The Cult of Loving Kindness (7 page)

It was a java tree, its fat trunk covered with a scarlet tar. Half its roots thrust up into the air; the other half was still embedded in the earth. Rael squatted down and pulled himself into the triangular cavity under the tree. When it fell, the trunk had cracked apart, and there was a fissure in the wood above his head. Rael pounded the heel of his hand against the bark, hoping to frighten away any biting lizard or constrictor that had made its home inside. Then he reached in and pulled out his equipment, which he had secreted there on previous visits: one long perfect spear of heartwood and a steel spike.

The heartwood he had cut himself. During the long march to the village when Rael was still a child, Mr. Sarnath had from time to time explained the properties of certain plants. Cassia had learned them all; he none of them but this, for he had tripped upon the heartwood root and gashed himself so deeply that he had remembered when he chanced to find it in the forest. He had stripped away its leaves, its branches, and the soggy, fibrous flesh of its long stalk until the heartwood was laid bare. Yet it was so tough that even then he had not contrived to break it from its root.

So he had left it there, naked, pointed to the sky, half a day’s peripatetic journey from the village, and he had returned only when he found the spike. That he had scavenged from the wreckage of an old factory—one of the ruins in the jungle hills. Most of the metal had already found a second life—put to more productive uses in the village, but this spike he had found himself when there was no one else around. He had worn it sharp between two stones, and brought it to the heartwood tree. Then he had smashed the tree down to the ground and scraped clean his long spear.

Now he pulled it from his hole in the cracked trunk.

 

At that time, fifteen hundred days after the master’s death, Mr. Sarnath was living in a one-room cabin, which the novices had constructed for him at the top of the hill. As he got older he had drawn into himself, and he preferred to spend his time in solitary meditation. Cassia came up every day after school to care for him and cook his food.

 

The cabin was constructed on a frame of dry bamboo. Its walls were plaited palm. In the heat of the day, the dark interior was pierced with beams of light. One, stretching unbroken between a spot on the floorboards and a small hole in the roof, gave him particular pleasure, and often when the sun was bright he would spend an entire day seated on a comfortable cushion, watching that taut beam of light change color subtly in front of him, and change its angle by methodical degrees. Whatever countryside his mind was traveling, he found in that bright wire a small connection to the world, for without thinking he could see the turning of the earth, and see also with immense precision just what kind of day it was, by examining at any moment the metallic content of the wire—how much silver, how much gold, how much copper, how much brass.

He was never taken by surprise, for example, when the sun passed behind a cloud. He would close his eyes the instant before the beam of light was broken, and open them an instant after it had reappeared. Or when evening fell and the sun sank at last behind the teakwood trees, already he’d have turned his face away.

As evening fell he would get up. He would put on his dressing gown and he would sit out on his small veranda with a glass of water. He would watch for Cassia to come along the rutted track. At the crest of the hill there was a bald place in the trees with the cabin in the middle of it, built on thin and rocky soil. Mr. Sarnath could see from the veranda a hundred yards along the track, to where it emerged from the wood beside a banyan tree. And though in those days his mind was never concentrated on one thing, still part of him would watch for her, and he would wait for the sight of her in her white dress. Below the banyan tree the path fell steeply to the village; climbing up, she always paused to catch her breath beside the tree, just at the moment she came into sight.

Near sunset on the same evening that Rael drew his spear out of the hollow log, Mr. Sarnath was sitting out on his veranda at his desk, a small wooden table with a top of lacquered ebony. It supported an oil lamp, an inkwell, and six hundred sheets of paper scattered over a palm-leaf blotter. Among them in its nest of parchment lay the dull brown ancient, strange, distorted skull, covered with carvings, which he had taken from the customs deputy at Camran Head and carried on his back a thousand miles, all the time that Cassia and Rael were growing up.

Now he picked it up in his thin hands. With the sleeve of his dressing gown he polished it behind the jaw, where the deputy’s carving was most exquisite. Then he held it up to stare at it, looking deep into its eyeholes. They were rimmed with silver, and there was silver too behind its grinning teeth.

