Explosions echoed across the courtyard as the bystanders watched the
physical destruction of the former Slavemaster of the House of Rababull.
Master Rababull proceeded to whip Habrunt mercilessly, again and again,
and Habrunt tried in vain to bear up under it as he lay shielding his
precious eyes with his arms until he finally collapsed into
unconsciousness, lying limp and bloody across the stone steps.
Finally, Master Rababull laid off, gasping for air.
"Interesting," he wheezed, wiping at the spittle in the corner of his
mouth. "I see nothing miraculous! Prut, take him away and let that old
hag L'acoci see to his wounds. When he is well, let him be sold also,
beside his intended bride!"
A wild-haired and sweating Master Rababull turned callously on his
heel, and as he staggered into the House past a silently weeping
Si'Wren, he interrupted his stride and turned to shake the bloody whip
in Si'Wren's face.
With every gesture, Master Rababull flecked Habrunt's blood on Si'Wren
as he shouted, "He has paid your debt! Verily is he your betrothed, for
he has paid also for your dowry with his blood and his rank, and shall
partake of your ignominy as well when you are finally sold at the next
auction, for he has entered into your own punishment! But even then he
shall not have you! I will see to that!"
In a towering rage, Master Rababull hurled the whip down at Si'Wren's
feet. It landed with a flat slapping sound and splattered red the
paving stones, still loosely coiled like a serpent poised to strike.
Then without looking as he walked off into the House, Master Rababull
said, "Take him away!"
Behind Master Rababull, Prut called briskly for several of his men to
come and pick up Habrunt.
Si'Wren, unharmed, waited until Master Rababull had finally departed,
and hastened to follow the bearers of Habrunt. She avoided the scornful
jeers of the other slaves, who were still too fearful to do anything to
her. When she arrived at the bungalow where they had taken him, Si'Wren
mourned at the sight of Habrunt lying unconscious on his stomach upon
the very same blood-stained litter which she had been given for a
sleeping rack during her convalescence.
Habrunt's entire body was in ruins, covered in a maze of criss-crossed
wounds and caked with blood both dried and oozing. If he did not die
first before the night was out, he would still almost certainly be
crippled for life from wounds like that, if only by the very number of
them. The underlying muscle, and not the skin only, had been slashed
innumerable times by the cruel bite of the bull whip.
"Come!" said old L'acoci, her wizened eyes beckoning to Si'Wren
urgently. "We have only a little borage tea, such as this one treated
you with before. It can work it's own miracles, but in his case, I
fear--"
Ominously, she did not finish her sentence.
Si'Wren was determined to do her utmost to try to help old L'acoci, and
set immediately to work as she began to gently bathe Habrunt's wounds
with the simple herb tea, which was all she had since being banished
from the spice tent. She began dipping it up into successive pads of
old rag-weave pasted with lard, and layering it onto Habrunt's ravaged
skin and flesh before finally wrapping him up in dandelion leaves and
covering it over with a bandage of coarse burr lap.
* * *
Later that same day, a messenger came riding his horse at a full gallop
through the front gates and sending stray chickens and goats scattering
madly for their lives in all directions as he lurched his snorting
horse to a stop directly before the front steps of the House.
He flew from his saddle before the foam-flecked charger had fully
stopped and pounded up the steps two and three at a time at a dead run.
Rushing past the two startled guards at the entrance, he ran down the
central corridor, filling the House with the strident echoes of his
high-pitched voice as he shouted repeatedly, "Master Rababull! Master
Rababull!"
Master Rababull was still in his private chambers.
The messenger arrived outside his door and shouted through the closed
curtains that he had urgent news that dared not wait.
At this most uncouth of all possible intrusions, Master Rababull's
personal valet pulled back the heavy drapes with a long-practiced,
decorous slowness, and faced him with a disdainful and dangerously
menacing look, whereupon the messenger declared again in a loud voice
that he had a message of direst urgency for the Master's ears.
Finally, Master Rababull himself stepped forth in an imperious rage,
deeply vexed at being thus disturbed on this of all possible days, for
he had lost his Slavemaster and his most favored junior female slave
all in one fell swoop, and the messenger promptly threw himself
face-down on the floor directly at the Master's feet before shouting
out his message.
