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

ground with a couple of coins in hand. Are you a lender? they asked. A money changer? (While they had no need for either, never living beyond their means, nor traveling far, they’d occasionally heard tradesmen mention such exotic professions.) He shook his head. He was a gambler, he said. A peddler of chance.
    They considered him more closely, then. Traders were a rough breed, naturally, but Gimmel made the others look like burghers: He lacked an eye, and three fingers on one hand. He’d no hair on his head, and his skin was burnished like a workman’s apron where it wasn’t covered up with an old burlap sack. And yet he was so perfectly oblivious to the misfortunes that had befallen his flesh, it made scant impression on those he met. None of the people gathered around him asked why his ear was torn, how his nose got bent. What’s a gambler? they wanted to know. What’s a chance?
    From his tobacco pouch, Gimmel took two small gems. He showed people how both were cut the same, perfect cubes of clear green, each facet drilled with a different pattern. Sides numbered one to six, he explained, letting folks examine. All approved of their evident orderliness. He cupped the stones again and said they were dice.
    — You sell them?
    — You roll them.
    — Why?
    — So that you’ve something to bet on.
    Gimmel found that it wasn’t easy to explain betting to these people, who had never known anything but certainty. First he compared it to choosing which crop to plant without being sure when summer would come, but in their country they had calculations that named the seasons in advance, to eliminate risk. Then he took love as an analogy: You gamble on the girl you wed. That confused them still more, for all marriages were equally desireless, to eradicate covetousness.
    The country was too rigidly defined for metaphor. So Gimmel decided to demonstrate instead. He showed how to lay money down, guess what number will come up, and toss.
    — How can you be certain of which way they’ll fall?
    — You can’t, unless you’re a cheat.
    — What’s a cheat?
    — Someone who’d rather win than bet.
    Gradually he taught a few people the game. When folks wanted to bet on the number one, because it came first, he had to show them that two dice always add up to double that. Thus he earned their respect: Never before had they encountered a tradesman who was also a mathematician.
    Money passed back and forth all afternoon in his corner of the market square, without a thought of cows or bushels of wheat: Gambling was not only entertaining but also worry-free, and soon Gimmel was more mobbed than all the other peddlers combined. Chance, pure as gold and free as air, was the kingdom’s latest luxury.
    Gimmel came out just enough ahead that evening to buy some supper, with a coin left over to gamble the following morning. He strolled into the forest, where the floor was as smooth and soft as a rich man’s bed. He lay on his back, and fell asleep counting constellations, God’s dice roll with the universe.
     
    In this country, the king was a very busy man. All day and night he dragged a wooden ladder back and forth across the floor of his palace library, researching. Years before, he’d tried assigning some of the work to advisers, but none of them could be relied on to assign every word its right weight, let alone to extract from whole passages their exact measure. In those books were encoded the rules by which the country ran, traditions so precisely honed that the whole kingdom could be torn asunder by a single error, as an entire mill can break down on account of one faulty pin. Every conceivable subject was contained in those books, a thousand volumes, each as heavy as a man could lift.
    They walled the room, a fortress of tradition, which, aside from the ladder, had as furniture only a table large enough to support one tome.
    Most of the king’s day was spent looking up routine matters, such as whether the forest floor had to