Gods of Green Mountain

by V. C. Andrews®

  “That evening when I came home, she greeted me exuberantly. ‘Sal-Lar, you’ll never guess! Today I dropped an orange pufar in the fire—quite by accident—and it came out tasting like nothing I have ever eaten before! It was soft, and mushy, and so sweetly divine. Mother and I quickly threw a few more pufars in the fire, and we gave some to Far-Awn, when he stopped by. He loved it! He named it a pudding, and suggested we women start cooking the pufars in different methods. “Puhlet meat is not the only thing that can be roasted,” he told us, and then he winked his eye.’ She stopped and smiled sadly. ‘You know, I wish he would find a wife. He is growing old, and he doesn’t have a child to inherit his talent.’

  “Far-Awn was growing old. He was sixteen now, and unmarried, an unheard of age to remain a bachelor. Baka Valente himself once said that at sixteen he had already fathered seven children—few of whom still lived.

  “Do I speak overly much of my friendship and closeness to Far-Awn? I hope not, and seek not to impress you with this. But remember, I was the husband of his sister. I was his closest friend. I was his most trusted confidant, more so than any of his brothers, or even his father. The love I had for him was different from the love I had for my wife, but very large, nevertheless. Still, he was for me always an enigma. He could sit staring thoughtfully into the fire, his brows wrinkled in a look of anxiety, when all was going so well. Though he worked as hard as any of us, he was given to overlong periods of just thinking, of daydreaming, of planning for the future when every day was so perfect now. We accepted this oddity of his personality as part of his talent and character, and respected the differences that were his. Still, his thoughtful frowns when he thought of the future put a few thoughts in my own head, trying to ponder on what could be the cause.

  “While Far-Awn thought of the future, of ways to defeat the storms when they came, the rest of us combed our brains to devise, invent, and originate different methods of cooking and preparing the pufar fruit. You see, we were very much enthralled with the needs and demands of our stomachs, for never had they been so cherished and delighted before. Into our ovens went the pufars, and they became not fruit or vegetable at all—but the very finest meat! Meat that was as tasty any day as the best puhlet flesh! Fried, the pufar was strongly akin to the best cuts of the quickets! Boiled, baked, stewed, roasted, toasted, or poached—any method at all produced new unique results. Not any one of us could say which flavor was the most pleasing. Even the texture could be altered with the cooking.

  “So we grated, we ground, we pulverized, mashed, and rolled. We sliced thin and long, short and chunky. We diced, we minced, and we pounded—and then we cooked!

  “Overnight it seemed we became a nation of chefs of great merit. Overnight we became exacting gourmets to add to our already gourmand appetites. Rivalry between the best cooks began, and juried competitions were an everyday event—and oh, how delightful to be a judge!

  “We became plump, but never fat, for our old habits of work without play were still very much upon us. Strange, how devoted we were with our obsession for food, for eating, as if that were all there was. So enthralled we were with our cuisine—as if that alone offered us limitless expectations!

  “Be understanding at this point. From time immemorial, in the aeons since we had uprooted ourselves from the ground, we had been nothing but tillers of the soil, farmers, dirt-dobbers, always on the verge of starvation, slaving always to nourish our bodies, balancing perpetually on the rim between life and death. Isn’t it only natural that once our immediate physical needs were satisfied, we would have the presumption to think—no, determined would be a better word—to determine that we would conquer all that had beaten us down in defeat before? Can’t you sympathize with our exaltation because at last we were well fed?

  “The future wasn’t ours. That belonged to our children and grandchildren. We had no thoughts of tomorrows—tomorrow could take care of itself. Today was our time to shine. When the tomorrows came, we would be cork brown and dead in our graves.

  “So we thought.”

  3

  Far-Awn

  Meets His Match

  A youth discovered one day, just fooling around with a split and hollowed-out fruit hull, that strings could be stretched across the hull and fastened down, and from this primitive instrument, sounds could be made that resembled that of the wind blowing down through the hills.

