The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  “Now,” said Mr. Sarnath, leaning toward her. “What did you learn in school today?”

  He had asked her the same question many times and never listened to the answer. When he was irritated or distressed he would take refuge in a few stiff, formal questions, designed to take him out of his own thoughts. He would set his face into a mask of concentration, which never fooled her, for she knew him well. But this time, as she started to recite the circumstances of the master’s death, she could tell that he was listening. His body started to relax and sag, and he slipped toward her down the rock.

  “ ‘In the center house there is a teacher,’ ” Cassia recited. “ ‘He is waiting for me there, and he has made a place for me among the last circle of novices.’ ”

  Around them, the first peepers of the evening had come out, scarlet tree frogs, and when they sang their throats swelled up as big as they. Mr. Sarnath turned his head. There was one sitting on a rhododendron tree ten feet away.

  “Interesting,” he said at last. He furrowed up his brow and then turned back. “What did you say to that?”

  “No one said anything. It was the last lesson.”

  “But you remember.”

  “Of course,” said Cassia. “It was just this afternoon.”

  “No—you remember when the master died. You were there.”

  Cassia frowned. “I was just a child.”

  “No. Is that what Langur Bey told you? You sat there between my legs. Don’t you remember what the master said?”

  She would have answered, but he raised his hand. He pointed toward the lowest branch of a tall tree, which hung out over the edge of the ravine. Just for an instant she could see a flicker of movement there, a flash of iridescent feathers.

  “Interesting,” Mr. Sarnath said again. “That you can tell a lie to a whole group of people who were witness to the truth.”

  “Oh, Papa, it was school. That’s all.”

  “I am not your father,” he said automatically. Then he smiled. Around them, the world was settling down, the shadows spreading, the colors mutating in the last of the sun. The sweat was dry on Cassia’s skin. “Shouldn’t we go in?” she asked. “It’ll be dark.”

  But Mr. Sarnath put his finger to his lips. On the other side of the ravine, in the cleft of a bloatwood tree, a man-of-the-forest stood erect. His studious little face was turned to them, and he was nuzzling shyly at a piece of branch, the trunk of a long sapling that he had pulled down from above, revealing a crown of flowers on its leafy head. Slowly, tentatively, he stretched out his naked leg, shifting his weight until he hung suspended between the sapling and the tree, spread out against a silver patch of sky. There he was at rest; in a little while he let loose a stream of urine out of his fat paunch, which arched over the lip of the ravine, spattering the darkness down below.

  * * *

  There was scum on the water and a dry, cold wind. Rael saw the bird explode in a flurry of bright feathers. He swung himself out of the culvert, dropping thirteen feet onto the bricks, which were confused near there, and so he came down on the side of his right foot and sprawled down to the water, falling on his hands and knees. He staggered up, and already he could barely keep his weight on his right ankle. Already it was swelling; he gathered up his spear to lean on it and looked across at the opposite beach, fifty feet away, where the female ibis strutted unconcerned, and for a moment Rael was sure the beast was gone. He was crying out with anger, kicking at the water with his injured foot, but then he stopped and stood watching the dark, long-legged bird, for she was searching the surface of the water for insects. Untroubled, she was wading through a wreck of scarlet feathers, untroubled also by the raving figure with the useless foot, and then Rael knew her mind was still held captive, as his was. There was a shadow that he couldn’t see with eyes made careless by his injury, a shadow that was waiting for him on the beach under the trees, a creature that was slow and weak, whose only power was a mental one, as he discovered when he took tentative, damaged steps around the pool and found his mind assaulted with a riot of strange shapes and an insinuating noise that seemed to grow inside his skull by slow degrees until it blotted out the beach, the bird, the sinking sun, and he was limping slowly through another, darker place, a darker landscape of the mind which nevertheless had one great burning dot in it, a dot pulsing with light, and he was limping slowly toward that dot until the shattered bricks beneath his feet gave out onto another surface. And though with all his force he was tending toward that dot as if against a pressure that was almost irresistible, still part of his mind was firmly concentrated elsewhere, because he guessed that when his mind was elsewhere he might move faster against an animal whose strength lay in its powers of misdirection; so he was concentrating on the darkness all around him, as if the pure force of his concentration could just puncture through. And all the while he was tending toward the dot, limping and shaking his sharp stick, and raging now with a noise that rivaled the cacophony inside his skull, convinced that if he could just touch that dot with the end of his sharp spear, then he would find the moment that resolves all doubts, the moment also when the beast appears out of the mists of illusion and spews its life out in a cold, choking rush—convinced also (and this was why he was shouting and raging with a maniac desperation) that if the skin of darkness which surrounded him could be punctured, then he would find himself inside another landscape utterly, a landscape that would have nothing to do with the hot wet fecund jungle and the greasy pool, a landscape he had never visited, yet it was achingly familiar: a high harsh grassy upland held in a fist of snow-capped mountains, where he could run and run after the rats, the does, the rabbits, and the silver wolves, and when he found them he could stab and stab and stab.

