The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  Much later, after Mr. Sarnath’s death, scholars from the University of Charn would hold an inquest, and with the superstition of born atheists would suggest that he had trafficked at this period with Magdol Starbridge, a loathsome succubus with naked breasts. It was not true. Sarnath was simply curious. And if there was a sin involved, it was at most the sin of arrogance. Sitting by himself day after day, meditating on the master’s lessons, he felt that he had reached a wall he could not cross. The master was pragmatic in all things: his goal had been to found a village and then help the villagers to live in it, at peace with others and themselves. His maxims had been practical, his metaphors concrete, accessible to everyone.

  But Mr. Sarnath, ever since the night when he had seen the moth drown in the bowl, had felt himself blessed with the potentiality of understanding. As he thought more and more about them, the simplicity of the master’s lessons became frustrating. He was no longer interested in what to do, how to behave. Especially as he saw the village go astray, and the power in the village gathered into hands he did not trust, he was no longer content to obey. He wanted to follow the master into a rarefied and better world, where all phenomena were understood.

  Five months—five hundred days—after the master’s death, he disinterred the skull and took it to his house. He felt it was a clue, because he had seen the reaction of the master, how in the moment of his death he had been shocked out of his thoughts. At that instant he had found out something that had stunned him, opened his eyes, perhaps, the way Mr. Sarnath’s had been opened on that night at his desk in Caladon. It was as if the master had mounted on a ladder through the door of death, and if he had turned around at last and ordered that the ladder be torn down and burnt and buried in a hole, perhaps it was because he did not trust the villagers to use new knowledge wisely, when he was not there to guide them.

  In the village Mr. Sarnath had kept his thinking to himself. But on the veranda of his cabin on the hilltop, he laid the skull out on his table, where he could see it every day. That evening as he sat watching, he held it up between his hands and rubbed it, moving his dry fingertips over the parietal bone, following with his fingertips the complicated sequence of small figures: the master gathering his scattered people and striking out into the wilderness to form a new community. He picked a cloth up from the table. Wrapping it around his thumb, he rubbed at an imagined blemish on the zygomatic.

  In fact, long contemplation of the skull had told him nothing. But after ten months, his translation of the manuscript was already half complete. It lay around him on the desk, almost a thousand verses, or, as he called them, “paradigms.” He searched for the first page. There it was: “Oh my beloved, let me pleasure you and kiss you, for you are like a God to me, that I may worship with my body, and your kisses help me, and heal me, and give me comfort, and illuminate my life. In your presence my heart is full of a new sensation, which is partly joy. . . .”

  His was a race that was gifted with languages. Always they had lived as foreigners in other people’s countries. Whatever place had been their home was lost, its location forgotten in the cryptic past. Myths and stories that referred to it tended to lack interior logic; anyway, the myths had changed over the generations, so that they no longer represented clues to a real place, a real culture, a real past. Instead the stories had been cast forward to a future where their inconsistencies would matter less: a vision of some ideal future in their own country, and they would be welcome like lost friends.

  But in the meantime they had lived in other people’s cities, and they had adopted other people’s habits. And most of what distinguished them, beyond the physical differences of their bodies, had been in some way forced upon them—their limited employment opportunities, their long gauze robes and masks, the bells that in some southern cities they had been obliged to wear, sewn into their sleeves. They had taken these restrictions and made a culture out of them. They had spoken a dozen dialects of other people’s languages.

  When the master had come out from Caladon, and with a handful of refugees he had founded in the deepest woods his little town, and he had said, “This is the place; the time is now,” it had been part of his dream that they should form one people, speak one tongue. Nevertheless, Sarnath had learned snatches of many languages when he was growing up. And in the world he had learned more, when he was teaching the precepts of the master to his clients at the Caladon frontier. He had taught them humility, and detachment, and the futility of all human enterprise, the counterproductive nature of desire. In return he had learned patience, and thoughtfulness, and wisdom, and obscenities and supplications in another fifty tongues, all of which were useful when, in solitude on his veranda in the evening of his life, he bent his mind to his translation of the Song of Angkhdt, from the original Bekata manuscript—an unknown alphabet but not completely unfamiliar—into his own Treganu dialect.

  During the day he meditated in his room. In the evening he worked on his translation. In the endless litany of love that makes up the first part of the Holy Song, he had searched in vain for clues to what the master meant. “Burn these papers!”—why on earth? What was the harm? Now, waiting for Cassia, holding up the skull in his starved hands, he thought he understood. For only in the past day had he finally recognized what he was doing. It is not until the 940th verse that the prophet’s name is actually mentioned in the text; at ten o’clock the night before, when he had sounded out for the first time that crabbed, mysterious syllable, he had sat back with a strange lurching in his heart.

  All winter and long into spring, the citizens of Charn and Caladon had been obliged by law to memorize large portions of the Holy Song. But by midsummer, so thoroughly had the questioners performed their work, all that learning was forgotten, broken, rooted out, persisting only among covens of witches, Starbridge renegades, and followers of the Cult of Loving Kindness. It was possible for an educated man like Mr. Sarnath, a man whose work had actually involved from time to time the persecution and exposure of the Cult, never to have known any of the old words. It was not until he had deciphered the 940th verse, working close to midnight by the light of his oil lamp, that he understood.

