makeshift furniture, itself spread with rags that had layered deep over un
laundered years, the latest thrown to cover holes in the earlier. By day the
light came from the window and the door; by night a solitary lamp provided as
much smoke as light over the indistinct shapes of lounging bodies and
furnishings and refuse. The back room emitted smoke of a different flavor and
added a nose-stinging reek to the miasma of the front room. And that space and
that eventually fatal vice was another of Mama Becho’s businesses.
She moved like a broad old trader through the reefs of couches and drinkers, the
flotsam of debris on the floor. She carried clusters of battered cups of her
infamous brew in stout red fists, a mountainous woman in a tattered smock which
had stopped having any color, with a crazy twist of grizzled hair that escaped
its wooden skewers and flew in wisps and clung to her cheeks in sweaty strings.
Those arms could heave a full ale keg or evict a drunk. That scowl, of deepset
eyes like stones, of jaws clamped tight and mouth lost in jowls, was perpetual
and legendary in the Downwind. Two boys assisted her, shadow-eyed and harried
and the subject of rumors only whispered outside Mama Becho’s. Mama Becho had
always taken in strays, and no few of them were grown, like Tygoth, who might be
her own or one of the foundlings, and lounged now with half-crazed eyes
following the boys. Tygoth was Mama Becho’s size, reputed half her wit, and
loyal as a well-fed hound. There was besides, Haggit, who was one of Mama’s