No trouble did that caravan of villagers and knights have from robbers. The prisoners said it was their band alone that preyed on the villages and towns there around the Semos River, and they did not lie. They claimed further to have no care for the country past the Lesser River, and as for the land between the two, there was many-spired Ambiripali, which was reached soon enough. The guides showed the knights when they passed the walls where was the main square, the road that wed the city to the port not far off that served it, and the street that led to the glory of the city, its theater.

They did, Sir Reiner most of all, but not before they learned of the homeward routes that seemed best and when they might board a ship, which was not that day or the next. For the ships there had waned in number to a few only during the reign of Viljami, and those which sailed so far as wide-walled Saphonium had done so already. No one was yet eager to send a ship far when closer trade than that had lapsed and might be regained.

Once aware of this, the unhurried knights saw the city and the charms that it had. Enviable Ambiripali pleased travelers most of all in the skill of its builders who fashioned such courts and churches as had been praised in the surest way, which was that cities more than one rebuilt their own in a like style after their men made visits. The knights looked over all that and then asked the people nearby when the soonest play next would be, for they wished to sit in that far-famed theater at the best time.

The Ambiripalians laughed at that and assured them that very day was their chance, if they did not hate a play that would have in it more of strangeness than any they had seen before.

“How is that?” Sir Reiner asked, and the natives called on one best able to answer that, though a foreigner himself.

“Sir knight, I am Zacariah the playwright. By chance, by wit, or by the several fondnesses of various lands, my works are esteemed more in this country than in my home, which is Luvanne, a place that loves craftsmanship more than art. I travel for that reason. Not long ago, a set of my amusements was put on in river-yoking Ambiripali, here. That is a happening as common as a farmer's complaint. The next day's sight though was rarer than that anyone should heed a farmer, for new players came without being hired. You will not believe me, but I will say it regardless. All these honest Ambiripalians will swear to it. They were animals. I have had praise before, prizes too, but never any such tribute as that when chickens, lizards, and snakes did my comedy. Everyone who hears this story is sad to have missed it, and every time I am pleased to tell them it is not so. The animals come out again every day, tireless in their eagerness for it. Watch and tell your peers and lords on some later day when you are denied the outdoors by the rains or gentle snows that visit the earth to tell tales of their own in lovely soft speech no man understands.”

The only ones in all the world who desired not to see that marvel were men and women who saw it already, twice at least. The more mindful of the knights, Sir Lanfranc and Sir Reiner among them, sought out the men that traveled with them and told them of it, which caused the theater to seem not wholly empty when the time came. Even so, all those wayfarers together along with the locals willing to watch again, or who desired rather to watch the faces of those who had not before seen the coming wonder and take joy from that, failed to fill that grand theater built for thousands and not hundreds. Much as countless cities and castles had come under King Percy, obeying him out of need, and yet even that wide-ruling king had but a small part of the world within his sway, even so did the seats there climb a mound of earth piled up for the purpose higher and wider by far than the people there filled or ever could.

“Now I can never hope for it, but do you know the play called The Filthy Window?” Zacariah asked that, and he was right that none did, save for the Ambiripalians. “Then I will do what no playwright wishes, which is to tell people watching the meaning of it. A greater shame than this cannot be devised even by a rivalrous enemy or my wife's honored mother, but what of that?”

Indeed he seemed not at all ashamed but rather gleeful, and the knights and townsmen trusted they soon would join him in that from what they had heard. And in trusting those words they were not betrayed, for the orchestra did fill with beasts, a marvel to see and to tell. Chickens and hissing snakes made the chorus that started the play with speech animals use and with such dances as they had the limbs to carry through.

Then came the actors, who had enough care for their craft, and none for their pride, that one served the other as a horse. A lizard, colorful even without such masks and costume as most cities like the characters to wear, though some deem it a lessening of the theatrical art that movements and voice alone should fail to carry the part, rode in on the back of a rooster that pranced and chased the chorus around.

Zacariah said, “First we see the foolish knight, a common role. In theater only, of course. He has wealth enough to arm and mount himself and other men beside, but for all that he boasts of his warlike feats, he has none. He is rather an owner of land and a lender of money. See how he worries the debtors.” The watchers listened to the words of the cheerful playwright and understood the story from them. Sir Reiner though seemed not to like what he heard, but said nothing.

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The lizard knight with its steed left the orchestra to the chorus. Thereafter entered a rooster, smaller in size and unridden. “Here is the young man, a rival of the foolish knight in love, but not in wealth or in honor, for in the first he is too much the weaker and in the second too far greater. He will plot to give his rival a jostling by getting at his hidden wealth to the joy of the debtors. Soon he will speak with his comrades on that. We must have our banter in a comedy, if only that the people have their chance to ignore the play and report the plot to those coming in late.”

