The Cult of Loving Kindness (8 page)

Birds circled overhead. Near Rael’s hand, lizards crept among the mossy pipes. On an overhanging ledge a monkey and a dinko grimaced at each other; one threw a stone. Apart from that it was a peaceful place. The waterfall provided a soft, comfortable clamor; it ran down into a steep-sided basin at one end of the pool. But at the other end the slope was gentler. Shyer larger animals came down to drink at a beach of concrete rubble intermixed with pebbles of worn glass—small forest antelopes, and tapirs, and wild dogs. At sunset it seemed as if they had a pact among themselves. Once Rael had seen a tiger squat down by the bank to clean his paws, while nearby slept a fat potbellied pig, dug up to her nostrils in the silver mud.

But there was another beast, one whose malevolence and hunger never rested. This pool was its stalking ground. When it was hunting, the temperature around the pool subsided, and there was milky scum upon the surface of the water. When it was hunting, Rael could feel a prickling on his skin, an ache in his back teeth. It exuded a small sound, an intimate small whispering that seemed to touch Rael in his inner ear. Then he would crouch down out of sight and wait until he saw a movement on the other bank.

He had waited at the pool a dozen times, and felt the change in temperature, and smelt the scum upon the pool; he had watched the creature make a dozen kills before he knew what he was seeing. Only when it was finished he had gone down to the little beach, and he had looked at the creature’s track in the wet sand. And he had looked at the wet bones of a dozen animals half buried in the sand, each one sucked clean, and perhaps a few rags of tattered flesh or feathers.

Now if he concentrated, he could see exactly where the creature was. But its shape and form were still indefinite. Appearing always in the twilight, it seemed covered in a skin of shadow. Sometimes he could see it better from the corner of his eye.

Once, after it had made its kill, he had seen it creep down to the pool to drink. Then he had climbed down to the opposite bank. He had hoped to catch a glimpse of its reflection. But the surface of the pool was too disturbed. He had gone down on his belly, not twenty feet away from it, and he had stared at it across the pool, and listened to the gentle sucking sound it made. Then it had raised its head. For the first time he had seen the glint of its sour eyes and felt a whispering in his mind. “Who are you?” it had asked. “Who are you, that you see so clearly?”

The next day he had waited for it and had watched it feed. Seven small peccaries had come down to the water. And as the strange, amorphous darkness formed in back of one of them, coming down from the jungle on its track of slime, none of the others seemed to notice. None of the others seemed to notice the drop in temperature, the new cold wind. They grunted cheerfully upon the beach. And even the intended victim, turning at last to face its attacker, never made a sound. It stood fascinated, with its head low to the earth. Even when Rael threw a stone to panic all the other animals, still that one stood.

Once Rael had accompanied a novice from the village, who had come up looking for an intact sheet of glass. When the moment came, Rael had seized him by the arm and pointed out across the pool, but the man saw nothing. Only he was concerned that Rael had touched him; with a wry smile on his bony alien face, he had pulled his arm away.

In the weeks that followed, Rael had gathered weapons, a spear of heartwood and a steel spike. On the evening of the day that Mr. Sarnath had spent meditating on the Song of Angkhdt, at the moment when Cassia stood by the banyan tree, her skirt pulled up around her hips, Rael raised his head off of the boulder. The sun had sunk below the hilltops, and the basin of the pool had filled with shadow. A scarlet ibis and its somber mate were wading near the beach.

 

Cassia untucked her skirt and it fell down around her legs. She squatted to pick up the gourd of water, which she had carried in her arms up the steep slope. She worked her bare feet down into the dirt. Squeezing the fat gourd between her palms, she lifted it in one clean rush and settled it upon a ring of wicker on her head. Then, supporting it with one hand, she rose up slowly, the other arm outstretched for balance, her tongue protruding from the middle of her lips.

 

Mr. Sarnath watched her make her way across the clearing toward his house. He had been the master’s favorite pupil when he was a boy, and the master had taught him to be careful always, even in the midst of speculation, to appreciate the offerings of his senses. Mr. Sarnath, though his mind was at that moment full of blank misgivings, allowed his heart to be lifted when he saw her. He moved the dry pads of his fingers over the incisions in the skull. A fly was buzzing on the steps. The garbage pile behind the house exuded a sweet smell. Cassia’s hair was black, her lips were wide. As she got closer he examined her more closely—the sweat around her mouth, the spot upon her chin—with a minute appreciation that included not the slightest spark of sensuality.

