The Children of the Pod by Mario Cordina

Synapsis: This is the story of the Children of the Pod, born as seeds out of the earth as they try to understand and mingle with the human race.

Wladende

First Meeting

Wladende was once a great town, founded by a man called Wlado. A giant of a man in search of a home. He came from far away, from across the Gobi desert through Asia to the west. His heart he held in his hand and whenever he stopped it beat harder than ever, restless and unsatisfied. So he moved on, the lone wanderer searching for a place to call his own. Basically the only ware he had to sell was a pinch of cocoa powder which he could have traded if he wanted to but its use was then unknown to men. They did not know it could nor how it was to be turned into something edible. He carried the cocoa in his heart, but when he showed his organ to the few locals that he ever came across, they scattered and fled in fear and disgust. Probably he did not look very attractive in his unshaved beard that almost came down to his feet and hair that trailed behind like a bride’s veil, catching up the twigs, stone, grass and dirt as it brushed along the ground. Thus he fertilsed the soil and sowed the seeds that his living mantle dropped. One can still trace the route he took by the straggling line of foreign vegitation which sprouted in his wake.

One day however he tripped over a stone and his heart rolled away and he could not find it. Alas he had suddenly gone blind and went around in desperate circles on all fours fumbling in the earth and grass for his heart. He heard some voices giggling and gibbering in the distance, but he could not see anything. Then she touched him. It was the first and only touch he had ever known, for he had been born under the roots of a large tree. When the men chopped it down, they found him inside thriving on earth worms and other delicacies in the soil. Her voice came out in uncouth jumbled jargon. A language he could not understand, nor any language whatsoever. The art of human speech was a magical weird discord that he had never deciphered. But he stopped rambling like a beast and stood up. A tree of a man. She tugged at his hands and he fell down to his knees and then she pushed his hair away from his face and he could see again. For the first time he could see her clearly and she was so………

So………

FAT!

But in the middle of all this disappointment he glimpsed his heart and jumped for joy. It had stopped beating, probably because it had not been pumped with blood for some time. He simply put it back in and let out a hollow stumpy bellow in mirth, sounds that his mother tree had taught him. The fat girl and her friends thought that it was in grief and they felt pity for him. They were also expecting him to die any moment, for who can live with a heart that has stopped beating. But he only caroused louder and louder, fell to his knees once again and kissed his saviour’s feet. As fat as she was, she did however have a pretty smile and a rotund bosom. It was then that she smelt the cocoa in his heart.

It was impossible for her to tear away from that smell, so when she saw that he was still alive and that there was no sign of his passing away, she took him to her little hut, where she lived, bathed him, cut his hair and trimmed his beard. When he emerged from the bath, he was the most attractive being that she had ever met and his perfume seemed to have cast a spell as did the size of his genitals. No clothes she had from her late father’s wardrobe would fit him, so she just gave him a night gown which just about covered his private parts and which her father had used to carry around him like a blanket with the ends trailing on the ground. The man born of a tree, then collected his beard and his hair snips from the floor and let the wind carry them outside, covering a little patch outside her hut and beyond into the barren meadows that no one had ever tilled. She was his saviour, the saviour of the life giving son of a tree, for in the months that followed rose bushes, tulips, carnations flowered, apple, pear, almond and citrus trees sprouted, a vine commenced its creepy crawl around the house, capers in their foilage burst forth wild and many other plants that were not known in that corner of the world together with a plant that carried his perfume, the cocoa plant.

The first word that Wlado ever uttered was Kinga which he discovered was her name. Wlado was the name she gave him for some reason known only to herself. The two claimed the fields beyond the hut and the couple prospered on its exotic yield. Soon they needed the help of other farmers for the harvests were plentiful. They traded fruit, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, beetroot, turnips, carrots, cabbage, cauliflour for their basic needs. Both were vegeterian and fed on what the earth produced. When other farmers found that their crop was barren, they would seek Wlado and he would come, cut a lock of hair, which he still kept long, although not as long as it had once been and sow it into the poor soil. The following season there would be a great harvest and his name and skill became a household name. Wlado thus gained the simple folks’ respect, just as his smell had conquered Kinga’s heart.

The Child 

But although the land prospered and the meadows grew first into a settlement, then into a village and would soon become a small town, and although Kinga’s hut had grown into a large house which became the envy of all those around, although food was in plenty, although the couple were in love and enjoyed the unrivalled respect of the locals, Wlado would wander troubled amongst the cocoa plant trying to learn its ways. Some of them grew bigger than others and could yield up to 100 pods per season. It was around this time that he completely abandoned farming, leaving Kinga to lord over the farm hands, which had doubled, tripled and tripled again in number as demand and crop increased. He dedicated all his time to the study of the plant whose perfume he carried within his heart and veins. 

