by Keeley Young

The beggar hobbled to the side of the pavement, his balance shaky and off-kilter. There was a wart growing on the underside of his big toe, and he paused to pick at the dead skin around it. Wincing, the beggar made a show of himself, scratching at the itch. The people of this cobbled city, wall-bound and in medieval recession, averted their attention away from his otherwise odious appearance. A mop of dirt-coloured hair was tied unevenly in a loose ponytail, swinging and trailing against the rise of his back. His clothes had not been washed in several days, although not for a lack of trying. The beggar attempted to clean himself, and his earthly possessions, in a nearby river, one outside the walls of the city of Fellhelltrell, only just yester-morning. Folk wandering nearby with woven baskets of laundry seemed put off by the smellier kin. The beggar was half-undressed when a woman near shrieked at his presence, the bush of untamed hair underneath his armpits. He had thought he found a relatively tame spot on the riverbank, where two mulberry bushes like his armpit hair plugged off a sort of inlet for privacy. But nevertheless, he had been spotted. Perhaps through the poking gap where shrubbery failed him. An almost-naked beggar man, although his age made him neither old nor sympathetic, mixing himself with those who could afford. He’d been embarrassed.

​

In the city, named commonplace as Fell, the beggar scratched the itch on the pavement as if he were squishing an oversized termite. Let them gawk. He had scrapes running the length of the backs of his legs, as if mauled, although the last time the beggarman saw a live creature larger than himself was back in childhood. His father, when alive, had been the sort to own, to possess, a soldier’s crossbow. The bow was carved of cherry wood and he himself had always staggered back and forth when he attempted to lift it from the rack it was prominently displayed upon. The crossbow, as it could be weaponised, would take down the creatures of the woods—bears, mostly, as his father was keen on selling the pelts for profit. They had lived beyond the walls of the city then. The beggar had come here sometime after the death of his father, although now the pleasantness of his backstory seemed altogether irrelevant to him. He was as ascribed: a filthy feature of the outdoors. Fell as a bricked-in place was falling to ruin. Diverts in the cobblestone were the result of pilfering—there seemed to be trade relating to the remoulding of shattered-down stone. Fell had a history.

​

His wrist started to itch. Someone behind him as he walked shouted in a language he could not translate. He had only learned to speak and write in Vaykhanesi, the common language of the people, most widely spoken for its simplistic origins. His mother had urged she be able to teach him Ufnelasi also, but he had struggled to wrap his infant mind around the shapes of the sounds, and then she had died four months later.

            The beggar kept forward, ignoring a language he did not recognise. It would be something from the south, but he was too uneducated to know whether people from other kingdoms spoke in vastly different dialects—hell, he was too uneducated to know what the word dialects meant. The beggar narrowly avoided a shoving. Some oafish stranger, a head or two taller than he, was traversing the streets without caution. People in Fell had little patience. The medicine folk of Fell had many patients.

            He scratched at his wrist, clawing at the skin. The dark patches of hair on his arms hid whatever colour his veins were. The beggar was hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, but his mind was operating on lamp oil and potential. There was a tavern in the distance and round a corner. This place he frequented some time ago, when he was younger still and in love. A woman had brought him to Fellhelltrell. Strange as it may seem, with the collapsing balustrade of that there balcony overlooking a side street that more accurately represented a marketplace in bustling season. People overcrowded Fell. The beggar lunged forward into a gap of space and made for the corner turn, thinking of even just taking a seat in the dimly-lit corner of the tavern. The Swallowing Tongue. Although people called it Tonguey.

            People had called it Tonguey, once.

            It was now quieter, more at rest with itself. No one sturdied themselves at the door, leaned against the post. The beggar sighed at his clear walk to victory, although in heaving open one side of the wooden door, he realised how unpopular The Swallowing Tongue was during the daylight hours, or perhaps how unpopular it now was. A scattering of folk sat either barside or at the boarded windowsills, smashing back pints of housemade brew. There was a man and woman on barstools, positioned to face one another, prominently ignoring the bartender’s presence. The barman was hardly a man at all—he looked fourteen and a half and was attempting to grow facial hair on his chin, although the light colour of his hair forced you to squint. A couple of older gentlemen grew like weeds.

            The beggar let the door swing back behind him and closed his eyes for a moment to let them adjust. The Swallowing Tongue was shadowy and smelled like wild nuts and alcohol. He was content. This ought to be a place he can rest his feet, he thought, briefly considering whether to repeat that nonsense phrasing aloud in his own voice. Maybe they would give a dirty, stinking, unintelligible hairball of a man something to drink just to keep him from squawking.

