Gods of Green Mountain by V. C. Andrews Page B

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