The Cult of Loving Kindness (23 page)

Miss Azimuth collapsed onto the rocks. Her dry hair protruded out from the left side of her head. Her scarf had slipped over her right eye. Her legs were splayed apart under her dress, and her face retained for several minutes an expression of remote astonishment. Cassia’s blood was beating in her head, her breath was ragged in her throat, and there were tears in her eyes, tears that could not manage to drip down her cheeks the whole time that she stood there. Inside she was a swamp of anger, a fountain of contempt; still after a moment the water dried out of her eyes and she could see more clearly. Her breathing settled, and the grunting at the back of it resolved itself into a few small words, a saying of the master’s, which Mr. Sarnath had taught her when she was a little girl. “ ‘There’s nothing sweeter than your love,’ ” she said aloud. “ ‘There’s nothing sweeter than your love.’ ”

This was a portion of a longer verse that Mr. Sarnath had taught her as a calming exercise, a way to vanquish feelings of self-righteousness, a way to climb back down into a comfortable humility. But now she could remember only the last line, and now the sick sensation of anger in her belly was driving her up out of herself, into a new high place inside her head. Her contempt came back redoubled as the pilgrims crept out from behind the rocks, behind the twisted trees, and they were kneeling down. Now from that high mountain in her head, it was easy for her to realize that they were bowing to her, that they had stepped aside for her. For her they had made the gestures of respect, her with her gashed foot and the golden blood painting her instep.

An old man came out toward her, creeping along the ground, his hand outstretched, his eyes averted. She turned away from him and hurried up the last remaining slopes until the trees gave way completely. She clambered up over the bleached rocks until she stood atop the rim of the caldera. Still above her, the bulk of Nyangongo loomed up to the sky, surmounted by its column of smoke, its cloud of mist. Below her the path descended a few dozen yards into a shallow flat circular expanse of sand and rock. It was the old collapsed caldera of an earlier and now extinct volcano. It formed a natural amphitheater more than a mile across, and it was full of people, perhaps ten thousand people with their baggage and their children. At the center of it stood an altar, a scaffold of wood and steel.

 

Rael hunted in the forest all day. He found a rubber wheel. He could not guess its age—whether it had lain there through the generations, preserved by chance or else some ancient process, or whether it had been discarded recently. There was no sign of any metal carcass, any truck or motorcar. The wheel was imbedded in the moss. Yet why would anybody carry it this far and no farther?

 

The tread was worn and cracked. He took the steel spike out of his belt and levered the edge of the tire up over the wheel’s rim, exposing the inner tube. Yet still his mind was full of questions; he sat back in the moss and shook his head, a sadness inside of him. Questions in his mind—they were like bats in a cave. And each one had a sentence printed on its wing, and each was talking words out of its mouth. Thoughts and feelings, thoughts and feelings bending to caress his face and then fleeing away.

He pulled the spike in a circle around the rim. And then he reached into the cavity and pulled out the old tube, its white corroded surface covered with small cracks. Yet there was still some suppleness left. He took out from his pocket the brass jackknife that Mr. Sarnath had once given him—a feeble tool. But he had kept the blade battered to sharpness, and now he cut a strip of rubber from the tube, a yard long, six inches wide.

He made a slingshot out of a small Y-shaped stick, and then he sat back on his heels in the moss, and sat there most of the whole day. With deliberate care he emptied out his mind, concentrating on sensation only: the ache in his feet and knees, the sweat upon his body, the smell of old rubber on his hands. After an hour or so of stillness he was conscious of a new spectrum of forest noises—the leaves, the insects, the stir of branches in the tiny wind. Animals too—after an hour and a half a family of swamp martens clambered up onto the long branch of a cypress tree. They were happy creatures with brown pelts and fluffy tails, and they were chattering to each other, and arguing, and playing. From time to time one of them would stop, reacting to some tiny noise which Rael too had heard with his new ears—the turning of a leaf, the click of a beetle’s foot against a stone. Then one of the martens would crouch down upon its branch, and Rael could see how in its stillness it had found a new intensity of action, straining, pregnant, and implied, where all its heart and fear and hope were concentrated to a single point.

A mother and two daughters, perhaps. And in time another one, an older male upon a stump. This one was slow, missing one foot, and with some naked cancerous growth upon its head. In its moments of immobility it seemed to achieve an even purer essence of awareness. When Rael lifted up his sling, it turned to face him. And when he pulled the strip of rubber, loaded with its shard of glass, against his ear, it assumed a stillness that seemed preternatural. Rael could hear the rubber creak, begin to break apart, yet still he did not release the stone. He kept it to his ear until the final moment. Then he let fly. The stone sailed harmlessly into the trees. The family of martens disappeared.