After the master died his senior students had tried to burn the parchment, as he had commanded. But it was treated with some chemical that rendered it impervious to fire. And so they had buried it too, buried it and the skull together in the same hole, obeying the master as completely as they could. Mr. Sarnath had been with them. But at about the same time that he moved out of the village and up into his cabin on the hilltop, he went out to dig it up, carrying a lantern and a mattock in the black of night. That night too he had stood polishing it, wiping the dirt out of its face, surprised to see that it was no different, that the paper which surrounded it was still intact, for the earth was full of vermin. Vermin crept out of the hole that he had made.

Much later, after Mr. Sarnath’s death, scholars from the University of Charn would hold an inquest, and with the superstition of born atheists would suggest that he had trafficked at this period with Magdol Starbridge, a loathsome succubus with naked breasts. It was not true. Sarnath was simply curious. And if there was a sin involved, it was at most the sin of arrogance. Sitting by himself day after day, meditating on the master’s lessons, he felt that he had reached a wall he could not cross. The master was pragmatic in all things: his goal had been to found a village and then help the villagers to live in it, at peace with others and themselves. His maxims had been practical, his metaphors concrete, accessible to everyone.

But Mr. Sarnath, ever since the night when he had seen the moth drown in the bowl, had felt himself blessed with the potentiality of understanding. As he thought more and more about them, the simplicity of the master’s lessons became frustrating. He was no longer interested in what to do, how to behave. Especially as he saw the village go astray, and the power in the village gathered into hands he did not trust, he was no longer content to obey. He wanted to follow the master into a rarefied and better world, where all phenomena were understood.

Five months—five hundred days—after the master’s death, he disinterred the skull and took it to his house. He felt it was a clue, because he had seen the reaction of the master, how in the moment of his death he had been shocked out of his thoughts. At that instant he had found out something that had stunned him, opened his eyes, perhaps, the way Mr. Sarnath’s had been opened on that night at his desk in Caladon. It was as if the master had mounted on a ladder through the door of death, and if he had turned around at last and ordered that the ladder be torn down and burnt and buried in a hole, perhaps it was because he did not trust the villagers to use new knowledge wisely, when he was not there to guide them.

In the village Mr. Sarnath had kept his thinking to himself. But on the veranda of his cabin on the hilltop, he laid the skull out on his table, where he could see it every day. That evening as he sat watching, he held it up between his hands and rubbed it, moving his dry fingertips over the parietal bone, following with his fingertips the complicated sequence of small figures: the master gathering his scattered people and striking out into the wilderness to form a new community. He picked a cloth up from the table. Wrapping it around his thumb, he rubbed at an imagined blemish on the zygomatic.

In fact, long contemplation of the skull had told him nothing. But after ten months, his translation of the manuscript was already half complete. It lay around him on the desk, almost a thousand verses, or, as he called them, “paradigms.” He searched for the first page. There it was: “Oh my beloved, let me pleasure you and kiss you, for you are like a God to me, that I may worship with my body, and your kisses help me, and heal me, and give me comfort, and illuminate my life. In your presence my heart is full of a new sensation, which is partly joy… .”

His was a race that was gifted with languages. Always they had lived as foreigners in other people’s countries. Whatever place had been their home was lost, its location forgotten in the cryptic past. Myths and stories that referred to it tended to lack interior logic; anyway, the myths had changed over the generations, so that they no longer represented clues to a real place, a real culture, a real past. Instead the stories had been cast forward to a future where their inconsistencies would matter less: a vision of some ideal future in their own country, and they would be welcome like lost friends.

But in the meantime they had lived in other people’s cities, and they had adopted other people’s habits. And most of what distinguished them, beyond the physical differences of their bodies, had been in some way forced upon them—their limited employment opportunities, their long gauze robes and masks, the bells that in some southern cities they had been obliged to wear, sewn into their sleeves. They had taken these restrictions and made a culture out of them. They had spoken a dozen dialects of other people’s languages.

