The Cult of Loving Kindness (28 page)

These gatherings in the dark formed the small root of a great movement, called at that time the New Society of Loving Kindness. The name itself Freedom Love borrowed from an extinct heresy. He borrowed also the precepts of human brotherhood and spiritual equality, which he combined with new interpretations of the Song of Angkhdt. He rewrote certain portions, claiming that the Starbridge priests had mistranslated them. He rejected the old vision of a social hierarchy of grace, described in Angkhdt 113-117, which the winter priests had used to sanctify an entire caste.

In place of the dead oligarchy, he envisioned something new. He envisoned a new kind of society, governed by a new class of saints. Accidents of birth would be discounted; these saints would choose themselves.

In the days following the Paradise festival, Miss Azimuth explained these things to Cassia as they sat together in the silken tent. “They take the Starbridge vow,” she said in her faint voice. “You saw it in the mission hospital. Anyone can do it, who has the strength to live the perfect life, you see. They are the soldiers of Paradise—bound for Paradise, yes, well. They live the pure life; it is not for everybody. I would hate it.” The old woman smiled, and looked down at her bright tattoos. “Five hours a day for spiritual meditation. Five hours a day for bodily exertion. They eat only water, and the holy grain that Angkhdt brought down. They do not … procreate.”

Here she gave a little giggle. She sat in an armchair, almost overwhelmed by its tall back and sides. On her narrow knees she balanced a book. Its bulky title—
The Posthumous Epigrams of Freedom Love Dictated from Beyond the Grave to His Disciple X—
was printed in gold letters at the top of every page.

“You see how he foretells all things,” she said. She put her finger on the open page. “ ‘The word of God is like a living thing. It has its season underground. In winter it recedes. Hard it is then. Tough and dry and crude. But in spring the sap is stirring, and the root inside the earth. In the summertime a flower will grow. Flame of the forest, and its colors will be white and silver and bloodred. Ten days it will lie open on the stump. Then it will fall.’ ”

Cassia sat shivering on her bed, her arms around her knees. Two days after the end of the festival, it was unseasonably cold, and a wet, cold wind blew over the caldera of Mt. Nyangongo. The door flap to the tent slapped open miserably from time to time. Now it curled back upon itself, and through it Cassia could see some of the deserted stalls.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“You. You, my dear.” The old woman smiled. “A lily flower upon a stump. White and silver and bloodred—the colors of your father’s family, you see. They are the colors of the bishops of Charn.”

Cassia closed her eyes. “Ah,” she said.

“That’s what they’re claiming now. When the bishop’s grave was opened, there was nothing in it. No body. No bones. The urn for her ashes was sealed with Lord Chrism’s seal, but it was empty.”

“Yes. You told me.”

“Yes. When they reached the cell where Chrism Demiurge had held her, they found a map under the bed. ‘Look for me among the days to come,’ it said. There was a date.”

“What date?”

The top part of the old woman’s body was wrapped in a black shawl. Nevertheless, the cold did not seem to bother her much. Her legs, too short to reach the floor, were bare. Her sticklike ankles were uncovered, and her feet kicked rhythmically against the wicker leg of the chair. “No one knows,” she said. “The map is lost. Stolen by the Desecration League during the revolution.”

She put her hand upon the open book. “This man saw it in a dream. But even then the numbers were obscure. The pattern of the continents—he says we must have faith to keep ourselves prepared. To recognize the moment when it comes.”

“And have you … recognized it?”

“Yes. We are all agreed. The map was of Mt. Nyangongo. The date was the sixty-third of September in the sixteenth phase of summer.”

“And from that day,” said Cassia, “the flower is open on the stump—how long?”

“Yes,” sighed the old woman. “Ten days and the woodman comes. The gathering man. He cuts the flower on the stump. But where the axe hits, there the blood runs down. Blood from the flower runs down through the bark. It runs down into the root. Ah yes, that is the freedom day. Eight days from now.”

“But I will die,” said Cassia.

“Ah yes—you will not feel it. You have not come to live in this world, but to redeem it. Your life was over more than twenty thousand days ago. Lord Chrism burned you at the stake.”

