The Star with the Broken Rope: Book 2 - The Desert

By Kevin CRAMPTON

Many years after a catastrophic landslide has swept a whole civilization away, a family of survivors are living as exiles among the shepherds of the grassland, their whole world now only fragile memories of the things that were.

A chance encounter rekindles hope that others may have come alive through the cataclysm and so begins a journey far beyond the sanctuary of the tribe to find answers to old questions.

Travelling across the roof of the world, from the rolling hills to the barren wastes of a rocky desert, their search will take them through the tents of the merchants and alongside the towering striders that cross the scorched sand in slow, steady caravans, spotter kites strung from their backs and map makers measuring the land as they pass.

Somewhere beyond the endless waste is a city, and the rumour of others like them that passed that way before, heading deeper into the unknown interior of the uncharted world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447755807

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The Star with the Broken Rope

Book 2: The Desert

Kevin Crampton

Copyright © Kevin Crampton 2021

Kevin Crampton has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance between characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-4477-5683-5

The Star with the Broken Rope Trilogy

Book 1: The Cliff

Book 2: The Desert

Book3: The Fire Mountain

For Mum, Dad and Lisa, Colin, Oliver, and Lewis.

Family is truly everything.

A special thanks to everyone that assisted with proof-reading and providing valuable feedback during the realisation of this novel.  In particular, Simone Mongiardo for tireless and timely feedback month after month.

CHAPTER 1: The Edge of the World

CHAPTER 2: The Black Cloth

CHAPTER 3: The Stylite

CHAPTER 4: The Wreckage

CHAPTER 5: The Market

CHAPTER 6: The Caravanserai

CHAPTER 7: The Beast Driver

CHAPTER 8: The Kite

CHAPTER 9: The Spiders

CHAPTER 10: The Blinding Ceremony

CHAPTER 11: The Songline of the Renegade Bride

CHAPTER 12: The Gatekeeper

CHAPTER 13: The Ceremony of Admittance

CHAPTER 14: The Palace

CHAPTER 15: The Ethnarch

CHAPTER 16: The Sightless Ceremony

CHAPTER 17: The Qanat

CHAPTER 18: The Tanners’ District

CHAPTER 19: The Cavern of Red Starlight

CHAPTER 20: The Inn of the Orange Seller

CHAPTER 21: The Sand Map

CHAPTER 22: The Bailey

CHAPTER 23: The Road Ahead

Epilogue: The Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 1: The Edge of the World

Just as he did every day at this twilight time, the girl’s father stood on the very edge of the world, his feet balanced precariously upon the ragged line that stretched from horizon to horizon and which marked the end of the great grassland plain on which they lived.  Beyond that precipice, the land took an abrupt quarter-turn downwards into the raw, grey, scarred rock of the immense vertical cliff – the boundary between land and air. 

She hated the cliff.  She hated how the plain seemed to have been cleft by its jagged passage – like a world cut in two, how she had to constantly watch her sheep to ensure that they didn’t stray too near that lethal edge and how you could never see the bottom so that your head swam if you looked too long into the depths. 

Today, the bulbous white heaps of cloud tops were dimly visible far below, crossed by the gliding silhouettes of birds riding the wind that blew in constantly from the abyss, rushing up against the immense wall of stone and on over the plain on its never ceasing journey inland.  Even on clear days however, the great cliff continued so far down that the creases and folds of rolling rock were eventually lost in the hazy blur of airy distance.  Some of the shepherds said it continued forever and anyone falling over that edge would die of starvation as they plummeted forever alongside the endless pillar that held up the world.

But most of all she hated how the cliff consumed her father’s thoughts and had done so for as long as she could remember.  He returned here as often as he could, watched the skies every day while grazing the animals and had tried several times to climb down and had only been held back by her mother and the screamed entreaties to see reason.  He slept facing the cliff, waking with the same haunted expression with which he went to his bed.  He told fantastic stories of how he had come from the world of the cliff before she was born.

She watched her father now, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, his gaze fixed directly out into the immense void of air as the sun sank lower towards some distant, hazy horizon.  He was reverentially repeating a phrase in prayer, his words caught and scattered by the wind, the same words over and over as if for luck,

Climb far, climb fast.

Rocas was fifteen with untidy black hair tied back by a string of woven grass, her skin burned brown by the long days on the pasture and possessed of that fierce pride born from having always felt like an outsider in the shepherd tribe.  She was proud that she could run as fast as any of the other children in pursuit of a breakaway animal, could calm even the most frightened beast, and that she could and would use her fists if one of the boys dared mock her father.  She knocked one of them down just as often as she was sent sprawling into the mud, and so she maintained a respectable if fragile position in the pecking order of the tribe’s young people.

