The Children of The Pod

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.