  Music was born that day.

  The youth took his music maker home and played it for his sister. Her eyes widened in a wondering rapture that jumped her to her feet, and she began to move, fitting her movements to the rhythm of the wind singing through a hollowed-out fruit hull. Dancing was the child of the music.

  Like everyone there who discovered something new and exciting, the two children rushed to Far-Awn and played and danced for him. A dreamy, faraway look came into Far-Awn’s eyes as he watched and listened—for this was not the first time he had heard music—but never before in El Sod-a-Por.

  “What are your names?” he asked of the two, for he would tell Sal-Lar so the discovers of music and dancing could be recorded in the book Sal-Lar would compile.

  The boy answered, awed to be in the presence of Far-Awn, “I am Mah-Lan, and this is my sister, Mar-Laine. Our father is Hen-Shee; he grows the purple, grown-in-darkness pufars.”

  It made Far-Awn laugh to hear that. He always laughed more easily than anyone else. “Perhaps your father’s crop accounts for your unusual talent. When you go home, tell your parents how much I enjoyed your music and your dancing. Teach others how to make instruments, and invent different shapes to make new sounds.” Only then did he turn his violet-blue eyes on the lovely girl, Mar-Laine. Her red-gold hair was very much like the color of his own. Her complexion was creamy fair, like his own, without even a hint of green. Thoughtfully, admiringly, he scanned her figure from head to toes, and it was unheard of for a man to be too taken with the beauty of a young girl. “Are you married?” he asked, his broken heart mending a bit, though he had grieved many a lovelorn day for not having Santan.

  She shook her head, unable to speak. She marveled that he could look at her so approvingly, when she was just a nobody, and he was the most important person alive.

  “Would you mind if I asked how old you are?”

  She swallowed nervously, for she was middle-aged and not yet married, and certainly he would laugh and be scornful. How could she tell him she had waited all her life for one special man to come and say sweet words, when men weren’t given to saying sweet words, except to domestic animals. “I am twelve,” she answered shyly, keeping her gaze riveted to the floor.

  “That is an advanced age, and not married, tsh, tsh. Are you perhaps disliking of men?” He said all this teasingly, strangely affected by the girl who was like his twin in looks, only of another sex. And he’d never seen anyone dance before—why it was like another form of communication.

  “Sir,” she said properly, lifting her head to meet his gaze directly. “Every day of my life my parents urge me to get married to someone, anyone. But I cannot marry just any man! I want what other women don’t seem to care about! I don’t want just a man to make babies, but a man to love me for what I am, and also not just for what I can do. I want a man who will listen when I speak, and not hush me up like I don’t have a mind at all to think with. I have a very good mind—so if you are not afraid of a woman who dares to be different, I might consent to teaching you how to dance.”

  He was charmed, bedazzled, especially when she smiled at him flirtatiously. “And, may I add, sir, you are much older than I am, and not married, nor are you betrothed, to my knowledge.”

  “Does everyone know everything about me?”

  “No one knows anything about you,” she said tartly. “But if you think I am unduly impressed with you, think otherwise. You are too much like my mirrored reflection. Except, of course, you do have a few minor differences.”

  “Minor?” he asked, taunting her, for he’d never enjoyed a girl so mu
ch. “I call the differences between you and me the most major difference in the world.”

  She backed off, surprised he thought as she did. Was he like her in all ways but that of gender? Was she no longer to feel an alien in her own world? He came then to her, and caught her hand in his. “Come dance for me again, Mar-Laine, and teach me to move as you do. I have a strange fluttering in the middle of my chest that says you and I are destined for one another, and all the tears I shed for another were only wasted.”

  Turning, she darted a long look back at him, then skipped off. Leaving Far-Awn sitting in his father’s large, strong house with a head full of romantic notions and not practical ones. Oh, there was a girl like his mother! Not just a female for breeding, but one for loving as well! What miracles the pufars had brought about!