"Sire, our water has been cut off!" announced the messenger. "The
fields and indeed the entire House shall thirst for the merest drop ere
the day is out if battle is not joined immediately!"
"What is this?!" asked Master Rababull, truly alarmed at such important
news. "Speak quickly, slave! Who has done this thing?"
"It is Kadrug, who lives to the north and proclaims himself the
anointed of the gods. He hath magnified himself greatly against the
House of Rababull, and has sworn to slay by the edge of the sword
whoever seeks to drink of the water without paying him tribute of gold
and silver!"
"Impossible!"
As Master Rababull regarded him incredulously, the messenger sucked in
more air, and went on breathlessly.
"Of a truth, sire! Kadrug has taken two hundred swordsmen, and they
have slain the watchmen of the canal, and clogged the sluice gates with
boulders, and diverted our water! He declares he will not let it out
again until much money has been paid. The crops will all soon be dead
and dried, but Kadrug has sworn this day that the House of Rababull
shall henceforth have no more water until there is enough dammed up to
utterly wash away all ere it is finally released again!"
"My croplands--dry?!" spluttered Master Rababull. "You mean--I have
been cheated of my own water?"
Master Rababull turned to Prut, and hesitated. For all of his great
size, the stupid oaf wasn't half the man that Habrunt was--or at least,
had been. Now, too late, Habrunt was worthless, crippled for life by
Master Rababull's own hand, just when he was needed the most, and now
it looked like he had a real battle on his hands!
A fight for water rights. No deadlier contest could there possibly be
than this. Kadrug promised first no water at all and then a flash
flood, unless paid much gold and silver. And of course, it would not
end with that. Unless he won this battle, he was as one already
destroyed.
"Send for my sons!" commanded Master Rababull. "While they are coming,
see that the war god is brought out and a human sacrifice prepared, and
slay and burn two of my bullocks! Have the slaves assembled at the
temple where I will make obeisance and pray for victory. Issue spears,
swords, shields, whetstones, and bows, for today we march on Kadrug at
the sluice gates!"
Prut clapped his right fist across his huge hairy chest and declared in
a loud and perpetually hoarse voice to the wall behind Master Rababull,
"I hear and obey, oh Master!"
Then Prut turned and ran out swiftly on his long hairy legs. As he
departed beyond view, there came the sounds of heavy blows and
shoutings as Prut knocked down several unfortunates who happened to be
blocking his path.
Master Rababull felt his eyes go stark with fear. At a time like this,
when he needed his best men, Habrunt was reduced to a beggar's status.
If not for the lying schemes of Sorpiala...
But it was too late to look back now. There remained only Prut to help
him. Stupid Prut! Everything about Prut was hairy. Master Rababull
sometimes imagined that even the insides of Prut's entrails must be
hairy.
Master Rababull turned fiercely on his personal valet as if about to
attack the quivering coward.
"Fetch me my armor and weapons! Hurry, you fool!" he shouted urgently.
Then, without waiting for a reply, he turned to a frightened-looking,
beautiful House slave girl, one of the pampered indoors concubines, and
said to her, "Go and tell the kitchen crew to begin preparing full
marching rations for every able-bodied male!"
"But--" she stammered helplessly, "but Master, how can I do this,
seeing I am but a concubine?"
Pampered from birth, and taken from the same mold as Sorpiala and her
kin, the foolish girl could not help but balk.
Wrathfully, Master Rababull took one step forward and backhanded the
surprised woman to the floor with a single blow.
"I said move! My men cannot fight on empty stomachs, you wench!"
Sobbing, the woman held her hand to her bruised cheek as she scurried
out of his reach and ran weeping to go and relay his orders to the
kitchen staff.
Master Rababull nodded to himself in satisfaction.
With a slap mark like that on the face of a beauty like her, there
would be no mockery in the kitchen when she arrived to give the orders.
Whoever contradicted her would surely be boiled in oil. It had been
done once before by Master Rababull, two hundred and eighty years ago,
and he knew the cooks still spoke of it on occasion, when the day's
work was done and they could at long last magnify themselves upon the
young and impressionable with their idle words.
Moments later, Master Rababull could hear Prut's voice, shouting from
the top of the stairs. Then a horn was blown repeatedly, with much
force and vigor of the blower's lungs, urgently calling all slaves to a
general assembly.