She stood beside the steps that led to the veranda. Curling the fingers of her left hand under the lip of the gourd, she twisted herself out from underneath it, so that it fell straight down to earth. It made a glug, and slopped some water on her hand.

Mr. Sarnath had risen from his chair. He stood on the top step. Cassia stripped the wicker basket from her back and held it up for him. When he had taken it, she wiped the hair out of her mouth. Bending down, she took a double handful of water from the gourd and rinsed her face with it. “Come,” she said. “Leave that and come down into the sun. I bet you’ve been inside all day.”

Mr. Sarnath shook his head. He stared out at the shadows on the grass. Then he turned. The brown skull watched him from the center of the desk.

“Come down,” cried Cassia. And there was something in her voice that changed his mind and helped him to decide. Carrying the basket, he disappeared indoors, and then returned almost immediately holding an old cloth bag. It had once been yellow.

“Vanity,” said Mr. Sarnath. “Vanity is still the hardest.”

“What?” Cassia had come up to stand behind him. Surprised, she watched him wrap the skull in parchment and stuff it down into the bag. The bag had a long throat. He twisted it, then tied it in a knot.

“When you light the fire tonight, use that paper.”

He motioned toward the tabletop, where the six hundred sheets of his own handwriting lay scattered. Then he turned around to face her.

“But you worked on it so long,” she said.

“I was deluded.”

He slung the bag over his shoulder and walked down the steps. The heat of the day was now abated, and the sun was shining through the long trunks of the trees. He scuffed his sandals in the dust—an area of crushed stone near the steps. Then when his toes had settled in their thongs, he set off toward the wood, the strips of alternating sun and shadow causing minute fluctuations in the temperature of his long cheeks.

His people did not sweat, not like the humans, whose skins were always damp. He could tell that she was close behind him by her smell, for she was quiet as a cat, and in the movement of her greasy limbs he could hear none of the incidental noises that he made when he walked. None of the small creaking, the whisper of the flesh rubbing the bone, just the silence of a wild animal, her and her brother. Then he paused, and turned to her and smiled, aware that his own disappointment had turned outward, as it sometimes did. Hundreds of nights of wasted labor hung suspended in his yellow bag.

She smiled back at him, and then they walked companionably into the wood, following a path that ran in back of the cabin, past the garbage dump, and left the crest of the hill at right angles to the way that she had come. “Where are we going?” she asked once, but he shrugged his narrow shoulders. He had decided, and in fact the path led only to one place. They pushed through a dark undergrowth of spiderbushes, rhododendron, jacaranda. Stepping carefully downhill, Cassia had to raise her forearms to protect her face against the branches whipping back. In a few minutes she came out at the lip of the ravine, a cleft between one hill and the next. Mr. Sarnath was standing in the sunlight on a bare place on the rock.

The ravine followed a break in the forest canopy, and the yellow sun was shining, its strength not yet used up. It was cooler here than on the hilltop, and the air was fresh and smelled of water. Deep below them at the bottom of the hill where it was already dark with shadow, she could hear the gurgle of a stream.

“This will do,” said Mr. Sarnath. He was standing on the edge, his arm outstretched, the long bag dangling from his hand. He opened up his fingers and the bag dropped down, bouncing off the incline and then rolling in a scatter of black dirt until it disappeared into a crevice in the rock.

He turned around. “The sun leaves here last. It’s perfectly safe.” In fact the rock seemed free of beetles and corrosive slugs; it was a wide flat piece of limestone. Mr. Sarnath sat down suddenly, collapsing on his creaking knees. Perched cross-legged, he looked like a gaunt bird atop its nest. Cassia took a seat more gingerly. She was very thirsty.

“Now,” said Mr. Sarnath, leaning toward her. “What did you learn in school today?”

He had asked her the same question many times and never listened to the answer. When he was irritated or distressed he would take refuge in a few stiff, formal questions, designed to take him out of his own thoughts. He would set his face into a mask of concentration, which never fooled her, for she knew him well. But this time, as she started to recite the circumstances of the master’s death, she could tell that he was listening. His body started to relax and sag, and he slipped toward her down the rock.