Two lizards, plainer in color than the knight, walked out as Zacariah foresaw. Sir Reiner frowned when he saw them, and more than that, Sir Poemen heard a grunt from the seat next to him, and was startled at it. He had placed there the unkind captain who drove them from the far end of the sea to that unhappy country, since become happier. That man practiced in dreadful rites and blasphemies had for all those miles made no sound or moved any limb, so that whether he yet lived was a matter of doubt till that noise that he made. Sir Poemen watched him therefore more than the play, and his hand was on his hilt.

The play went on, the actors and chorus speaking and singing in no way that men understood, yet the charm of it mastered the watchers and cheered them. The animals of that troupe caused more of laughter than the actors had who played those roles, who might have been chagrined but that they were watching as well. Most pleasing of all was the lizard-bearing rooster, which bobbed and strutted across the orchestra with such a will for it as the common actor seldom has.

“The plot of the young man and his henchmen has as its lodestone this, that the foolish knight is passing proud of his windows and their panes, which are all of glass. I hoped to own that kind if my latest tragedies fared well. This next part I wrote when I learned the result. The hero dirties a window behind the foolish knight's very back, who when he learns of it, hires the two plotters for the reason that they are famed as the best among cleaners, a rumor that came from the young man's mouth and was no true word.” So Zacariah the playwright told them.

“Are there men famed for cleaning?” Sir Henryk asked.

“I know not, sir knight, and will never learn save that my next tragedy fares better.”

After that, the plotters learned the place where was kept the knight's wealth and removed it. The foolish knight, when he went himself to count the pile and add to it, had such startlement to see it gone that the lizard tumbled from the back of his rooster, overcome by sorrow. The plotters went about the city in the guise of aiding him, the playwright said. The knight for his part remounted his steed that stumbled about as the wily lizards ran all around him, handing out money in the hope of hearing some useful talk as to the fate of the treasure they claimed, but in truth it was the knight's riches they spent that the people might settle debts that were owed.

To put up a new scene was too much for the deftness of animal limbs, and so the troupe pushed in a rock to stand for it. The rooster who had the lead role of the play strutted to the left and to the right, cawing its final speech, before it lifted the rock with its proud beak and sat beside it. Before him the chorus stepped the last dance, and that was the end. Then the animals came out together and stood there, and the seated men and women praised the play, Zacariah among them, all but two.

For one man, not there by his own will but by the work of Sir Poemen of Argetych, stirred in his seat and seemed almost to weep from the sound that he made. As for the other, it was Sir Reiner, who had this to say. “If I have seen a play before or ever judged the acting of it, I say this is no comedy. You laugh at the chorus of animals for the marvel of it, but there is no doubt of studied dourness in the movements and songs. There is this as to the actors, that the knight rides a rooster for his steed, proud and bold, when a chicken would suit him more were his role what the playwright says, the fattest and laziest. We must look to another lack as well, which is that at no time does either of the lizard plotters, or both, speak with a clever servant of the foolish knight's household and prove thereby the playwright's art in wordplay, which part a comedy such as we are told this is must have in it.”

“You are right in that, sir knight. The animals did not understand it and so left it out, I ween,” Zacariah the playwright said. “Or else they understood it too well and misliked it. A lord once ran me out of his city after one such dialogue. None of his people had the wit to know why, but I tell you now it was earned.”

Sir Reiner spoke in words firm and trustworthy. “For these reasons and others too which I will speak on more should anyone wish it, I make this claim, that the play we have seen is of this sort instead. Three warlike men, one bolder and mightier by far than his friends, went against some foe that did hurt to the people so that they were affrighted at it. The three beset the foe, if my senses tell me aright, and felled it, but the best of them had wounds too sore and died. Before that, he hid some treasure of his, for he either was not able to give it into the hands of his friends or else he deemed them unworthy of it. If you will allow it, you knights and honest men and women, I will say what is less sure but I believe to be true. These beasts of the grass and rocks did not for a small cause neglect their own affairs and come to play for us who have players of our own. It may be that there is some need that the treasure be found forthwith. If I am not mistaken, you animals, I proclaim to you this which no honest man may say is untrue, that the king of Boncot, Percy, is the best in all the world and most fit for all wealth and any duty. That wide-ruling king is not here, but I, Reiner of Boncot his man, am. I am willing moreover to take in charge anything you judge better in other hands than yours and swear to use it for this country's good.”

The people there sat unsure in their minds whether to believe Zacariah or Sir Reiner as to the story, the writer of plays or the judge of them. They kept their quiet because of that, but as for the animals and birds, they left off their waiting and flocked about Sir Reiner, cawing, screeching, and dancing yet more, much as when the people raise houses built and painted well about the grim tower of some war-wise lord skilled in defense. So too did those beasts, bright in their feathers and scales, surround Sir Reiner and rejoice.