No Strings Attached: Stage Show

For as long as anyone remembered they had lived, and died, in the valley. The valley had always been their home. And the gods who looked down on them had always provided everything. Food, cloth, tools. Whatever they needed.

Yaoul walked along the hard-earth track, carrying the bag of wheat on his shoulder. It was heavy, and the sun was hot. His bare feet scuffed the brown, baked soil, and his shoulder ached. He had been working with his mother, in the small field of potatoes, for half a day. He was tired. His mother said "Hoo now, you sissy! You are too soft to be a worker!" but she scalded him warmly, because she loved him.

"But mother!" Yaoul protested, "I am only twelve! I do not have the power of my father!"

"One day you will," his mother said, "Then you will be the leader of our village. You walk in your father's shadow today, but then you will cast your own!"

But that dream seemed so far away to Yaoul, he never thought about it much because it was too distant. "No use playing with dreams and visions," he said to himself. "I will never be as old, or as strong as my father!"

The first long shadows of the valley were beginning to creep down from the peaks. The first houses were already turning blue in the shadow's hands, and evening fires were beginning to send their fairy wisps of smoke into the still air.

For it was very peaceful in the valley. It had been like that for as many generations as there are stories to tell. And no-one had ever gone from the place, except by death, and no-one had ever come to visit, except the gods, who they believed lived along the summit of the valley walls, too high and too far away to see. It was Yaoul's home, as it had been his mother's home, and his grandmother's, and so on, back into the ancient tales of how the first people came to live there.

Yaoul looked at the sheer rock walls which enclosed his own home, and his gaze went up to the top of the house walls, where a thick bank of thorn trees grew. It formed another solid wall, like a ring, clumping thickly along the precipitous circular edge. Spines. Hard and sharp. A ring of death.

Far away, in the stories of the past, there were myths and legends, of people from the village who had tried to leave. They had, the stories said, climbed the walls and fought the thorns which grew among the peaks. Some had managed to push their way into the rocks and slide along crevices like beetles, and burrow upwards, but every