The Cult of Loving Kindness (13 page)

“Where did you get this?”

She smiled and shook her head. She pulled back her neck so that he could feel some tension in the string, but he did not let go. The moment had passed, and now he was aware of something else in her, some new kind of concern.

“Give it to me,” he said.

She smiled and shook her head, but now he was aware of a new look in her eye, a sudden closure in her eye. It did not alter her expression in the slightest, yet somehow she had changed. A small window had closed, and he grasped the medallion, using his strength for the first time, clutching it with a new kind of desperation, as if he could drag her back just a few inches, just thirty seconds or so back through their conversation, back to the instant before that window shut.

“You can’t wear this,” he said. “Not with Cathartes here.”

He closed his hand upon the devil’s mark, the shining sun of Abu Starbridge. “Give it to me,” he said. “I’ve got a steel dollar in my pocket.”

She shook her head. The smile was gone, and he had not seen it go, although he had been studying her face. She pulled back, and Blendish could see the pressure of the string upon her neck; it made a thin pink line and he thought for the first time: I could force her. It was an idea he suppressed as soon as it had taken shape—suppressed it with a feeling of self-loathing, replacing it instead with a desire to protect. He was right. Doubtless she had picked the medal up somewhere, found it in the woods, got it from some traveling cultist; no one who understood its meaning would dare to wear it openly as decoration. Not with Cathartes here. He tightened his grip on it and then he yanked back with all the force of his frustration. The pink line turned red, and then it disappeared, and he was holding the medallion in his fist.

She was standing above him, her hand upon her neck. What was the expression on her face? Who knew—who ever understood what anyone was feeling? She was standing above him, and then she stepped back off the tarpaulin onto the grass.

“You want too much,” she said.

Her gaze—frank, serious, untroubled—filled him with shame. He bowed his head. When he looked up, she was gone.

 

He sat by the stream until the late afternoon. Toward four o’clock, the butterfly upon the tarpaulin separated its wings for the first time. They split apart suddenly, easily, like the halves of a rock, revealing a seam of turquoise that was completely unexpected, for the underside of the insect’s wings had been dirty and uninteresting. Blendish sat watching, waiting for the butterfly to take its first brave leap into the air. Its wings were dry and fully extended. There was nothing to be gained by the delay. Yet for an hour it barely moved; suddenly disgusted, Blendish brushed it off into the grass. He rose to his feet and packed his things into his bag. Then he climbed back up onto the almond path, sweaty, bad-tempered, out of breath.

 

A hundred yards below the barricade he saw Dr. Cathartes striding toward him. He was frowning and smiling at the same time, and the language in his body seemed to speak of tension, purpose, and excitement. “I was looking for you,” he said, not loudly. Yet Blendish heard him from a dozen yards away, and there was something in his tone that seemed to pierce the pressure of the dull, hot, humid afternoon, pierce it and drain it away. His face was radiant, triumphant.

He was dressed in tailored jungle fatigues, made of pleated cotton, and on the collar Blendish recognized the logo of a fashionable department store in Charn. Weary and dispirited, he stopped in the middle of the path, feeling his gorge rise and his bowels sink as the professor strode up close to him—too close. He stood inches away, and his breath was scented with some kind of mint. He was a handsome man, his skin perfumed and smooth, his lips voluptuous and red—Blendish stood sweating, pimpled, miserable, his mouth slowly filling with saliva.

He had kept the copper medallion in the pocket of his jeans. With his right hand he reached down to touch it, to chafe it in his fingers. “I’ve been looking for you,” Cathartes said. Then he smiled. “Did you find your ape?”

Blendish shook his head. “I’ve got to work farther afield. Today was a dry run. I’m too sick to work properly.” In his pocket, his hand squeezed the medallion tight between his index finger and his thumb.

“You should take a guide. For safety’s sake.” Still smiling, the professor shook his head. “It’s not safe here by yourself—listen, do you remember what I said this morning?”

Blendish did not reply. He was conscious of a subtle ringing in his ears, and his mouth was full of spit.