  On and on he sat, flipping his thoughts away from love and the beauty of Mar-Laine, until he was dreaming of one of the most important of all his innovative inventions. From beginning to end he thought it out, and then he acted.

  He gathered all the members of his large family, male and female about him and gave them each specific orders. Then he joined in with the work, demonstrating exactly what he wanted done. Mar-Laine stood to the side, invited without explanation.

  “What by the Gods are you doing now?” demanded Baka, sitting idly in the sunlight while everyone else worked. In his hand he held a cup of the magenta wine, from which he sipped from time to time. Life was so easy now, he had time for sitting and drinking, and asking querulous questions. “With so much good food overflowing our storage bins, why waste your time messing about with those rock hard hulls?”

  Without interrupting his labor, Far-Awn answered, “These yellow hulls are the toughest material we have. I have thought of a use for them.”

  Baka couldn’t begin to imagine why his son would want to use those things—they had a bitter taste, and were tough and stringy when cooked. Indeed, the pufars that were brittle, hard, and yellow, grown in full sunlight and without water, were tough enough to break one’s teeth. But Far-Awn wasn’t dreaming up another recipe. He used a huge stone mallet and brought it down hard on a yellow hull, hammering until the hull was a yellow mash. All day he and his brothers hammered at the hulls until they had a huge amount piled in a heap. This they covered, and pinned down, so in the morning they wouldn’t awaken to find all their fine, golden mash blown away by the winds.

  In private, Far-Awn had already done some experimenting, so he knew exactly what to add to the mash to get the consistency he wanted. When he had the mash rolled out, like a huge sheet of dough for baking, Baka barked again, “What, by the gods, are you going to do with that? It’s too large for any of our ovens.”

  Far-Awn and his brothers were too busy to answer. Already they had stripped Baka’s home free of the puhlet hide covering, and now they took large sheets of the pliable mash-cement, and began covering the sod house.

  Leaning back comfortably in his chair, Baka stopped fuming, and watched his dull-gray sod home slowly change into a brightly gleaming golden dome. The simmering heat from the suns soon had the mash as hard as metal. Far-Awn looked at his father when the job was done, and slowly smiled. “Well, Father—do you have anything to say now?” Baka looked the house over, and stated flatly: “Looks rather pretty, though I suspect the first hard wind and rain will have it down.”

  “No, Father. This is the house I will live in with my wife.” And with those words, Far-Awn’s bachelorhood ended.

  Not the hardest rain could wash off the golden mash covering that soon protected every home on the upper borderlands! Nor could the strongest winds blow the houses away! Nor could the funneling winds rip up the houses and hurl them miles away and smash them down, or against a mountainside, as the funnels had done in their so recent past. Nor could the sod wash down into mud again.

  Oh, the joy of it! The thrill of it! The excitement of being innovators, each man, woman, and child! With unlimited food, with energy unrepressed, with rampant hope and enthusiasm, so much those people accomplished in a short while, changes that would have taken a less determined, less industrious populace generations to achieve—they did it all in a matter of years, a few years.

  The blustering weather was still their enemy. But now they had the energy, with permanent shelter, with material they could use to protect and shield themselves and their animals. The pulverized tough hulls of the sunbaked pufars were mixed with the juice of the purple melons, and this mixture was shaped into huge blocks, and baked in mammoth mountain ovens. The heat from those ovens was comparable to the fire of a hundred noonday suns! The white-hot sizzling blocks were then cooled in the blue ice taken in great slabs from Bay Gar—and the steam from the cooling blocks rose to the heavens! Surely the Gods had to see this! When the blocks cooled, again they were heated, and again cooled. Time and again this was done. What had been only nebulously suggested after the first firing and cooling became an awesome reality!

