The Cult of Loving Kindness (27 page)

Built for a different climate and a different atmosphere, it seemed fragile and unwieldy in the air. For that reason, perhaps, it was unthreatening. Its thumping rotors and its blinking lights made it seem part of the festival. Some children clapped their hands as it turned slowly overhead. Enid was trying to make out some of the writing on its side.

“ ‘Property of the University of Charn,’ ” she said. “ ‘Rural Initiative #2: Donation. Inter-Cooperation Friendship Group. Carbontown.’ ”

But then a klaxon was sounding over the loudspeakers, and in time the gunfire was returned. Soldiers moved along the street dressed in black uniforms and carrying automatic rifles. Their captain carried a megaphone, and he was warning the people to stay calm.

This was almost the first deployment of Longo Starbridge’s militia, the so-called “soldiers of Paradise.” Unkempt, barefoot, young, they gave no indication of the expert ferocity that later would distinguish them. Except as they came past, the harsh mist of their perspiration rose around them, and Rael turned his head aside.

A rocket had exploded, and two cardboard shelters were in flames. The soldiers moved around them. Some were firing guns into the air, although the helicopter was already out of range. It had drifted away, off to the east.

But suddenly Jane and Enid were tugging on Rael’s hands. “Come farther in,” they shouted. “This is the children’s part.” And in fact children were making up most of the crowd now that the soldiers had passed. They were crawling from the tents; they were leaving their parents behind. They were clapping their hands and shouting. Their faces were painted in strange bright colors, or they were wearing masks. They had capguns and sparklers and noisemakers and squibs, and they were moving in a slow mass down the spiral toward the center of the caldera, toward the altar of Beloved Angkhdt. Rael could only see the top part of it where it rose above the arcades and the booths, the shelters and the tents—two towers of scaffolding, hung with spotlights and crowded with people with their legs hanging free over the edges or poking through the struts. They were pointing up at the face of Paradise, and some had turned their spotlights from the stage between the towers, so that beams of multicolored light shone upward.

But now Paradise was rising like a silver sun, overwhelming all but the brightest lights, bleaching the faces of the children in the crowd, bleaching the faces of Enid and Jane as they pulled Rael inward through the spiral. He looked behind him to see the old man and the old woman with their arms around each other, and the woman waved. Then they were gone, and they had disappeared around the bend. Enid and Jane were chattering to each other, pulling Rael until he lurched into a run. He felt confused and shy but somehow happy, and the silver light of Paradise was beating down upon his head, flattening his thoughts. There was no movement in his mind, just the mirrorlike reflection of image after image. “Look,” said Enid. “Look at the servant. Look at the Servant of God.”

In the middle of the arcade a space had been kept clear, where the booths were arranged in a ring. The crowd was parting around a white circle of sand, where all night there had been fire eaters and trick cyclists and jugglers. Now a woman with piebald hair and piebald skin had spread a sheet out on the ground. Two men in robes held torches, while between them, a black squat pregnant woman was dancing. She had a rope of bells tied around each wrist and each knee, but apart from that and a cloth over her sex she was naked, and the torchlight was shining on her buttocks and her belly and her fat bare breasts. She was raising her wrists to the sky and knocking them together until the bells clashed; she was whirling round and round with her head flung back. Her eyes were rolled back and her tongue was thrust out past her teeth. Her skin was slick with vegetable grease, and the sweat ran down her breasts. Rael could smell her. In all that mass of people Rael caught a wisp of an odor that could be her alone, something raw, something alive, something so hungry that he found himself attracted, drawn forward by a force that was greater than the two girls tugging on his hands. “Let me see!” they shouted. “Let me see!” And he gathered Jane up, and put his arm around Enid’s shoulder, and then he pushed his way through the people, not understanding their curses as he trod on their feet. He pushed them aside until he stood in the front rank of the ever-thickening crowd, with the girls beside him.

Between two men with torches, the woman was whirling in a circle. She was describing a circle perhaps twenty feet across.