The others called her father King Aaron for the fantastic stories he told of his life supposedly before arriving on the plain.  He said that he was born on the cliff itself – in a vertical world of climbing and descending and destined to be a ruler of his tribe.  He told of falling from his village on the cliff, betrayed by a witch, and miraculously surviving, and that the immense edifice did have a bottom which he had seen with his own eyes – a great liquid plain of ever-moving water that lay at the foot of the cliff and had eaten away at its base until a great portion had collapsed around the time of Rocas’ birth.

He told of rising back up with Rocas’ mother to this, the top of the world from his point of view and that the rest of his people would soon follow – the remnants of the civilizations of the cliff.

The great collapse was the one thing which the shepherds agreed upon.  They had also seen the cataclysm fifteen years before when the ground had shaken, the cliff had sheared away in an agony of tearing stone and the sky had been filled for many moons with thick, black, choking rock dust that turned the sun blood red.  A great comet had passed at the same time and the shepherds had understood it to have been a portent of some great evil working in the universe, a herald of the sky and land remaking themselves.

A great swathe of their grassland territory, several days’ journey across, had disappeared in the blink of an eye into the void that day and their world had been given a new boundary, a new cliff edge.  They had lost many of their own people and animals and it was a confused time of refugees and orphans, of tears and terror, of the dust settling on everything and many survivors almost starving to death.

The shepherd tribe had found the family shortly after the cliff had fallen while they were heading inland for fear of further collapse.  The pitiful trio were wandering lost and disoriented and carrying a new-born infant and the strangers seemed in a state of shock and spoke an unknown language.  Particularly, the survival of the child was considered a charm of great luck, a gift of new life amidst the death and destruction, and so it was agreed that the family would be given sanctuary and that the child would bring the tribe better fortune after the destructive remaking of their land.

As they spent time among the shepherds and gained the language, Aaron’s stories around the campfire at the close of day had amazed, amused, and then angered the tribesmen.  His insistence that they return to the edge of the cliff and climb down were insane, but he was tolerated for his hard, uncomplaining work alongside the shepherds and for fighting when neighbouring tribes tried to steal animals from their flock.  He was tolerated also for the sake of his gentle companion Chalia, with her deep blue eyes and scarred face, the mother of the lucky child born from the cataclysm.  She radiated a calming presence but seldom spoke, and it was assumed that she had also never fully recovered from the trauma of those terrible days.

Aaron still told his stories to whoever would listen, and Rocas’ ears now burned with shame to hear him obsessively repeating the details of his fall and miraculous rising back up in a flying machine, oblivious to the weary looks exchanged between the tribesmen and the gentle replies that were worse than a rebuke, the words you use when dealing with a mad man.  She loved her father for his gentleness and strength but a part of him always seemed closed off to the world and to his daughter.

Chalia never spoke at these fireside meetings; Aaron would sometimes end his stories with an appeal to her for confirmation and she would only gently nod with a smile and return to staring into the flames.

This then was Rocas’ heritage – confused stories of a world beneath the world, of people clinging on to the vertical hollows of the cliff and of flying balloons that had delivered her pregnant mother and father to the grassland and saved them from the landslide.  Of betrayals and loyalties, prophecies and visions and her father driven half-mad by the need to find other survivors from this time before as if a part of him had also fallen, lost forever, alongside the collapsed cliff.

Rocas had questioned her mother about it several times,

Why does father say these things?  Doesn’t he know how the tribe sees him?  And her mother had sighed, and turned her piercing sky-blue eyes tenderly to meet her daughter’s angry and questioning gaze,

There was a time before Rocas, but it doesn’t matter now.  Our lives are here, and this is where we will live out our days among these good people who saved us when we needed saving.  Be gentle with your father as he’s been through so much more than I can make you understand.  Just know that we lost everything when we came here but more than that loss, we gained something infinitely precious, we gained you.

And the subject was closed like that, a chapter of secrets that her mother had locked up in her heart and which it was clearly painful for her to revisit.  Rocas eventually stopped asking but never stopped worrying about her father or feeling that she somehow needed to protect him in a world that she understood so much better than he seemed to.