  * * *

  He killed the creature in the water near the bank and dragged its body to the shore. Now he could see it clearly; it was smaller than he’d thought. Dead, it looked like any other kind of beast. It had short, powerful arms and legs, a pale belly that was punctured now, and its back and head was covered with dark hair. Its yellow eyes had been an illusion. Poking with his spear, Rael could not judge where on the beast’s head they might have been. A small, featureless triangle, a red soft mouth—the beast appeared to have no natural defenses. It had no claws, no spines, no teeth.

  Squatting in the shallow water, Rael ran his hands over his body, searching for wounds. His skin was covered with a dirty slime, and it was mixed with his own blood. He knew it, knew that he was bleeding still, and yet he could not find the source, even after he had washed himself clean. The sun was setting. The entire pool was tinged with red.

  In time he pulled himself up on the sand and lay upon his back, watching the sky change color. Tiny beads of blood were forming on his chest, gathering like sweat, dripping down his ribs.

  Staring up at the dark trees, his mind chased dazzling afterimages among the leaves—a flock of radiant birds. For a few minutes he lost consciousness. When he awoke, the body of the beast was gone. He turned over in the sand, propping himself up onto his elbows. A wet track led away into the bushes—too dark now to follow.

  * * *

  In the cabin on the hillside, Cassia stirred the fire with a stick. It had sunk down to almost nothing, a glow of yellow embers, the only light in that small room. Outside, the wood was full of noises, now that night was come.

  Behind her in the darkness Mr. Sarnath lay asleep, his face turned to the wall. As was his intermittent custom, he had drunk a glass of laudanum with dinner, then wrapped himself from head to toe in a white sheet. Now he lay immobile in his narrow bunk under a row of moldy paperbacks upon a shelf.

  Sometimes in the evenings he would lie down for a while with a book, some gentle comedy of manners, set in a more sophisticated region of the continent, or else even overseas. He would read until he fell asleep. That night Cassia had made him peanut curry and pressed rice, but he had been uncommunicative, had gone to bed earlier than usual, had left her with the pot.

  Now
she sat stirring the fire, waiting for her brother’s whistle, and from a wicker basket by the hearth she took out handfuls of paper—Mr. Sarnath’s manuscript—and she was burning it. At first she had taken each sheet and crumpled it up separately, but that took time, and she was anxious to return to her dormitory in the village before it got too late. And there was something else: For reasons that she couldn’t specify this labor made her anxious. Once, a month before, she had carried in her hands the brown, carved skull that Mr. Sarnath had kept out upon his table on the porch, and it had given her a queasy feeling just to touch it. She had been glad when he had dropped it down the cliff. But now this paper gave her some of the same feeling; she picked up a big clump of it, all that remained, and loaded it upon the fire. The room went dark. The fire was struggling underneath the mass of paper. With her stick she tried to spread it out, to make it burn more easily, but every time she poked at it she felt light-headed, feverish, worse. Tongues of fire curled over the dark mass of the manuscript, and she could read it:

  Nutmeg from the Orient,

  Candied ginger I will bring you.

