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The sick boy sniffed, and wriggled his hands behind his back. He tried to wipe his dribbling nose against his own shoulder.

The Manmonger pulled up another blade of stalkgrass and used it to prod a little at the sores on the boy’s face. There was something almost tender in the way he did this. Then he caught his own leather sleeve up with his thumb and front finger, and used the resulting stretch of leather to wipe the boy’s nose for him.

‘He’ll get better,’ said Tighe, on a sudden rushing impulse. ‘By the time we get to where you’re going, he’ll be in a good condition to sell. Maybe only a little drink and perhaps some food.’

The Manmonger seemed to be ignoring him, staring hard into the sick boy’s face. ‘Food,’ he repeated, softly. Tighe did think he ought to say something like ‘Yes’, to agree with him to keep his mood good, or at least keep the conversation going. But something in the Manmonger’s manner put him off.

All four of the commodities were staring at the Manmonger.

Tighe was suddenly very certain that the Manmonger was going to hit the sick boy; to beat him for being sick. There was an ever-present hint of violence to come in the softness of the man’s voice. That was it, Tighe realised. The promise of violence, like the winds being held back just before dusk, ready to come roaring out and pull things from the ledge. Tighe realised he was holding his breath, waiting for it to happen. A voice inside his head was scolding him for having spoken out at all.

Then, with a release of the tension inside him, Tighe saw that the Manmonger was untying the thong from around the boy’s neck. With careful fingers he picked open the knot and then opened the noose and
slipped it up over the kid’s head. A puckered line of red marked the boy’s white skin where the thong had been.

The sick boy was staring up at the Manmonger’s face as he did this. His eyes were wide with hope.

The Manmonger slapped the boy’s legs, pushing them together, and retied the tether around his two ankles. It occurred to Tighe to wonder how the sick boy was supposed to walk, with his feet tied together. Wouldn’t it be better to tie only one ankle?

Without getting up, the Manmonger reached over and retrieved his pack from the lip of the ledge. He unhooked it and picked out another stump, which he forced into the turf in front of him. Then he tied the sick boy’s tether to this new stump. He reached again for the pack and this time brought out a knife. For a moment Tighe didn’t register what this artefact was. Thought it was a flask, perhaps something medicinal. There was the edge of misunderstanding about the whole sequence of events. The Manmonger was settling back on to the floor in front of the boy. Tighe didn’t have time to be shocked, couldn’t quite process what was happening. The Manmonger sank his fingers into the mass of the sick boy’s hair and angled the head back. With a swift flick he pushed the end of the knife through the stretched neck, a little above the adam’s apple. Almost as part of the same movement, the Manmonger shifted his sitting weight back and kicked out with both his feet. Scattering blood in a glittering arc, the sick boy’s body lurched to the side and over the edge. The tether whickered and tautened suddenly, heaving at the stump.

Gone, over the edge of the wall.

It still didn’t quite register. Tighe couldn’t quite grasp it. Some extreme remedy, folk medicine, somehow. Something. But the shine of midday sun through the red rag of falling blood refused to fit.

The dark-haired girl was sobbing, swift, stifled bursts of air. The red-haired girl was staring at the floor. Tighe wasn’t sure she had even seen. But no, of course she had seen. They had all been watching the sequence of events with minute attention.

Tighe realised his own eyes were wet. Why? His breath seemed to be coming in slow draws.

The Manmonger went back over to his seat on the lip of the ledge. His knife, blood still on it, sat on the grass. The sick boy’s blood made a mark like a dark slug trail to the edge. Presently the Manmonger got to his feet and began gathering some snatches of stalkgrass. He went further along the ledge and climbed up a little to pull down a withered old ledge-bush. Three pairs of eyes followed his every movement. He came back with the kindling and the woody tendrils of the bush and lit a small fire, chiming sparks from a flint until the old grass caught, feeding the little fire and eventually
making a smouldering heap of stalks. Then, still watched by everybody, he hauled the sick boy’s body back up to the ledge and laid it down on the grass.