When the master had come out from Caladon, and with a handful of refugees he had founded in the deepest woods his little town, and he had said, “This is the place; the time is now,” it had been part of his dream that they should form one people, speak one tongue. Nevertheless, Sarnath had learned snatches of many languages when he was growing up. And in the world he had learned more, when he was teaching the precepts of the master to his clients at the Caladon frontier. He had taught them humility, and detachment, and the futility of all human enterprise, the counterproductive nature of desire. In return he had learned patience, and thoughtfulness, and wisdom, and obscenities and supplications in another fifty tongues, all of which were useful when, in solitude on his veranda in the evening of his life, he bent his mind to his translation of the Song of Angkhdt, from the original Bekata manuscript—an unknown alphabet but not completely unfamiliar—into his own Treganu dialect.

During the day he meditated in his room. In the evening he worked on his translation. In the endless litany of love that makes up the first part of the Holy Song, he had searched in vain for clues to what the master meant. “Burn these papers!”—why on earth? What was the harm? Now, waiting for Cassia, holding up the skull in his starved hands, he thought he understood. For only in the past day had he finally recognized what he was doing. It is not until the 940th verse that the prophet’s name is actually mentioned in the text; at ten o’clock the night before, when he had sounded out for the first time that crabbed, mysterious syllable, he had sat back with a strange lurching in his heart.

All winter and long into spring, the citizens of Charn and Caladon had been obliged by law to memorize large portions of the Holy Song. But by midsummer, so thoroughly had the questioners performed their work, all that learning was forgotten, broken, rooted out, persisting only among covens of witches, Starbridge renegades, and followers of the Cult of Loving Kindness. It was possible for an educated man like Mr. Sarnath, a man whose work had actually involved from time to time the persecution and exposure of the Cult, never to have known any of the old words. It was not until he had deciphered the 940th verse, working close to midnight by the light of his oil lamp, that he understood.

I will bring a bag of pearls,
Enough to spell my name out on the ground.
And you will spell my name out on the ground,
And you will spell it “ANGKHDT.”

He had written “Onket.” He had stared at the unfamiliar word, testing it in his mouth for the first time. Then he had sat back. His hand and pen had fallen slackly to his side.

That day, almost for the first time, his meditation had seemed bitter and unprofitable to him, and he had risen from his cushion prematurely, with aching knees. Now the sun was going down. Long shadows slunk across the floor of the veranda. With his thumb he rubbed along the maxillary bone, along a sleeping image of the master. Then he paused, remembering the statue of St. Abu Starbridge, which he had kept upon his desk that last night at his post in Caladon. He remembered the golden star inlaid upon the saint’s copper palm, glinting in the moonlight. Perhaps that too had been a sign. A moth was drowning in a bowl of light—one tiny circumstance had led him on a long and weary path. But perhaps also it had been the image of the saint that had led him to the place where he now sat, a mental journey just as long and complicated as the physical had been, through swamps and forests just as thick.

He raised his eyes. There at the clearing’s edge, Cassia stood beside the banyan tree, her skirt rucked up around her hips. She was standing with her hand outstretched, her fingers buried in an enormous tassel of roots which hung down near her, searching for the ground. She was carrying a basket of fruit upon her back—jackfruit, selamat, and durian.

 

There was a place for him to lie invisible above the pool. He lay crouched behind a boulder in the mouth of an old culvert, which had fed the dye pit of some ancient factory. Near his hand crept one of the fat rael bugs that had given him his name, its carapace clicking in the dirt. When he was a child he had been able to imitate the sound.

 

The silver pool was a round concrete cistern, perhaps fifty feet from edge to edge. Opposite where he lay hidden, a narrow waterfall coursed down a slope of bricks, pure water from the stream above. But whether there was still some residue in the bottom of the cistern, or whether some of the numerous pipes which hung out over it still dripped some ancient effluent, the pool itself retained a milky color, a distinctive smell.