The Hassocki had built a fane to their Quadrate God next to the Grand Temple. It gave them a place to worship in Thasos. Other than that, I have to say, it wasn’t a success. The four low domes on its roof aren’t so much of a much compared to those two spires, even if the wrong one was taller. (No, I was going to pass over that in silence, wasn’t I? My apologies, kindly reader.)

I got the feeling the lot hadn’t been vacant very long. Whoever’d cleared the rubble from it had plainly won the contract on lowest bid and made up for that by not clearing a good bit of it. Bricks, broken bottles of arrack (if there’d been any unbroken bottles, the rubble haulers had taken care of those-oh, you bet they had), and roof slates argued a building had lived there not very long ago. Crumpled papers might have come from it, too, or from anywhere else in Thasos. They blew by, now in flurries, now in blizzards.

And we added our own papers, as if Thasos didn’t have enough. We pasted flyers for Dooger and Cark on anything that didn’t have a mouth and ears. There are at least half a dozen languages in the Nekemte Peninsula. Dooger and Cark, being too cheap to have wizards use the law of similarity to reproduce them in every relevant speech, solved the problem by not using any. Probably Cark’s idea; he’s the one who was born speaking no known tongue.

So our flyers showed a pretty girl wearing not very much (have you ever known a circus without one, or more than one, to give the marks something to stare at?) turning cartwheels, a lion and a unicorn on their hind legs like the supporters of the arms of Albion, a two-headed man (actually, Josй-Diego quit a while ago, after he got into an argument with himself), a clown brawling with a well-hung demon, and, soaring above them all, an acrobat doing an obviously death-defying flip.

Me. Yours truly, Otto of Schlepsig. Star of Dooger and Cark’s, Prophets help me.

I lugged a pastepot while Ilona carried flyers. She’s the pretty girl on the poster-a redhead from the Dual Monarchy with a temper like dragon’s breath. “Hurry up!” she snapped at me, as if I were her slave. Well, I’ve heard ideas I liked less.

“You’re carrying paper,” I pointed out. “I’ve got this bloody heavy bucket, and my arms will be as long as a forest ape’s by the time we get this job done.”

Ilona said something in Yagmar, the language she grew up speaking, that should have set the flyers on fire. We’d been using Schlepsigian up till then. It’s my birthspeech, and Ilona knows it because the Dual Monarchy crams it down everybody’s throat in school, like it or not. Almost everybody in the circus business picks up some of it-except the Albionese. They think other people ought to speak their language.

Ilona wasn’t in costume. She would have caused a riot if she’d gone out on the street wearing what she almost wore when she performed-and not a friendly kind of riot, either. Hassocki can have harems, but they start pitching fits if they see more of a woman in public than her hands and her face. You figure it out-I’ve given up. And Lokrians, probably because they’ve had the Hassocki next door for so long, are almost as straitlaced.

Costume or not, she still got stares. She’s a damn good-looking woman-I already said that. And she has red hair down to about the small of her back. In a place like Thasos, where just about everybody’s swarthy, she stood out like an honest man in parliament.

A fellow in a skirt and tights said something in Lokrian. Seeing us look blank, he tried again in Hassocki: “You’re…circus people?”

Hassocki I speak-a lot better than he did, in fact. They beat it into you when you join their army. “Of course not, sir,” I answered politely, adding my best bow. “We’re in the chicken-giblet business. I can give you a fine bargain on gizzards.”

It didn’t faze him. Nothing much fazes Lokrians-either that or they start pitching fits. He jerked a thumb at Ilona. “Sell me her giblets.”

“What does he say?” she demanded. Without waiting for an answer, she called the Lokrian something that made what she’d said before sound like love poetry. That didn’t faze him, either. He swept off his broad-brimmed straw hat and bowed almost double. She turned her back on him. Considering some Lokrians’ tastes, that might have been ill-advised. But this fellow just sighed and went on his way.

Such is the glamorous, romantic life of a circus performer. Makes you want to run away and join, doesn’t it?

Actually going out and performing is always a relief. You may hate traveling. You may hate shilling (although nobody in his right mind hates Albionese shillings-they’re the soundest money in the world). But if you hate performing, you wouldn’t be out there in the first place.

With the usual jitters, I watched the crowd filter into the tent. If the house is lousy, the owners have an excuse for stiffing the crew. Of course, the owners will try to stiff the crew if the house is full, too-especially if they’re Dooger and Cark-but at least then you know you’re getting screwed.

Things looked pretty good. The portable stands on either side of the ring were filling up. Roustabouts steered Lokrians to one side, Hassocki to the other. Why borrow trouble? You get plenty even when you don’t borrow it.

Hassocki complained they couldn’t see the lions as well as they wanted to. Lokrians complained they couldn’t see the clowns as well as they wanted to. Everybody complained about how much we charged for wine and pistachios. Hassocki aren’t supposed to drink even a drop of wine. That doesn’t stop them, or not very often. They flick out a drop from a cup, as if to say, There, I didn’t drink that one, and then they go on. Sometimes I think they enjoy wine more because they don’t just get drunk-they get to feel guilty, too.

Out swaggered the ringmaster, in an outfit that would have made an Albionese duke at a coronation feel underdressed: top hat, tailcoat, white tie, knee breeches with silver buckles, shining white hose, and patent-leather cambridges with even bigger silver buckles. And Ludovic had a whip-how can you be a ringmaster without a whip?-and he had waxed mustachios just as black and just about as long. Ludovic is a piece of work, all right.

He cracked the whip to draw everybody’s eyes to him. Good thing the locals didn’t decide the war had started up again, that’s all I can tell you. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels!” he said, first in Lokrian and then in Hassocki. At least I assume the Lokrian was the same as what I could understand.

People applauded. They really did. Like I’ve said, we hadn’t played Thasos before. For all the locals knew, we really were marvelous. Unfortunately, they’d find out pretty soon.

“And now,” Ludovic called in a voice that filled the big tent without seeming strained, “I give you the famous Madame Ilona and the unicorn. Madame Ilona, ladies and gentlemen, direct from the court of the Dual Monarchy!”

The only court in the Dual Monarchy Ilona had ever seen was the one that gave her a sentence for vagrancy. Nobody from the royal and imperial court at Vindobon (royal and imperial, mind, not just one) was likely to show up and give us the lie, though, so why not?

Out she came, doing flips across the unicorn’s back and cartwheels and somersaults all around the beast. Everybody stared at her. Well, Ilona is worth staring at anywhere she goes. But all she had on was skin-tight emerald satin that covered her from just above those to right around that, and women in Thasos don’t dress that way, not where anybody can see them they don’t.

Hassocki and Lokrians all gaped as if they’d never set eyes on a woman before. The shock value probably made Ilona look even better to them than she would have someplace where people don’t have a stroke when they look at a leg.