The Cult of Loving Kindness (3 page)

 

Now the moon was rising, and the track wound gradually uphill. Sarnath moved his bag to his right shoulder. He walked quickly, for his breath was good. And toward three o’clock he broke out of the trees—a wide, sandy valley stretched away from him, and in the distance glowed the lights of a small town.

 

Here the wind was in his face, a cold new breeze. It came to him up from the shore. South and east between the hills a line of stars dipped low over the bay. It was a constellation known locally as “the cucumber”; beyond the village Sarnath could already see some lights upon the beach, as the fishing boats set out to hunt the most elusive of the deep-sea vegetables.

The wind blew up the valley toward him, and brought a mixture of fresh smells. After the dark and pregnant forest, Sarnath turned gratefully downhill. The air was full of salt, and there was sagebrush all around him on the valley’s upper slope. And something else: some hint of poison in the soil, some alkali that kept the trees away.

It was this poison that gave the place its character. A quarter of a mile down the slope the path traversed another wider way, which stretched east and west into the hills. An ancient monument stood near the crossroads, the tomb of Basilon Farfetch. He had been the patron saint of travelers before the revolution.

As was traditional in that part of the country, the crossroads was a barren, lonely place. It was inhabited, according to the local superstition, by ghosts and spirits who had cursed the soil so that nothing grew. They were the ghosts of all those who had died by violence in that part of the country—after midnight, travelers were rare. Mr. Sarnath, coming down out of the trees, hesitated in surprise to see a light at the crossroads, the flicker of a lantern in the wind.

He looped the ends of his veil around his face, concealing his mouth. Almost he was tempted to leave the track and go down through the bush another way. This area was famous for the depredations of a highwayman, a man who called himself Lycantor Starbridge—though his real name, Sarnath suspected, was much humbler. Since the days of reconstruction, when outlaw bands of Starbridge soldiery had terrorized these hills, it had been the custom for all bandits to wear silk and jewels, and to pretend extraction from the ancient kings.

Lycantor Starbridge had carried this tradition to extremes. A handsome man, he had treated women with flamboyant gallantry. But his reputation among men was crueler; a hundred yards from the crossroads Sarnath paused again.

A lamp was guttering untended on the sand. And for the first time Sarnath heard a noise, the sound of weeping in a woman’s voice, and a high-pitched cry. Then some soft words of command. Mr. Sarnath hesitated, and then moved forward, reciting in his mind the precept of his master, that fear is an illusion of the heart.

And in a few steps he was conscious of another noise, a subtle groaning in the wind and the small clanking of a chain. Wading through the sage, he came down over the last hill and out onto an open, barren place with the crossroads at its center. The tomb of St. Basilon Farfetch was on the other side, beyond the gusting circle of the lamp, and Sarnath could see the outline of the stone bulk of the tomb, and the statue of the ancient saint astride it. The stone stumps of his hands were raised up to the sky. Behind his head, the moon shone like a halo.

A gallows had been raised along the wider road that led off west toward Charn. Hidden before by some trick of the shadows, now it was visible, a twenty-foot shaft of wood surmounted by a short crossbar. The body of a man hung from this crossbar, suspended from a chain around his chest.

Ten yards away under the flank of the stone sarcophagus, a girl lay on her back, her head against the sand. The lantern cast a flickering shadow against the wall of the stone frieze; as Sarnath came close, the silhouette resolved itself into two dark bulges, one formed by the girl’s upthrust knees, the other by the back of someone else who was hunched over her body. The girl turned her face into the light so that her cheek was flat against the sand. There was sweat on her face, moisture on her lips.

“Easy now, easy,” came a voice. The second humpbacked shadow straightened up. Coming closer, Sarnath could see part of a face, a mass of long grey hair. It was a woman. “Easy now,” she said. She was kneeling down between the legs of a young girl.

She was talking to herself. The girl on her back was beyond listening, her eyes turned backward in her head. Sudden, wild convulsions shook her body, and the middle of her spine arched off the sand. “There,” said the other as the spasms quieted down. “There now, there, that’s all it is.”

She was an old woman dressed in black. She was crouching down between the girl’s knees, but when the crisis passed they lolled apart; the woman rose and pulled herself around, so that she could take the girl’s head upon her lap. “There now,” she said. With the hem of her shawl she wiped the girl’s lips and wiped the sweat from her face. A small crescent of sand was stuck to the girl’s cheek, where she had laid her cheek against the ground.