This was why Rocas accompanied her father on these trips to the edge of the world, carrying inside a strange mixture of love, pity and curiosity and knowing also that it reassured her mother that Aaron didn’t venture to the cliff alone.  He was still a strong man physically, accustomed to the hard work of the land but something inside him was broken – like the string of a singing lute she had seen over-tightened at a tribal feast so that it squeals in pain just before it snaps - or, perhaps more accurately, like a string tuned to a different register so that its notes held no harmony with the others and insisted on carrying its own discordant song.  It was the song he was singing now as he repeated his words about climbing far and fast.  As she lay in the grass a little way off listening to him, his voice almost seemed to be chanting a lullaby, full of the same tenderness which he’d used when she was little to sing her to sleep.

What does that prayer mean? she asked and turning towards her and returning from whatever reverie held him, Aaron’s voice cracked a little with emotion as he spoke,

It’s an old thing we used to say when I lived on the cliff, to wish others well, to pray for their safety.  We also used to tell them to descend gently so they wouldn’t fall until it was their time.  You must understand that when you are born on the cliff, you live with the constant knowledge that you might fall at any time.  He paused and looked back down the plummeting sheet of shear rock,

I saw my own mother fall and I watched my fall reflected in the eyes of someone I loved, my brother Castor.  I never imagined that the rest would all fall together though, carried down in ruins of broken rock, I still can’t imagine it and that is why I can’t believe it and know that some of our people must have survived.  There were so many, some would have escaped.

Who Papa, who could have survived?  The tribe says that the ground was ripped from their feet and whole forests, hills and rivers were sucked down when the comet passed.  The dust ate up the sky and blocked the sun!

Aaron’s eyes were unfocussed and Rocas wasn’t sure if he was replying to her or speaking to himself when he mumbled, barely audibly,

But they knew it was coming you see.  They had read it in the sky when that star with a broken rope was falling across the Heavens.  They knew about the danger when the land began shaking and they knew how to escape it – by flying with burning rocks, by tunnelling with a great hammer.  We flew, Chalia and I, we travelled along roads of air in balloons woven from black sheets gossamer-thin but strong and supple.  There were other balloons, an armada of flying craft they told me.  Others will have followed, flying out of the sunset as we did.

Rocas knew this look, this tone of voice – her father had retreated into some place within himself where the fantastic stories wove themselves into sense and the missing others, whoever they were, were still alive and waiting for him – a chapter that her mother had closed but which her father never could.

The sun had now sunken to the great air horizon far out beyond the cliff and was being flattened from beneath.  Rocas got up from her comfortable position on the grass and softly slipping her hand in to her father’s, she guided him back from the edge of the abyss and turned him gently towards the camp.

It’s time to go back papa, they’ll be lighting the cooking fires soon and we’ll eat.  We can look for the others tomorrow.  Aaron nodded slowly, as if dazed and allowed himself to be led.  The man who called himself a King and his daughter, her eyes watery with restrained tears, returning through the twilight to the tribe’s evening fires and the cycle of another day that would end with this same twilight vigil at the top of the cliff with only the constant wind and her father’s strange memories for company.

The shepherd’s camp was sprawled across the pastureland nestling in the lee of a hill to protect it from the onshore breezes.  Crude tents of woven fabric were huddled around cooking fires and the animals grazing on the long rich grasses, guarded day and night in rotating watches to protect them from predators and for the neighbouring tribes that would steal or slaughter their beasts.  The smell of hot animal fat hung over the place and the people crouched around their cooking as busy silhouettes.  An evening calm hung over the place, the soft murmur of many people concentrating on their chores.

Before the great cataclysm the tribes had lived in peace, there was enough pasture for all and the animals bred and multiplied, but for the last fifteen years, with less land and with the lean years of death and dust in the skies, times were harder and people desperate.  Men as well as animals had been killed in the days following the cliff’s collapse and the tribe had tracked further from the cliff edge in search of new land and safety.  Many years after the landslide, when no further shaking of the ground was felt, they had grown bold enough to travel back this close to the edge to make their camp in the richest grasslands.

One still had to be on one’s guard however, the horrors of the dark times were seared into the memory of all who had been alive then.  The memory of hunger like that lasts a lifetime.

Having left her father and mother seated together by their fire, Rocas went to meet Linsus, one of the shepherd boys to relieve him of his watch.  If Rocas maintained her place in the hierarchy of the children with fists and kicks against all challengers, Linsus enjoyed the predominant position thanks only to the advantage of age and size and the fact that he was the Chief’s son.  A year older than Rocas, he towered a head’s height above her and would throw his whole weight behind a clumsy punch to floor any of the other children who challenged him.  He had gathered a coterie of followers who enjoyed his protection and took pleasure from needling Rocas about her father’s eccentricities.  His nose had been broken when he was very young, giving him a squashed, twisted look and Rocas considered him an oversized bully.  Like most bullies, he was only really dangerous when surrounded by his supporters.

