Gods of Green Mountain (10 page)

Lee-La and her sons sat silent, all with their eyes fixed on Baka. Outside the sky blazed with a riot of glorious colors as the first sun hid itself behind the Scarlet Mountains.

"Baka Valente," Sal-Lar began in a voice he struggled to make manly. "As I said before, I am risking my life by coming to warn you. I want you to run away and take Bret-Lee--for they are going to put you all to death! They are voting, but already everyone knows the outcome, for they are constructing extra sacrificial altars."

"Fools!" roared Baka with all his former vigor of vocal power. "They should be using that energy to plough and seed the soil!" Then his temper simmered down, and he looked with narrowed eyes at the boy standing before him, thin as a rail, and hollow-cheeked. "Why do you care, boy? Why do you risk your life to save us?"

Sal-Lar walked to the bed where Bret-Lee lay without movement, her eyes staring blankly into space. Very lightly Sal-Lar stroked her cheek. "Bret-Lee and I have been secretly in love for years. I had intended to ask for her hand in marriage when I reached the age of fourteen..."

"How old are you now?" asked Baka, without much interest. What meaning had love when death was around the corner?

"Thirteen. Two months and I will be fourteen." Sal-Lar spun about. "But you must run and hide! I'll go with you, so I can be with Bret-Lee. If she dies, I will not choose another."

Baka shook his head. "No, son. I won't run. There is no place to hide. Twice I have lost wives that I loved, and both times I said I would never take another, yet I did. Life without a wife is no life at all. A man alone is nothing. We are all farmers, meant to sow our seed. If you love Bret-Lee, then kiss her good-bye while she lives...for by tomorrow this time, she will be dead. And when this is done, go down below and tell those who wait that Baka's family will give their lives willingly to save theirs. Though personally, I don't believe our deaths will appease the Gods. The storms will still come. Our ancestors tried human sacrifice before, and it didn't work. We have slain our animals on the altar blocks, and that didn't work either. We have burned the best of our grain--and what good did that do? So go and tell them, Sal-Lar, that we will die for their sakes. I only pray it helps."

Dejectedly Sal-Lar made his way to the huge cavern where the elders met. He strode boldly into the council room, where only the elders were allowed, never a boy of his tender years. In a voice cold and loud with abhorrence he interrupted their meeting. "I have been to Baka Valente and told him what you mean to do. He will not run, or put up any resistance. He says he and all the members of his family will gladly give their lives so that you and yours may be spared. But he also said he doesn't believe the Gods see your sacrificial offerings. They are meaningless executions, committed only by savages."

The gray-haired elders turned and stared at the boy who stood so rigidly defiant before them. One very old man lifted his hand and stroked his long white beard. "This is disappointing. We were certain Baka would run, like his cowardly son."

"Baka Valente is no coward!" Sal-Lar flared passionately. "You are the cowards! You put the blame on Baka for everything that has gone wrong in your lives! For every one of you is jealous that he succeeds when you don't! Baka's house is the only one left standing because he constructed it better--not because he connives with evil forces! Far-Awn ran with his flock in order to save their lives, not because he is a coward! In fact, I believe, of us all, he is the bravest. Which one of you has traveled to Bay Gar and lived to tell the tale?"

Sal-Lar met then the eyes of one of the elders--his grandfather. "So, when you spread Baka and his family on the altar blocks and slit their throats in the sun, so that their blood will enrich the ground, put up an extra block, one for me, for today I married Baka's daughter, Bret-Lee. She is now my wife, and I too am a member of Baka's family."

The skin on Sal-Lar's grandfather's face turned very pale. His son was already dead of the dim-despairs, and only Sal-Lar and his sister, Santan, remained alive. The old man swallowed twice. "You lie, Sal-Lar," he said in a weak and old voice. "Bret-Lee is too near death to repeat the marriage vows."

"She managed to say them," said Sal-Lar. "I cut her finger and mixed her blood with mine, and she is my wife. I will die when she does."

For long moments all the elders remained quiet. Then one spoke up. "This changes nothing. If Sal-Lar is fool enough to cast his lot with those ordained to die, then so be it."

The grandfather of Sal-Lar filled with panic. He was too old to father more sons, or even daughters. Sal-Lar represented the last of his line--for Santan was committed to one of Baka's sons, and she too must die, for it was whispered they had lain together, and she was even now with child. "We are deciding all this too quickly. Let us sit down and rationalize. Perhaps there is some truth in what Baka says. Perhaps the Gods won't notice our sacrifices, and will continue to send the storms."

Like warfars, the rest of the elders turned upon him, snarling out in anger: "Hah! You seek to save your grandson and granddaughter! You have betrayed us! It was you who sent Sal-Lar to warn Baka and take the surprise from our attack! We don't want sacrificial victims who willingly give their lives as if they were without value! We sacrifice only the strongest and the best--and we believed that of Baka! Why to kill him now would be just another way of allowing him to root his feet in the ground! What irony is this! Baka is too clever for us!"

"Yes," agreed Sal-Lar without thought, "he always has been."

A dawning light of comprehension and cunning developed in an elder's eyes. "Thank you for saying that, Sal-Lar. You are right. Baka has always been the smartest and cleverest, and we were almost taken in by his act. He knew we wouldn't sacrifice those waiting and wanting to die, so he has played a game. Now he has been caught in his own trap--and you with him."