            Before he could mutter, the kid raised his voice up and spoke with authority. ‘Mate, you look weary,’ he said, side-stepping towards the section of bar which reminded the beggar of a barn door trimmed in half. The tavern was not overly large and was almost certainly one of many, many in the city. Its days-of-old appearance was at least charmingly familiar. Other taverns, perhaps, had shuttered more than just their windows. ‘Take a seat then, we welcome in the sleepless.’

            The fourteen-year-old lad hardly looked equipped to service any tavern, but he returned to his duties, filling a large, almost-oversized urn of a glass with foamy golden liquid. The woman seated at the bar offered the beggar a polite smile but largely paid him little attention. It was not the sort of tavern to attract musical performance or bardsmanship, although the beggar listened to the sounds of the barlad, the chink of glass, the thud onto wood, the squeak of an underneath floorboard. There was peace in The Swallowing Tongue. His feet ached.

​

Making himself comfortable on the stool, the beggar chose a spot without overlap to the other patrons of the tavern. There was distance, respectably so, and he felt no one would bother him if he kept to himself. The antithesis of who he had once been, the young, fleshy dreamer in love with that girl...now her name was a burden, so he never spoke it, or misspoke it, a pretence to the elderly. This tavern had seen his wild youth, teeth miscoloured by grog, the hardy oy of another round, the one leg lifted onto the stool, wobbling with trepidation. Flashes came back to him.

            This wasn’t the place anymore. Or he was getting older, more grown, as his father would be measurably concerned with. Older, but not old—the men at the boarded windowsills were older, into their greyer years, with unshapen beards the colour of bleached ash. Reminders of forests taken to wildfires, a commodity, of sorts, in this particular region of Teval. Arsonites licked at the free flame, attempting to bottle it up, but nobody could bottle an element.

            The beggar stared at the jug of beer placed down in front of him. ‘Free of charge, sir,’ the barlad said, as if of a superiority to offer anything for free to the needy. He of the streets, the beggar thought, can come in from the heat and get himself a sip. Condensation ran down the thin walls of the glass. How refreshing it looked then. The beggar licked his lips, ignoring the itch running in circles on his wrist. He lifted the chalice, as that is how he saw it, the holiest of grails, up to his lips and tasted his pleasured past. In one mouthful.

            ‘Careful there,’ the woman near him cautioned, and the beggar realised how feverishly he had tipped the glass back, caught first in his desperation for something to drink. He thought himself more civilised than that, but there was a certain culture shock to being let inside, first, then offered something to drink. The mere day before he had been scorned for disrobing in as private a spot as possible, when he had neither roof nor makeshift shelter over his head. ‘You’re spilling some on yourself. It’s an awful waste of good drink.’ Her voice was polite, in a tavern’s way of polite. She still sounded hearty, a little taken by the alcohol, but her manner was not offensive to the beggar.

            The man sitting beside her was filling his gaping mouth with some form of bush nut—the beggar was taught to be a hunter, not a gatherer. He knew the fauna of the wood, not the flora. He could name several different species of rabbit, of bear, of ankredoe—a fat, hungry, hideous little insect that pestered his father while he stood outside in the moonlight cleaning the crossbow.

            The woman introduced herself as Alina and offered to purchase him a second drink, as the remnants of his first dwindled down to a mere swirling pool at the bottom of the glass. ‘You get stepped-on underfoot outside,’ she said, acknowledging the bartender with a slight nod of her head. ‘By the time you’re drunk and well at ease, the crowds have parted in the night and no one is your blockade.’ She talked, briefly, of the attic she paid an elderly woman for in the roof of a cobbler’s place. Her home. The whatever-shaped constellation she could spy out her solitary window.

            Alina leaned with her elbows on the wood of the bar.

            ‘Feeling better now then?’

            The beggar nodded his head, suddenly shy. The beer was careening through his system, alighting itself on his senses, even still. His fingers tingled. This was the life he once afforded. The girl and he would come to The Swallowing Tongue sometimes, although she found the atmosphere the least bit romantic. Romance itself seemed to have always floundered in Fell, but theirs…theirs had been beautiful, while it lasted. The beggar paused. A droplet of alcohol sat on the crease of his lips. He thought about it all. His feet dangled in the air, relieved to be levitating, relieved to be without pressure. He was feeling better now, then.