The piebald woman was spreading out the sheet in the middle of it. On the sheet lay a cripple with massive arms and shoulders and thin, withered legs. He was also naked. He was lying on his back under risen Paradise, with a frightened expression on his face. He was looking toward the edge of the crowd to where another man was drawing figures in the sand—long strings of numbers. He squatted over them and rubbed his jaw, often consulting his wristwatch and a pocket astrolabe.

A copper lantern stood before him on the sand. It was fashioned in the shape of a man with an animal’s head and a long penis, which he held out in front of him between his hands. Now the man in red took out a butane lighter, and he lit the lamps so that a small jet of flame protruded from the statue’s foreskin. This was a signal, for at that moment some people in the crowd started to sing, and many others started clapping to the rhythm that the dancing woman made. She was whirling in a circle, shaking the bells upon her wrists, but now she stopped. She knelt down beside the piebald woman.

The cripple lay on his back, his long legs crossed, each ankle locked over the opposite knee. The two women were kneeling on either side of him. The piebald woman had unscrewed the top from a jar of ointment, and she was rubbing this ointment on the cripple’s legs. Still the crowd was singing and clapping to the rhythm that the pregnant woman had abandoned; she was out of breath. Her naked breasts were heaving as she bent down low and took some of the ointment on her palms.

Now the man from the edge of the circle joined them. He squatted down by the cripple’s right knee, which he took between his hands. There was a bandage on it, which he removed. Then he was pushing his thumb into the joint, while with his other hand he kneaded the pitiful flesh. Then he seized hold of the cripple’s right ankle, where it lay crossed above his other knee. Bracing himself, he yanked the leg straight; there was a crack as the frozen joint unlocked, and the cripple’s back arched off the sheet where he was lying. Around Rael, the clapping and the singing wavered and then recommenced. The cripple’s face was twisted up with pain and fright, but then he relaxed somewhat. He was staring up at risen Paradise while the pregnant woman rubbed his thigh.

Now his right leg lay straight. It seemed to flop around under the woman’s hands as though it had no bones. But his left leg was still bent. The priest moved to it, and again Rael heard the sharp crack of the joint. Again he saw the cripple’s back lift from the sheet.

The noise from the crowd was more urgent now. The priest got up to retrieve his lantern from the circle’s edge. It had gone out, and he stood fiddling with it while the two women massaged the cripple’s knees. His legs were so frail that they could easily join their hands around them, even at the thick part of the thigh. His penis seemed as big around as either of his legs. It was swelling and distending underneath the women’s hands.

The two men with the torches stood as still as rocks. The priest had lit the lamp again, and now he walked between the cripple’s outstretched legs. He was saying something that Rael couldn’t hear, and he was making gestures with his hand.

Rael turned his head toward Enid, who was standing beside him holding his hand, her face soft and composed. And then toward Jane, who had climbed up upon the crook of his arm. She had her right arm around his neck. She had pushed back the red mask from her face, and she was sucking her thumb. Her eyes were open wide. Rael could see the glare of the torches in her pupil, and in the contractions of her iris he could see the scene; he didn’t have to look. In the minute adjustments of her iris he could see pity and anxiety and disgust and fascination all succeeding one another, across that tiny circle. He could see the pain in the cripple’s face. And in the waxing, waning noise of the crowd he could hear how the priest was trying to raise him to his feet—trying and failing, trying and failing until finally, with the women’s hands under his armpits, the cripple took a few false steps.

Jane closed her eyes for several seconds and then opened them. Her pupils now contracted to hard dots, and she hid her face in Rael’s shoulder. He could smell the henna in her hair.

“Come,” he said. They went. Jane climbed down to the ground, and then she was off, her slight figure fading through the crowd. Rael and Enid followed more slowly; they turned again into the spiral path, which was widening as they approached the center of the caldera. Soon it led out into an open space around the altar of Beloved Angkhdt. The crowd was thicker there, but it was mostly made of children. Rael moved through it easily, not stopping until he stood between the towers of scaffolding. Then he looked up. A wide stage rose in front of him, ten feet off the ground, and it was surrounded by soldiers dressed in black.