“I said there was something strange about this place. Now I found a clue.”

He was standing very close. Blendish could barely understand what he was saying, so conscious was he of the professor’s presence—“Listen. An hour ago I went by the new field. Kurt Sofar asked me to come down. There is a retarded man who lives here. An old man. Have you seen him?”

Blendish nodded.

“He was standing in the middle of the field. He had a club in his hand, and with it he had just finished beating a cow almost to death. The animal will have to be destroyed, I think. It was blinded in one eye.”

Blendish nodded. He tried to swallow.

“Can you imagine it? It’s against nature. Wanton cruelty to animals—I wish you could have heard it shriek. The old man just stood there. Sofar was incensed. He needed the animal for his project. This is an act of sabotage to him. He wants to have the fellow whipped.”

The ringing in Blendish’s ears seemed to increase. He brought his hand up to his mouth. “He is retarded,” he ventured.

“Not like that. I had spoken to him before. He was a gentle old man—no, there’s more to it than that. I’ve read about this countless times. I’ve seen photographs. Cruelty to animals—that’s often the first sign. And destruction of property; that creature was important to the village.”

“And so?”

“It’s like poisoning a well. I told the grant committee that there might be some form of devil worship here, some alien offshoot of the Cult of Loving Kindness. I based my proposal on a similarity between some of the sayings of the master and a quotation from the Starbridge catechism. At the time, I thought it was a long shot. But this community was formed after the revolution, when all the devil worshipers had been expelled from Charn.”

Blendish held the medallion in his fist, making a bulge in the pocket of his jeans. He was squeezing it tightly, and as he increased the pressure the ringing in his ears seemed to increase also. He wiped his mouth with his left hand.

Cathartes smiled. “It’s flimsy still, I know. But I’m making progress. And I could make something from this. That man Sarnath is the key. Canan Bey told me that he kept some bones up at his shack, which he was using for some private ritual. And it’s terrible what he did—to kidnap a young human girl and take her from her family. I can’t believe it doesn’t serve some purpose.”

Blendish felt some vomit in his throat. He put his left hand on his mouth. Inches away, Cathartes watched him curiously. “Are you all right?” he asked, his face full of a quick, intolerable solicitude.

Blendish squatted down. With amazement, he watched himself take his right hand out of his pocket. He was squeezing the medallion as hard as he could; then suddenly he stopped, relaxed his fist. And when he opened it to reveal the medallion on his palm, the buzzing in his ears suddenly stopped.

 

In the evening, Mr. Sarnath sat by the old peepul tree below the village. In the middle of a rapidly expanding glade, that one ancient tree stood isolated from the rest. The soil was particularly good there, in the bottomland between two hills. The new agronomists wanted to flood the stream and dam an area eleven acres in extent, where they hoped to experiment with a new type of ochoa shoot, a hybrid developed at the University of Charn.

 

Their plans called for the eradication of the tree, whose roots spread under the entire field. It was a subject that had been debated in the council of elders, debated with a gentle melancholy, for the tree had been among the master’s favorite places. Every morning while he was still strong he had meditated for an hour beneath its branches, and every evening he had slept there for an hour upon a bamboo mat. Remembering this, still Langur Bey had argued for the tree’s destruction. Hesitantly, almost in tears, he had reminded the others that the symbol of a thing is different from the thing itself. Under that very tree, he said, the master had once warned him to be cautious of corporeal attachments.

The council had not yet reached a conclusion. But in anticipation, the agronomists had already marked the trunk—a red X painted on its shaggy bark. In the darkness the mark appeared to glow. Sarnath sat under it, cross-legged, straight-backed, his heart full of a despair too rich for words.

Through this excess of feeling, in his careful, controlled way, Sarnath had approached a kind of peace. The heavy branches stirred softly above him in the tiny wind. So he had often seen it, separate from all the stagnant forest, its massive leaves sensitive to breezes that no other tree could feel. Around him a soft glow from the sky fell upon the silent grass, fell upon the excavations and the fallen trunks that littered the edges of the glade, gilding them, making them perfect, reminding him of the transitory nature of all beauty, reminding him also that no change is wholly bad. His heart felt drunk on poison. Why is it? he asked himself. How is it we have failed? We are not evil men. Our hands were greedy for the grasp of truth, yet it has slipped away.

