When people had first come to the Escapement, one could still see the Wild Harlequinade pass by on the prairies, and even Harlequin itself was sometimes seen. Some of these new arrivals fell under the spell of clowns, long before ever the first strongman and the first bearded lady married and brought into being the great circus houses of Boreal and Mercator.

And they believed.

There were still preachers, here and there, though you had to wish you’d never meet one; and here and there upon the body of the Escapement there were still the missions, built in years past, when people still found magic in a pratfall of clowns.

The tinkerers did not offer a reply to the Stranger’s comment. The woman, Titania, disappeared again under the canvas, and could be heard moving around inside the wagon. The man, Fledermaus, climbed down from the bench and stretched, though it was hard to make him out under his layers of clothing. He looked like a short, fat mushroom.

“It will do, stranger,” he said. “It will do.”

That night, the travellers built a small fire and sat beside it. The horses grazed in a patch of grass nearby. Earlier, Titania had disappeared into the Escapement, and when she returned there was a bloodied hare in her hands. The Stranger had heard no gunshots. The woman skinned the creature and her brother set a pot to boil over the fire, the two of them working in wordless unison. From within the wagon they fetched two shrivelled onions and several lumpy potatoes, dirt-encrusted and hard. They added the vegetables to the pot and Titania flavoured the soup with salt, and dried herbs the nature of which the Stranger didn’t know. The smell of the soup as it cooked made the Stranger’s stomach grumble. It had been weeks since he’d had a hot meal. Fledermaus relit his pipe and sat there content, puffing out clouds of smoke that more often than not resembled balloon animals. His sister sat warming her hands by the fire, and she hummed the same few bars of that song the Stranger didn’t know. Her mostly tuneless humming had a soporific effect on him, so that he found his thoughts kept wandering, trailing off and returning, and every now and then he’d startle himself awake, and stare around him as though he were seeing the place and his companions for the very first time.

No sound came from within the wagon now. If there were rats indeed there, or something else entire, it was silent now, but the horses still did not approach the wagon or come close to it. The swishing of their tails merged with the crackling of the wood in the fire and with the whisper of the soup in the pot and with Titania’s humming. The smell of the cooking meat overwhelmed the Stranger’s senses.

“It is kind of you,” he said, “to share your food.”