The Cult of Loving Kindness (20 page)

 

But he was confused by other traces; in the morning as he lay awake he had sensed the presence of other travelers nearby, and when Cassia was gone he had let his hearing dwell on certain sounds: the crack of a stick, the banging of a spoon against a pot, a shred of laughter. These sounds suggested motion. People moved nearby, and yet as Rael lay on his stomach he felt none of his usual shyness, none of his usual caution, for everything he heard seemed separate from his world and Cassia’s—the residue of actions performed by ghosts, while he and she were the only real human creatures in the forest. He thought that nothing possibly could interfere with them. So that it was with disbelief that he saw the print of Cassia’s foot mix with someone else’s, with disbelief that he climbed up to the deserted glade where she had met Mama Jobe and the rest.

He searched for signs upon the trampled earth. The fire had been covered up, yet it was smoking. Cassia was gone. In a panic, he paced in circles around the glade, for it was as if Cassia had stepped away from him into a world of ghosts, of strangers, deeds, and motives. In desperation he ran a little way along the path until it reached a wider way. And there were people. He crouched behind a bush and watched the people walking past, and some were carrying knapsacks and bundles on their heads. He felt that she was gone among the people, and she was disappearing like a drop of water on the surface of a pool.

A man with a long beard stalked past, carrying a basket full of wood. Rael let him go by, and then he leapt to his feet and rushed back to the tin warehouse, back to the floor where he and Cassia had lain. Already someone else was there—some woman was holding up his blanket. He pushed her down and ripped it from her hands; then he was gone, running to the stream away from the path, running up the slope upon the other side, striking out across the woods, moving close to the ground through the small branches, the rolled-up blanket clasped to his chest.

And in a little while his mind was clear. Or it was full of forest problems—detours and thorns and biting nettles, insects, swamps, unsteady branches, submerged logs. Cassia was lost beyond these things. He was following an animal trail, perhaps a deer run or even an okapi, for he was picking through a thorn bush that held tufts of striped black fur.

The sky was overcast. Toward afternoon, he descended down the side of a steep dark and tangled dell. The undergrowth was thicker, and he stopped to rest. The dell was full of laurel trees. Branches hung down over the trail, and he was pushing through suspended clusters of the sharp leaves, each one as thick and stiff as pottery, and they clanked against one another as he disturbed them.

There was no wind.

He saw the tracks of another animal.

There was a patch of bare ground near where a rivulet had spread over the trail. He bent down to examine two large paw prints. They had filled with water, yet even so they were still fresh, the mark of each claw still articulate.

Rael knelt down at the rivulet to drink. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. He felt a presentiment of danger. He felt a strange, airless constriction in his chest, which was fear, although he didn’t recognize it. Around him from time to time, the laurel leaves banged randomly together.

He sat back on his heels and pushed the hair out of his face. A man stood erect in the shelter of some saplings. Rael’s eyes traveled up his long dense golden legs, almost hairless, knotted with muscle, bleeding from six parallel cuts along his outer thigh.

He was wearing the skin of an animal, tied around his hips and again around his heavy shoulders. Rael stared at the black and white striped fur, the cruel paws hanging down. The man was wearing the skin of a dead tiger. Also, the surface of his arms and throat were striped with tines of shadow, for the sun had burned down to the bottom of a layer of clouds, and the trees were full of a new color and a new dappled light.

For a moment Rael stared at the man’s curled ear, the hairless jaw, the coarse yellow hair that was like his own. And then he bent back down so that his face was in the mud. He turned his cheek to one side and laid it in the dirt. So that when the music came he couldn’t tell whether the stranger had produced it with his mouth and with his voice, or else from some small instrument. It was nothing: over in a moment, a small scattering of notes, an interrogatory tune, or perhaps a puzzled warning. But Rael was staring at the stranger’s toe. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the toe was gone. The sun also had receded back, and there was nothing around him but the muffled banging of the leaves.

Soon he picked up his blanket roll, and wandered back the way he’d come. By the time he had retraced his steps, it was already dark.