​

One of the older grumps—for he assumed the man was grumpy, for he assumed the people of the walled city were grumpy—wandered out of his seat and disappeared through an unmarked door at the rear of the tavern. The beggar remembered the door, remembered people entering and exiting through it, but merely assumed it was a restroom for the frequent patrons. In the past, when he needed an alcohol-fuelled piss, he would wander outside into the light of the bristly night and stumble into an alleyway, unbuttoning his trousers and pissing on the uneven pavement. The splash was noise, not cicadas or an intruding ankredoe. Though they, as a species, seemed to avoid the patina of Fellhelltrell. 

            The beggar made to make some comment to Alina, but she was distracted and burst into sudden laughter. Opposite her, the man had made a joke of some kind, and the tavern was the shrillest it perhaps had been all of daylight. Her laughter was not polite and muted—she was thoroughly amused, and let it show. The fourteen-year-old tender made an effort to not engage. He shuffled off in the opposite direction, making to polish in circles an untouched segment of the wood countertop.

            ‘Must have been a hilarious anecdote,’ the beggar muttered to himself, but he was overheard.

            Alina spun almost without moment’s hesitation. She was still mid-hysterics.

            The man seated with her attempted to explain himself. ‘It really was not my best work.’ He had noticeably hoped to sound modest, but his voice was brash, obvious, laced with a quality which made him sound like he ought to be a performer for a travelling circus. The beggar did not know those.

            Alina reined herself in, the laughter petering out into a quiet humming sound.

            ‘Tem was telling me of a misfortune,’ she began, and then shook her head brazenly. ‘Not one which had befallen him! I wasn’t laughing at his misfortune, but of someone else’s. I’m afraid the more I explain the story, the less hilarious it would become, I was not born with the poker in a bedazzled hand.’ At this she gave the beggar a simple smile and scooted forward on her stool.

Alina straightened her back—the beggar was still intently listening, likely waiting for her to repeat the joke, nevertheless. She made a quick glance towards Tem, then continued. ‘My good friend Tem, he is often a traveller. He sells wares, you see, and these wares are of no use to the people of this crumbling abyss.’ She made quick gesture not to the tavern, but the wider city, that of Fell. ‘These wares are peddled in our streets for cheap, tokens of craftsmen and women, the symbolistic trinkets your mother would make while the babe was asleep in the crib by the window.’ Alina paused for a moment, her expression slightly apologetic.

            ‘Tem takes them at this Fellen price, fallen price, and moves them to villages that remain in obsession with our mystical city. See, if you come from nowhere, you get the illusion of glamour from a place you cannot step foot within. People in towns of small number, yet towns more affable than we, they froth for Fellen goods. It is the marksmanship. You can tell an item of this kind was made by a battered sort of folk, someone who keeps themselves in-between the walls out of a terror for the woodland. They make an assumption of their own strength, but their own handiwork is ordinary, not artistic.’

            Alina sighed against the wooded countertop. She slurped down a mouthful of ale and continued with her story, albeit already meandering well from anecdotal joke territory. The beggar was intrigued, although perhaps he dined on the words in place of a morsel.

            ‘Tem is out on the path, and he does so on foot, which his mother would have once called treacherous. She is of the kind to think the world outside of the city is of shapeshifters, of terrible beasts which lurk no matter the season. Fear a man who claims to have himself been taken a fool.’

            No end seemed in sight to the story, but the beggar continued to lean in and listen. The barlad, at this moment, had drifted down from the opposite end and was talking to the older man who had returned from the door at the rear. Alina’s voice was that of a storyteller.

            ‘He is on foot, but he carts behind him this elaborate vessel in which his wares—the wares of our kin—are stored. He must be cautious, as to not hit a wheel against a small stack of pebbles in the path and lose control of breakables.’ Alina mimed shattering her glass against the wood floor of the tavern, which caused the beggar to widen his eyes, half-expecting her to actually destroy it. The lad behind the bar was now paying her attention and polished a jug of his own with slow caution.

            ‘I don’t intend to break anything, Humdre,’ she said, aiming an amiable stare towards the kid. Humdre merely shrugged his shoulders. ‘Tem is a knowledgeable haggler. Very respected for his ability to sell what he is proffering.’ Alina gave the tall, dark-haired man sitting opposite her one final look before she returned to her storytelling, to giving her attention to the beggarman.

            ‘This happened a mere two days ago. I could see on his face as he told this story how fresh both the hilarity and embarrassment of the moment were. You see, Tem is very expressive too, which is perhaps why is a keen navigator of how to sell something to a potential customer. He can recall a beautiful tale of an old woman, haggard for her years, collapsing in spirit for the labour of making such fine artwork as the clay crock in which he holds.’

