"Dare to wager a Gypsy?"

Bran had heard Marcel issue this challenge dozens of times, in dozens of crowds of peasants, in dozens of market towns. It was like casting bait.

"Spawn of the devil!" an old woman cried out. "Thieves. No good layabouts. Get back on the road."

Bran had heard this before too. He stood among perhaps twenty people. There urere housewives, farmers, apprentices, maids, and beggars.

Marcel held a piece of rope above his head. The rest of the rope was wrapped around Marcel's thick body, coiled over one shoulder and under the opposite arm pit.

"One end of this rope there!" Marcel pointed to the tiled roof of an ancient stone building. He moved his arm to point across the cobbled street. "The other end there! And I walk across!" Marcel paused. His black eyes glittered in the midafternoon sun.

Bran wished he could wear the same arrogant manner. Bran wished he had the same dark good looks, the same heavily muscled body. At twenty-one, Marcel was a man in his prime. Bran? He was sixteen years old. No amount of wishing could give him the power and command that Marcel held among the Gypsies.

Bran was small. Fair-haired. He rarely spoke above a whisper. That alone made him an outcast among the Gypsy families.

There, too, was the matter of Bran's entrance into the Gypsy world. His mother, a Gypsy princess had died from the Black Death, barely a day after giving birth to Bran. This ill omen had cast a dark shadow on Bran. Another baby might have received sympathy for entering such a harsh world without a mother. Not Bran.

For his father had not been a Gypsy. Those from outside the dan were hated and distrusted; Bran's father had done far worse than most strangers. He had taken the Gypsy princess away to be married in the church. Nearly a year later she had returned without the outsider, swollen with Bran, ready to give birth, and in the final stages of the dreaded plague.

It was all Bran knew about his parents. Neither remained to care for him. Both had left Bran an inheritance of disgrace, something for which Bran daily paid among his gypsy brethren.

"I shall walk across this rope!" Marcel repeated. He stood upon the back of a wagon, and none nearby could fail to notice him or his family members sitting on the wagon behind him. "And I shall be blindfolded."

More peasants, farmers, and idle townspeople gathered. It was a hot day. Bran smelled bodies which had not been washed for months, waste thrown onto the cobblestone from houses, and manure from cattle driven down the streets.

Bran took refuge in his mind by thinking of cool nights and fires banked outside the Gypsy tents. He thought of his quiet world in the shadows outside the Gypsies who sat in circles around the fires, and how those moments seemed to bring him what little sanctuary he could ever find in a day.

"Yes, blindfolded!" Marcel said, "I will juggle three eggs as I walk from one side to the other!" "What is your wager?" someone finally called from the crowd.

Despite his lonely thoughts in the midst of a growing crowd, Bran smiled. Always, there was one voice to ask that simple question. And so the hook was set.

"Why, if I drop one," Marcel said, "every person gathered to watch will collect ten lire." The noise of the crowd swelled into excited babble.

"Quiet! Quiet!" a man shouted. Bran, on his tiptoes to see above the shoulders of the people around him, caught a glimpse of this new speaker.

He was wide and red-faced beneath a dark beard, wearing the luxurious colors of a wealthy shopkeeper. A circle of hair ringed his bald head.

The crowd obeyed his command. This man, Bran decided, was one of the town's respected leaders. Perhaps a mayor.

"If you drop an egg," the man said, "you will pay ten lire to every person gathered." "That is so," Marcel said.

"Blindfolded, walking across a rope, juggling three eggs." Marcel smiled. "If you like, have men beneath with pitchforks pointed upward at me. So if I fall, I impale myself." Crowd noise began to rise.

The shopkeeper raised his hands to keep the noise down.

"You announced this as a wager," the shopkeeper said. "Not a contest. What, then, is the wager?"

Marcel waited until every eye in the crowd was upon him. It grew so quiet that the only sounds were of squawking chickens in the market stalls further down.

"What, then, is the wager?" Marcel said. "The only fair wager possible." Again, he paused.

Bran admired Marcel's showmanship. Marcel knew how to play a crowd.

"If I succeed," Marcel said. "Each of you gathered pays me ten lire." People in the crowd turned to each other to trade their views on this.

Marcel did not ask for silence. Instead, he held up a small leather pouch, bulging with coins. Heads turned back to him. Mouths shut.

"Is ten lire not a fair price to pay for entertainment? After all, I risk not only my hard-earned coins, but my very life!" Bran knew with certainty that the wager would occur.

Few were the opportunities for entertainment. These were not men and women of royalty, able to hire musicians, throw extravagant feasts, or travel with bodyguards to summer estates near the sea. Instead, these simpler poor folk lived their entire lives within the town walls, or on farms within a half-day's walk from the town. A hanging was entertainment for them, as were drunken brawls. Or the spectacle of chasing Gypsies.

They would take the wager, simply for the chance to watch someone risk falling onto pitchforks.

Bran knew, too, what was going through the minds of most of these townspeople.

Gypsies, they would think with scorn. If he drops an egg, we will make him pay. If he succeeds, we will not pay, but run him and his clan out of this town. After all, they are only Gypsies.

"I will take that wager," said the wealthy shopkeeper with a greedy smirk. "Any others?" All in the crowd raised their hands and voices.

"So be it!" the shopkeeper shouted to be heard above them. "Prepare the rope."