But oh! She wished Corylus was holding her now in his strong young arms!

The spectators were beginning to drift toward the exits. Corylus led his burly servant through them against the flow. Pulto would have been more than willing to force a path, but Carce wasn't a frontier cantonment and Publius Corylus was no longer the son of a high military officer.

Still, though Corylus didn't push people out of his way, the senator's toady who thought to shove the youth aside got a knee in the crotch for his bad judgment. He heard Pulto chuckle behind him. I am a freeborn citizen of Carce, and I learned on the Rhine how to handle lice.

They got clear of the audience and found that the steps from the orchestra to the stage were concealed behind an offset panel. "Just like a Celtic hill fort," Pulto said as he followed his master up them.

Corylus' face blanked as he tried for an instant to fathom the deep inner meaning of what his servant had just said; then he smiled. There isn't any deep inner meaning, here or ever with Pulto. He'd seen the entrances to Celtic hill forts designed the same way, so he said so.

Corylus ducked behind the curtain. A few actors were still standing on stage. One had been dressed as a naiad in silk pantaloons painted to look like a fish's tail with flowing fins. She had stripped off her costume and stood nude, weeping desperately.

"What's all that about, do you think, lad?" Pulto said in puzzlement.

Corylus glanced at him; they were side-by-side again. Pulto still thinks it was all stagecraft!

Picking his words carefully, Corylus said, "I think it must have surprised the actors even more than it did us in the audience. They were closer, you see."

The performers had been inside the vision. Perhaps the effect simply blinded them, which would be frightening enough. From the stunned looks and worse on the faces of the actors he saw, the experience had been worse than that.