The Cult of Loving Kindness (32 page)

“Sit down,” said Marchpane.

“I want to stand. I don’t know more than I told you.”

Cathartes sat forward in his chair. “How many people were there?” he asked.

The miner shrugged. “Maybe ten thousand. Maybe more.”

“Tell me what they did. Was there a religious ceremony?”

“There was a stage, lit up. There was a big man with a dog’s head. Made of paper, maybe—paper and bamboo. They torched it at the end.”

“What else?”

“Sir, there were speeches. A man stood up and spoke about some guns. Someone had given them a lot of guns. I saw guns everywhere.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know names.”

Cathartes shuffled through the photographs until he found one of Cassia. “What about her?”

“That’s the bishop. They called her the bishop.”

“Did she speak?”

“She didn’t have to speak. She was just there.”

Cathartes squinted. “What are you telling me?”

“It’s not what she is, it’s what she means. Just her. Without her, there’s nothing there.”

“Did you see any drugs?”

“Lots of drugs.”

“Any sexual activity?”

“I guess so. It was a party. When the moon rose they were singing songs.”

Cathartes shuffled through a few more photographs. “Sir,” continued the young man. “I want you to understand, it’s all anybody talks about right now. Since I got back. I say there’s a lot of discontent here now. A lot of problems. They read the papers. They know you’ve got something. Some kind of relic in your office.”

He and Cathartes stared at each other. “I’ve got to get back,” said Nanda Dev, picking up his gloves.

“Just a minute,” said Cathartes. He sat frowning in his chair, and then he spoke. “You think this is a dangerous woman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A threat to the security of the mine.”

The young man rolled his eyes. “Sir, I’ve been telling you …” he said. But he stopped talking when Cathartes moved his hand.

“What could I offer you to do some work for me?” Cathartes said.

“What work?”

“Some dangerous work.”

The miner made a small impatient gesture with his gloves. “Sir, I do what I do. No more—I have a wife and child. Besides, what do you want with me? Why don’t you just go in there?”

He turned to Professor Marchpane. “Sir,” he said. “Why can’t you go there? You have the men.”

Professor Marchpane cleared his throat. “They’ve moved now, is that true?”

“Yes, they’re closer now. They moved again last night.”

 

When he had gone, Marchpane and Cathartes sat together in the close heat and talked for a few minutes. “He’s right,” Cathartes said. “We have the men.”

 

“Do we? He thinks I’m in danger just by visiting the pit without an escort. I’ve got five hundred men—ample for most circumstances. Not for attacking ten thousand armed fanatics.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” he said after a pause. “I want to get that bone of yours out of here as quickly as I can. I want you to go with it. The girl—I don’t give a damn about her. I want to hold on here until the Board returns, and then after about two months I want to turn in my resignation.”

Cathartes wasn’t listening. “You know I had her,” he said. “At the plantation—I had her in my hand. I could have avoided all of this.” He shook his head. “I was soft-hearted. She was so young.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Yes, I should have known. I thought it was the old Treganu, the old man. I was a fool. What was she doing out there by herself, in that village full of aberrations and monstrosities?”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Ten thousand people—she’s infecting this whole district. I will not forgive myself.”

Cathartes was leaning forward in his chair, his face sunk in shadow. Now he raised his head and squinted out the open door. “Never,” he said. “These popular delusions have long roots, which must be torn out daily.” He got to his feet. “I find this place oppressive.”

Again on the way back Cathartes walked with the overseer while Marchpane lagged behind. There were five miners waiting at the elevator at the end of the glass tunnel. Marchpane nodded at them while they looked at their shoes.

Suddenly he felt frightened. Yet why should he? The miners knew him. He knew hundreds by their names; he knew their families.

The cage arrived and he stepped into it. The miners followed him, shuffling their feet. They would not meet his eyes.

Why should he be afraid? Always he had fought for them—they knew that too. The disability pensions, the new hourly wage—all that was his initiative. Once he had gone alone into the prison to meet with the trade unionists.

Cathartes was talking with the overseer. The cage made several stops, and it was crowded. Someone stood on Marchpane’s foot.