            ‘Do you want to get to the moment, Alina?’ Tem intoned, giving her a playful slap on the right shoulder. She hardly reacted, not in torment or annoyance, and laughed him off without shifting for the slightest of moments.

She grinned at the beggar. ‘He is also a bother,’ she said.

Tem turned towards Humdre and ordered himself another drink. He licked his lips.

‘Two days ago, yes.’ She continued. ‘He was peddling the wares, attempting to convince an elderly woman to purchase something, anything, she could perhaps even name a price if she wished!’ Tem groaned over Alina’s shoulder. ‘The woman was uncertain, but she noticed Tem looked tired beyond his days and offered him to come inside and rest his feet for a moment. She would brew him something to drink, for she was herself curious about the uses of a flower.’

            Alina embellished a few details of the old woman, giving them flurry—she described the way this woman moved, her joints making aggressive cracking sounds, startling Tem the first time he heard them. She described the way this old woman spoke too, like she was a headmistress of a girl’s school in the city of Fell some many, many moons earlier, and had since forgotten to drop certain formalities when she intoned a question, or asked of Tem from where he was coming. Tem was described of going further into the belly of a beast, although the woman seemed, yes, sweet and harmless.

            ‘She was merely offering him something to drink, yes,’ Alina said with an unassuming smile.

            ‘Then, of course, the old woman was to fall flat on her face.’

            At this she stifled a small flutter of laughter.

            ‘I should not laugh, I should not be inappropriate, but look where we find ourselves,’ she continued, gesturing to the tavern features around her. Dark furniture, dim lighting, the mere suggestion of sunlight attempting to filter in through the cracks. ‘Gremez is one drink from wetting himself,’ she shouted out in the direction of an older man sitting somewhere behind the beggar. Gremez, who at that moment had his hands interwoven with the handle of a mug, raised it with one swift movement and sloshed his pants with a mouthful of the golden liquid. He did nothing but cheer when he noticed.

            ‘Ahh, Alina,’ he grumbled out in a thick accent, ‘come lick up my urine when I do, free drink!’

            She made a performative disgusted face at him and waved away with her hand. The beggar, witnessing such an interaction between the two of them for the first time, was taken aback, but this only made him reach for his drink quicker and take another sip. He attempted to hide what had been merely an instinctual reaction to be disgusted—he was, after all, filthy, starved, and probably smelt like pee himself.

            After swallowing down more beer, the beggar at once felt like returning to the story. He spluttered out his first true words in The Swallowing Tongue, ‘The woman? She fell…’

            Alina was quick to trace back to where she had left off. ‘Yes, yes, you are right, of course, stranger.’ This she finished with a wink. ‘The woman collapsed to the ground, huffing and puffing first on her face, then as she struggled onto her hands and knees. It was awkward and incorrect, and of course, my friend Tem was there to go, that’s enough struggling now.’ Over her shoulder, Tem was halfway through the ale he last ordered. Liquid had wet his moustache. His eyes were half-shut, as if he were squinting at the room, but in particular, at the back of Alina’s head.

            ‘What was…funny?’ The beggar spat out.

            Alina grinned at him; at last she would let him in on the joke.

            ‘What was funny…what was funny was,’ she said, in a boisterous tone, ‘the woman tripped over her own feet in her own home, with nothing in the way, nothing to slip over, to trod upon.’ At this Alina let out the bottled laughter and Tem’s own soft laughter came too, stifled from the glass lifted to his lips. ‘Do you not find clumsiness to be amusing like that, stranger?’

            She paused, again, and shook her head disdainfully. ‘I warned, I had warned. It was painfully funny in the context of the moment, but alas the more you dwell upon something so painfully tormenting, laughing at a helpless woman who fell from the air, well…it does lose some of the humour. I warned, I warned, I am not meant to attract the masses in some travelling circus, the hired fool, the comedian.’ She glanced over at Humdre and simply nodded her head, trying to ease down from the jittery emotion. The barlad seemed only capable of doing his job.

            Alina went quiet for a time, leaning with her elbows on the wood, facing out towards the tavern door. The beggarman loved the taste of the alcohol sloshing down his throat. He had missed it, craved it, had unfortunate wet dreams about tasting it once more. In the time he frequented The Swallowing Tongue, perhaps with a woman, it had been his healthy. Stable, ol’ reliable. The atmosphere was electric. He remembered how once a woman, certainly a woman with her breasts enviable, had pulled down her billowing skirt one evening, clearly quite inebriated, and exposed a flaccid cock. Everyone in the tavern hollered—they’d not seen a woman with a penis before. For a few beats—there was a bearded man only the height of the beggar’s waist banging on a large ornate drum—the woman swung her penis from side to side, men and women alike shouted in time with the beat, and not a sole on staff grumbled a word. At that time, now he remembered, many worked in Tonguey during the day and in the evening. Now it was simply Humdre and all of his fourteen or so years.

