The Cult of Loving Kindness Read Online Free PDF Page A

Caladon was put to death.
    In those midsummer days, forests and jungles stretched a thousand miles from the coast, beyond the borders of the old diocese of Charn. Traveling through it on his long, slow journey toward the village of his birth, Mr. Sarnath passed evidence of this new awakening. He saw the shining sun of Abu Starbridge painted on stones and on the trunks of trees. He saw the painted image of Immortal Angkhdt. And even though he had left his duties at his desk in Caladon, still he was made anxious by these new phenomena. For he was a student of history, a student also of human nature, and he wondered how the indigent and unsophisticated peoples of the forest could find anything in the old legends to attract them. Yet the Cult of Loving Kindness seemed to flourish best among the poor.
    Once when the children were just old enough to walk, Mr. Sarnath had stayed a month in a small town. It was hidden in a grove of mescal bushes; on the sixtieth night he had left the children sleeping and had climbed down the slope into a swamp. Dry land in the middle of the wet, difficult of access, and there he had crouched with many others, watching a shaman of the Cult of Loving Kindness sing his song. The man had told them how Beloved Angkhdt came down from Paradise in the world’s morning, and sifted gold from dirt, and threshed out corn from chaff, and raised up certain men and women to be Starbridges and kings. He told them how the rest should suffer gladly, how they like Angkhdt himself had been reborn on earth to suffer for their sins, how it was only through glad suffering that they could purge themselves of sin, until their souls rose up to Paradise again.
    The shaman’s face was painted white. His lips were drawn back in a grimace almost of anger as he told them of Angkhdt’s journey through the solar system, through the planets of the nine hells where worse torments, perhaps, awaited them upon their deaths. And in the swamp they had sat listening with eager gaping faces as the shaman made each of them confess their own inadequacies; troubled, Mr. Sarnath had climbed back up into the town to sit with the children as they slept.
    Or once when Cassia was already talking, he took a job for a few months near Cochinoor. One night he saw a traveling group of players act the passion of St. Abu Starbridge—how his hand was marked with the tattoo of privilege. How he declined to use it to protect himself. How he was put to death. How he was seen drinking in a barroom that same night, according to a dozen witnesses. How he descended into darkness, and fought there with a white-faced devil. How by his victory he spread his privilege to common folk, and loosed the chain of hell, and brought the sugar rain. How he replenished all the earth.
    Or in another town, Mr. Sarnath once had been accosted by a doddering old woman, who told him stories of the wonders of old Charn before the revolution. She was toothless and she mumbled so that he could barely understand. She gripped him by the arm. A city of ten thousand palaces and shrines, she told him, ruled over by a Starbridge bishop of the golden blood, a young girl martyred by the usurper Chrism Demiurge, burned together with her wild lover. She and her wild antinomial had been taken down from her tower cell and burned. But a magic tree had grown over the pyre. Broken open in the revolution time, her tomb was empty. She was the white lily on the stump—“Wait for me among the days to come,” she’d said. Also: “Once more I will be with you for a little while.” Also: “I am the spark that reignites the fire.”
    The old woman had gripped him by the arm. Mr. Sarnath smiled at her and pulled away, sad in his heart. Yet there was something touching in this version of events. How poignant it is, he thought, that we are always eager to surrender the burden of our own power, even to people who have always tortured us. He conceived of a desire to discuss this with the master, and so