You’re late and I am hungry, was all he grunted when Rocas arrived at the pasture a way off from the camp.  A flock of animals were bunched together for mutual warmth against the wind and Linsus squatted on a rock watching over them with a bored expression.

No, I am not, see the big blue star over by the horizon, it’s only just come out.  You should use that to measure your watch, not the voice from your fat belly.

Ask your daddy about the stars, I hear his destiny is written up there, that he’s flown up to them and ridden the comet across the sky.

The stories that had grown around her father was the easiest way to annoy Rocas and she knew that Linsus knew and exploited this so said nothing, casting a practiced eye over the animals, and quickly counting them.  But Linsus had scented a welcome distraction from his long, uneventful hours of guarding the herd and obviously decided that his belly could wait,

I know he really cares about those stars.  Do you know what your papa did when the comet finally disappeared years after the cliff fell?  Did your mummy ever tell you that?

Rocas did not know, and despite not wanting to give Linsus any advantage, she was interested.  She knew how much the travelling star had fascinated her father and how he’d felt it entwined with his own destiny.  He’d called it the star with the broken rope, just as he said he’d once fallen clutching a severed climbing rope.  Linsus could see the curiosity in her eyes,

You know what he did when that star left us, when it disappeared down to the inland horizon and faded forever?  He wept like a baby.  Your daddy wept for days and said that even the Heavens had deserted him and wiped away his destiny and his future.  That’s what my father told me and that’s why King Aaron wanders around now as docile as these dumb animals.  He spat in the direction of the herd.

Linsus had been enjoying the story so much that Rocas had the advantage of surprise and her first punch connected satisfying with his ugly jaw and sent him sliding off the rock.  He was back on his feet in an instant though and the blow to Rocas’ stomach doubled her over just as Linsus’ knee came up to smash into her nose and send her reeling onto her back into the long grass, a hot, wet trickle of blood across her cheek.

Linsus pinned her to the ground with his knee and had scooped up a handful of animal dung which he held over her face menacingly,

So much filth comes of your father’s mouth, you should be the same – open up.

Linsus suddenly stopped however, his hand frozen in place and it took a heartbeat longer for Rocas to notice it too.  From a short way off in the direction of the animals, they heard an unfamiliar voice – a man’s deep, gruff tones talking to the creatures in a seductive singsong,

Now you’re a plump little treat, aren’t you?  Who’s supposed to be looking after you tonight, eh?  Where are they?

Linsus’ eyes had gone wide in alarm and Rocas could see the flash of fear there.  She was reminded of their childhood – before his height sprouted and his muscles grew, how he’d looked when he’d been unable to take on an older child, the arrogance of being the Chief’s son changed in an instant to uncertainty.  She knew how he was sometimes at his most vicious if he felt you’d seen his weakness. 

She met his gaze and silently mouthed the word,

Raiders.

They had been told the stories, but their tribe had been left in peace for many years now and neither Linsus nor Rocas had ever had anything threaten their watches.

They both scrambled to their knees but kept low enough to stay hidden by the long grass, scanning the flock of animals by the starlight to find the intruder.

The raider wasn’t even bothering to conceal himself, a stout man with a curious wooden frame hung across his back was walking among the beasts, a hand outstretched to pat them as he scanned around to see if he was being watched.  He placed his hand on the head of one of the prime males, stroking the horns and inspecting the creature’s health.

Linsus’ confidence seemed to have drained from him completely, his voice had now completely lost its arrogance,

What do we do? he asked, and Rocas’ mind worked furiously as she decided how best to protect the creatures in their charge, the first real threat that had ever happened on their watch.

The camp was too far back for the alarm to be raised in time; the raider could easily make away into the night with an animal by the time it took to run for help.  Similarly, the man would easily overpower two children if they tried to rush him.

We’ve got to scare him off, do you have your sling?  Linsus nodded in answer and pulled the weapon from his tunic, the two woven chords connecting a cup for a projectile.

But I don’t have a stone.

The children dropped down to search the ground, but it was too dark to make out the muddy soil and their hands turned up small pebbles only, nothing suitable as a projectile.  Rocas cast about without luck and then spotted Linsus’ hand still clutching the dung.

