Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [93]
Forget what it had been like to be a frightened child, powerless and utterly at the mercy of others.
At the front of the room, the bald monk was saying, ‘In some fundamental sense, the great religious leaders were no different from other great leaders of men. A king, say, or a general.’ He smoothed the contours of his silk robe around his folded knees. In the front row of the classroom, two of the girls were trying to see up his robe.
‘Obviously a great prophet or a religious leader can make a more enduring or valuable contribution to humanity. A king may at best pass some enlightened laws and improve living conditions for his subjects. A general may at best lead his fellow men to their slaughter, for his own personal glory. But the prophet can, through his teachings, improve the entire human condition. He can lead his fellow men to their salvation.’
In the front row of the classroom one of the girls passed the other girl a note. On it, in back-slanting peacock-blue ink, it said: ‘ I don’t think he’s wearing any.’ The second girl blushed a deep scarlet and hid the folded note in her text-book. The young monk kept speaking, caught up in his topic, not paying any attention to them.
‘Yet all these men, the great kings, generals and prophets, have in common their ability to inspire others to follow them. To believe in them and follow their commands.
In a sense, such men define the reality of their fellow human beings.’
At the back of the classroom Wolf began to relax. The monk was drifting away from the topic of religion and he could ignore him now. He let himself drift off into vivid sexual fantasies about Amy Cowan. Wolf bending over her, Amy not wearing a stitch
— but let’s leave her shoes on, shall we? — as she lies naked on the desk in her office and Wolf applies himself sweatily to her.
But just as Wolf had begun to relax at the back, at the front of the classroom Ricky had begun to feel deeply uneasy about the direction the Young Master’s lesson was taking.
‘How can such a thing be?’ said the monk. He seemed perfectly relaxed, sitting cross-legged on top of his desk. His composure seemed to make the kids pay attention. There was none of the fidgeting and whispering a novice teacher might expect from a class full of teenagers. ‘How can ordinary people surrender control of their own lives? How can they allow someone else to define their beliefs and behaviour?’ The monk suddenly swung his long muscular legs off the desk and stood up again. He flowed into motion with the smooth thoughtless grace of the athlete, the girls in the front row watching every move he made.
‘Yet all over this huge planet, in wildly different cultures, over thousands of centuries of human development, this pattern emerges again and again. A leader will stand out from the masses. And those masses are willing to follow his lead.’ The Young Master frowned thoughtfully, massaging the smooth skin of his forehead. ‘It’s as if all human beings are programmed with the need to respond to this kind of leadership. It isn’t a voluntary thing. It’s something built into human nature at a deep, unconscious level. This need, or vulnerability, is a kind of indentation in the behavioural carapace of the human mind. Like the pocket at the corner of a pool table. Only imagine that the pool table is steeply tilted towards that pocket. All you have to do is set a ball on the green felt of the table and it will go rolling straight into that pocket.’
The monk was patrolling the classroom again, wandering up and down the aisles, pausing now and then to make a point. He paused in front of Wally Saddler and Wolf Leemark at the rear of the classroom. Both of the boys were unusually silent. It was almost a respectful silence and it had no small impact on the other kids. If Wally and Wolf didn’t dare disrupt