“Ah,” said Cassia.

“Life and death, they are not real to you,” crooned the old woman. “Nothing is real, except the love of Angkhdt.” She was intoxicated. The backs of her fingers were stained with hashish oil. She had dipped six tobacco cigarettes in a cup of hashish oil, and already that day she had smoked three, though it was not yet noon.

“Why was she condemned?” asked Cassia.

“Witchcraft. That was his excuse—she was a sorceress. Lord Chrism had her burned because the people loved her, yes. But he had a pretext when he found her coupled with the antinomial. The meat-eater. It was an impurity, he said.”

That morning, the antinomial lay in a corner of the tent, lashed down to the naked springs of a steel bed frame. His face was still puffed up from the beating the soldiers of Paradise had given him. One eye was still swelled shut. On the night of the festival he had tried to push through them as if they weren’t there, for he was searching for Cassia among the tents. They had struck him with their rifle butts and perhaps they would have killed him. But the old woman had come running. “It is the meat-eater,” she had cried. “It is the cannibal,” she had shouted, before falling into a narcotic swoon.

Now he lay quiet on the bed, tied down with canvas cords, which he tested from time to time with his crushed hands. From time to time the bedsprings sang as he moved his weight. His left eye was swollen shut, but his right eye was open, staring up at the roof of the tent as it billowed and shuddered in the wind.

And now Cassia asked her: “What do you mean, a cannibal?”

Miss Azimuth giggled. “Oh, not literally. That’s what they used to call them. You know, like an animal. A carnivore. Oh, they were a wild lot. North of the River Rang—they had lived there in the snow. Vagrants, you see, no property. No families, no language even. Nothing but the music. My mother told me about it when I was a little girl.”

“Music,” repeated Cassia.

“Yes—she said you used to hear them sometimes, singing in the abandoned buildings. They used music as a kind of language. In Charn, that was, before the revolution. They were big and yellow-eyed, like him.”

Cassia got up and walked over to the steel bed frame. She stood above it. She said: “I looked for you—where did you go?”

Behind her the old woman was still talking. “He came to kill her in the temple, because her soldiers had attacked his people: She lay down with him—as you must know.”

The tent flap curled open to reveal the grey day. A grey mist was gathering. Still visible on the altar, the wicker statue of Immortal Angkhdt was lying on its side. Only its charred skeleton was left. It had been lit on fire at the crisis of the festival.

“I looked for you,” said Cassia. “Two times I looked for you. Why did you leave me with these people? Now it is too late.”

Rael moved his hands in the canvas straps. The bed frame sang a little song. He opened his bruised lips. “Free me,” he said.

She shook her head. “I am not that person anymore.”

It was true. There had been a surface in her mind like the surface of a pool, and everything that she had known about herself had floated on it. Now some new creature whose shape she had sometimes seen moving in the darkest water had lurched to the surface, scattering it into a thousand tiny flecks. How to put back together that broken mosaic of light? How to retrieve what she had thought, what she had felt, with that creature flailing in the pool? Deformed, inhuman it had seemed, and yet not strange.

Behind her the old woman had sunk into a drugged perusal of the book. Cassia, standing in the draft from the open doorway, shivered and looked down. A tear had formed in Rael’s eye, the first one she had ever seen there, and she watched it with a kind of fascination as it grew and grew until it leaked out past his eyelash and down his cheek.

 

Many of the pilgrims had already dispersed. Most of their tents were gone. The cold wind picked through a debris of newspapers, balloons, and plastic cups.

 

The last night of the festival, Brother Longo had stood upon the stage under risen Paradise. He had shown Cassia to the people, and he had asked them to share this piece of destiny, for it was of limited duration. Ten days, and it was done.

The people had cheered. They had shouted themselves hoarse, but by morning some had already decamped. More left the next day, especially parents with their children. Many had taken their small vacations to coincide with the festival. Others were content just to have seen the bishop’s face.