It was around this time too that Kinga was with child. She was fatter than ever and the whole settlement, which had grown into a village with tradesmen and smiths providing goods and services for the prosperous farming community, awaited Wlado’s offspring. Wlado heard Kinga scream into the night and as the crescendo turned into a litany of pain, he blocked his ears and closed his eyes, but stormed into the labour room just as Kinga gave birth to what looked like a large seed, lifeless, hard and dead. The midwife looked at the thing dripping with the blood and water of the uterus in fright, but Wlado took it from her calmly and took it outside. He dug a small hole in the earth and carefully placed his offspring within, covered it and watered the grave. Kinga lost her power of speech and refused to leave her bed. But Wlado only smiled, kissed his wife on the forehead, thanked and dismissed the midwife, before returning to his cocoa plantation. 

The village went into mourning for the word had got round that Kinga had given birth to a dead pod. Wlado, the richest and most influential person around, the lord and master of many, still had no heir. But life went on much as usual. Traders like gypsies, tinkers, leather sellers, tanners, hawkers, and artists of all kinds were attracted by the village’s wealth and it bustled with all kinds of human activity. One season followed another as the village grew into a small rural town. The place where Wlado’s and Kinga’s pod had been buried sprung into a strange tree. It was stranger for it had three sole branches, two of which reached out horizontally like pointers one towards the east and the other towards west. The third branch grew vertically upright and then arched back downwards. The riddle was about the speed with which it grew. Everyday the tree rose higher and stouter, which made it quite an attraction for no tree was known to grow so fast. Wlado spent much of his time and energy keeping the curious away from the spot for a grave demanded respect. That at least was what the locals believed. Wlado placed flowers and silently sat for an hour everyday. Kinga still refused to leave the house, but when the villagers asked Wlado about her, he always replied that with a little patience things would turn out well. 

One day the news ran round the village that Wlado had purchased an axe and many left whatever it was that they were doing to gather around the garden as Wlado hacked away at the fat hulk of the tree that marked his offspring’s grave. Wlado was such a giant that the tree gave way in no time, lurched to and fro to finally sway crackling and moaning its last stand as it lost its feet to crush into the garden, destroying the rose bushes and the cocoa plants. It came to rest finally with a thunderous boom of earth. Then they heard the weirdest sound ever to be attributed to a human. The stump that was all that remained of the tree was hollow. Wlado with tears in his eyes bent down and picked up the thing that had produced the sound. It was an infant, blind, covered in grime and soil. Wlado presented his son and heir to the people, who quailed at the sight, for no man was known to be born from a seed. Upon hearing the commotion outside, Kinga left her bed for the first time. “Like father, like son. You’ll be the death of me.” 

But Wlado was so happy with his newborn son and with his wife’s return to the world that he ordered for food and drink to be brought to everyone around and the feasting lasted throughout the night. The village now produced wine from the pressing of Wlado’s grapes; beer too had always been a popular beverage. Wlado would not allow meat into his garden but those who could not do without cut up pork slices, beef chops and chicken legs and grilled them outside the fence. There were salads of every sort and a giant pear, as large as Wlado himself. One of his experiments. He had covered some pears and rested them on specially built stools, injected some concoction into them and they grew and grew. The pears and the tree that had given birth to Wlado’s son and like most of the exotic plants that grew in Wlado’s and Kinga’s extended garden was like no other in the region, strangers to the vegetation that was typical of the area, but they survived the snow and thrived in the water logged conditions of the spring, did not seem to mind the lack of sunlight during poor summer weather and did not drop their leaves in the autumn. Indeed, the mango trees, a couple of palm trees, a cactus which produced fruit, a sparse number of banana trees, an olive patch, a grove of citrus trees, sown into a pit to protect them from the wind, similar pits or quarries mothered almond, pear, apple, but the vine crept around the house and beyond on a wild rampage. So did the capers, the rose bushes and amongst others the cocoa plant. Such an exotic array of life, alien species at home, surrounded by pine forests, so far away from the desert, the Mediterranean or the Pacific, the tropics and their countries of origin. It was said that whatever Wlado touched found new life and grew. 

Wlado’s son, known as Wlado The Younger, would grow up to be a handsome, strong and wise man, but that would come later. When Kinga bathed the child, her own son, she could smell the cocoa in his fragrance and wept with joy. A quiet child he was, used to silence and oblivious to human activity. Thus he would sleep quietly for hours. But he would not eat anything. The milk from her breasts had long since dried away. She tried everything. There was a whole range of a choice in the house, but he would not touch anything. But Wlado smiled at Kinga’s alarm. He picked up the delicate thing in his massive arms and took it outside. In the soil, the child reveled in the lush earth, throwing in the soil and eating whatever life was inside it. “I will not have my child eat earthworms and other things in the soil.” Kinga furiously made her mark, bolted herself in her room and refused to come out or have anything to do with a child on such a diet. This time Wlado did not smile. He turned his attention to the cocoa plant as if he knew that the solution to this little tumult in his family life lay hidden in its stalks. For days, his son wriggled in the soil and his wife confined herself to her room and he had to sleep in the kitchen.