Polynomial systems supported on circuits and dessins d'enfants

We study polynomial systems whose equations have as common support a set C of n+2 points in Z^n called a circuit. We find a bound on the number of real solutions to such systems which depends on n, the dimension of the affine span of the minimal affinely dependent subset of C, and the “rank modulo 2” of C. We prove that this bound is sharp by drawing so-called dessins d’enfant on the Riemann sphere. We also obtain that the maximal number of solutions with positive coordinates to systems supported on circuits in Z^n is n+1, which is very small comparatively to the bound given by the Khovanskii fewnomial theorem.