 

In the darkness, Cassia paced back and forth under the trees, beyond the trench for the latrines at Brother Longo’s mission. She crossed her arms over her chest. From where she was, she could still see the lights in the clearing, and she could still hear the crowd: the gravid silence first, and then the roar of voices, not always loud enough to cover a shrill scream.

 

The air was cold away from the fire, and Cassia was rubbing her bare arms. A thin, harsh stink of urine was rising from the trench, mixing with the sickness in her stomach and the liquor in the back of her throat, which she was swallowing again and again to keep down. And she was thinking of Mr. Sarnath, his gestures, his inflections, his dry voice. She was thinking of the way that he would hold up his forefinger when he quoted from the master. Once when she was a little girl, just after she had moved into the girls’ dormitory, she had refused food for three straight nights. The keeper had told Mr. Sarnath, and he had come to see her in her room, and he had stood in the doorway with his forefinger raised. She had ignored him; she was lying in her cot with her face to the wall, studying a crack in the palm matting. Some light was seeping through. It was in the morning.

The master had not approved of self-mortification. Nor had Mr. Sarnath—he called it the easy path. In time he came to sit beside her, though he did not touch her. In his left hand he was carrying a ripe persimmon, and as she listened to him talk, her mouth had filled with a sweet anticipation.

She found herself walking among pine trees. And it was not quite dark. Paradise still glowed behind its layer of mist, and the entire sky glowed silver. Somewhere nearby she heard water dripping, and then she was aware of someone in the woods with her, among the pines, and she could hear his footsteps, and the crack of a dry branch. She crossed her arms over her chest and turned to go back toward the fire, but then there was a shadow in between two trees and it was he, it was Rael; she knew him by his height and strength and shoulders as he took her in his arms; she knew him by his smell, his roughness as he crushed her without speaking, and ran his hands over her breasts, her buttocks, and her thighs. There was some sickness in her belly, but it was lighter now, and she was conscious of another yearning, also, as he pushed her up against the rough bark of a tree and made a kind of love to her there, lifting her up until she clasped her legs around his waist, all soreness and all nausea forgotten.

Then they lay together on the pine needles. Rael lay on his stomach, and she curled up beside him. His skin seemed hot, and it was hot enough to keep her warm. “Just pay attention,” she said into his ear. “Just be careful.” But she could feel his tension and his wakefulness; once she woke up in the middle of the night to see him standing over her. Later, he was gone again. She woke feeling empty as a broken bottle. But he had left the blanket, and she wrapped herself in it and sat up until the dawn.

 

Part 8:
Mt. Nyangongo
A
t the end of the sixteenth phase of summer, the citizens of Charn elected a new mayor, who went on to surprise them with his energy and daring. Inheriting a massive public debt, nevertheless he managed to negotiate new loans with the city’s foreign creditors, while at the same time expanding his commitments to education, nutrition, health care, rural literacy, and rehydration. These priorities differed from those of previous governments, which had tended, with the encouragement of foreign banks, to favor large public works. By September of the sixteenth phase of summer, most of these projects had been curtailed or abandoned, so that the countryside beyond the city was full of half-built bridges, and stadiums, and dams.

 

The mayor was a man named Marcus Gentian, and he was squat and stout and stupid-looking, with an elaborately wrinkled face and a permanent expression of befuddlement. But he brought great force of character to his job. Almost single-handedly he managed to coax various austerity measures through the council, including taxes of 500 percent on luxury and imported goods. In this way he hoped to encourage domestic manufacturing and reduce the hemorrhage of raw materials abroad.

Also at this time he was working on a universal employers’ code, specifying new levels of minimum pay, and including new provisions for overtime, vacations, and sick leave. This code was already in effect in the city and in all government-owned businesses, but in the rural areas it was ignored. Most of the large agricultural and mining projects were still owned and managed from abroad; since they had involved major investments in land reclamation and technology, most had been started and maintained with foreign money, foreign expertise. The mayor’s new survey on abuses, which so far had been blocked from publication, had mentioned seven industries in particular, and had even suggested criminal proceedings against the owners of the mine at Carbontown.

