The Cult of Loving Kindness (6 page)

“And?”

“I wanted to come home. You told me when I went into the world—you told us we would be hated and condemned. You told us we would find new masters. You told us we would be rejected for our differences—all that was true. You told us to wait patiently. Seven months, and I had other postings before that.”

The master settled back upon his pillows. His eyes had a new milky cast to them, and his voice was soft and weak. “A moth drowned in a bowl,” he said.

“Sir,” said Canan Bey. “Perhaps it would be better—”

“No,” persisted the old man. “You listen to this. It is important.” He was holding the skull loosely in his hands.

His voice had sunk to a harsh whisper, audible only to the first circle of spectators. Many of the others had grown restless. Many of the children, especially, had become irritable in the heat and the bad smell. Infants had begun to cry; their mothers took them out on the veranda and then down into the town. The master appeared to have dozed off. And as noon approached, more and more of the adults got up to go. Carpenters who had left their hammers balanced on the laddertops, farmers who had planned to dig a certain acreage before the worst heat of the day, housewives who had left a pot of water on the fire—they bowed their heads respectfully and slipped away.

Cassia sat motionless on Sarnath’s lap, her head upon his thigh. He might have thought she was asleep, only sometimes he saw her nose wrinkle slightly as some new waft of putrefaction reached her from the master’s bed. Honest Toil was kneeling with the tears running down his face. Around them the room had emptied out. Only a scattering of villagers remained. Now a few more bowed their heads and rose to leave, responding to a small gesture from the hand of Canan Bey, dismissing them to do their work.

The master’s eyes were closed, and he had sunk down deep into his pillows, so that he was almost prone. “My head is full of shadows,” he complained. But then he roused himself. “Stupider,” he said. “Stupider and stupider. You carried this dead piece of bone from Camran Head? If we all carried on our backs the burden of our errors, just to remind ourselves …” His voice sank into nothing.

Canan Bey leaned forward. “Leave him now,” he whispered. “All of you.”

He was leaning forward across the master’s body, making a small gesture with his fingers. Then he bent down to wipe some spittle from the master’s lips, but at that moment the old man started awake. His eyes started open and he reached up to grab the student by the ear. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Sir,” said Canan Bey. “I thought you should rest. Perhaps you should rest, and I could change the dressing on your leg.” He tried to pull his head away, but the old man grabbed him tighter. “Please, sir, you’re hurting me.”

“No!” shouted the old man. Then he let go. He turned instead to Mr. Sarnath, who had begun to rise. “Talk to me!” shouted the master. “Talk to me—you understand. How long were you a prisoner of your own thoughts? You know what it means to wait and wait. Tell me—what did that moth mean to you?”

“Sir,” murmured Mr. Sarnath. “I took it as a sign.”

“It was a sign. And this”—here he lifted the skull up in his two hands, so that they could see its strange dead grinning face. “Is this also a sign? A sign for me? My God, my God, my God, my God, my God,” and these words were peculiar, for never before in his whole life had he called upon a deity, or even mentioned the possibility that one existed.

“No,” he said. “But take this and destroy it. Burn these papers.” Then he muttered something incoherent. Then he died.

 

Part 3:
Brother and Sister
“
T
he day the master died,” said Langur Bey, “he was attended at the end by Canan, Mayadonna, Palam, and myself. This was on the ninety-second of November of the fourteenth phase, near one o’clock in the afternoon. We had feared that he would die during the night—his pulse was very weak. But in the morning he revived somewhat. He even took a little bread. And he was resting comfortably. He did not appear to be in pain. We were discussing, as we often did, some point of natural philosophy—it was a favorite topic for him, the relation between natural philosophy and ethics. As I remember, he was making the point that in human intercourse, just as in science, it is important to select the simpler explanation: that it is always the simpler explanation that has a tendency toward truth.

 

“Toward noon he grew a little weaker. I remember he had fallen into a light doze, and we students were still carrying on the conversation, though in a distracted way, of course. It is what he would have wished; in any case he woke up. He was staring at the ceiling, and we could see his eyes were unfocused. And it was then that he called for all the townspeople to come in. He knew his time was growing short. He was too impatient even to listen to their questions, though some were bothering him with trivialities and emotional displays. He cut them off—there was no time for such things anymore. He cut them off so that he could pronounce his final discourse—you have it in your copybooks—on the nature of obedience and the suppression of the will, which I would like you to memorize by next Friday.