 

Part 9:
Soldiers of Paradise
T
he summit of Mt. Nyangongo, in the days before its most recent eruptions, rose eleven thousand feet out of the valley floor. The main cone of it was rarely climbable, because of the constant fog of poisonous gases at the top; even halfway up a change of wind could always bring a trace of some debilitating odor. Toward the top the angle of ascent exceeded sixty degrees, and the vitrescent rock was sharp and smooth and sheer. In those days the mountain was still growing, and new lava seeped out regularly from a split in the narrow crater. At night the summit of the mountain glowed through a cloud of mist, its contour described by a small tracery of fire.

 

Halfway down the western slope, the old crater bulged out of the mountain’s side. Long collapsed, long extinct, impressive, isolated, easily defended, it had become over the months of summer a place of refuge for the faithful, a meeting place, a gathering place. Thousands of people from all over the old diocese of Charn had made the trip up through the woods for Paradise Festival, and they had brought liquor and marijuana and coffee and imported goods to swap or sell.

In winter, the festival had been a bitter ceremony, a celebration of the hundred kinds of slavery. The rites had been imposed, determined by the Starbridge hierarchy—the bishops and the princes and the priests. Now, in summer, the impulse for the festival had come up from below, and it was still a joyful, mirthful, hopeful thing. When at sunset on the sixty-third, Rael arrived upon the rim of the caldera, he stood for half an hour listening to his breath, summoning his courage to descend. For it seemed to him that the old volcano still showed signs of life—the whole round plain below him was ablaze with shifting light, speckled with ten thousand fires that were dwindling and growing as he watched, winking out and reappearing. There were cookfires, bonfires, lanterns, flashlights, fireworks, and acetylene torches. To Rael, who had lived all his life in the forest and had rarely seen an unimpeded sunset, it was as if the mass of fire in the bowl in front of him had torched the sky. And though it was cold on the mountain and he could feel a cold wind along his spine, his face was glowing from the heat that was rising from the crater. The separate sounds of cherry bombs and shouts and music and ten thousand conversations had combined into a roar. The smell of gunpowder and food and smoke and unwashed bodies was rising like a steam—an acrid steam that hurt his eyes.

He turned around for a moment so that the heat was at his back, and looked down the way he’d come. He felt giddy in the new altitude, giddy and unsure. The valley where he had seen the martens was opaque with shadow, and it was as if a flood of shadow was mounting toward him up the slope, obliterating every rock and tree. Soon he was standing on an island in the middle of a sea of shadow, an atoll of red rock, with only the red mountain and the red sky still above him. In front of him, at the level of his eye, five thousand feet above the valley floor, a bird turned swiftly, the last of the sunlight in its wings.

When he was a little boy, before he could even speak, he had cut twenty-four lengths of dry bamboo and arranged them on a frame of strings. Mr. Sarnath had helped him. Alone in the woods, he had beat on it for several days. Then he had stopped.

Now, on the mountainside, an image from his childhood appeared to him. A young boy with an angry face, half-naked in the woods—it was himself, his sticks upraised above his xylophone. Six notes occurred to him. Whether it was a song from those old days, whether it was something put into his mind by the hunter he had seen among the laurel trees, whether it was something new—he couldn’t tell. Even there, standing with the hot roar of the crowd behind him, he thought he sensed somewhere in the cold high air the whisper of a song, a few notes of a melody that was meant for him alone. Six notes only, yet they seemed significant. He turned around.

A quarter of a mile away there was a crack in the rim of the caldera. A path ran down from it among the rocks into the shadow, back the way he had climbed up, and Rael could hear the voices of late-coming pilgrims. Their lanterns mimicked the flow of lava from the crack of Mt. Nyangongo high above—a tiny stream of fire that trickled down into the dark. Climbing from the valley, Rael had tried to stay just out of earshot from it, just out of sight. Now, above timber, the path seemed close, and Rael could see the scurrying black figures underneath the torches, and he could hear their anxious voices.

Then he turned back again. Or perhaps the stream of fire was like a cable which brought power up from down below. Taking a few steps down into the heat of the caldera, Rael could hear the thump thump thump of a gas generator, which someone had lugged up all that way.

