Page 154 - The Grotesque Children's Book

only she could hear it, “I’ve warned you. Don’t speak about that in public. You never
know...who’s listening.”

Carola didn’t like the look of the dark shadow which crossed over Tozzo’s face. But she
nodded her assent. She served the last round of ale without saying another word, watching to see
if anyone was watching her.

Translator’s Note. Hucklebones. A sort of poor man’s craps in medieval
times. Four dice were thrown; high scores are added up. Only, they’re not really
dice; they’re bones. Apparently there’s a bone down near the ankle of a sheep
which, although rounded at the top and bottom, is effectively a rectangular prism
with four sides, each distinct from the other. The sides were numbered 1, 3, 4 and
6. Perhaps the rounded ends were numbered 2 and 5, but in my research I have
never seen anyone refer to any of the sides except 1, 3, 4 and 6.

One of the sides is flat: that’s the 4. One side is concave, sloping inwards:
that’s the 6. The side which has a value of 2 curves outwards a little, and the 3 is
more curvy than the rest.

If you do the math, you’ll find that four of these bones thrown together can
yield some thirty-five combinations, and some of the sums of the numbers are
more likely than others. For instance, only one combination -- all 1’s -- will give
you a score of 4, whereas several combinations are possible for other numbers,
except 24, which is made of all four 6’s. This yields a perfect environment for
gambling, especially for those who were mentally acute enough to estimate
likelihoods and probabilities. In Carola and Tozzo’s day, the science of actual
probabilities and statistics was still a half-century in the future, but people were
starting to sniff that there was something behind the fact that some of the numbers
in hucklebones came up more often than others. There was a “Book on Games of
Chance” which was being written around this time by an Italian named Cardano.
Cardano was apparently not so good at making a living through any of the
traditional trades and crafts, but he figured out how to make money by gambling,
by roughly estimating the science of odds and probability before anyone else even
knew what they were, really. He wrote his book, but didn’t published it in his
lifetime. Probably he didn’t really want anyone else to figure out the odds of dice
and card games. Who could blame him?

Although most likely he was surrounded by not-very-towering pillars of
genius like Tozzo “Four Fours are Twenty” Scatenarsi, there were indeed the
occasional eavesdroppers such as Carola whom Cardano needed to fear, and
with good reason. Someone with Carola’s street-smarts could end up taking
everyone’s money and, with an innocent shrug heavenward, avert the blame onto

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