The beggar took another swallow of drink and finished off his second. No one was offering to pay for a third, and now he began to worry if his time off his feet was coming to an end.

              Gremez moved from his position at the boarded-up window to a stool two down from the beggar. There was nothing at first, until the older, wrinklier man cleared his throat. ‘When you eat last then?’ He said to the beggar. His accent was from outside of Fell, but certainly within the kingdom of Teval. Northern, thick, bloated, even, like there was a fish swimming round inside his mouth.

            The beggar shook his head—he hated being addressed.

            It was a struggle to remember when he had last consumed something that was not trash found tossed in the streets, or a handful of leaves he forcibly ingested just for something in his stomach. If Gremez was after the last meal, there would be no hope in singling out a plated anything. As if on cue, his stomach grumbled and he considered making a hurried exit out the door. Back to facing the unending crowds and the language which made him confused and isolated.

            ‘Some day,’ the beggar said. His voice sounded hoarse, desperate.

            ‘Why you come to a tavern that’s not got meat to peddle?’

            The beggar was shrinking inside of himself. ‘I wanted to sit down.’

            ‘Then don’t flinch,’ Gremez said, and he swung his arm, a fake hook, and the beggar froze, willing himself to take whatever he was about to face. The older man merely laughed, a spritely chuckle, and stumbled off the stool and back towards the door at the rear of the tavern.

            ‘Ignore the old bastard,’ Alina interjected, staring out at nothing in particular. The hole above the entrance door, perhaps. The scratching in the wall. Some impossible future.

​

What was her name? The beggar could not remember. Had she been there that night, or the others? His foggy memory seemed to be splintering the time, fractioning off memories of his father, of the woman he had loved, of the raucous nights in the tavern when he would come home in the early hours of the morning with the carved bowl of bush nuts he seemingly had stolen off the table.

            ‘There is too much competition for you in the city.’ It was Humdre, the bartender, who hovered on the other side of the bar with his hands limply behind his back. The beggar wanted to ask him how old he was, why he worked in the tavern during the day instead of learning how to hunt or some other trade. But he knew his place, too. His refusal to give up the seat.

            He merely sighed low. ‘I go someplace else, I die,’ he said, giving up on the courage in his voice. Humdre looked over him as if he were the older one. ‘I cannot pay for the drink.’

            The beggar’s voice cracked and groaned, but Humdre continued to shake his head politely, respectfully. ‘The first was to honour you, my friend. You come in from the heat, you like many can no longer afford to be taxed underneath King Ogranth, you need something to drink.’ Humdre’s thin figure only made this illusion of a paternal warmth seem improper, but the beggar was comforted, nevertheless.

            ‘So, thank you for taking a drink,’ the barlad concluded, flashing his teeth. They were small, and rather square-shaped.

            The beggar could feel his exhaustion overcoming him. Despite the sitting-down, and the alcohol in his system, it had been some time since he slept through the night. The ground was an uncomfortable nest, and without pillow or blankets, he shivered regardless of the temperature. It was warm weather, inching towards the hottest of times in the kingdom, and the beggar was nodding off.

            He forced his eyes open, taking in elements of the central room in the tavern he may previously have ignored. There was a hand-carved clock in one corner, although it was not operational. The face had been half-covered with a thin grey fabric, so that only the upper numbers were clear. These were painted a dull brown colour, the colour of a woodstump. The uppermost number appeared to have been the target of a hungry critter, perhaps a feasting insect, as a semi-circle was taken out of part of it. The beggar was amused, but still exhausted, and thought of leaning his head down on the wood of the countertop and feigning sleep, although he imagined this would be only to trick his mind into giving in completely.

            Alina and Tem were engaged in a conversation, although their muted voices meant the beggar could hardly make out words from either of them. Gremez had only now returned from the back room, adjusting his trousers. Humdre was pouring another older fellow his drink.

            The beggarman tapped a finger on the wood. ‘I will go,’ he said gingerly, beginning to slide himself off the stool. At once the folk around him noticed, turning their heads ever so slightly to catch his cumbersome movements. He was not delicate or dainty—he stumbled backwards, then straightened himself up, grimacing at the sudden pressure on the wart on his foot. Alina looked at him, her lips parting to speak.

