back again in a fortnight, broke and slinking about the backways, sleeping as
the destitute immemorially slept, under rags and scraps and up against the
garbage they used for forage (thin pickings in the Downwind) for the warmth of
the decaying stuff. So they began again or sank in the lack of further ideas and
died that way, stark and stiff in the mud of the alleys of Downwind.
Mama Becho was one who prospered. There was an air to Mama Becho, but so there
was to everyone in Downwind. The stink clung to skin and hair and walls and mud
and the inside of the nostrils, and wafted on the winds, from the offal of
Sanctuary’s slaughterhouses and tanneries and fullers and (on days of more
favorable wind) from the swamp to the south; but on the rare days the wind blew
out of the north and came clean, the reek of Downwind itself overcame it so that
no one noticed, least of all Mama Becho, who ran the only tavern in the
Downwind. What she sold was mostly her own brew, and what went into it (or fell
into it) in the backside of her shanty-tavern, not even Downwinders had courage
to ask, but paid for it, bartered for it and (sometimes in the dark maze of
Downwind streets) knifed for it or died of it. What she sold was oblivion and
that was a power in Downwind like the real sorcery that won itself a place and
palaces across the river that divided Sanctuary’s purgatory from this
neighboring hell.
So her shanty’s front room and the alley beside was packed with bodies and areek
with fumes of brew and the unwashed patrons who sprawled on the remnants of