He raised his eyes. A painted wicker figure dangled from a chain above the stage, just grazing it, swaying slightly to and fro. Beside it, a man stood with a microphone. Rael examined his face and saw that he was saying something. Then Rael heard his voice, coming from the loudspeakers on either side of the stage. What had been a loose rattling in Rael’s ears now became words, and he realized that he had been hearing this noise for a long time. It had been meaningless for a long time, growing louder as he approached it through the spiral. But now, when he saw the movement of the emcee’s lips, he could distinguish for the first time the shape of the words, and he could even understand some of them, although many were still beyond his comprehension: “… yes sir ladies and gentlemen, a gift of seventy-five thousand dollars in cash, as well as twenty-five hundred fully automatic assault rifles, and you have only just seen demonstrated tonight how necessary that kind of firepower is to us and to our cause—though I’m happy to say that the injuries to Mr. Myron Callisher and his wife are not as serious as were first reported. But even so, that airship, now luckily repulsed by our brave freedom fighters, just goes on to demonstrate how we can never be safe from these attacks. Our basic freedoms have been consistently denied us. Well I say it’s time to stand up and be counted. I say it’s time to say that we won’t tolerate it. I say it’s time to stand up for our rights, time to say no to torture and death. So I know you’ll join me in giving a very warm round of applause for his high excellency Karan Mang, who arranged for the delivery of this gift. Also a very, very warm round of applause for his sponsor Prince Cotillion Starbridge, foreign minister of the royal episcopal government-in-exile of Charn, who naturally could not be here tonight, but who has sent this inspirational message from his palace near Lake Baladur, which I will read to you …”

The emcee was a short, bald man, with a white satin shirtfront and a white mask over his eyes. Rael looked away from his mouth, and instantly the words from the loudspeakers turned back into random noise and static. But Rael had something new to look at, although again it took a while for him to decipher. Behind the emcee, a big white curtain formed the backdrop for the stage. A portrait of a woman had been projected onto the surface of this backdrop. Rael could see the beam of light from the projector, full of motes. And he could see the image of the woman drifting in and out of focus as the curtain stirred.

Rael bent down to the girls on either side of him. “Finding thanks,” he said. “She and I and joining. Now go back.” He shook each of them gravely by the hand. Then he stood. He turned toward the stage, toward the row of soldiers, and walked forward with his hands open in front of him, because the woman’s face upon the curtain was Cassia’s face.

 

Part 10:
The Skull
T
wo generations before these events, in the eighth phase of spring, 00016, a revolution had come to Charn. Following the executions of two popular figures, Prince Abu Starbridge and the beautiful young bishop of the city, there were demonstrations in the streets. The loyalty of the army was split apart. Even some priests joined in the rebellion, which culminated in the siege of the Temple of Kindness and Repair. There Lord Chrism Demiurge had sat with his council, but on the fiftieth of October in the eighth phase of spring, the temple’s gate was broken. The thirty thousand shrines of the Beloved Angkhdt were looted and ransacked, the idols smashed or smeared with excrement. All over the city the Starbridges were hunted down, dragged from their palaces and offices and barracks rooms and sacristies. Four thousand men, women, and children were executed during the month of November alone, though many more were able to escape abroad.

 

In that purge the power of the Starbridge caste was broken, as it had been in many other springs. The bishop’s council was overthrown. The pass laws, the transit laws, the birth laws, the laughter laws, were all repealed during a single triumphant session of the new National Assembly. In the following weeks, all the thousands of lesser statutes by which the priests had regulated people’s lives—whom they married, where they worked, what they wore, where they lived, what they named their children—were abolished one by one. And most important, the system of belief was banned, the cult of Angkhdt, the Paradise cult. For it was at the heart of the old slavery—those found practicing its rites were jailed or flogged.

But despite the best endeavors of the police, these beliefs persisted underground, mutating and transforming as the season changed, and spring changed into summer. It acquired new prophets and new saints—Abu Starbridge, the martyred bishop, Freedom Love.

This last was a defrocked priest. During the revolution he had lived with a few followers in the catacombs of Charn. He had celebrated secret masses in the lower crypts, and on Fridays people had climbed down from the streets of Charn to listen to him speak. “The word of God is like a creeping vine,” he said. “It has its seasons underground.”