            ‘Stay, stay,’ she uttered, putting on a rather natural voice that avoided an air of pleading or desperation. She was the welcoming host inviting a guest to continue the festivities, although the beggar felt ill at ease about staying. His head thumped, his legs hardly felt rested, and instead of filling his stomach with something productive, it was now sloshing with golden beer, making him somewhat queasy. Remembering this life, this youthfulness he felt slipping away from him, only reminded him of the truth: his love no longer wanted anything to do with him. He was nothing now. Not a shelter, not a warm hearth, not attractive. The loose ponytail was coming undone, like he was.

            ‘It is only early,’ Alina said, glancing over at Humdre. ‘Perhaps you want to lie down for a time. Half of the tavern is lodgings, where Humdre lives, where his family once lived.’ She outstretched her arm and pointed to the door at the rear of The Swallowing Tongue. ‘Through there.’

            The beggar could only nod. With Alina and Tem’s assistance, he was escorted through the door into a small, dark room illuminated by a solitary candle in an iron holder fastened to the far wall. The beggar could hardly see where he was planting his feet, but he entrusted in the two hooking their arms around his frail, measly body. He thought about himself starving mid-slumber.

            He thought about the woman, but could scarcely understand which one.

            Had he been in love with the woman who pantsed herself in the tavern, swinging to the rhythm, or someone completely different? He ached. Alina’s breath was on his ear. Tem’s too.

            They must have both been familiar with the layout of the room, for neither one smashed nor crashed into anything in the darkened space. Using his foot, Tem shoved another door open, and another dimly-lit segment of the tavern’s lodging put the beggar further at ease. He was blinking his eyelids open and closed, the thought of sleep penetrating every other thought imaginable.

            Beyond the walls of Fellhelltrell, in the village he had once known to be his home before big ambitions, before illumination and damnation, the beggar’s father was there in his mind. Wishing him goodnight. Sleep well, my son, he whispered, and the beggar was fast into slumber.

​

​

When he awoke, he misunderstood himself. He was upright, but no longer hoisted by Tem and by Alina. In the dim space, he was alone, but did not immediately collapse down to the ground—nor were his feet aching, for he was not standing, not quite. The beggar’s arms and legs were bound to three planks. It was these planks which kept him upright, not any means of his own.

            ‘Hello,’ he spat out, meekly. He could not see behind him, but predicted a door lay somewhere in that direction. In front of him his eyes could only catch onto the glow of a low fire positioned in the centre of the room, rather than against the wall in a fireplace. It seemed the sort of fire one would construct in the wilderness, say on a hunting trip with your father. The beggar groaned, not of this realisation, but because there was suddenly a sharp pain running through his leg.

            ‘Hold still,’ came a voice from somewhere below. The beggar attempted to adjust his line of sight, but his head ached the moment he began to nudge it downwards. There was movement near his leg, a steady back and forth. His cries, his pleas, echoed through the room. His eyes were beginning to adjust—there was a wooden table in the corner, a table which seated at least seven or eight people. The firelight was brighter than he imagined, or someone was stoking it, adding extra logs in between blinks. There was a figure in the corner, although it could have been merely a tall, handsome post.

            The beggar attempted to communicate with the sound below. ‘Hello,’ he repeated, trying to wriggle out his arms. It ached to speak, too. His throat was hoarse.

            ‘Hold still, keep quiet,’ the voice uttered, ‘and do not make me add a third to the list.’

            He thought he would pass out again. The agonising pain of his leg seemed to be withdrawing, although perhaps only because it was a struggle to remain conscious. The beggar could not wriggle the toes on his right foot. But he could wriggle the left…

            Alina straightened herself out, drifting from where the beggar was towards the open flame. She was carting something in one hand, letting it dangle through the air. When she reached the fire, she hooked the hunk of meat to the two ends of a spitroast and began letting the meat spin above the flame, orange light licking at what the beggar now understood to be his right leg.

            ‘Meat off the street is cheaper,’ she said, warming herself, too, by the fire. Off in the distance, Tem found another adequate-sized log and moved it onto the roaring mound. ‘We are an advantageous kind. The door is always open for human compassion in a city so licked by injustice, by cruelty, by poverty.’ Alina took a step towards the bound beggar.

            He watched as the fire sizzled the large, bulbous wart on his sawn-off foot. The spin was hypnotic. It would soon enough be dinner time.