Kendadh and the Moving Star

Kendadh and the Moving Star takes place in the distant future. It is set in the Kingdom of Alban, which once had a high civilization but has degenerated into a land of terror and disorder with only a few places where calm prevails. One of these is the Abbey of Truila in the largely lawless province of Galividia. There lives a boy named Kendadh. Kendadh is twelve years old. He was left as an infant in the care of the monks of the Abbey, a place where unquestioning obedience is the most prized virtue. The fact that he is a fatherless foundling means that he is not well treated. To make matters worse, he has four noticeable qualities: a loud, infectious laugh that makes all adults within hearing distance very nervous; an independent mind that always makes him ask, "Why?" in a place where unquestioning obedience is the most prized virtue; a love of daydreaming, especially when he should not be doing it; love of a good fight. It should come as no surprise that he is in constant trouble at the Abbey, and on one bright May morning he decides to run away. He does not get far. About three miles from the Abbey, he encouters a divergent, as the Albanach call grotesquely mutated variations on normal life forms, this one an outsized cat with huge claws and fangs. His life is saved by the sudden appearance of three strangely clad, black-skinned strangers. One of them kills the divergent. When he and the strangers have established that they have no language in common, Kendadh, for want of anything better to do, leads them to the Abbey. There, on instructions by the Lord Abbot, Kendadh, who has a gift for learning languages, learns theirs, teaches them the High Tongue of Alban, the one used by the upper classes, and becomes their interpreter and companion. He learns that the strangers have come from an orbiting space craft that that the local people have been calling, "the moving star." Their lander has been damaged, and they seek a tensile metal neede