He levered himself laboriously to his feet, and Si'Wren ducked under his shoulder to prop him up. As he indicated the direction of their flight, she helped him to get on his way with surprising strength for a girl her size.
Si'Wren refused to give up so easily. Yea, she only feared the others, but reverenced Habrunt, and whither he led she would surely follow.
* * *
"All bow!"
There was a general sound of the physical movements of many attendants and lawful petitioners as the masses bowed low to virtually scrape the floor with their noses. In addition to the Court Officers representing various royal functions, the riff-raff of the spectators' galleries looked on in gleeful anticipation, as sometimes the judgements could be quite severe.
Under the watchful eyes of the Palace Guard with their weapons at the ready, his Royal Majesty, singular ruler of the fertile gulf plain and self-proclaimed Anointed of the Gods, his Highness the Emperor Euphrates, father of many noble offspring and husband of countless wives, entered at a sedate pace accompanied by various officials and took with unfeigned boredom to the throne, his back against the stone wall and a pageant of armed guards in watchful attendance on either side. He was huge and gross of body, fleshy of face, hair and beard molded into one mass of shining streaming black all streaked with gray. To look up at him from the floor at a time like this was to die.
The proper doctrinal announcements were made by the Royal Crier, a tall thin reedy-looking fellow who could by now have pronounced them in his sleep without interrupting his own dreaming, and the great and terrible Emperor Euphrates was duly installed for the day.
The Public Hearings came first, during which he lounged on his amply padded stone throne and ate purple plums -a favorite delicacy; and gods have mercy upon the slave who dropped and stepped on so much as a single plum in the act of serving them- as he sat in state and heard out the wearisome, endless complaints of his subjects.
'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' was the customary rule, but men of means could get out of that if enough money was paid to satisfy their legal indebtedness to the Kingdom for whatever offenses.
One pair of contestants were given swords and, under the watchful eyes and ready lances of the Palace Guards, invited to fight it out on the spot in a bloody battle. In the end, both died of their wounds and their survivors fled the palace to grab what they could before the sacred arm of the Emperor's covetous priesthood could contrive a sufficient excuse to come and take all.