Cade 2

Cade awoke as day broke to the sound of a distant rooster's crow. All around him, people stirred as they prepared to go about making their way in the world. He sat stiffly, rose to a hunch �" the bridge was low here near the edge �" and made his way into the open with a yawn. He squinted through his good eye at the morning sun. “Shoeless,” he thought. “I'll have to make the butcher's walk shoeless.” As he made his way to the trench to do his morning business, he realized he would have to do that shoeless as well. It was not a pleasant thought.

When Cade arrived at the Northern Gate the butcher was there, waiting for him. He did not ask about Cade's swollen eye, his missing purse nor shoes. They waited in silence as the sun crept over the horizon, already beginning to bake off the light morning mist. Soon a cart, pulled by two men rather than by horse, ox or donkey, drew through the gate. They unloaded nearly twenty boxes of meat, not yet besieged by flies in the cool morning air, which Cade loaded onto the butcher's two wooden sleds as quickly as he could. At first his sore body howled with the effort, but toward the end he began to loosen up and by the time they were making their way to the Western Gate he'd paid the previous day's aches no more mind than his twisted knee or broken hand. Over the last month, which had seemed a brief eternity, he had become familiar with the quiet pain of hard yesterdays.

The days passed, his work for the butcher became regular and he was, for the most part, happy. Every few days he would have to fight, for his shoes or his coat or a bit of leftover dinner in his pocket, but as Fall moved along and Winter took her place Cade found himself content, even if it was a bit chilly sleeping on the ground. It was one morning shortly into Winter that he came to a startling realization. He had thought when he'd arrived that these people were waiting to get into the city. Certainly they had arrived thinking to gain entrance. Like him however, despite the fact that they would most likely never enter the city proper, they stayed. They simply had nowhere else to go. This was their life. Given a few more years with no changes, there would surely be children born in the moat outside the gates who had been raised there and knew no other life. It was then that Cade knew he must move on. He didn't want to grow old in this new slum.