  Topaz, diamonds, and quartz,

  From the mines of RANAKPORE,

  From the turbaned NEGRO’s toil,

  From the fabled mountainside,

  From the bottom of the sea,

  Pearls as big as PLOVER’s eggs.

  I will bring a bag of pearls,

  Enough to spell my name out

  on the ground.

  And you will spell my name . . .

  She knew the rest. She knew the song. She knew the errors Sarnath had made in the translation. When the page was too charred to decipher, she sat back on her heels, her hand locked around the small copper medallion he had once given her, and which she wore on a string around her throat. Sometimes in the evening it seemed to burn under her fingers, as if the engraved image of the sun possessed some warmth.

  She stared into the flame, afraid to raise her head, afraid to meet the eyes that she felt suddenly were watching her from across the fire, from the dark corner where the brooms were propped.

  She raised her head and there was nothing. The fire had guttered down to nothing.

  And yet there was a lingering smell that reached her through the black smell of the fire and the rank smell of her sweat. It was the smell of incense and of perfumed oil; once she had had a dream, a dream that had been like a journey. Awake, she could remember its beginning, middle, and its end. Awake, she had been terrified, but in the dream she’d felt no fear, and everything she saw had seemed familiar: an altar that was like a stage, and at the back of it a four-armed statue of cast bronze, thirty feet high, sitting cross-legged with a fat, gleaming belly, and in the shadows above her—for she had been a dancer on this stage, dressed in silk clothing with a candle in her hand—an enormous, vague, distorted head with a sharp muzzle like a dog’s. And there had been incense on the altar, and her tattooed hands were glistening with a perfumed oil.

  There was nothing in the corner of the cabin. But she had no desire to stay longer. She would wait no longer. So she rose unsteadily to her feet, rubbing her legs, and she took the lantern from a nail near the door.

  Outside, the sky shone silver-grey. Above the small roof of the cabin, a triangle of stars burned brighter than the rest. She looked up; she was standing on the middle step. In her left hand burned a stick which she had taken from the fire, the small blue flame untroubled in the quiet air. Her lantern was a candle in an ancient mason jar held in a net of wicker braid.

  She lit it and then tossed the stick out onto the wet grass. Then she stepped down. Around her, lantern bugs were rising through the weeds, each one carrying its intermittent glow. She took a few steps down the path. To Rael, watching sore and weary from the trees, it looked as if she were surrounded by a cloud of light.

  He called to her, whistling like a curlew, three low notes and one high. It was his signal, and she was happy to hear it, for the walk to the village was uncomfortable in the dark. Her night vision was poor. She often stumbled on the rocks, and around her she could always hear the crashing of the beasts.

  But that night her brother’s whistle sounded different. He missed the note. The pure curlew’s trill was harsh and garbled. Then she saw him; he was sitting by the banyan tree, his head bowed low.

  She stood above him with the candle; then she went down on her knees. “What happened?” she said. “What happened?” but he shook his head. His skin was covered with a crust of blood, his hair was stiff with it. To her bad eyes, it looked like dirt. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. She put her arms around him and helped him to his feet; he was wearing a ripped pair of shorts and nothing else. Beside him was a long, sharp, broken wooden stick—he picked it up and leaned on it, and that was good because she never could have supported his whole weight, not with the lantern too.

  He didn’t say a word. He was limping through the darkness, slipping on the path, and she was holding him up with her left hand under his armpit all the way to the new barricade of thorns. There he seemed to revive somewhat, for he made it over the gate, and above the village he picked up his stick, and pointed down the slope off to the right. It was the way to the bathing pool, a track used only by themselves, for the Treganu disliked getting wet. A spring of water ran down through some rocks, forming a narrow pool two hundred yards above the village. They could see the lights.