Nor could he blame the rest of the council and not himself. Yes, he had argued against the production of the ikat trading cloth. But he had taken joy in questioning those first travelers, when the location of the village became known. He had advised the council what to trade for—medicine, laudanum, utensils, books, all of which he had used and enjoyed. Yet he could remember seven separate times when the master had told him to value self-containment above all.

And on that other night of meditation, when he had seen the moth drown in the bowl and his ability to concentrate had reached a keenness it had never approached since—on that same night he had taken the copper medallion from his desk at Camran Head. The guard he’d hoped to bribe had been asleep, yet even so, he had slipped the coin into his pocket instead of throwing it away. He had kept it in the bottom of his pocket, even though he knew how dangerous it was. Who knew better? A dozen times he had chastised the owners of similar medallions—he knew what it had come to mean. Yet he had given it to Cassia to play with. He had threaded it upon a string, so that she could wear it round her neck.

With the pads of his fingers, he tapped himself three times upon his high, flat forehead. Aloud, he repeated a quotation of the master’s: “ ‘When it is no longer possible to live correctly, then it is time to think of further options.’ ”

That night he was waiting for the moon, which was rising in those latitudes for the first time since the month that Cassia and Rael were born. A silver glow was shining to the east. The clouds were full of light and darkness, and they were combed in strips across the sky. Sarnath imagined the clear pure airless void above them, where perhaps the soul mounted after death. Then the moon rose out of a low bank of clouds.

Once, when he was a child, he had sat out with the master underneath the peepul tree, one night when the moon was visible from earth. Then the master had told him of the Starbridge myth, of how the souls of men and women had descended from the moon, had been reborn on earth. And after death, perhaps, they might reascend, either to their lunar paradise, or else farther still to planets less hospitable even than this one.

When he was a child, the moon had been remote. The master, raising his hand toward it, had been able to occlude it with his thumb. Then, the legend had seemed ludicrous to him, and he had not understood how something so absurd could have enslaved whole generations. Now he could understand it better, now that the moon was truly Paradise again, fully one quarter larger even than the last time he had seen it, when Cassia and Rael were born. Now it rose out of the clouds, luminescent, pale, wonderful, the bright sister of the dark and troubled earth, and on its sweet, miraculous surface he could see contours that he could imagine might be mountains; ranges of mountains, shores of glistening seas. And if he looked closer he could see patches of light and darkness, a rolling stippled plain, and on the verge of it what looked like the refractions from a million mirrored roofs—perhaps a town.

He sat staring till the clouds came in again. And when Paradise was covered up he rose to go, pulling himself slowly to his feet, for his knees and back were aching. He put his hand out to the tree trunk for support. Erect, he stood rubbing the bark fondly, sadly, giving a loose strip of it a final farewell tug, and then bringing his fingers to his nose to smell them. Then he was off along the path, climbing through the almond trees up toward the village, his head bent low.

On the way, he passed the new logging camp, and the boundaries of the new plantation. The lights from several long barracks glimmered through the trees. Inside: new men from Cochinoor; he could hear their voices. Underfoot, moonlight glinted on a litter of tin cans. He stepped around them delicately and then stepped over the bridge; there he felt better. And as he came up through the houses of the village, people greeted him, for many were sitting out on their verandas, where they had been watching for the moon. Their soft voices, their soft gestures followed him as he climbed the main street, up to the house of elders, where a light was burning. He put his hand out to the railing at the bottom of the steps, and then gathering his forces, he mounted quietly, allowing not a single creak to escape out of the split bamboo. And when he reached the porch, he stood still next to the bamboo post.

As luck would have it, the screen was drawn along his side, shielding him from the council chamber. He could see the light shining through the carved palm slats. The council was in session. Sarnath could see a row of four black, bulging shadows, projected along the bottom of the screen.