“Hush now,” said the grey-haired woman. The girl’s head rolled loosely in her hands. Since the crisis, all the girl’s muscles seemed to have relaxed—her knees and arms lay flat against the ground.

“Can I help?” asked Mr. Sarnath. He was standing at the crossroads. Now he came forward and squatted down next to the old woman, where she sat cradling the other’s head. She turned to watch him and turned back—a sharp-faced, hard-skinned woman, smelling of kerosene.

She shook her head. “No help,” she said.

By contrast, the girl in her lap was beautiful, with red curls around a delicate, pale face. “No help,” muttered the old woman to herself. “No help—she’s almost gone.”

With the vague idea of trying to find her pulse, Mr. Sarnath reached out to the girl’s arm, where it lay near him on the sand. But he stood up when the woman hissed at him and pulled the girl away. “Don’t you touch,” she said.

The girl’s legs were spread apart. There was a blanket thrust between them, partly hidden by her long red dress, which had blown up almost to her waist. Embarrassed, Mr. Sarnath stood waiting, and after a minute the old woman relented, and when she spoke her voice was softer. “Sleeping pills,” she said. “Poisoned herself, because of him.” She gestured with the point of her chin toward the gallows, where the corpse hung creaking in the wind.

“Your daughter?”

“No, my sister. Who are you? You’re one of those officers they’ve got up by the border. Hunh—I’ve seen your face.”

Around them now, the night was full of noises. Sarnath watched a centipede next to his shoe. “I’ll go down to the town,” he said. “I’ll get a doctor there.”

“No. It’s good like this.” The woman’s hands upon her sister’s cheek were gentle and forgiving, but her face was not. “She used to come up here to meet him,” she continued. “Sneak out at all hours. This is where she met him. Hunh—Lycantor Starbridge. She’ll be with him now.” Again she gestured toward the gallows with her chin.

“Do you live near here?” asked Mr. Sarnath. “I could help you bring her home.”

“No!” repeated the old woman. Again, her voice was harsh and rough, but her hands were soft around her sister’s face. “No—just leave us.” She nodded down the western road. “Is that your way? Two miles on the left you’ll see the Forest View Motel. Tell my man to bring a shovel. He’s the owner there.”

Irresolute, Mr. Sarnath pressed his palms together. The girl’s breath was shallow in her chest, and there was a froth of scum upon her lips, which her sister wiped continually away. How strange it is, thought Mr. Sarnath. Perhaps the soul’s life has a natural end. The wise person knows when to desist, to seek out some new understanding. But to abandon life before that end, perhaps—

“Are you still here?” grumbled the old woman.

He stood watching the corpse of the highwayman, turning slowly on its chain. Then he stepped away toward the girl’s legs and kneeled down. “What’s this?” he asked.

The woman shrugged. “The pills caused her to miscarry. She was ninety days before her time.” She pointed with her chin. “There’s the father, so she claimed.”

“The child is still alive,” said Mr. Sarnath.

He had dropped his knapsack a few feet away. Now he retrieved it and pulled out his flashlight. Switching it on, he drew back a corner of the blanket to reveal two infants in a caul.

A movement had betrayed their presence, a small tremor on the surface of the blanket that had covered them. No cry, no noise had escaped them, though now Mr. Sarnath thought he could detect a tiny sputtering. They turned their heads away from the harsh light, a dark girl and a pale, fair boy, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Their eyes were open, blue and dark, their arms were wound around each other’s backs, their tiny legs around each other’s hips. Sarnath noticed with surprise the boy’s erect penis; he laid the light aside and then picked up the pocketknife the gatekeeper had given him, to cut the double, knotted cord that joined them to their mother.

“They’re alive,” he said.

“Not for long.”

The cord was greasy underneath his fingers, slippery with blood. He cut it off ten inches from the mother’s slack body and then held it up, pinching it tight, unsure of what to do. “What do you mean?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’ve seven of my own.” At that moment, her sister started to moan softly. The old woman pulled her sister’s head into her lap and cradled it in her thin arms—a fierce, protective gesture. “Take it away,” she said. “Leave it on the altar—there.”