“And that was very near the end. He spoke a few words to Sarnath Bey, part of our mission to the Port of Caladon, who as luck would have it had arrived that morning. Cassia, you remember that—he was asking many careful questions, though his voice was weak, and then finally he paused. His face seemed to relax into a smile that was also grave and dignified; he lay there for some little time. He was lying near the window, and he asked for the screen to be removed. I remember it had just begun to rain. He asked Canan Bey to help him turn onto his side, and he looked out of the window toward a patch of bamboo trees, which at that time grew beside his house. And he said, and these were his last words, ‘There is another village in the forest, identical to this. The houses are laid out on the same plan. It sits, like this one, in a grove of almonds. Yet in those trees the fruits are made of gold, the leaves are made of silver. And in the center house there sits a teacher. He is waiting for me, and he has made a place for me among the last circle of novices.’ ”

Langur Bey, dressed in a white robe, sat cross-legged on a dais in the schoolroom. His left hand in his lap was pressed into a fist. Next to it, he had joined the fourth finger and thumb of his right hand over his palm. His hands were thin and long, his gestures graceful and precise. Now he took his hands out of his lap. He held his left hand spread out above his knee, and with the smallest finger of his right hand he wiped away a tear, a small accretion of white dust in the outside corner of his eye.

“For tomorrow,” he said, “please meditate upon these words, and ask yourselves especially whether in any way they can be taken literally, or if their meaning is purely metaphorical. Please ask yourselves also …”

Rael lay on his stomach with his hand stretched out along the matting of the floor. He was staring at the back of Cassia’s head; she sat ten feet in front of him with her back perfectly straight, and she had tied up the mass of her black hair, exposing her neck and the rims of her ears. Even at that distance if he stared hard enough, he could see the circle of small hairs between her shoulder blades, over the line of her white dress. Even at that distance he could catch the smell of her skin; he breathed deeply, and tried to separate that one small disappearing scent out of the stench of the Treganu all around him. Even at that distance he could make her sense his presence. He imagined the pressure of his stare reaching out like a long stick, touching her gently on that dark circle of hair until she shuddered without understanding why.

Or he could make her turn her head. He could make her turn her head and look at him. He could make her smile, just by releasing one small sound into the air, some breath or gasp or whistling tune, something to remind her that in this schoolroom full of alien creatures there was one who was like her, whose heart struck the same beat. Rael was lying stretched out on the mat. He raised his cheek up from the floor, and he was humming the first note of a small tune, very carefully and low, molding it and aiming it so that it would reach her ear and no one else’s.

“Sir,” said Langur Bey. “If there is anything that you would like to say to me, either on this subject, or on any other, I would be glad to listen and respond. As you can see if you consult your schedule, our session for today includes a period for questions, which however does not begin for fifteen minutes. Until then, I beg you to refrain from disturbing us with these noises, the meaning of which, if in fact they have a meaning, can only be clouded and obscure.”

Rael raised himself up off the floor. All around the little classroom the students had turned to look at him, all but one. His sister still sat with her back to him; all the rest had turned their strange, sad, thoughtful faces toward him. Strange and not strange—these were boys and girls he had grown up with. He knew them. Yet as always at times like this he found that he could barely tell one from another. Their separate individuality seemed to recede into their faces. Looking around, all he could see were the small characteristics that kept him isolated and apart: their frail, bony faces, their eyes too close together, their weak chins.

“Please, sir,” he said. “I beg to be excused.” It was a phrase that he had carefully rehearsed.

The teacher bowed his head.

Outside, the sun was sinking down the western sky. Rael paused on the veranda, rubbing his forearms, rotating his wrists. Then he tramped loudly down the wooden steps, and for emphasis he pounded loudly on the bamboo banister, making a racket that no one else in the entire village could have made, for of all of them he was the strongest and most powerful. A woman was squatting in the wet dirt near the pump; she glanced up to look at him, then she smiled and waved. She was washing out a piece of red cloth in a bucket.