  I will bring a bag of pearls,

  Enough to spell my name out

  on the ground.

  And you will spell my name out

  on the ground,

  And you will spell it “ANGKHDT.”

  He had written “Onket.” He had stared at the unfamiliar word, testing it in his mouth for the first time. Then he had sat back. His hand and pen had fallen slackly to his side.

  That day, almost for the first time, his meditation had seemed bitter and unprofitable to him, and he had risen from his cushion prematurely, with aching knees. Now the sun was going down. Long shadows slunk across the floor of the veranda. With his thumb he rubbed along the maxillary bone, along a sleeping image of the master. Then he paused, remembering the statue of St. Abu Starbridge, which he had kept upon his desk that last night at his post in Caladon. He remembered the golden star inlaid upon the saint’s copper palm, glinting in the moonlight. Perhaps that too had been a sign. A moth was drowning in a bowl of light—one tiny circumstance had led him on a long and weary path. But perhaps also it had been the image of the saint that had led him to the place where he now sat, a mental journey just as long and complicated as the physical had been, through swamps and forests just as thick.

  He raised his eyes. There at the clearing’s edge, Cassia stood beside the banyan tree, her skirt rucked up around her hips. She was standing with her hand outstretched, her fingers buried in an enormous tassel of roots which hung down near her, searching for the ground. She was carrying a basket of fruit upon her back—jackfruit, selamat, and durian.

  * * *

  There was a place for him to lie invisible above the pool. He lay crouched behind a boulder in the mouth of an old culvert, which had fed the dye pit of some ancient factory. Near his hand crept one of the fat rael bugs that had given him his name, it
s carapace clicking in the dirt. When he was a child he had been able to imitate the sound.

  The silver pool was a round concrete cistern, perhaps fifty feet from edge to edge. Opposite where he lay hidden, a narrow waterfall coursed down a slope of bricks, pure water from the stream above. But whether there was still some residue in the bottom of the cistern, or whether some of the numerous pipes which hung out over it still dripped some ancient effluent, the pool itself retained a milky color, a distinctive smell.

  Birds circled overhead. Near Rael’s hand, lizards crept among the mossy pipes. On an overhanging ledge a monkey and a dinko grimaced at each other; one threw a stone. Apart from that it was a peaceful place. The waterfall provided a soft, comfortable clamor; it ran down into a steep-sided basin at one end of the pool. But at the other end the slope was gentler. Shyer larger animals came down to drink at a beach of concrete rubble intermixed with pebbles of worn glass—small forest antelopes, and tapirs, and wild dogs. At sunset it seemed as if they had a pact among themselves. Once Rael had seen a tiger squat down by the bank to clean his paws, while nearby slept a fat potbellied pig, dug up to her nostrils in the silver mud.

  But there was another beast, one whose malevolence and hunger never rested. This pool was its stalking ground. When it was hunting, the temperature around the pool subsided, and there was milky scum upon the surface of the water. When it was hunting, Rael could feel a prickling on his skin, an ache in his back teeth. It exuded a small sound, an intimate small whispering that seemed to touch Rael in his inner ear. Then he would crouch down out of sight and wait until he saw a movement on the other bank.

  He had waited at the pool a dozen times, and felt the change in temperature, and smelt the scum upon the pool; he had watched the creature make a dozen kills before he knew what he was seeing. Only when it was finished he had gone down to the little beach, and he had looked at the creature’s track in the wet sand. And he had looked at the wet bones of a dozen animals half buried in the sand, each one sucked clean, and perhaps a few rags of tattered flesh or feathers.

  Now if he concentrated, he could see exactly where the creature was. But its shape and form were still indefinite. Appearing always in the twilight, it seemed covered in a skin of shadow. Sometimes he could see it better from the corner of his eye.

  Once, after it had made its kill, he had seen it creep down to the pool to drink. Then he had climbed down to the opposite bank. He had hoped to catch a glimpse of its reflection. But the surface of the pool was too disturbed. He had gone down on his belly, not twenty feet away from it, and he had stared at it across the pool, and listened to the gentle sucking sound it made. Then it had raised its head. For the first time he had seen the glint of its sour eyes and felt a whispering in his mind. “Who are you?” it had asked. “Who are you, that you see so clearly?”

  The next day he had waited for it and had watched it feed. Seven small peccaries had come down to the water. And as the strange, amorphous darkness formed in back of one of them, coming down from the jungle on its track of slime, none of the others seemed to notice. None of the others seemed to notice the drop in temperature, the new cold wind. They grunted cheerfully upon the beach. And even the intended victim, turning at last to face its attacker, never made a sound. It stood fascinated, with its head low to the earth. Even when Rael threw a stone to panic all the other animals, still that one stood.

  Once Rael had accompanied a novice from the village, who had come up looking for an intact sheet of glass. When the moment came, Rael had seized him by the arm and pointed out across the pool, but the man saw nothing. Only he was concerned that Rael had touched him; with a wry smile on his bony alien face, he had pulled his arm away.