The two suns peaked over the grain fields that yielded nothing now. The fields would not be seeded until the Gods had been appeased with the blood of the sacrificial victims. Earth soaked with fresh blood always gave the most in the past, and those with strong religious fervor believed it would be so in the future.

For a land where the weather was almost daily tumultuous, it was uniquely calm, as if the Gods on their distant Green Mountain were indeed attracted to the ceremony that was to take place, and held back their usual wrath.

Already the populace of El Sod-a-Por was pleased. It was going to work, this killing of Baka and all related to him through blood and through marriage. Once more their fields would ripen, and the Gods would send animals, perhaps even more wild puhlets that they could tame into domesticity as their foreparents had. They would begin again, and keep to the old ways: live humbly beneath the ground, and not allow the Gods to see them walk again on the surface in the light from the two suns.

A few in the crowd sighed regretfully, thinking back to all the good and kind things Baka and Lee-La had done. But when they gave it more thought, it was Baka's son Far-Awn who had started this disastrous chain of events. He was the troublemaker. A pity he wasn't here to share in his family's fate. Misshapen and deformed babies were always destroyed. Far-Awn hadn't been misshapen or deformed, only strangely colored, but ugly color was in itself a deformity. Baka had talked them into having mercy then: "Look at this good baby," Baka had pleaded when he laid the newborn child naked for the judges to see. "He is only pale--of a different color--but see what a fine male he is. Why, he could be a changeling sent from the Gods--and they would be angry to see him destroyed."

So Far-Awn had been permitted to live--and look what had become of it!

Bret-Lee was carried out of the sod home of her father, followed by the young husband she had married while unconscious. The comatose girl and Sal-Lar were strapped down side by side on an altar.

Standing helplessly, Baka turned his eyes away. He couldn't watch the sharpened crystal blade that would slash his only daughter's throat. Beside him his wife struggled not to cry, to remain impassive as was the rule, but she failed, and softly began to sob. The women in the crowd started the ceremonial chant.

Baka swept his eyes back quickly to the altar. The judges were conferring with the elders in whispers. Progressively Baka's family would be killed, the youngest first, and Baka last.

"Fool boy," muttered Baka to Lee-La, as he looked pityingly at Sal-Lar. "He shouldn't have married our daughter. For him there would be another. There is always another."

"Is there?" asked his wife brokenly, looking up to search his eyes. "Have I completely wiped from your mind the sweet memories of your first wives?--do you never think of them, or long for them? Does a live son always replace a dead one? Are two of us ever alike?"

Baka couldn't reply. He turned his eyes toward the western horizon, staring almost blindly, his legs so weak they began to tremble as the women's voices rose higher in the cry that would bring down the sharp knife.

Coming down through the hills, he saw a slow moving line of small dots. Heading the line was a tall and slender figure that moved with exceptional agility and grace. Baka's heart jumped upward and began a fierce and excited pounding. No one walked like that but his very own son--his most beloved youngest son! He threw back his head, summoning all the vocal power his weakened body still possessed, and he roared out in a mighty voice: "Stop this execution! The Gods have answered our prayers! There is no need now for human sacrifices!"

Bewildered and surprised, the judges and elders turned to stare at Baka. The death chant of the women dwindled to a faint wail. Baka raised his arm, pointing his finger to the west. "Look there," he commanded in a voice of such authority no one could help but look. "There is my son whom you all claim is a runaway coward, who stole our last meat supply. But he has survived weeks in the wilderness, lived through a storm that kept us asleep for four nights and three days, and wiped out three-quarters of our population--yet
he
is alive, and leading back with him a flock of puhlets much increased in numbers. Now tell me where the right and the wrong belongs: with him, or with what you tried to do today?"

The entire remaining population of the upper borderlands turned and stared at Baka's youngest son, suddenly grown much taller and very strong-looking as he came running fast, followed by the long line of puhlets and half-grown yearlings.

Far-Awn ran straight into his mother's open arms. Lee-La began to cry. "My son, my son," she sobbed, "we believed we would never see you again."

"Oh, I am not so very easy to kill," Far-Awn said, smiling at his mother. Then his expression sobered. He looked at his father, thin and gaunt, with new gray sprinkled in this mop of thick brick-red hair. He stared at all of those people there, like living skeletons, their purple eyes far back in their heads. Certainly he had arrived just at a most auspicious moment.

Once more he met his father's eyes, mixed with emotions. Baka was greatly relieved that his son was alive, yet he felt some anger too. He wanted to shout and throw accusations at this boy who had been, and always was, the source of so much trouble, and yet he couldn't. He was too happy. His face became a sunset of changing colors as he struggled to find just the correct way to address this son so unexpectedly returned from the dead. And healthy-looking too--grown into a man in the weeks since he stole away. Baka's hand stretched out. "I am glad to see you," he said, in fierce understatement.

A large smile split Far-Awn's tanned face, shining his white teeth in the sunlight. "Father, you have said something
nice
to me! As for me, I am delighted to see you! And my mother, and my brothers...but they are not all here." He looked then toward the row of large red boulders in a parallel row, and his brows creased in a frown. "Why are Bret-Lee and Sal-Lar strapped down on that rock?"

No one could answer, though guilt flushed their faces, and they looked uneasily at one another.

Far-Awn saw the godsigns painted on the face of his sister, and also on Sal-Lar. He paled with shock before he spoke. "Have you all gone mad? Have you started again practicing the evil ways of the ancients?" His incredulous eyes scanned the ragged, starving people. "Has not the weather killed enough of you, so that you seek now to kill yourselves--like the warfars?"