The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six by Jonathon Keats Page A

spilling it onto the floor. The fire flared. Yankel fled with the money chest. Iser and Koppel scaled the wall. The rest of the troupe followed.
    They ran through unfamiliar streets in their colored costumes, pursued by men and women wielding weapons fleeced from Teyvel’s chest. Urchins abandoned their empty-handed gambling to join in the pursuit. If they couldn’t afford a stage show, at least they could see this troupe of buffoons, stupid country clowns, chased down and beaten.
    By midnight, the troupe was miles outside the city. By daylight, they were safe in the forest. All except pregnant Glukel. She was gone. Naturally they couldn’t turn around and fetch her. All that could be done was to blame Heyh and move on.
    — Why is it my fault?
    — You got us chased out of town.
    — I only did what I was supposed to do. I even did it right this time.
    — Don’t you understand, you ass? If you’re a clown, right is wrong.
     
    The troupe looked for work. But wherever they went, they were preceded by word of their big-city bust. Of their debacle, every detail was known, and suitably embellished for swift travel. Some folks claimed that Heyh was a charlatan, whose accidents were simulated, and that her big-city flop was a failure of nerve. Others, better-educated, said that she’d been planning her metropolitan debut since the beginning, that all along she’d been playing her audience for the fool, and not crashing that evening was her ultimate act of ridicule. Where Heyh the Clown was not mocked, she was loathed.
    The circus ran out of money. They’d no equipment, no props, and, aside from Yankel’s harlequin attire, no clothes. Another winter was coming. Cold and snow. And their whole company was no longer worth a sack of potatoes.
     
    Now it happened that Schprintze’s family was from a country at war. The trouble had begun there, several years before, through no human fault, but rather on account of an earthquake that had split the land. The schism was neither deep nor wide, and could easily have been filled, had people been able to agree on where the requisite stone should be quarried. But folks on the eastern side of the kingdom claimed that the gap lay to the west, while those on the western countered, following the same line of logic, that it lay to the east: In short, each side believed that responsibility fell to the other, and accused the other of divisiveness.
    It was a matter that the king could have settled with a word. But the skirmish got no response from him, as if the quake had struck him dumb. For weeks and months, advisers tried to talk their young monarch out of his fugue, all the while secretly shuttling him between east and west lest either side lay claim to him, yet his silence was increasingly irrelevant as the scrimmage hardened into war.
    Regional differences were found in every commonplace. Folks discovered idioms and accents. More ambitious militants raised armies on arguments of larger consequence: Who owned the water in the rivers or the rain clouds in the sky? Did the east withhold the sun in the morning, or was the west embezzling it at night? Such philosophical matters, usually minded by the crown, were abdicated to the generals, who agreed to disagree, and to blow each other’s soldiers to smithereens.
    This, then, is where the circus traveled in search of work. Schprintze was right in her prediction that the troupe’s high-wire acrobatics would be a welcome distraction to troops who passed their lives hunkered down on the front line. Eager to boost battalion morale, generals were pleased to exchange provisions for entertainment, and soldiers simply needed something to lighten the mood while they killed.
    Shrewdly taking neither side, the circus moved freely around the country, dazzling everybody. Armies provided the equipment—ropes to walk, clubs to juggle, swords to swallow—from their own arsenals. And, as for costumes, Teyvel cleverly had everyone in the troupe perform