"What if they won't give?" I asked.
"When they say no and shake their heads, you look them right in the eyes. You smile your sweetest smile. And you say with a voice like an angel's,
'Your mother sleeps with camels.' And then you move along as though you have given them your greatest blessing."
I liked the idea of being a beggar. It didn't offend my sense of pride. It was a challenge; it required technique. I wanted to be good at it. By o Beng the Devil, I wanted to be the best!
Later when I went ghosting forth on Earth and saw the Rom of the old days I watched them at their begging with the eye of one professional for another. They were good. Very good. I saw the Gypsy mothers in the street whisper to their little ones, four years old, five, "Mong, chavo, mong"-beg, boy, beg!-and send them out among the Gaje. To train them, to develop their skills early. Begging helps to teach you not to know fear. Fear is a useless luxury when it is the Rom life that you live. A little of it gives you the spice of wisdom, any more than that and you are made helpless.
Begging is useful in another way. It makes you invisible. Most people don't want to see a beggar, because the sight of him stirs guilt and anxiety and niggardliness and other negative feelings. So a beggar can move among a crowd practically unnoticed except when he insists on being seen.
(I should make it clear that the prime activity of the Guild of Beggars isn't begging. Begging pays the company's expenses, more or less, but the main work of the guild is espionage. No one spelled that out for me when I came to Megalo Kastro. But it became obvious as time went along.)
When he was finished instructing me Lanista furnished me with the accoutrements and regalia of my profession. My alms bowl, into which money could be dropped but out of which money could not be taken without setting off an alarm. (The bowl would also sound its alarm, loud enough to shake a comet from its orbit, if it ever wandered more than three and a half meters from my body.) My staff of office, signifying that I was a licensed beggar and that all funds I took in would be put to pious uses. My red neckerchief, which all guild beggars wear so that they can recognize each other at a glance and keep a proper distance. And my holy amulet, a small flat plaque of silvery metal chased with intricate coruscating patterns in some scintillating darker substance, which I was to hang about my throat under the neckerchief to protect me from unspecified perils of the soul. The amulet contained a recorder sensitive enough to pick up anything spoken within a fivemeter radius of me, but Lanista saw no need to tell me that.
"You are all ready now, Yakoub," he said. A car was waiting outside the lodge to take all the beggars to town for the morning's work. Gently he shoved me toward it. I turned and looked back and he made a secret Rom sign at me and winked. "Go," he said. "Mong, chavo, mong!"
IT WAS A HIDEOUS TOWN, NOTHING MORE THAN SHACKS of corrugated tin splotched with purple mud from the unpaved streets. Light rain fell about six hours out of every ten and the air was so thick with mildew and mold that it had a greenish cast. White furry things sprouted in your lungs every time you drew a breath.
But the begging was good. The miners would come back from their shifts and draw money from their pay accounts for a quick holiday, and they thought it was bad luck to let the money stay in their pockets too long. Mainly they spent it on gambling, drink, drugs, and whores, as men in such towns have done since time began. But there wasn't one of them who wouldn't toss a handful of obols into a little beggar-boy's bowl, and when you happened upon one at just the right moment of exuberance he'd grandly fling you fifty minims, a tetradrachm, even a cerce piece or two, whatever happened to be in his purse. It added up.
Though I was the youngest and cutest and probably the cleverest, I was also the newest and maybe the most innocent. That cost me at first. You had to have a territory; and of course the established boys of the guild already had staked out the most lucrative zones for themselves. As for the other boys who had arrived with me, they were anywhere from two to five years older than I was, and were quick to grab the best of what was left for themselves. The best I could do was lurk around the edges of the town. I was lucky to bring in five obols a day.
That was bad. We were credited with a percentage of our take toward the price of buying our freedom, and if I kept on at that rate I'd still be a slave to the guild when I was a hundred years old. I didn't want that and neither did the guild: a beggar older than about twelve was useless to them and they wanted us to be able to buy our writs and clear out when we were no longer efficient producers. Often they would ask the most capable ex-beggars to sign on as freedmen in the upper hierarchy,though.
Once I realized what was happening I found a niche for myself that the other boys hadn't bothered to notice. Instead of soliciting the miners I solicited the whores.
Their guild had the same buy-out deal that ours did, but they were bound by a minimum ten-year indenture and so they didn't feel the same pressure that we did to earn and save, earn and save. And quickly I found how easy it was to wheedle the coins from them. Just bring out the maternal in them, that was the ticket. Let them mother you. And they'd pay and pay and pay.
Good God, how I wish I'd been older! I spent my working days in this perfumed crib and that, letting them hug me against their shining jiggling breasts or nuzzling up with my cheek to their plump jewelsocketed bellies. Even after all this time I still remember them vividly, even their names: Mermela, Andriole, Salathastra, Shivelle. The fragrance of their bodies. The silken sheen of their thighs. Those rosy nipples, that rippling resilient flesh. Every one of them was beautiful. (Perhaps it wasn't really so, but that is how I remember them, at any rate, and so be it: they were all beautiful.) They let me touch them everywhere. They giggled, they laughed, they loved it. And they loved me. When the customers showed up I quickly went out the back way, though some would let me stay, hiding behind the curtains and listening to all the panting and groaning. I would watch now and then, too. I learned a great deal very young. And into my begging bowl went the obols and tetradrachms and once in a while a gorgeous five-cerce piece shining with all the colors of the rainbow.
In the whorehouse district I was everybody's mascot, everybody's toy. Some of the younger ones-they weren't more than thirteen or fourteen years old themselves-were even willing to give me a little first-hand instruction in the mysteries of love. But of course I was only seven and that would have been not only an abomination but a waste of their time and mine besides. I was content to learn by observing, at least for another couple of years.
How the money rolled in! There were days when I could barely carry my bowl back to the lodge, it was so stuffed with coins. (My recorder was stuffed, too, with the intimate chatter of the whorehouses. I still had no idea that the senior members of the guild were miners of sorts themselves, that they spent hours every night processing our tapes, filtering the idle noise and panning for the data that we beggars were being paid to collect, such nuggets of information as whether the men in the mines were cheating their employers by withholding the locations of rich lodes of ore.)
In short order I was the star of the guild. The big producer: the number-one beggar. I knew that because Lanista and the other senior brothers of the lodge treated me with great warmth and respect and also because of the obvious envy and even coldness of my fellow beggars. Well, I could handle that part of it. When my cabin-mate Sphinx tried to cut in on my bordello territory I took him aside and beat him bloody. I was eight and he was eleven; but I had my career to look out for.
Now for the first time ghosts were beginning to visit me with some regularity, too. That was the most exciting thing of all, even more than the games I was beginning to play with the whores in the cribs, even more than the occasional sight of some snarling giant reptile looming outside the force-field that protected the town.