  They turned toward it, and Rael slumped down between the rocks. Cassia put the lantern down onto the rock. She pulled up her skirt and knotted it around her hips, then she stepped into the icy stream. She splashed water over his shoulders while he groaned and shook his head. She rubbed the water through his hair, washing him clean while he sat with his cheek against her leg.

  Then she stood up. She stepped out of the pool and moved up the stream. Standing on the hump of a wet rock, she unbuttoned the bodice of her dress, for there was a smell on her skin now that she found intolerable, a smell of perfumed oil mixed with blood. She knelt, and brought up handfuls of water which she poured over her neck and breasts, turning away from Rael so that he couldn’t see her, confident he couldn’t because to her eyes he was just a shadow in the stream, unaware that as he looked up with his eyes of a night animal he could see her clearly, see the reaction of her skin to the cold water. He dropped his head, turning his back a little also, so that in the light of the lantern near his hand she could not tell what was so evident to him, even in his pants.

  Part Four:

  Deccan Blendish

  BY SEPTEMBER OF THE SIXTEENTH PHASE of summer, 00016, the city of Charn was once again the primary conduit for trade in that whole northern country. Ships from the gulf would anchor at the big container port below the town, and stevedores would then transfer their cargo, depending on its nature, either to the flatbeds of the railway or else to barges that were floated upstream, thirty miles up the river and up into the city itself, through the uninhabited swamps at the eastern end of Lake Nineteenth of May. Here the barges off-loaded onto smaller craft that motored over the flat waters of the lake, past the old Mountain of Redemption. This edifice, a gigantic prison in prerevolutionary days, was now the cultural museum in Charn, a showplace for the horrors of the old Starbridge regime. Its enormous bulk still dominated that whole section of the valley, dominated also smaller domes and towers that still rose up through the water. From time to time these smaller buildings would collapse, causing sudden hazards for the boatmen passing through them toward the city; occasionally also the surface of the water would be troubled as the lake flowed into some new subterranean chamber.

  Boatmen in straw hats with colored ribbons navigated their flat craft through a series of shallow but massive locks, which ran under the power plant and let them out into the river marketplace of Charn. On all days except national holidays the water there was crowded with a vast array of boats, selling printed fabrics, batteries, and a myriad of foreign gadgets, as well as produce that for whatever reasons could not be grown lo
cally. And they were joined there by other, smaller boats that had come down through the city on the radial canal, selling grains and oils and nuts and spices and a hundred different kinds of fruits and vegetables at dementedly low prices, for in those days there was no shortage of food in Charn, in Caladon, or anywhere in that whole region. Even the humblest, poorest rooftop garden could provide food for an entire extended family, and the terraced hills beyond the city were so fertile that—the old joke ran—you could drop a handkerchief at dawn and harvest an entire suit of clothes by noon. At the end of the sixteenth phase of summer, orchards and rice fields extended hundreds of miles outside the city—more and more each day, for they were cutting down the forests of teakwood, limewood, and the scented ebony, and shipping the timber overseas.

  In those days, in Charn, from noon to five the streets were almost empty, and the temperature would rise above a hundred. From three-fourteen to five o’clock the rains would come; those were the hours of the afternoon siesta, for sometimes the rain was hot enough to hurt the skin, and sometimes in the streets the water rose up to midcalf, despite the excellent new drains. But at five o’clock precisely every afternoon the rains would stop, the clouds would wash away and disappear, and the provost of Sabian College would fire off a signal from the tower of the University of Charn. Then as the water receded underfoot, every afternoon a new fresh breeze would waft up from the gulf, and the shops that had been closed since morning would reopen, and a steady throng of people would flow from the houses down into the streets, and they would pack the tree-lined boulevards, the bars and the cafes, and especially the parks and public squares. In those days Charn was full of children; and there were thousands upon thousands of children everywhere, almost six for every adult. In a crowd the heads of the adults would protrude above the mass, and they seemed isolated and self-conscious like a race of freakish giants.