They crossed out of the opposite door and came to the yard. Four birds, all short-feathered and blood-red, moved about the pen, pecking at the grass. Each represented a healing, or anyway a patient’s recovery by one means or another, ague being the common malady. The birds would have been gathered for a mass sacrifice to the governing devils; or else for a sale, depending on the scruples of the jaddese.
In trips through the country selling caps, Rutland had seen red cocks of this sort sold in bulk by these lesser priests. A dozen years later, during one of several escape attempts, Knox and Loveland would bring six of these birds, gathered on a reconnaissance trip, back to camp. They’d got them from a jaddese for an iron pan and a few coins. Having lost their common blade fording a river, Knox twisted the necks of some of the birds, rotating them two revolutions until he heard the pop. Loveland, disturbed by the noise and feel of cleanly snapping bone, preferred to smash their heads with a rock. Rutland recalled the plucking vividly, the luster of the feathers, the patience involved. Once the birds were all gooseflesh, they tore out their bowels with their fingers and spiked the gutless creatures on long young branches, roasting them with only the salt they had for sale.
They gorged on the pink meat, the skin sweating fat and blood. They dug out the marrow from steaming bones. There was too much. Two of the birds were tossed into the marsh. Their crisp bodies, their taut, charred skin shrunk tight over bony scaffolds, their gaping bellies, they watched it all sink in brackish waters. Manaar, the northernmost province where entry and exit were possible, was close now, and they had the full stomachs that might carry them through this time.
But the king’s men had not been far behind. They were soon overtaken in the swamps. Their lead had been lost roasting birds. The Englishmen saved their lives by playing off the dash as an especially wide merchant wander.
Darasa took Rutland through the covel only for contrast with the proper Buddhist temple they were headed to. He related how the jaddeses sometimes appeared mad, and it was then that they were taken for gods, not devils. Advice was sought. The people would pose questions of many sorts, practical, metaphysical, political, personal. The priest would answer all in the same tone, riddling and frenzied by turns, and his words would achieve a gravitas they could not approach in saner moments.
Unlike the jaddeses, Darasa said, the people could be inhabited only by devils, not gods. But they talked much the same as the priests then. Rutland had seen a man in the forest writhing and shaking. First he thought it a case of the sacred disease — epilepsy — or snakebite, perhaps; but as he approached to give succor, the man started mixing local sayings and proverbs, and indeed some European ones too, into novel, unimagined maxims, deforming and inventing meanings, so much so that though the grammar of sense remained, Rutland could not follow him.
He was convinced that something intelligible was said, if only his capacity to comprehend could keep pace with the man’s capacity to pronounce. He couldn’t call them ravings. Rutland had heard those many times, in Yorkshire and St. Andrews, by his ostensibly possessed countrymen. Maybe it was they who merely had the sacred disease. For the Sinhalese man’s speech did not bear much resemblance. In the British cases, there was just the simpleminded repetition of a few phrases, invocations of the Devil and of God: nothing nearly so complex and creative as what he was hearing from this man.
He wondered whether the Sinhalese possession, then, was the genuine sort, and what had come before, in his homeland, were merely the babblings of the mentally deficient. Or could it be that the devils possessing the Sinhalese were simply cleverer than Satan? Perhaps this was owed to their multiplicity, their regional grounding, each devil having his province and jurisdiction. Might there be spiritual specialties, smaller expertises exceeding any single intelligence, ones that issued not in universal claims, but in both ones tailored to the region of origin and ones that were crossbred, the most fertile of all, which correlated to the various routes one might traverse the country by?
Rutland conveyed to Darasa what he could of these thoughts, which put the monk in mind immediately of the prophet of the god without name. The god, or anyway the prophet, first made himself known by a trail of fallen dewals, temples of the gods, which were bound to the covels by a common commitment to idolatry (both sorts were held in less regard than the vehars, the proper Buddhist temples). The prophet claimed, through his messengers — he, like his god, was never seen — that the nameless one had commanded that the other gods’ temples be razed.
Over several months, collapsed temples appeared across the north, from Trincomalee through Anuradhapura. Chunks of clay with branches running through them lay scattered about, no less than the people’s offerings. The relics included arms (some of them European), clay figures (some of them Virgin Marys), and collections of household objects that were also the symbols of embedded gods. These were all carefully defaced, the clay figures dismembered, the swords bent in two and displayed in their abasement.
The people shrugged off the nameless one at first, but as his destructive powers grew, and the wreckage accumulated, their allegiances shifted. Next to the rubble of the dewals the villagers would leave fresh victuals and new items to be enchanted by the god.
The prophet, finding so much success, thought he might be not only a god but a king. Through his messengers, prophets of the prophet, he declared his intentions to establish a northern kingdom that would overlap Rajasingha’s.
The king had been happy enough for the prophet to rule over the next world. But not this one too. He dispatched soldiers to the north to monitor the remaining dewals. Eventually, in the night, the prophet and several of his disciples were discovered undermining a temple. The squat Dravidian and his assistants were brought before the king, who asked his name. Munjan. This incarnated god was bisected. The resulting aspects of the man-god were incinerated in the center of town, just outside the royal court. In the morning, in front of the smoldering pit of Munjan’s bones, there were flowers, victuals, and relics.
Rutland and Darasa came to another clearing, this one with rice paddies, clusters of coconut trees, and livestock, all managed by local farmers. They paid their taxes in harvests, Darasa said, and not to the king but to the vehar, where they maintained its monks. The king provided men to help collect the produce, look after the livestock, cook the meals, and serve the food as needed, when the farmers themselves could not.
At the center of Ratukela, holy satellite partner of Belemby, was the vehar, just as the administration was at the center of the king’s townships. None but the townsmen were admitted to pray. Women, even the best of them, were thought in some way unfit to affirm the destruction of want, the prime doctrine of the Buddha.
At noon the townsmen would serve the monks food and give offerings to paintings or drawings of past ones. The monks arranged themselves in a row, with space for the likenesses that were interspersed among them. The men would move down the row, ladle in hand, each offering a different dish to the monks. With a nod a monk accepted, with an extended hand he declined. The plates of the likenesses were always piled highest, as only they never refused.
Rutland and Darasa regarded the stone vehar, sober yet grand. The roof’s lime-whitened edge was inlaid with onyx in a pleasing but inscrutable pattern. The temple dated back centuries at least, and the current Sinhalese builders could not match the skill of the originals, which meant that every renovation was also a defacement, an aesthetic and perhaps spiritual diminishment. So the Buddhist priests, the senior ones especially, liked the vehars restored as little as possible. As long as the walls didn’t collapse, and the roof mostly held the rains at bay, they preferred the unreconstructed shelter, vulnerable though it was. Rajasingha was pleased to go along with this, as it came at a savings to him.