The clothes were mostly vegetable cloth, rotten, and were ripped away easily. The Manmonger examined them, checking if anything was salvageable, but it was junk, so it went on the fire. Then he crouched over the nude corpse, peering minutely at the skin – checking it, Tighe realised with a lurch, for sores. But, apart from the face, the skin seemed clear.

The sun was high in the sky now and the ledge was filling with shadow. Tighe was shivering, but not, he thought, from the cold. He watched, blinking rarely, as the Manmonger butchered the boy as deftly as he might a goat. He turned the body over, where strands of grass were sticking to its white back and narrow buttocks. Then he cut briskly through the spine at the back of the neck and sawed round to the front. With a heaving cut the head was free. The Manmonger picked it up and looked more closely at it, peering at the sores. They had lost of lot of their raging colour when the body had been drained of blood, but they were still obvious and disfiguring. The Manmonger seemed to be considering if there were anything that could be redeemed from the head, but it didn’t take long for him to make up his mind and he tossed the ball carelessly over the edge.

Tighe wasn’t looking at the Manmonger now; he was mesmerised by the headless body lying on the ledge. The bony body of the boy, with shoulder blades poking up like rocks and the bumpy line of the spine drawing the eye up towards the neck; only there was no head, nothing to complete the picture. There was something monstrous here. The Manmonger was retrieving something from his pack. A smaller sack, also made of leather, that unpeeled and opened up into a flat piece of skin. Inside was a pile of grey powder that Tighe only belatedly realised was precious salt; bought from the pans of the canyon ledges away to the west.

Then the Manmonger was back at the body, cutting away first the right arm and skinning it expertly; then the left, then the legs, the buttocks, the small of the back and the top of the torso. He turned the dismembered body that remained over and carved some more from the belly. Finally he cut free some of the ribs and poked his knife end amongst the viscera. Blood was leeching out all over the grass. He had worked quickly. Had it been a goat, Tighe would have spent several hours salvaging good meat from the carcass before giving the rest as fodder for village pigs. But the Manmonger seemed easily satisfied, and he kicked the remainder over the edge in a desultory fashion.

He cut prime pieces from the arms and legs and wrapped the fillets in the salt bag, stowing it back in his pack. Then he fed the fire with some of the bush twigs, so that it chuckled and threw up flames. He picked up the
bones and dumped them on the fire to cook up the marrow. Then he took some of the lesser cuts and packed them in mud to stop them singeing. By the time he put them on the fire they were shapeless lumps of brown.

The smell of cooking meat made Tighe’s hungry stomach inside him twist. He felt sick.

Soon enough the Manmonger was pulling out bones with a stick and cracking them open with his knife. He scooped out the bubbling marrow and ate it still hot, slapping his lips together noisily and panting with satisfaction. Then he chewed a mouthful of grass, presumably for the moisture. He pulled the mud balls out of the fire with a stick and cracked them open with his knife. The meat inside smoked, and the smell was so like freshly cooked goat – that sweet luxury – that Tighe’s mouth watered. More than watered: saliva dribbled down his chin. He hated himself for that.

The Manmonger seemed to be in a better mood now. That made some sort of sense. He had been eating nothing more than a few strips of salted goat’s meat and some pieces of grass-bread. He was a thin man, stretched, used to meagre rations. Here was a sudden, luscious feast of tasty meat and fat. He sat cross-legged and devoured one portion of meat from the mud, absorbed wholly in the meal. By the end he was grinning. Then he picked out a piece of meat on the end of his knife, and got to his feet. It was the red-haired girl he went to, holding the little piece of cooked flesh in front of him.

He sat down in front of her, only holding the morsel in front of her mouth. She stared at him, not with horror or fascination but with a kind of dumb blankness; but she did not open her lips. After a while he laughed, a deep growly sound. ‘Not hungry yet, not there yet,’ speaking almost to himself and he popped the meat into his own mouth. ‘Give it a couple of days, give it a week, you’ll be different. You’ll watch me feasting like an Emperor every night and you’ll start to thinking why should I go without?’ He got up again and returned to the fire.

For a long time he simply sat, finishing off his meal. Then, as the shadow crept down the wall, he lay down with his knife still in his hand and fell asleep.