  Even Far-Awn in his red-hot sizzling love affair with his new wife, had to stand perfectly still and stare at what they had just created. He put his arm about Mar-Laine’s shoulders, and said to no one in particular. “This is beyond my greatest expectations! For years I have dreamed of something like this—but to see it—to know at last we have the ultimate means of protecting ourselves…”

  No one quite guessed what he intended to do with the transparent blocks that were stronger than any metal they had yet found in the underground burrows. Far-Awn stood with his arm about his wife, and said, “There, shimmering with a soft luster, is truthfully our salvation. What does it matter now what wraths the Gods aim at us? What angry God can hurl a mighty arrow that can penetrate through these diamond-strong domes we will build over all our land? This transparent dome will not shut out the sunlight, but it will be our shield against the storms.”

  Yet, to cover all the land with a dome large enough seemed an impossible task. A meeting was held, and Far-Awn spoke: “We will construct a series of transparent domes, but it is beyond reasoning to protect every house, every farm with planted fields. We must form villages, and surround our homes with farmlands, and over all of that, we will build transparent domes.”

  They began the impossible task, and succeeded. For the first time in their known lives, all that they owned, loved, possessed, and held dear was safe from the extremes of weather. They were, at last, in control.

  Eventually, in time, every village and farm in the upperlands was sheltered under a glistening domed roof. No longer could the driving rain flood away their seedlings. And the rain flooding off the domes was caught in reservoirs and used again. The people under the domes rejoiced that never again would they have to burrow in the earth like worms, or crawl on their knees like insects, or curl their toes into the earth because of the underground darkness and the dim-despairs that went with it. Free they were to live forever in the lights from two suns. They felt sometimes, almost guiltily, like the Gods themselves. It worried some when they thought long on this subject. Everything was going so well—it wasn’t natural. Life wasn’t ever easy…

  However, anxiety over anything couldn’t persist overlong when their small villages expanded into towns, and then into cities, and a way was found to make brilliant dyes from the pufar hulls and the pigmented ground under the crystals. Faster than quickets grabbing up grain, the women seized upon these dyes, and colored the cloth they spun from the webby pufar roots—and soon their clothing rivaled the radiance of the sun-downings, and the glories of the day-startings. The small golden huts enlarged into multiroomed mansions of any color of their choice. Like walking jewels, they felt full of power, eager and zealous for all the good life now offered, though they still labored hard and long. They were accustomed to work. Now they learned to play just as hard. A council of men headed by Far-Awn met each day, discussing the boundless dreams they meant to magnify into reality.

  “We will ribbon our cities with connecting covered highways,” said Far-Awn. “Now it will be easier to so
ar over the mountains and hills than to curve around them.” The bridges and flying highways were the greatest challenges to the new young engineers with brains never stymied, as the ingenious paths of talent were many, though untried before. It amazed most that so much of their brains had lain dormant, unused, with abilities not even suspected, except by their leader.

  In more time, all of Upper and Lower El Sod-a-Por were connected together. One invention inspired another invention, and genius inspired its like, and no one was spared in the challenge of creating the perfect environment. For their children, and the children that came after, they would have a jeweled setting, where there would be time for education, for personal achievements, for the private pursuits of pleasure and happiness. In fifty years most of the surface of the upper and lower borderlands were changed drastically. Even the weather seemed to dissipate and mellow, withdrawing into the distant hinterlands of the mountains and bays.

  It was only then that government was thought about seriously.

  Baka was given the honor of naming the leader nominated. He was old now, very, and walked with a cane, and his once brick red hair was entirely white. Yet he had lived to reach an incredible age—an age unheard of in the old days when all life was a constant struggle. He was ushered respectfully into a room where Far-Awn sat with a grandson on his knee, patiently teaching the child to read. “Hey, shepherd,” Baka called in his strong voice that hadn’t mellowed with age in the least. “Guess who was nominated—and who was elected by unanimous vote to live in that grand crystal palace so foolishly placed on the highest bluff?”