By this she meant the stone sarcophagus. The image of the saint loomed over them, his hands held to the sky. Sarnath bowed his head, and with a common sense he didn’t know he quite possessed, he tied the cords off on the bellies of the twins and cut them short. With a corner of a pair of underpants, Sarnath wiped the blood and fluid from the babies’ faces, and removed the remnants of the caul. They stirred fretfully under his hands. And they were making noises now—wet little clucks and moans, though still far short of crying.

He wrapped them in the blanket. “I’ll take them to the town,” he said. He sat cross-legged on the sand. The eastern sky was pale above a line of hills.

Awkwardly, he held the children up. They were restless and squirming in the blanket. Their mother had quieted down again, and the old woman’s eyes were full of tears. Then she made a sign that Sarnath barely recognized. She ducked her chin down into her left armpit and then spat into the sand—the ancient sign of the unclean. “Who’ll take them?” she said fiercely. “Spirit children, look—they’re one month premature. More than ninety days—they should be dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at them—they’re healthy as a snake, while she lies dying. Big, too. They weren’t so big inside her body, I can tell you. You could scarcely see.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at this place! Do you think those are her children? No, but they were conceived there on that altar.”

“These are superstitions,” murmured Mr. Sarnath. He was trying to find a way of holding the children that would keep them comfortable. But they were squirming and fretting in his hands. Were they hungry? He had goat’s milk in a bottle.

“Superstitions! No one comes here. No one but the murdered dead.” She pointed toward Lycantor Starbridge with her chin.

 

Part 2:
The Master
I
n those days the moon rose twice each season. The first time Mr. Sarnath saw it he was just a boy, living with his master in the village in the trees. It had risen for a dozen nights during the final phase of spring, the time of its least influence in the affairs of men. Then it had been a small disturbance at the zenith, a small light in a bank of clouds.

 

Then he had stood watching in a bare place in the almond grove, while his master raised his arm to point. But Sarnath wasn’t listening. Then it had been hard even to think about the wintertime. Hard to imagine all the trees down, and the horizon all around, and the land empty. Hard to imagine how Paradise had shone like a pale sun on the pale snow, commanding the night sky, the dreams of men, the city of Charn—it seemed unreal to think of it. Winter was safe when Mr. Sarnath was a boy, a distant memory, a distant prophecy of nightmare. It was sealed in the past, sealed in the future.

Yet eleven thousand days later, when the moon rose again the night that Rael and Cassia were born, its power was already waxing. Only midsummer, yet already by midsummer the world had turned. Gradually, inexorably, new impulses were combining with ones as old as time to threaten the power of democratic Charn, born in the bloody revolutions of midspring. Not so long before—there were men alive who still remembered the tyranny of the old government, and it made them desperate to forestall the future. Desperate when they saw those old roots bear new greenness, those old sophistries and superstitions gather weight. It was for this reason that the smuggler at the port of Caladon was put to death.

In those midsummer days, forests and jungles stretched a thousand miles from the coast, beyond the borders of the old diocese of Charn. Traveling through it on his long, slow journey toward the village of his birth, Mr. Sarnath passed evidence of this new awakening. He saw the shining sun of Abu Starbridge painted on stones and on the trunks of trees. He saw the painted image of Immortal Angkhdt. And even though he had left his duties at his desk in Caladon, still he was made anxious by these new phenomena. For he was a student of history, a student also of human nature, and he wondered how the indigent and unsophisticated peoples of the forest could find anything in the old legends to attract them. Yet the Cult of Loving Kindness seemed to flourish best among the poor.

Once when the children were just old enough to walk, Mr. Sarnath had stayed a month in a small town. It was hidden in a grove of mescal bushes; on the sixtieth night he had left the children sleeping and had climbed down the slope into a swamp. Dry land in the middle of the wet, difficult of access, and there he had crouched with many others, watching a shaman of the Cult of Loving Kindness sing his song. The man had told them how Beloved Angkhdt came down from Paradise in the world’s morning, and sifted gold from dirt, and threshed out corn from chaff, and raised up certain men and women to be Starbridges and kings. He told them how the rest should suffer gladly, how they like Angkhdt himself had been reborn on earth to suffer for their sins, how it was only through glad suffering that they could purge themselves of sin, until their souls rose up to Paradise again.