Then they arrived upon the ridge and they descended. There was quite a crowd. The cog railway had halted for no reason he could see. Idle men and women stood next to the boiler hole with tin cups in their hands, though it was past the hour. They stared at him with red-rimmed eyes, their faces gleaming in the firelight. One had the impudence to spit, and Marchpane was relieved to see that Cathartes took no notice.

 

Part 12:
Nanda Dev
T
hirty-five hours later, Nanda Dev stood in Longo Starbridge’s tent. In his speech and in his posture, he showed the same proud submissiveness that he had in the crystal chamber in the mine. Here, Karan Mang took the Marchpane role. He was sitting in his canvas chair, and with his right index finger he was stroking the back of his left hand. Longo Starbridge stood behind him, his beard sunk on his chest.

 

It was midmorning. Sunlight was piercing through a hole in the flap. Washed, scraped free of grease, in different clothes, Nanda Dev was a handsome man with hairless skin. “Yes,” he said. “It went all right. It went like I said.”

“Tell us.” Karan Mang’s thin lips moved more than those two words justified; he seemed to be suppressing a yawn.

“He’s done for. He was the last one. My man hit him with a spanner as he got out of the elevator.”

“Did he kill him?”

“No. I told him not to push. But he crushed his skull behind the ear. He’s in the hospital.”

“And so?”

“And so there’s a new man, like I said, sir. He’s an associate professor of religion. But no one knows him. No one in security. No one in the hole.”

“I see.”

If Karan Mang had any interest in the answers to his questions, he didn’t show it in his voice. With his right forefinger he stroked the back of his left thumb. Longo Starbridge stood behind him.

Nanda Dev was barefoot. The red turban on his head was carefully knotted. The tasseled end hung down over his ear. “Now’s the time,” he said. “You shouldn’t wait more than a few days, sir. The phone is down, but there’s another one in Cochinoor. One way or another, he’ll get a message through.’’

Karan Mang shrugged his small shoulders, and rearranged the silk cuff on his wrist.

“Sir, maybe you don’t get it quite,” said Nanda Dev. “He’s just one man. He doesn’t know the mine. He doesn’t know how close things are to breaking open. I told him, but he doesn’t know. Marchpane knew. But Marchpane’s gone.”

“It’s not up to us.” Longo Starbridge spoke for the first time. His voice was low, deep in his beard. The hair trembled around his mouth. He shook his head. “It’s four days till the woodman comes.”

Nanda Dev clicked his tongue. “Who says you have to wait?”

“I do. It’s the sign. The first sign is the lily on the stump. The adversary cuts the lily on the stump. The woodman, and the golden blood flows down into the root. The second sign is the flame-of-the-forest tree, and the fire burning on the mountains. The third sign is the groaning in the earth. The fourth sign is the cracking of the tower. The fifth sign is the splitting of the sky, when Angkhdt will come into his country.”

“That’s all right,” said Nanda Dev. “But maybe we can hurry it along.”

“No we can’t. It’s not like that. You say there are five hundred security in Carbontown. That’s a lot of men. Everything must be exactly right for us, on our side and on yours.”

Karan Mang pursed his lips, and then he raised his hand to hide them. Longo Starbridge took two steps backward and lifted his arm, a rhetorical gesture, out of place in that cramped tent. His fingers grazed the roof; it was streaked with sunlight.

“The first sign is the bishop’s death,” he said. “The second sign is the fall of Carbontown. It is the fire burning on the hilltop. It is the flame of the forest, which Freedom Love saw burning in a dream. He says, ‘I was on the crack of the abyss, and I felt the flame inside my heart. And the pistons of my heart were pumping, and the furnace of my heart was bursting, and the engine of my heart was breaking. My arms, my chest, my belly, and the cavity of my brain was full of liquid fire.’ ”

He paused. “In fact the text retains its ambiguities,” said Karan Mang, staring at his thumb. “But Brother Longo is persuasive, and at the moment the level of sophistication among our followers is low. Unfortunately the commentary on the first sign is clearer. And the schedule is specific—unfortunately, I say, because we are uncomfortable here.”

“I don’t understand,” said Nanda Dev.

“I’m saying she’s going to die,” said Longo Starbridge. “She’s going to die according to the prophecy. Everybody knows it—she knows it, even. Do you think these people follow us because they like us?”

There was a silence in the tent. Karan Mang broke it: “Naturally, this has to be arranged from your side. The woodman is the enemy. He is the incarnation of the enemy.”

