Spending over a fortnight in these slums I’ve managed to work out a social breakdown of the people living here at the bottom of this world’s society.

Firstly, as a point of interest, there are hardly any women, at all, anywhere in the slums. The only women are the wives and daughters who live with their husbands and fathers on the edges. Even if this actually takes up about half the area of the slums, there’s still only a handful of women and girls.

From what I can gather these are the low income/on the poverty line people who do the lowest jobs and just manage to scrape by. They occupy small homes on rough streets, but manage to cobble together some sort of a living.

This is also where the crime factions and gangs of the city reside and proliferate; the town guards don’t step in here at all from what I’ve seen so far so their rule is law here. I haven’t managed to identify the gangs or how many there are but I have seen a couple of times them shaking down or beating people up to extort some loose change or whatever, so I have been watchful of them.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the lack of women means there are no brothels or a red light district anywhere around here which I have found odd. From the ventures I have made into the more civilised parts of town I haven’t caught any glimpse of it, nor any gambling or drug dealing anywhere in town. The drugs I can understand, those depend on having some understanding of chemistry and some narcotic know how to make, most definitely lacking around here. But gambling and prostitution are intrinsic to any society. Definitely weird.

The next class lower than the criminals and the poor working man are the dumpster dwellers. They are the men that live in the dump and on the river side of the outskirts of the slums. The ones who had kicked me out.

From what I’ve gathered they are the ones who have survived and kept some of their strength living out on the streets. This means that they have no injuries or illnesses and can fight well enough to get their share of scraps when the daily round of rubbish comes in.

In retrospect again, if I had fought hard and shown I’m not one to be messed with and respected some of the underlying rules a bit I probably could have fit in with the dwellers alright. But I’m no fighter, and those men I could see had done some pretty horrible things to keep alive in this cesspool and I wasn’t going to be a victim added onto their list.

Finally comes the lowest of the low, the bottom class of the slums which I have found myself falling into: the beggars.

They live in the centre of the slums and are by far the most unfortunate.

And there’s no point denying it, they’re disgusting.

This is because they consist of the too sick, too crippled, too mad and too old who are completely alone and can’t fend for themselves outside of the slums anymore in one way or another.

At the centre of the slums where they live there is no semblance of happiness. It is dirty. Waste and muck line the sides of what used to be streets between buildings that are barely standing. Rats, stray cats, stray dogs and bugs alongside other vermin slither and crawl through the mounds of filth and shoddy structures.

And the people. Some find some shelter as best they can and carve out little corners for themselves but most just lie down in whatever spot they find themselves in for the night until they get back up again for the morning. From what I can see, this is what they all do, until they can’t do it any more. Until they just lie there dead in the street, their corpses waiting for others to come and pillage whatever little they have and the vermin to come after and take care of the rest.

I had seen it when I had wandered through the slums trying to find a refuge for a night. Dead bodies that had been eaten and were still being nibbled by bugs and rats as they lay rotting naked in the middle of a path.

Needless to say I didn’t want to live like this and end up like this but I had no other options at this point because, while they spent their nights in the slum, they spent their days by the docks.

It was probably the most depressing thing I had ever seen when I first saw it. Some time after the Sun rises, all the people that lived in the heart of the slums that could still find the strength to stand and walk, funnel into each other as they make their way in a progression down to the docks. They then spread out, find places to sit and proceed to beg the sailors and whoever else passes them by as they make their way between the port and the city.

This was their day.

Occasionally people threw pennies and scraps of food at them as they passed by but this was how they all spent their day, until the Sun began to set.

After that, to my surprise, a cart started making its way down the dock and the beggars who had anything they could spend started exchanging whatever, if any, small amount of coin they had in exchange for food.

I thought that even if there was no charity here some people still did some good work, but as I saw the cart pass before me from where I had hidden to watch how the beggars lived their lives for a day, could I see into the cart.

The food … it was all rotten. It had mold and rot all through the assortment of produce that was assembled together. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that this wasn’t even a tiny bit of charity. This was some grocers way of making a bit of money back on what he had spent on his now useless fruit and vegetables.

It was sickening.

Watching these sick, elderly and crippled men bite down and eat these disgusting leftovers as it was all they had, all that was allowed them, as they staved off their hunger before their eventual depressing deaths.

After the man with the cart had gotten rid of all his leftovers he soon left with his recouped coin. The beggars then made their way back to their hovels, to lie down before they did the same thing all over again the next day.

And the day that, and the day after that.

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And that is what I have arrived at today.

I had found the best spot I could amongst the rubble and rubbish I could the night before and got whatever sleep I could. The Sun is up now and the line of beggars has started making its way to the ships.

I slip in amongst them and keep myself stooped. Just to make myself fit in a bit more I start walking with a limp so that I at least look like I have a reasonable excuse to be there, amongst them, instead of appearing as pathetic as I actually am.

Eventually we made it down to the port. I find myself in a spot that I will have to make do with as I’m figuring this out for the first time. As the morning begins people start going about their business as they live their days with me now looking around at them.

A happy looking sailor is making his way to me, whistling a tune, and I do what I had seen everyone else here doing.

I look up at him, and hold out my hands.