By the morning of the second day, Brother Longo had begun to understand a bitter fact. The miracle had happened, and he was unprepared. How many times had he exhorted his followers? We do not know the hour, nor the minute, nor the second when these truths will come. Therefore be prepared, he had said. Therefore be prepared to seize the moment as it comes. Yet he had eight days left before the woodman came to cut the lily from the stump, and he was stuck upon the slope of Mt. Nyangongo—a site that he and Azimuth and Mang and Porphyry had chosen for its isolation. Furthermore, he had no food. The pilgrims had carried what they needed for the week. Those who had stayed—he thought as he stood in the doorway to his tent, looking out over the caldera—must already be reckoning what they had left.

Behind him the bulimic Reverend Porphyry sat in a canvas chair. He was examining a newspaper. “Did you see this?” he asked, folding the page back to reveal a long column.

“Somebody’s read it. They marked it with a pencil. ‘Egghead Professor Discovers Skull of God.’ ”

In the doorway, Brother Longo turned to stare at him.

“ ‘Carbontown,’ ” continued the priest. “ ‘September sixty-first. Professor Benjamin Cathartes, working at the new plantation eighty miles east of here, has claimed to have discovered an old relic, which disappeared from Charn in revolutionary times. Using a combination of photographic and textual evidence, he has identified the so-called “Skull of Angkhdt,” which until its disappearance had been on public display in the old Temple of Kindness and Repair—now the metropolitan campus of the University of Charn.’ ”

 

“I looked for you, but you were gone,” repeated Cassia.

 

To Rael she looked beautiful standing above him. And it was the first time that he had ever been conscious of her beauty. Always she and he had been too close for that. They had been together every day since they were born. Even in the village in the trees when he had gone away from time to time, still she had been with him. When he turned around, when he stood steaming, out of breath, often he could feel her vanished presence, as if just that moment she had passed behind a tree. Sometimes miles from the village he had heard her talking in his ear.

She was as close to him as his own body, and for that reason he had never stopped to think: She is this way, she is that way. He had never, during all the times that he had seen her, thought to himself—she is so beautiful, the way she pushed her hair behind her ear.

But now he felt it, and he felt also the single tear roll from his eye, because he knew something had changed. Not just because she said so, but he could feel it in her new beauty, her new distance. He could feel it in the futility of his bruised hands as he strove against the straps. She had changed, and yet she was the same. Only she was wearing new white clothes of some soft, smooth material. She wore stockings on her legs. The corners of her eyes were painted with a purple powder, and her hair was clean and fastened up in a new way.

“Not understand,” he said, but he did understand. For it was true: For two mornings in the forest he had thought to leave her, to go away and not come back. He had gone away and let these changes come.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Free me.” She sat down beside him on the bed frame, and the springs made a soft groaning noise. She bent over him to untie his hands, and the smell of her skin was so bewildering, the soft skin over her jawbone was so close to him, that he closed his eyes and turned away his face. But he could feel her fingers on his wrist. And in a little while he felt them on his cheek, pushing tentatively at the swollen place. His hands were free; he rose up from the bed and took her into his arms, but she was cold and awkward there.

 

Reverend Porphyry was reading from the paper. “ ‘ “There have been objections to the nature of my project here,” says Professor Cathartes. “My discovery must answer those objections. It shows that this small village was the center of a complex net of witchcraft, devil worship, and reaction. It is not a neutral act to romanticize such things.” ’ ”

 

“Where does he mean?” asked Longo Starbridge.

“It’s the Treganu site—the new plantation. Manioc and lumber. That’s what the plans are. Forty miles southeast of here.”

“I never heard of anything that way.”

“Nor I. They kept to themselves.”

He read for a while in silence. Then he said: “That was on page four. But look at this. ‘Graduate Student Claims That Bone May Be of Extraterrestrial Origin.’ ”

 

Miss Azimuth had fallen into sleep. Her head had fallen back on her thin neck, and the hinge of her jaw had fallen open. A creaky whistling emerged from her dry mouth. Rael turned his head to listen.

 

After a moment he turned back, and pushed his face into Cassia’s hair. “Bitter gone,” he said. “Sweet gone and disappear. Now door.”

The door to the tent curled open. Mist lingered there along the flap as if awaiting permission to come in.