Would that women could fight, fumed Master Rababull, that he might
double his fighting force! As well to wish that the stone idols should
come to life! But he was pragmatic enough to realize that mere temple
idols could not so much as move themselves, let alone that they should
wield weapons.
When his personal body slave had arrayed him in his bronze and leather
body armor, he turned and marched in haste for the temple. The war god
did not have to move anyways, a contemptuous Master Rababull
deliberately reminded himself. It only had to make his slaves move--to
swing their swords and throw away their own precious lives in the face
of any possible enemy, the better to save his own precious hide.
He watched as the temple priests prepared the shoulder litter, putting
the solid ebony war god and trophy bones on the platform and brushing
off the dust.
The temple was a miniature copy of the Emperor's, barely large enough
to permit two or three priests to move about and conduct family
ceremonials. The Emperor himself would not trouble himself to lend
assistance, Master Rababull knew. To the Emperor, any fight amongst his
subjects over what he would consider petty water rights was a mere
squabble, too far beneath his dignity to so much as notice.
Indeed, Master Rababull reflected sourly, from the Emperor's point of
view, a new landlord might be more successful with the harvest and
produce greater taxes. Why waste the lives of the Royal Guard, over
such? Master Rababull had seen it before, from the sidelines, as it
were. That was how little the Emperor cared for his own, although it
was seldom proclaimed in so many words.
The temple was built out of stone pillars on a raised mound of
flat-topped, hard-beaten earth, a level berm six steps above the
surrounding compound courtyard, with heavy carved cedar timbers for a
roof. When it got too damp, they threw down coarse-woven grass mats to
keep the mud down.
There weren't too many sources of building stones in the Persian
Valley. Just an endless vista of fertile croplands to fight over, which
was how he had acquired much of his own property, both human and
otherwise.
The skulls surrounding the House war god on the litter were from the
heads of past possessors and contenders for the land owned by Master
Rababull. All of the skulls had their two front teeth knocked out and a
hole punched through the center of the forehead.
When all was ready, Master Rababull was adorned with a ceremonial red
and black robe and walked out in front of the litter, carrying his
sword in his fist.
There were four priests out in front, the two foremost blowing war
pipes, which were also used on New Year's ceremonies, and the two
hindmost bearing smoking clay incense pots blackened by soot.
Sounding their pipes, the two priests in the lead started blowing hweee
and hwaaa fanatically while the whole procession, with the acrid
incense smoking putridly, marched from the assembly area behind the
temple and worked their way slowly toward the temple proper.
Hweee-hwaaa, hweee-hwaaa, hweaeaea they sounded in unison, blowing
continuously in a deafening discordance as they proceeded. The priests
and their attendants were all shaven-headed and splattered with wet
pitch black coal dust, scarlet red goat's blood, and white ashes from
head to toes.
At the temple, a female baby lay squalling on the flat stone alter,
while the baby's mother, a slave-woman, was held back by two temple
attendants who held her by the wrists but allowed her to scream wildly
for her baby.
Her outbursts were the unintentional focal point of the ceremony,
signifying by her very real torments and anguished outcries, the
ceremonially-expressed feelings and sentiments of the House of Rababull
over the foreign danger to it's property holdings and, specifically in
this case, it's water rights.
For where there was no water, there could be no life.
The temple drummers were already there, beating on huge drums that sent
out a deep rolling beat that put the slaves into a zombie-like state of
mind.
A state of mania, for war...
Too late, Master Rababull thought of having the baby thrown, alive,
into a cauldron of boiling water. Such a sacrifice would signify his
humility, a generous gift of the fruit of his human possessions. The
boiling water would signify that it was his water, and his anger bound
up in the water, an impressive liturgy to the war god.
No time now. Have to do it the old way.
The entire procession halted, and as the drumbeats rose in tempo to a
heightened furor, shaking the very bones of all present as by the
impending battle sounds of the hooves of war horses, Master Rababull
stepped momentously around to the fore, facing them all front and
center in a grand entrance.
At the raising of both of Master Rababull's arms, the drums increased
in a furious tempo, and when the arms dropped the sound of the drums
abruptly ceased, although one witless soul kept beating a fraction of a
second too long before realizing that he had overlooked the cut-off
signal.