Clouds of midges danced around her head. Rael squatted down next to her to wash his face. He washed under his armpits, and rubbed handfuls of water through his hair while the woman pumped the pump. “Lesson over?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Thinking in my thoughts is idiot fool.”

She clicked her tongue against the ridges of her teeth. “We are not all gifted in all ways,” she said, quoting a bromide of the master’s.

A leechfly, drawn by the scent of human blood, had landed on the lip of the bucket—a repulsive creature with a snout almost an inch long. Rael flapped his fingers and it drifted away. Anywhere outside the village, he would have crushed it gladly.

The woman said: “In six months Langur Bey will let you go to work. You’ll like that better, won’t you?”

Rael felt the water trickle down his ribs. He brought his wet hands to his face and inhaled deeply, then he shrugged. In front of them, the neatly swept dirt street curled down into the forest.

She said: “It will feel good to use your strength.”

He doubted it. To the right and to the left, the street was lined with wooden houses upon stilts. He lowered his knee down into the mud, and lowered his head so that he could peer under the veranda of the nearest house. There was some movement in the dark, the scurrying of some animal or bug.

The woman didn’t hear. She was smiling at him. He smiled back.

 

Down at the bottom of the hill, the path wound round the edges of the paddy field. Rael stepped up onto the embankment. In the far corner of the field a group of men in wicker hats stood up to their ankles in water, and they were coaxing the village’s lone bullock into position with soft pats upon its rump. They were building something on the far bank, and the bullock was pulling a sledge loaded with sand: a stupid plan, thought Rael, because the bullock was crushing the young shoots of rice under its hooves. A few strokes with a split bamboo would have brought the beast onto the ramp, thought Rael, but instead it was wandering contemptuously through the field, losing sand with every turn, ignoring the melodious expostulations of the men.

 

A tall boy moved ahead of the beast to frighten away any minnows that might drift beneath its hooves. Standing on the embankment, Rael shook his head, seeing in the boy a premonition of his own future. The boy had been in school ten months before, but he had graduated last in his class.

Rael stretched his arms over his head, taking pleasure in the long, heavy muscles of his shoulders and his arms. Then he was gone, jumping down off the embankment and running east along the almond path. He was itching to get away; at moments like this it seemed to him as if there were a boundary around the village, a mental boundary beyond the barricade of thorns, a moment when the incoherent burden of his mind was finally lifted and he was free, leaping away between two trees appreciated only by himself, leaving the path and running up the dense and crowded slope, his bare feet leaving no mark and missing as if by a succession of small miracles all the sharp roots and thorns and edges of the forest—slipping through the undergrowth, protected from each clawing branch by an integument of sweat that covered his whole body. And even if he did from time to time feel a thorn rip across his skin, or if he gashed the instep of his foot against a stone, no matter, no matter, it made no difference; he had all the blood in all the world and he could run forever in that forest without drawing breath.

He ran up the bed of a small stream, and the slope was steep on either side. There were savak bushes and disgusting joberoot, each plant a nest of writhing leaves. Monkeys hurtled overhead among the limpus trees, their hairless bodies smashing clumsily among the upper branches, shaking loose a patter of small leaves and sticks, and disturbing a whole colony of anvil birds—he didn’t know these names, he didn’t care. But where the slope curled back upon itself, reaching toward the perpendicular, and the stream turned into a small rain above him, he stood up to his shins in a slough of mud and knocked the sweat out of his eyes.

Nearby, the remnants of an ancient bicycle protruded from the earth, a metal, twisting plant. Creepers stretched down through the rocks, and he reached out to steady himself with his left hand, while with his right he pulled a stick out of his yellow hair. He stood as if in a pit of wet black earth; near him a tree had tumbled down the cliff, clearing a gap in the forest canopy, and he could see the sun there burning like a blowtorch, that whole swath of sky a molten blue. And in the gap the anvil birds staggered unsteadily into the air, five feet long with little stubby wings, their heads encased with helmets of bright bone which made a whistling, whirring noise as they rose up.