Corylus stepped down into the fourteenth row again. He'd been punctilious about following the rules when he put his freeborn servant in the row behind him, rather than getting Pulto a ticket for the Knights' section as Orpelia-and hundreds of others-had done for the slaves attending them.

"No reason not to sit beside you now," he said.

"There was no reason not to before, except you're so stiff-necked," Pulto said with a broad grin. He glanced in the direction Orpelia had disappeared and said, perfectly deadpan, "Too bad the lady had to go. We could've had an improving conversation, I'm sure."

He nodded his head toward the stage and added, "Better than going on up there, anyhow. What are they supposed to be doing now?"

The curtain had been drawn over stage left while the company, including Hercules on his rock, danced a complex measure. "They're moving, marching," said Corylus after a moment's consideration. "I don't know where to."

Mimes had their own visual language, as surely as birds and animals did. Corylus hadn't spent enough time in Carce to be fluent in it yet.

Pulto snorted in disgust. "It's not what I remember route marches being like," he said. "Which is good, mind you, because my knees aren't what they once were."

The curtain drew back. The thirty feet of stage closest to that wing was now water on which flats of sea creatures floated on shallow rafts: a ribbonfish, an octopus painted an unexpected green, and what was probably meant for a whale. Corylus had never been to the mouth of the Rhine where it emptied into the German Ocean, but he was pretty sure that the whales which were sometimes glimpsed there didn't arch their bellies, lifting their tail flukes and their long, grinning jaws into the air simultaneously.