It stood amid some boulders, surrounded by canisters of fuel. Some men stood near it, drinking and shouting above the noise. One, stripped to his waist, was lying on his stomach with an expansion wrench in his left hand. He was making some adjustment among the whirring belts and wheels around the generator’s underside. His face, twisted with effort, was illuminated by a spray of sparks. As Rael approached, for an instant the thumping sound quit suddenly, and a whole wide area of the caldera floor went dark. Curses and whistles rose up all around, turning to cheers when the generator started up again. The lights came up. Near Rael’s foot, the thick and knotted wire jerked suddenly as the electricity rushed through.

It was not two dozen yards from the rim of the caldera to its floor. With every step downward Rael had felt an increase in the heat, the noise, the light. When he stepped out onto the sandy floor, he turned his face up to the sky. But it was gone—the wind, the quiet, the color, the solitary bird, all replaced by a harsh artificial glow, the sound of drunken shouting. People were all around him. It was as if he had stepped into the streets of a city. A long erratic spiral of tin, cardboard, and canvas shelters curved away from him.

He was dressed in his old tattered cotton shorts which Mr. Sarnath had made for him, and which he had scarcely taken off since he left the village in the trees. His upper body was wrapped in his blanket, which he had pulled up around his neck and shoulders. It hid most of his face; summoning courage, he stepped out along the first turn of the spiral. Almost for the first time in his life he was conscious of how he must appear to other people: a brooding, ominous figure. These folk were as alien to him as the Treganu. For the festival they had put on bright, gay clothes. They had painted their bodies with bright colors, and most of them wore masks. It was a hot night, and many of the young women had stripped down to almost nothing—just a pair of red spandex knickers, for example, or, as in one spectacular case, white leg-warmers, white gloves to the shoulder, a white mask, and a wide white plastic belt. Their bodies were slick with oil, pungent with sweat. They walked arm in arm between the tents, talking and laughing. Many had painted their teeth and mouths and throats with silver Day-Glo, which was particularly effective under the electric lights. When they threw their heads back to laugh, their breath seemed to share some of the silver glow, appearing for a moment in a glinting cloud.

Rael was hungry. In front of almost every shelter the occupants had lit a cookfire or a primus stove. It was the hour for eating, and whole families squatted around them now. Rael was assaulted as he passed between them by the smell of vegetables in oil, of puffbread fried in bell-shaped pans, of spattering hot grease. His ears were assaulted by a hundred thousand cries and groans and shouts and yells, rising everywhere above the murmured conversation. To his right and to his left, old men sat on blankets spread out on the sand, and they were smoking sinsemillian cigars, and playing dominoes and chess. They were shouting at the children, who scattered sand in their faces as they chased each other down the curving path, and hid from each other among the tents. There were children everywhere, laughing, screaming, fighting, playing games. In front of Rael five little boys were setting off bottle rockets and flying saucers under the supervision of an older sister. Behind him, boys lit strings of squibs and threw them at each other. They were the only ones who paid any attention to Rael; they threw firecrackers and ran after him, pulling on his blanket, taunting him with questions that he didn’t understand. When he turned on them they backed away.

The first curve of the spiral path ran close against the wall of the caldera. Halfway along it, Rael came out into an open space, where the tents and shelters gave way temporarily and the path ran through an assortment of ramshackle structures made of wood and steel and glass, twice and three times as tall as men. Another generator hummed nearby. Black cables ran over the sand, for these structures were electric and alive. From time to time, in sequence, each one would shudder into life, its red and green and silver neon tubes would light up from its base to its crown, its wheels would move, its arms and head would move, its lights would flash on and off, and for ten seconds or so it would describe in jerky and repetitive pantomime one of the episodes of the immortal life of Angkhdt—stories unknown to Rael, who wandered between them with his mouth open in amazement, but serious as death to the assembled pilgrims, especially the older ones. Old men and women knelt before each one, and some had worn grooves in the sand from the pressure of their foreheads. The children didn’t care as much, and they were running through the thicket of mechanical statues, intent on their own missions. Occasionally one or two would stop as Rael did, wide-eyed before some spectacular tableau—the defenestration of the yellow gypsy, for example. Angkhdt appeared first, his silver neon dog’s head barbarous and impressive. His cobalt eyes glowed. His scarlet lips grinned. Then his arms, which had been hanging by his sides, disappeared as the lights that described them were extinguished. New arms flickered on, these ones holding in their massive clasp the foreign whore, naked with red hair, her breasts perfect circles of yellow neon, her nipples dots of red. Angkhdt turned his head to show his profile, and then the entire structure moved several feet along a greased and creaking rail toward the window, which had suddenly appeared, outlined with glowing ruffled curtains.