DOWNWIND by C. J. Cherryh

i

There was enterprise among the sprawl of huts and shanties that was the Downwind of Sanctuary. Occasionally someone even found the means of exacting a livelihood out of the place. The aim of most such was to get out of Downwind as quickly as possible, on the first small hoard of coin, which usually saw the entrepreneurs 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 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 eldest, a lean and twisted man with lank greasy hair, a beggar, generally: but some mornings he came home, limping not so badly as he did in Sanctuary's streets, to spend his take at Mama Becho's.

So enterprise brought some coin to the Downwind in these days of unrest, with Jubal fallen and the Stepsons riding in pairs down the street, striking terror where they could; and coin inevitably brought the bearer to Mama Becho's, and bought a corner of a board that served as a bench, or a pile of rags to sit on, or for the fastidious, the table, the sole real table with benches, and a draft of one of Mama Becho's special kegs or even (ceremoniously wiped with a grimy rag) a cup and a flask of wine.

Mradhon Vis occupied the table this night as he had many nights, alone. Mad Elid had tried him again with her best simper and he had scowled her off, so she had slunk out the door to try her luck and her thieving fingers on some drunker prey. Thoughts seethed in him tonight that would have chilled Elid's blood, vague and half-formed needs. He wanted a woman, but not Elid. He wanted to kill, someone, several some-ones in particular, and he was no small part drunk, imagining Elid's screams-even Elid might scream, which he would like to hear, which might ease his rage at least so long as he was mildly drunk and seething. He had no real grudge against Elid but her persistence and her smell, which was nothing which deserved such hate. It was perhaps because, looking at her, with her foolish grin that tried to seduce and disgusted him instead, he saw something else, and darker, and more terrible; and smelled behind her reek a delicate musk, and saw hell behind her eyes.

Or he saw himself, who also had traded too much of himself and sold what he would have kept if he had had the luxury.

But generally the whores and the bullies let Mradhon Vis alone. That was tribute of a kind in Mama Becho's, to an outsider, and not a large man. He was foreign. It was in his dark face and in his accent. And if he was watched, still no one had seriously tried him, excepting Elid.

He paid for the special wine. He maintained his solitude through a slice of gritty stoneground bread and some of Mama Becho's passable bean soup, and kept his surreptitious watch over the door.

Night after night he spent here, and many of his days. He lodged across the alley, in space Mama Becho rented for more than it was worth-excepting her assurance that it would stay inviolate, that the meager furnishings would always be there, that there would never be some sly opening of the door when he was out or while he was asleep. Tygoth made his rounds of Mama's properties all night with stick in hand, and if anything was not what it ought to be, then corpses floated down the White Foal in the morning.

That was good so long as his small hoard of coin lasted, and it was running low. Then the reckoning came.

The woman-mountain rolled his way and loomed beside him, setting down a second cup of wine and repossessing the empty. "Fine stuff," she said, "this."

He laid down the coin she wanted. Fingers the match of Tygoth's picked it off the scarred table with incongruously long curved nails, ridged like horn. "Thank 'ee," she said sweetly. Her face in its halo of grizzled hair, its mound of cheeks-grinned to match the voice, but the eyes in their suety pits were black and almond and glittered like eyes he had seen the other side of swords-point. She fed him on the best, gave him sleeping space like a farmwife some fatted hog; he knew. She would be sure she had all the money first and then go on to other things- Mama Becho dealt in souls, both men and women, and she named the services, when the coin was gone. She had him in her eye-a man who could be useful, but having weaknesses-a man who had tastes that cost too much. She scented helplessness, he reckoned; she smelled blood and made sure that he bled all he had- and oh, she would be there when he had run out of money, grinning that snake's grin at him and offering him his choices, knowing he would die without, because a man like him did die in the Downwind when the money ran out along with any hope of getting more. He would not beg, or sell what sold in the Downwind; he would kill to get out; or kill himself with binges of Downwind brew, and Mama knew what a delicate bird she had in her nets -delicate though he had survived half a dozen battlefields: he could not survive in the Downwind, not as Downwinders did. So it was possession that gleamed in Mama's deepset eyes, the way she regarded one of her treasured pewter cups or looked at one of her boys, assessing its best use and on whom it was best bestowed.