His three remaining commodities stared at him. Nobody moved; nobody tried to free themselves from their tethers, although it would have been easy enough to do. It was (the thought rose in Tighe’s head) as if he had fastened them with a more than material tether.

The Manmonger twitched in his dreams.

After a period, some hours, he woke suddenly and lurched upwards with his eyes wide. It took a moment for him to orient himself. The fire had burnt itself out. He held his knife out in front of him. Then he rubbed
his face with his clear hand and breathed noisily in and out through his nose.

He prodded the fire with his foot to check that there was no more heat in it, and then he went and sat on the lip of the ledge one more time. His head was back now, as if (Tighe thought) in sleep; but, no, he was only looking up after the swift rising sun. There was a pink tint to the white-blue of the sky that Tighe could see, which must mean that it was nearly time for the sun to go over the wall.

Then, without saying anything, the Manmonger got to his feet and paced over to his commodities. He still had his knife in his right hand, but he put it into a pocket of his leather jacket as he unfastened the tether of (Tighe’s heart pummelled, he couldn’t immediately see which one) the red-haired girl (despite himself, Tighe felt a rush of relief). She was rigid as a wooden woman, but he yanked her and pulled her away from the group.

The sick boy’s free tether was lying on the ground and the Manmonger hooked it around her ankle (only one ankle, Tighe noticed), and tied her to the other stump. Then he retrieved his knife and simply pushed her to the ground, himself on top of her. With his knife he reached down to cut through the cheap cloth of her trousers before pressing the blade against her neck. Tighe couldn’t see clearly what was going on. He could see that the red-haired girl was lying completely motionless, her left leg trembling slightly. Her pink flesh was visible now through the rips in her trousers and Tighe could see the tremor that passed up and down it. But otherwise she held herself completely still as the Manmonger loosened his own trousers with his free hand. Then his form was juddering over hers, a weird pulsing motion as if he were seized by convulsions. It didn’t last long and then he seemed to be asleep again, lying directly on top of her, his knife still at her neck.

Tighe watched; the motionlessness of the scene seemed more terrible than the action. His own wick betrayed him. He shuddered. He tried to fix his eyes on the colour of the sky, trying to trace with his eyes the subtle gradations of colour. He rubbed his hands against one another behind his back, as much as he was able. But his eye was caught by movement; the Manmonger’s body was in jerky motion again, heaving and bouncing. On, on, stop. Then he was adjusting himself and climbing off her.

Later, during the dusk gale, the three commodities were forced to huddle together with the Manmonger, pressing in against the back of the wall to avoid being blown off. Tighe was so revolted by the stench of the Manmonger’s skin that he hardly noticed how feeble the dusk gale was. But as it drained to nothing he did feel surprised; it seemed to him that the gale had somehow got stuck in a preliminary phase, as if it had not developed its proper ferocity.

The Manmonger removed himself from his charges, checked their tethers in the darkness, and curled himself up in his blanket.

It was not that night, but rather the following day, that Tighe realised – with a sickening sense of belatedness that made the realisation more painful to him – that the Manmonger had never intended to sell them as commodities at a near-by village. He could sell the three of them and maybe have enough for one goat; but why would he want to eat one goat when he could feast on all of them and eat three times as much? Tighe realised that, from his own point of view, this was a special time for him, a time to indulge himself, a sort of holiday.

In the morning the Manmonger took out one of his pieces of human flesh and ate it, wiping a rag over the dewy grass and chomping on it to relieve his morning thirst. There were no rags for the others. Taking his cue from the other two commodities, Tighe fell to the floor and licked the wet grass. For a while his thirst was satisfied, but that only made his hunger more acute.

The Manmonger sat grinning at them. ‘Hungry?’ he asked them in Imperial. ‘Hungry?’

The three of them sat and stared at him. Tighe had a sudden flash of Ati, of Ati’s head twisted round through a terrible angle. It forced a spurt of anger up through his chest and he coughed. ‘You’ll devour us all,’ he said. ‘You are evil man.’ Twist
his
neck, the way Ati’s neck had been twisted!

‘I am reputable Manmonger,’ the grinning man said. ‘Evil? I have a full belly. That is the difference. There is no
good
and
evil
, there are only full bellies and empty ones. We have a long march today.’