There was a moment of stunned silence, as the women seemed to take a moment to realize that any number of personal complaints would get them nowhere near as much sympathy as whatever they could conjure up about Puffat.
Then all at once the recriminations resumed, centered perfectly on the outrages suffered by one called Puffat.
One called Puffat, the women alleged, was seen crying out in extreme agony on account of the aggravated torments from his gain-green, as he was summarily dragged out and executed by no less a personage than Conabar himself, to eliminate him as a possible contender for the Headship of the House of Rababull.
As the perceptive widows watched him and played on his sympathies like shameless minstrels singing a love song for a handful of coppers, Emperor Euphrates, his eyes growing more fiery with their every word, slowly drew himself more vertically upright whilst sitting in his stone throne, and angrier still as he leaning successively still farther and farther forward until he seemed to ready to fall upon them all, until the widows finally began to quail at the sight of him and one by one, fell silent.
All but one old crone.
Oh yes! she declared, playing it for all she was worth. Old and useless, she would have death or glory, and cannily raised her cracking voice in shameless petition for the lost virtues of Puffat, a many-times thrice-removed relation of the Emperor!
Puffat suffered horribly before execution, declared she, with one squinted eye and one enlarged, red-rimed one in her woeful lamentations to an increasingly wrathful Emperor. Puffat's beautiful brown eyes were put out, wailed she. Puffat's big toes and thumbs were hacked off, gesticulated she, jerking at her own toes and thumbs with either bony hand and a rising croak of wheezing lungs and that unnerving, squinting stare.
Puffat's excruciatingly agonizing gangrenous leg was kicked repeatedly.
Puffat this. Puffat that.
"Enough!!"
Emperor Euphrates finally slammed his fist down on the chair arm and jerked himself straight upright in his seat, towering over them all in a furious rage.