On September fifty-third of the sixteenth phase of summer, 00016, the mayor of Charn inaugurated a week-long celebration of civic harmony. This was to coincide with the dates of the old Paradise festival—the moon was visible that week, and made a strange, disquieting addition to the summer sky. The mayor hoped that this ceremony, this demonstration of public pride, would help to salve a new dissatisfaction among the middle classes, caused by the sudden disappearance of tape recorders, portable cameras, dishwashers, cassette players, and motorbikes from the city’s shops. He sought to evoke a spirit of solidarity, and at the same time to counteract a new insidious phenomenon—the secret worship of Immortal Angkhdt, which after the hiatus of a lifetime was beginning to resurface even within the city limits of Charn itself.

On the night of the sixty-third, for the first time since the days of Raksha Starbridge, the temples of the old regime were opened to the public. The mayor hoped that he could preempt their old significance by using them for his new ceremony—the interiors had all been renovated and redone. During the revolution, the thousand temples of the city had been used as barracks, stables, shooting ranges, public restrooms; they had been gutted and vandalized by semiofficial partisans, and many had been subsequently torn down. But the stonework of the great old churches was still intact: St. Dimity’s, St. Soldan’s, the Cathedral of a Thousand Tears.

All reference to the old religion had been expunged. The space inside the Church of Morquar the Unkempt was empty. The frescoes on the sanctuary walls—portraits of the thirty-two bishops of Charn—had been painted over. The mosaic of the dome had been redone. With infinite and patient labor, tile by tile, the figures of the saints had been transmogrified, their faces and their gestures changed, their bright halos eradicated. Of course the new work was cruder, easy to distinguish from the old, but that night among the crowds who packed inside, there was not one who could have possibly remembered what the dome had once been like. They gazed up dully, yet even so, many thought it was peculiar in a way they could not quite identify, to see above their heads on the great central panel a representation of the first national assembly of the revolution. There, standing in their seats, were figures who to the people had already taken on the attributes of myth, glimpsed only through official statements and the foggy reminiscences of their parents and grandparents. There—Valium Samosir, dressed in white, representative of the seventh ward and later president of the Board of Health. There—Earnest Darkheart, leader of the Rebel Angels. There—Martin Sabian, ugly, tiny, crippled. And there, an enormous black gaunt figure on the central throne—Colonel Aspe, the Liberator, Lord Protector of the city until his death from cancer in the ninth phase of spring.

No one could have guessed by looking at it what the mosaic had once represented. No one could see the glorious convocation of the first Starbridges around the throne of Immortal Angkhdt. Yet even so in the packed crowd some seemed to understand, and even there were some who mumbled secretly a part of an old prayer, or made tiny secret gestures with their hands.

The mayor had rededicated each of the five largest churches in the city, and had declared each one a monument to a distinct aspect of civic progress. That night, at nine o’clock precisely, the spotlights were turned on around the new palaces of Hydroelectricity, Justice, Agriculture, and Nonviolence. In preparation for the celebration, new streetlights had been erected all over the city, in an attempt to rob some splendor from the risen moon.

Yet even so the ceremony was less than a complete success. Even with the new mosaic, the interior of St. Morquar’s—the new Palace of Industry—had an empty, purposeless look. Alcoholic beverages, in short supply since the embargo on imported hops, were distributed free from a long table in the nave. There was an enormous crowd, yet somehow their reaction to the spectacle which formed the heart of the evening was unsatisfactory. People shuffled their feet, yawned, sweated, smiled inopportunely, scratched their heads.

The drama was performed on a square dais underneath the dome, and the people stood around three sides of it. The sets were gigantic, the costumes pleasingly expensive. Several celebrities—members of the city council, the postmaster general, the dean of the school of law—had taken roles. Some of the speeches, including several in praise of the inventor of a new process of smelting, had been written by the mayor himself.