“ ‘In the center house there is a teacher,’ ” Cassia recited. “ ‘He is waiting for me there, and he has made a place for me among the last circle of novices.’ ”

Around them, the first peepers of the evening had come out, scarlet tree frogs, and when they sang their throats swelled up as big as they. Mr. Sarnath turned his head. There was one sitting on a rhododendron tree ten feet away.

“Interesting,” he said at last. He furrowed up his brow and then turned back. “What did you say to that?”

“No one said anything. It was the last lesson.”

“But you remember.”

“Of course,” said Cassia. “It was just this afternoon.”

“No—you remember when the master died. You were there.”

Cassia frowned. “I was just a child.”

“No. Is that what Langur Bey told you? You sat there between my legs. Don’t you remember what the master said?”

She would have answered, but he raised his hand. He pointed toward the lowest branch of a tall tree, which hung out over the edge of the ravine. Just for an instant she could see a flicker of movement there, a flash of iridescent feathers.

“Interesting,” Mr. Sarnath said again. “That you can tell a lie to a whole group of people who were witness to the truth.”

“Oh, Papa, it was school. That’s all.”

“I am not your father,” he said automatically. Then he smiled. Around them, the world was settling down, the shadows spreading, the colors mutating in the last of the sun. The sweat was dry on Cassia’s skin. “Shouldn’t we go in?” she asked. “It’ll be dark.”

But Mr. Sarnath put his finger to his lips. On the other side of the ravine, in the cleft of a bloatwood tree, a man-of-the-forest stood erect. His studious little face was turned to them, and he was nuzzling shyly at a piece of branch, the trunk of a long sapling that he had pulled down from above, revealing a crown of flowers on its leafy head. Slowly, tentatively, he stretched out his naked leg, shifting his weight until he hung suspended between the sapling and the tree, spread out against a silver patch of sky. There he was at rest; in a little while he let loose a stream of urine out of his fat paunch, which arched over the lip of the ravine, spattering the darkness down below.

 

There was scum on the water and a dry, cold wind. Rael saw the bird explode in a flurry of bright feathers. He swung himself out of the culvert, dropping thirteen feet onto the bricks, which were confused near there, and so he came down on the side of his right foot and sprawled down to the water, falling on his hands and knees. He staggered up, and already he could barely keep his weight on his right ankle. Already it was swelling; he gathered up his spear to lean on it and looked across at the opposite beach, fifty feet away, where the female ibis strutted unconcerned, and for a moment Rael was sure the beast was gone. He was crying out with anger, kicking at the water with his injured foot, but then he stopped and stood watching the dark, long-legged bird, for she was searching the surface of the water for insects. Untroubled, she was wading through a wreck of scarlet feathers, untroubled also by the raving figure with the useless foot, and then Rael knew her mind was still held captive, as his was. There was a shadow that he couldn’t see with eyes made careless by his injury, a shadow that was waiting for him on the beach under the trees, a creature that was slow and weak, whose only power was a mental one, as he discovered when he took tentative, damaged steps around the pool and found his mind assaulted with a riot of strange shapes and an insinuating noise that seemed to grow inside his skull by slow degrees until it blotted out the beach, the bird, the sinking sun, and he was limping slowly through another, darker place, a darker landscape of the mind which nevertheless had one great burning dot in it, a dot pulsing with light, and he was limping slowly toward that dot until the shattered bricks beneath his feet gave out onto another surface. And though with all his force he was tending toward that dot as if against a pressure that was almost irresistible, still part of his mind was firmly concentrated elsewhere, because he guessed that when his mind was elsewhere he might move faster against an animal whose strength lay in its powers of misdirection; so he was concentrating on the darkness all around him, as if the pure force of his concentration could just puncture through. And all the while he was tending toward the dot, limping and shaking his sharp stick, and raging now with a noise that rivaled the cacophony inside his skull, convinced that if he could just touch that dot with the end of his sharp spear, then he would find the moment that resolves all doubts, the moment also when the beast appears out of the mists of illusion and spews its life out in a cold, choking rush—convinced also (and this was why he was shouting and raging with a maniac desperation) that if the skin of darkness which surrounded him could be punctured, then he would find himself inside another landscape utterly, a landscape that would have nothing to do with the hot wet fecund jungle and the greasy pool, a landscape he had never visited, yet it was achingly familiar: a high harsh grassy upland held in a fist of snow-capped mountains, where he could run and run after the rats, the does, the rabbits, and the silver wolves, and when he found them he could stab and stab and stab.