“What does he look like?” asked Nanda Dev.

“He is dressed in black. It is not complicated.”

“Two hundred dollars,” said Nanda Dev.

“As you like.”

“I’ve got a family,” said Nanda Dev. “I’m right, aren’t I? Whoever it is will not survive. I bet the prophecy is clear on that.”

“It is ambiguous,” said Karan Mang.

 

That day, the Cult of Loving Kindness was camped along a river bottom seven miles from Carbontown, in a grove of fig trees. It was a peaceful place. Light filtered through the leaves, speckled the canvas rooftops of the rows of tents. Nanda Dev, stepping out into the open air, was hoping for a breeze. His skin was slick with sweat. In fact the air outside Brother Longo’s tent was almost as wet, almost as close, almost as still as it had been inside. All was quiet in the grove, and whatever noises did penetrate—the buzz of an insect, the laugh of some small child—seemed muffled and made dull. The tents were empty. The soldiers of Paradise were in the forest, scavenging for food.

 

“Come,” said Longo Starbridge. “She’s with the children.”

They walked through the trees. The flies were thick upon the leaves, thick upon the fallen unripe fruit. As they reached the fringes of the grove, Nanda Dev wrinkled his nose. The path split left for Carbontown. It ran down by the river, which ran thick and slow and noiseless in its banks. He didn’t go that way. He followed Longo Starbridge through a clump of gutted bamboo huts. The meeting house, built of heavier wood, still smoldered.

They passed a shallow ditch in an open space where the ground was black and beaten flat. The dirt was looser there, turned over, and flies were crawling out of it. Nanda Dev wrinkled his nose, because a smell of carrion was rising with the burnt wood. The soldiers of Paradise had burnt the town; almost he turned aside. This is nothing, he thought. This is nothing, he thought to console himself. They’ll be a pile of bodies stacked up to the moon when Carbontown goes up. There was a murmur of voices coming from somewhere up ahead. They were in the forest now, pushing through a tangled mass of manzanita, following a tiny path which nevertheless was rutted deep with footprints. The manzanita gave out into separate clumps of tall bamboo. Here the light penetrated the foliage in sharp and dirty spears, flatter and wide-bladed and more numerous as they progressed, until they stepped out into an open glade. At the far end the bishop sat on a low bamboo bench, surrounded by children. Their mothers lay back in the shade.

Nanda Dev took out his camera from the pocket of his shorts. He had promised Cathartes some photographs. Some for his wife also, and one for the miner’s shrine, cut out of the glass on Level 36. Already he had brought a wooden mask from Nyangongo, as well as a small wooden image of Beloved Angkhdt.

He made ten photographs that day, most of which were lost. One of them, however, formed the model for the portrait which later hung in a much larger shrine in the new Autumn Temple. In that dark and pungent place, full of incense and acolytes and urgent prayers, it glowed like a source of light. For the painter captured with his crusted oils the brilliance of the sunlight in that forest glade where Cassia sat in her white dress. She had raised one hand. She was talking to the children who flocked around her feet.

The photograph, however, included figures missing from the painting—the figures of three adults who were with her by the bench that day. Two sat cross-legged: a grinning piebald woman, and an old man with his legs shrunken away to the bare bone. And one young man erect, his elbows raised, his fingers in his tangled yellow hair, his eyes mere holes in his dark face.

Nanda Dev’s camera was new, imported, so small it could fit easily upon his palm. Unlike models even from a few months before, which had required that the subject pose for several minutes without moving, this one could capture minute fluctuations of expression. He folded back the plastic lid. He looked for a moment through the aperture, and then he let the lens wander over the scene. He rejected as a point of focus first the bishop’s pensive face, next the young man’s expression of tense hatred, of violence barely suppressed. Finally he pressed the shutter ten times at random. Looking up, he thought he could feel the tremor of a breeze floating toward him down the glade, bringing with it some sweet smell.

“God in Paradise, she’s beautiful,” he murmured.

At his side, Longo Starbridge grunted assent. Then he walked forward into the glade and squatted down by the side of an old woman dressed in black. She was sitting on a blanket in the shade of a litmus bush, an old, dried, withered woman, loosely put together like a bundle of dry sticks.