"Face this way," he smiled, crinkling his eyes. Then he said, "Now that way." He regarded the boy with just a suggestion of teasing admonition, and said, "Hold still now."
"That's it," the physician smiled and nodded his approval again encouragingly, as he inspected carefully. "Aye, I see."
The boy fairly trembled all over, and Si'Wren watched with the others, mourning the suffering of both boys and temporarily forgetting her own miseries.
The Physician had turned to rummaging in his kit bag, and now he pulled out a beautiful unglazed clay jar with dark-colored berry stains all over the rim and sides. The jar was stoppered with a cracked and discolored wooden cork.
It seemed only right and proper to the old Physician that the noble-born Master Rababull, no doubt put on the spot at times by the mischief of those beneath him, should be the proper court of final recourse, and in the Physician's view of things, what must be done must be done. Too bad about the gentle boy's suffering, but right was right, and the bully had received his just recompense.
"No, that's not it," he said, frowning as he sniffed at the contents.
Although the Physician might secretly have wished for a fairer and less vindictive world, he could but observe that well had the gods fated Rababull to be Master.
Could even one of his servants have inflicted such drastic punishment, and have done it so impartially and without undue hesitation, as he had just done? The Physician sagely reflected that another could not have done it at all. Perhaps instead, the other fellow would have become too emotionally involved and done too much.
Or a man of more timid nature might have betrayed cowardice and chosen to talk it off haughtily and do nothing at all, thereby engendering a smoldering spirit of outrage and rebellion in his own subjects. If the master could not settle the matter to the adequate satisfaction of all, who could?
But there was more to it than that. What Master Rababull had done was to make all fear him, and justly so. It was no doubt a telling reason as to why the man was still alive after so many hundreds of years in such a deceitful and vicious world.