The dung ball, we can blind him with that, it stings like mad, and you can’t see for ages, but we’ve got to hit him in the face.

Linsus looked uncertain, without discussion he transferred the ball of slimy filth to her and said,

You do it, you’re more accurate than me, surprising Rocas to hear anything other than an insult from her old enemy.

OK, but he has to turn this way, step out and challenge him and when he turns, I will launch.

Linsus looked every bit the frightened little boy again, but something resolved itself in him as he looked into Rocas’ eyes and he took a deep breath and sprang up and screamed at the intruder, it sounded more like he was giving voice to his own fear than issuing a threat.

The man jumped with fright at Linsus’ scream and wheeled around at the same moment that Rocas’ gained her feet and brought the sling around in a carefully controlled arc, sensing the weight of the dung by the tension of the sling in mid-swing and trusting her instinct to launch it accurately.  The ball of filth flew out with surprising speed at the same moment that Linsus shouted,

Rocas, no, it’s the colporteur.

But it was too late.  The dung slammed into the man’s face with a wet slap, and he screamed and clawed at his eyes as he took a step back and fell over one of the animals, startling the flock and causing them to bolt away in all directions with alarmed bleats of terror – darting streaks of white against the dark pasture.

Linsus looked horrified.  He and Rocas ran over to where the man lay prone, swearing and rubbing at his face as he moaned in agony and Rocas now also recognised the wooden frame on the man’s back hung with sacks, bottles, and trinkets.  It was the travelling tinker that visited the tribe a few times a year, and he was writhing in pain while the animals scattered in alarm.

They are going to thrash us for this, was all Linsus could say but Rocas didn’t hear him.  Hanging from the tinker’s frame, glistening slightly in the starlight was a scrap of fabric, thin and airy and jet black, like a piece of deeper night, and unlike anything she had ever seen before but which she recognised from having heard it described over and over around the campfire.

CHAPTER 2: The Black Cloth

As morning broke over the plain and the people emerged yawning from their circular tents, the Chief, Darius, went to check on the tinker.  A dwelling had been set aside for the man, displacing its disgruntled owner, and water brought during the night to clean his face, but the colporteur had kept the camp awake almost until morning with his raving and swearing.

The tents were pitched in a rolling landscape of gentle grassy hills, good country for the animals and the tribe would spend several more months here before shifting to new grazing.  The shelters were organised in a rough circle around a central meeting place and faces puffy with lack of sleep were emerging into the dawn, with coughs and curses and feet stamped for warmth.  Fires were being kindled back to life with the crackle of fresh, sap-fat twigs.

Darius found the man sprawled across a makeshift bed of fresh grass and in no better mood than when he had left him the evening before.  His eyesight was returning but his eyes were bloodshot and swollen and he would probably remain partially blinded for several days more.  Darius had spread his own fair share of dung in his peers’ faces in his time to know that the man wouldn’t be comfortable for a while yet.

The whole incident had secretly amused him.  The tinker was a nuisance who arrived and departed without warning and brought useless things that distracted the tribe and caused petty jealousies.  A string of beads or a bottle of fermented milk could be the cause of a fight and Darius had enjoyed a good, long laugh in the privacy of his tent at the thought of the tinker’s misfortune at the hands of the children.  For once he was proud of his son considering how he’d handled his first taste of what must have felt like real danger, although he’d scolded the boy in private for not keeping better watch.  He worried that he’d indulged his son as a child and that he had grown too soft in this recent time of plenty to face what might be more difficult times ahead.

The scattered animals were a far more serious matter however and a search party had been awake all night combing the rolling hills to locate and return the beasts.  By sunrise all had been accounted for but an example would need to be made of the children for the good of everyone.  Some sort of short banishment was the law of the tribe, but Darius feared his son ill-prepared to survive independently just yet. 

Darius welcomed the opportunity to remind everyone of a little discipline however, as the rest of the tribe (like his son) had grown far too complacent of late with their easy lives on this fat and forgiving land.  They would be easy targets if a real raid ever came again, so perhaps the girl Rocas was continuing to bring them luck in her own subtle way?  She had a wild but self-assured look in her eyes that Darius had noticed even as a tiny babe in her mother’s arms, or maybe it was just his fanciful imagination reflecting back the personality of the young woman she’d become.  His son had come home with black eyes and bruises and stories of Rocas almost as soon as he was old enough to walk. Darius had been impressed by Linsus’ description of her shot - such accuracy, in the dark, was evidence of uncommon skill.

