes was painted also. Its wide strong back was loaded with bundles, loaded with bags behind its plastic saddle.

Its rider had fallen. Maybe he’d been shot. There was no sign of it; there was no mark. But he sat with his legs splayed in the mud, his round plastic helmet sunk upon his breastplate. He too made no motion.

Rael laid the bier upon the ground. He rubbed his elbows and his forearms for a moment, thinking, listening to the high, thin, airless breath of the animal, whistling through the slit in its beak.

A high, thin, creaking music, and it meant something. Rael let it seep into his mind, displacing thought. He used a technique that Mr. Sarnath had once shown him. Sarnath and Cassia—no. But that was gone. Instead he let his body move, and it seemed to him then that he was the only moving agent on that field. Other horsemen, other pilgrims had disappeared in the small mist.

And the plastic rider in front of him was sitting with his legs splayed out. He didn’t even raise his head as Rael approached. He didn’t even raise his head as Rael untied one of the bundles from the horse’s back. It was a zippered duffel bag. Rael opened it and dumped out into the mud a primus stove, a dozen pots and pans. They clanged and banged and that too was a kind of music.

Cassia had fallen from the litter and was lying on her side. Flowers lay around her; he brought the duffel bag back to the bier and loaded it with flowers. He loaded Cassia in. Her body was lighter than he had remembered. He plucked off her high-heeled shoes and dropped them to the ground. He eased the zipper shut over her feet.

Now at the limit of his mind he could hear shouting. But he did not allow himself to hurry. He knew this was part of the myth also, how the antinomial took the bishop’s body and disappeared with it into the wood, leading his horse north along the road, to Cochinoor and then beyond. In the story he was not pursued. The rider had not raised his head.

He tied the bag across the saddlebow. It sagged down on either side. He took the horse’s bridle. By pulling it, he set the world in motion once again.

 

Epilogue
T
hat summer, a new irregularity in the mechanism of the heavens brings Paradise within the reach of earth again, two hundred days after the bishop’s death. On the night of December third, in the seventeenth phase of summer, it rises again over Mt. Nyangongo, whose crater is again filled with an expectant crowd. To them it seems to take up half the sky. It sheds a golden light.

In Carbontown the light touches the skeleton of the burnt-out office building. It touches the cold smokestacks. It finds the grave of Deccan Blendish by the fig tree. Benjamin Cathartes, taking supper in his cell in Cochinoor, sees it glow upon the window ledge. It casts a shadow of the grate.

In the forest, the light is soft, liquid, thick. It falls from leaf to leaf. Farther north where the trees falter in the chalky soil, the light seems harsher and more uniform, more a quality of the air.

The trees give out entirely on the bank of a shallow river. On the night of the third, a horseman walks his horse over the stones.

The land rises quickly on the other side. The rider takes his horse along the gorge and then dismounts to lead it up through the thick grass. He is tired. It’s been a hundred miles since he passed a town.

The grass at the top of the rise is full of insects and rodents, and the horse is distracted by small sudden noises. It is hungry. It pulls on the bridle. But the man is looking northward, to where the light of Paradise is breaking on the glaciers of a range of mountains.

He pulls himself back up into the saddle. They ride for a few hours. At midnight the land changes and they come out into a broad shallow bowl. The light is overhead now and it is underfoot, reflected from a circle of old concrete which lines the bottom of the bowl. It forms a flat expanse perhaps two thousand feet across, split apart in some places and in others still retaining vestiges of paint. Everywhere the moss has spread in complicated patterns, following the cracks.

The horse’s hooves make a flat sound like the clapping of a hand. They pass by the remnants of three small buildings, surrounded by a rotten wire fence. Rael doesn’t look at them, and he ignores also the four gigantic metal tubes—all broken, all fallen on their sides but one, which is still pointed like an arrow at the sky.

It doesn’t take long for steel to crumble in this country. Even in summer, the wind is cold and harsh here. The rider doesn’t feel it. He bloats his lungs with the cold air. It is like food to him, better food than the dried turnip which he gnaws without dismounting.