  In the weeks that followed, Rael had gathered weapons, a spear of heartwood and a steel spike. On the evening of the day that Mr. Sarnath had spent meditating on the Song of Angkhdt, at the moment when Cassia stood by the banyan tree, her skirt pulled up around her hips, Rael raised his head off of the boulder. The sun had sunk below the hilltops, and the basin of the pool had filled with shadow. A scarlet ibis and its somber mate were wading near the beach.

  * * *

  Cassia untucked her skirt and it fell down around her legs. She squatted to pick up the gourd of water, which she had carried in her arms up the steep slope. She worked her bare feet down into the dirt. Squeezing the fat gourd between her palms, she lifted it in one clean rush and settled it upon a ring of wicker on her head. Then, supporting it with one hand, she rose up slowly, the other arm outstretched for balance, her tongue protruding from the middle of her lips.

  Mr. Sarnath watched her make her way across the clearing toward his house. He had been the master’s favorite pupil when he was a boy, and the master had taught him to be careful always, even in the midst of speculation, to appreciate the offerings of his senses. Mr. Sarnath, though his mind was at that moment full of blank misgivings, allowed his heart to be lifted when he saw her. He moved the dry pads of his fingers over the incisions in the skull. A fly was buzzing on the steps. The garbage pile behind the house exuded a sweet smell. Cassia’s hair was black, her lips were wide. As she got closer he examined her more closely—the sweat around her mouth, the spot upon her chin—with a minute appreciation that included not the slightest spark of sensuality.

  She stood beside the steps that led to the veranda. Curling the fingers of her left hand under the lip of the gourd, she twisted herself out from underneath it, so that it fell straight down to earth. It made a glug, and slopped some water on her hand.

  Mr. Sarnath had risen from his chair. He stood on the top step. Cassia stripped the wicker basket from her back and held it up for him. When he had taken it, she wiped the hair out of her mouth. Bending down, she took a double handful of water from the gourd and rinsed her face with it. “Come,” she said. “Leave that and come down into the sun. I bet you’ve been inside all day.”

  Mr. Sarnath shook his head. He stared out at the shadows on the grass. Then he turned. The brown skull watched him from the center of the desk.

  “Come down,” cried Cassia. And there was something in her voice that changed his mind and helped him to decide. Carrying the basket, he disappeared indoors, and then returned almost immediately holding an old cloth bag. It had once been yellow.

  “Vanity,” said Mr. Sarnath. “Vanity is still the hardest.”

  “What?” Cassia had come up to stand behind him. Surprised, she watched him wrap the skull in parchment and stuff it down into the bag. The bag had a long throat. He twisted it, then tied it in a knot.

  “When you light the fire tonight, use that paper.”

  He motioned toward the tabletop, where the six hundred sheets of his own handwriting lay scattered. Then he turned around to face her.

  “But you worked on it so long,” she said.

  “I was deluded.”

  He slung the bag over his shoulder and walked down the steps. The heat of the day was now abated, and the sun was shining through the long trunks of the trees. He scuffed his sandals in the dust—an area of crushed stone near the steps. Then when his toes had settled in their thongs, he set off toward the wood, the strips of alternating sun and shadow causing minute fluctuations in the temperature of his long cheeks.

  His people did not sweat, not like the humans, whose skins were always damp. He could tell that she was close behind him by her smell, for she was quiet as a cat, and in the movement of her greasy limbs he could hear none of the incidental noises that he made when he walked. None of the small creaking, the whisper of the flesh rubbing the bone, just the silence of a wild animal, her and her brother. Then he paused, and turned to her and smiled, aware that his own disappointment had turned outward, as it sometimes did. Hundreds of nights of wasted labor hung suspended in his yellow bag.

  She smiled back at him, and then they walked companionably into the wood, following a path that ran in back of the cabin, past the garbage dump, and left the crest of the hill at right angles to the way that she
had come. “Where are we going?” she asked once, but he shrugged his narrow shoulders. He had decided, and in fact the path led only to one place. They pushed through a dark undergrowth of spiderbushes, rhododendron, jacaranda. Stepping carefully downhill, Cassia had to raise her forearms to protect her face against the branches whipping back. In a few minutes she came out at the lip of the ravine, a cleft between one hill and the next. Mr. Sarnath was standing in the sunlight on a bare place on the rock.

  The ravine followed a break in the forest canopy, and the yellow sun was shining, its strength not yet used up. It was cooler here than on the hilltop, and the air was fresh and smelled of water. Deep below them at the bottom of the hill where it was already dark with shadow, she could hear the gurgle of a stream.

  “This will do,” said Mr. Sarnath. He was standing on the edge, his arm outstretched, the long bag dangling from his hand. He opened up his fingers and the bag dropped down, bouncing off the incline and then rolling in a scatter of black dirt until it disappeared into a crevice in the rock.

  He turned around. “The sun leaves here last. It’s perfectly safe.” In fact the rock seemed free of beetles and corrosive slugs; it was a wide flat piece of limestone. Mr. Sarnath sat down suddenly, collapsing on his creaking knees. Perched cross-legged, he looked like a gaunt bird atop its nest. Cassia took a seat more gingerly. She was very thirsty.