It may have been funny, but it shouldn’t have been funny enough to make a man fall off his chair. When his gaoler had recovered, wiping his eyes and his mouth, and righting his stool, Dalip had reduced the apple to a thin woody core. The pips were lined up on the edge of his plate.

‘So, little lion man. Why are you here?’

‘I’m not here to fight.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘We’ve done all that.’ The urge to wipe the table clean of plate, cup and the guard’s grin was strong. ‘None of us have done anything to anyone. Yet we’ve been lied to, taken against our will, locked up, and now, you’re making me kill dogs for some mad woman’s entertainment. Why?’

‘Because.’

Dalip howled in frustration. ‘That’s not an answer. We don’t deserve to be treated this way.’

‘How else do you think you should be treated?’ The smile slipped. ‘Listen. Until you do something that earns you better treatment, you’re lower than maggots, you’re lower than that, even. Just dirt. You came with nothing, you are nothing: you can stay nothing, I don’t care. No one’s going to be kind to you – you can forget all that. You work, and maybe she’ll pay attention to you.’

‘I will not live like that.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘you’ll die like that.’ He took Dalip’s plate away, and tipped the pips and crumbs on to the floor. ‘It’s not that bad. You’ll get used to it.’

‘That’s what they said about people calling me nappy-head in the street. I didn’t get used to it.’ Dalip clenched his jaw. ‘I want my patka back.’

‘Your what, now?’

‘Patka. My head covering. The black one.’

‘They were taken away for a reason.’ The man reached out for Dalip’s cup, but Dalip snatched it away and drained it.

‘What’s the reason?’

‘Because she wanted me to.’

Dalip passed the cup across the table. ‘It’s important to me. That and my turban, and the steel bracelet, and the comb, and the little sword. They’re what marks me out as a Sikh.’

‘So earn them.’

‘How?’

The man got up from the table, banged the plate against the top and simply put it back on the pile with the others. The cup went unwashed on to a shelf. Dalip looked up and around him, at the soot-stained wooden roof-beams, the cobwebbed corners, the rough, unfinished, unloved nature of everything.

‘Everyone’s different. For you? You know what you need to do.’

‘Fight? I won’t do that.’

The guard put his hand on the knife at his belt. ‘You’ll do it when you’re told to.’

‘No. I’m not going to be some sort of, whatever it is. Performing seal.’

‘Then the next time you go into the pit, you’ll die.’