Master Rababull made the slightest turn of his head to see who it was,
and marked the terrified fool for a thorough whipping later.
In the sudden silence, the terrified slave-woman could be heard weeping
and begging desperately for the life of her daughter, as Master
Rababull stood with his arms raised again like an eagle before the
general assemblage.
Before him were all available members of the House of Rababull, men to
the fore, women to the rear, children hindmost, and freeborn family
members to the right.
The first row, signifying the first-line defense arm, was comprised of
his many sons. It would be Master Rababull's long-awaited opportunity
to have a few of the more ambitious of his offspring lead the battle
charge and see them finished off before they could come home to glory
and threaten his personal authority over all his holdings. Immediately
after these, in the second row beginning on the right and trailing off
to the left, stood male in-laws beholden unto him enough to show up or
risk serious loss of status.
He surveyed their ranks, noting whoever was absent and deserving of
punishment for it. There were a few. Punishing in-laws was a necessary
thing, best done while the sword was still dripping red from the
victory of a battle well-fought.
He made a mental note that a small war-party would have to be detailed
to go take care of the drop-outs when he had finished off Kadrug's
forces.
Old Maskron, one of his fathers-in-law, was there at the fore as usual.
Maskron, a fierce, white-maned old scoundrel, always showed up with his
dinged old bronze sword polished and gleaming like gold, and he was
always asked to come forward to utter the closing prayers, shaking and
waving his sword in the air in wild gesticulations of false bravado.
Maskron was too old to fight, and too proud to stay away, so it was
exceeding helpful, in saving face for both of them, to permit him this
signal honor.
One distant cousin of the son of his sixth wife, whose name was Puffat
and whose mother bore an illegitimate connection to the Emperor
himself, stood with one armpit held up by a crutch, his broken and
splinted right leg having recently been the source of much grief at the
hands of the bonesetter.
The leg was beginning to turn green. If sorcery was of no avail, the
young man was doomed either to lose the leg, or die in agony of the
gain-green.
He was excused from battle, but there would be no time now to send for
the Sorcerer and have a ceremonial procedure. Later, though, they
would. Then, Puffat's leg could either be exorcized, or amputated and
cauterized.
Master Rababull gave a brief announcement detailing Kadrug's activities
to cut off their water, and called upon the entire House, all
able-bodied males both bond and free, to fight.
A loud outcry rose up at this as everyone present, women and children
too, screamed and howled for the death of Kadrug.
Satisfied, Master Rababull turned to the Chief Priest and commanded
that the sacrifice should proceed.
Two priests held the squalling infant from both ends on the stone altar
before the war god, one at her tiny feet, one at her little hands.
The infant's mother, insane with terror, shrieked her protests as the
priest lifted up the ceremonial sword, much abused from previous
impacts with the stone surface, and brought it down on the defenseless
child's naked body.
The tiny voice was cut off.
"To war!" shouted Master Rababull.
"TO WAAAAR!!" howled the crowd, drowning out the hopeless sobbing of
the baby's mother as she fell brokenly to the dirt when she was finally
released.
Drowned out, also, were old Maskron's shouted invocations as he stood
in front of them waving his flashing bronze sword.
In the back of the crowd, Si'Wren dropped her head in anguish, for had
she not also screamed in the past for the death of their enemies when
Master Rababull led the war cry for a neighbor's field? Had not little
Si'Wren once prayed to that ugly physical thing to which other babies
had been sacrificed in the past, and which the others even now still
worshiped so blindly? Would that she might dare to speak and tell them
what her heart had learned, reflected from it's own inner pool, upon
the graces of the Invisible God.
She, who alone might have spoken truth, stood silently amidst the
screaming and drum beating as the shouting went on in a frenzy to kill
the enemy. Master Rababull brought on renewed cheers as he mounted his
stallion, a half-wild white-spotted gray beauty, and rode to the head
of the long riotous formation of shouting men and neighing and stamping
horses.
Behind him the drums thundered until the very air seemed to pulsate
with the blood-lust, and in the midst of this Master Rababull suddenly
raised his sword high in the air and held it up for a long moment as he
whirled it around and around, and finally pointed it straight ahead of
him in a sudden lunging motion.
"Onward--to the battle!" he cried.