Darius was a natural leader of these people and was related to almost all the twenty families that made up the tribe.  He had led the remnants of his original kin away from the ruined cliff in the time of destruction after the death of his own parents, picking up other survivors and somehow keeping them together.  He had assumed control when the previous chief had ventured back to the cliff edge to look for survivors and never returned.  Darius’ own wife had not been found and raising Linsus alone had been far more difficult than leading these people.

They were all of his blood, except of course for Aaron and Chalia and wild-eyed Rocas.  That man was a mystery to the Chief and possessed of a strange otherness that set him apart in the small insular world of the shepherds. Darius respected him and sensed a rare strength there however, the kind of man you would trust even if you would never fully understand him.  The shepherds had the expression that the quietest waters hold the most cunning fish, and this seemed apt for Aaron. Darius pushed him out of his mind as he considered the situation before him though.

This morning, the tinker was crying for blood, threatening never to visit the tribe again if the children weren’t punished appropriately.  Darius dismissed this nonsense with a wave of his hand,

Don’t be ridiculous.  You shouldn’t be creeping about at night by the animals – why don’t you go by day like an honest person unless you’re here to cheat us again with your baubles and broken beads?  Maybe you did fancy some advanced payment from our herd?  Didn’t an animal go missing when you last visited?  This was a lie, but the colporteur didn’t know that.  Darius knew how to gain the advantage when bargaining.

The merchant’s face broke into an appeasing smile, sensing that maybe he’d gone too far and ever playing the salesman and trying to charm despite his squinting and rheumy eyes.

But I bring you exotic goods from my travels, many wonders, medicines, and rare luxuries in return for the hides and milk.  We must all look after each other in these new times.  I look forward to my visits here and to sit beside Darius’ people’s fires, there’s no warmer welcome in the rimward pastures, good health to your herds!

Darius was immune to this charm and had already decided what he would do.  He would announce a suitable punishment for the scattering of the animals, not though for the blinding of a clumsy intruder, to a general assembly of the tribe at the middle of the day to make an example of the children and show no special treatment to his son.  It was important that the tribe saw no favouritism and that Linsus came out from his father’s shadow to be a man in his own right.

As Darius was preparing to leave the tent, Aaron slipped through the opening looking unusually determined, his eyes straining in the darkness of the interior before they found and fixed themselves on the wandering salesman. 

Noticing the Chief, Aaron gave a short respectful bow and mumbled a quick apology for the behaviour of his daughter.  Since she had a reputation for being wild and independent Darius said nothing, his son had told him how it had been Rocas’ idea to hurl the dung and he’d also been impressed by her quick thinking as well as the accuracy of her shot.

Without waiting for an answer, Aaron dropped on his knees beside the tinker while staring at the load which the man usually wore on his back and which was now leaning against the wall with his wares hung on the wooden frame,

It was my daughter that blinded you and I am sorry for your pain, but she also told me that you carry a thin black cloth with you, may I see it please?

Darius knew that there was nothing worse than showing an interest in the vendor’s merchandise.  As soon as the man knew you were attracted by any of his knick-knacks, you were drawn into the long, intricate dance that ended with you being cheated, but he was intrigued to see Aaron interested in anything other than the cliff edge or that imaginary world inside his head that animated Aaron’s fireside stories.

The tinker seemed to forget his pain instantly and groping behind him for his wares he seized on a scrap of unusual-looking black cloth that was tied to his pack.

You daughter has a good eye.  I bring you something truly unique and even I don’t know the fully extent of its powers or nature.  It is a piece of the night sky that fell to earth, the very fabric of the Heavens.

The scrap was the size of Aaron’s palm, and he rubbed it between his thumb and fingers testing the texture.  The cloth clearly fascinated him, and he wouldn’t stop looking at it as he spoke.

It’s from a flying balloon, it’s from my people, I recognise it as it’s the twin of the craft that brought us here.  But our fabric was lost after the cliff fell, where did you get this?

It’s a gift from the skies, insisted the tinker, one of the wonders from my travels but it’s unique, I couldn’t possibly sell it until I’ve unlocked its powers, unless the price offered matched its wonderous potential.

Aaron did not seem interested in buying the scrap however, he lifted it to his nose to drink in the smell and asked again, this time with more urgency,

Where did you find it?  Were there others there?  Was there wreckage?

A scrap of Heaven, repeated the vendor clearly warming to the prospect of a sale, a truly unique and valuable thing, but the salesman’s words only served to annoy Aaron who suddenly and without any warning grabbed the man by