"WHOO-RAH! WHOO-RAH!" chorused the marchers, and at this, the great
crowd of men formed a disorganized marching column, many abreast, the
men's hoarsened voices bellowing their war cries as they chanted in
time to the marching drums and war pipes, over four hundred men-at-arms.
As the ragged formation tromped out the front gates and away down the
road in the direction of the sluice gates, which were at the
northwesternmost limits of Master Rababull's property holdings, their
voices and figures dwindled with distance, and the screams of blood
lust from the cripples, women, and children left behind gradually died
out.
Si'Wren noticed the boy who had been punished earlier for putting
another boy's eye out, by having one of his own put out, and suddenly
realized with shock that his other eye had also been put out, and his
nose broken. The second eye was so infected that the boy was staggering
drunkenly in an extreme delirium. His mouth opened and a hoarse,
plaintive croak emitted from the depths of a tortured soul.
Shaken to the core of her very soul, Si'Wren began to approach the boy,
when his mother came walking from her left toward the boy. Si'Wren
naturally held back, thinking how the mother must yearn upon her
savagely punished child. But when the mother sought to walk past the
boy without paying any attention to him, she happened to clear her
throat involuntarily.
The sound was instantly recognized by the boy, who took a step in her
direction and reached out to her with another croaking plea.
Instantly the mother, who was barefoot, stepped back and jerked herself
clear just before the boy would have touched her. With a loathsome
leer, the mother froze just out of reach, totally silent, watching her
own son as he continued to stagger in the same direction he had
initially chosen, until his own footsteps had carried him away from her.
Without a word, the mother turned on her heel and continued on her way
but did not look back either at her bleating son, nor did she notice
Si'Wren watching open-mouthed.
Eventually after they had almost all cleared out, all that could be
heard was the broken, muffled sobbing of the woman whose daughter had
been sacrificed.
Si'Wren watched as a couple of naive young slave-girls walked past the
grieving mother and one of them cursed her for her lack of loyalty to
the House of Rababull.
"Fool!" cried the girl. "What is your one daughter's life, to the loss
of all our water? She has died for the glory of the House of Rababull!
It was only a girl anyway! Why do you cry like that?!!"
The girl and her friends walked on, puffed up with their borrowed sense
of self-importance, all worked-up into a feverish blood-frenzy at the
spectacle of yet another gory victory for the family name.
Si'Wren looked long upon the girls' departing backs, desiring to tell
them the truth, to tell them all that it was they who were the fools,
and to scold them for their senselessness. Then she noticed that one of
them was an especially vengeful member of Sorpiala's inner clique, and
fearfully, Si'Wren turned and faced away from them.
What could she have said to them, anyway?
Deeply disturbed by all that she had seen, and still pondering the
madness of it, Si'Wren hesitantly approached the sobbing mother. How
could she have been so blind as to embrace such evil before, to copy
and mimic such horror?
What a curious thing it was, that it took an Invisible God to open the
formerly blind eyes of a seeing person such as herself, to the evil
that lay right under all their noses, and still none could see this but
Si'Wren.
She knelt down beside the sobbing mother, but was immediately rebuffed
by her.
"Get away from me, you filthy idol-breaker!" the woman screamed, wildly
slapping Si'Wren off. "Get away!"
Shocked and mute, Si'Wren looked on numbly as the sobbing woman raised
herself up and, stricken with grief, stumbled in a hysterical
staggering traipse across the yard to fall down at the feet of a
half-finished idol in the workshop, wailing desperately to it to bring
back her daughter, or give her a son to replace the daughter who was
lost.
Si'Wren knew that she had not broken the other idol, that dismembered
thing of glistening green jade and jeweled eyes. It was Sorpiala who
had cleverly broken the idol earlier, and only blamed it on poor
Nelatha. But she also knew that it was beside the point who had broken
it; idols -she now knew- deserved to be broken.
Anyways, it did not matter so much anymore. She was as guilty in their
eyes as if she had. What mattered the most now, was that it was
Sorpiala by whose evil machinations brave Habrunt, former Slavemaster,
now lay a beaten and broken-spirited man on that blood-stained sleeping
rack in the slave quarters.
Si'Wren turned away. She must go to him, and help wise old L'acoci tend
to his wounds.