* * *
When she awoke again, it was to the morning sounds of the sleeping and hung-over alike, sighing and snoring all around her in the cypress bungalow, and to renewed thirst, chills, and constant tormented shivering from the pronounced effects of the fever.
There was an aching in her beaten head and face, and a curious, inexplicable emotional void in her soul where once her long-fervent love of her Master Rababull had long flourished eternal.
Soon the bungalow's occupants had all risen. Tired and hung over from all their ravelings of the night before, they ignored her. It was Master Rababull's custom to get the slaves as drunk as they could possibly manage and exclusively on red wine, but not in the House with his honored guests, so that by their hangovers they might not desire the fancies of a freeman with quite the same vigor in times to come. Their lusts were gone from them now, and they all went through their daily preparations for a day's work in the Master's fields in a curious pinch-faced, silent expression of unaccustomed suffering, their heads aching miserably as they shuffled out without so much as a single solitary civil word from the lot of them.
None dared speak to Si'Wren, in spite of her worse suffering than theirs. What she had done was taboo. Selling idols was an important means to gaining much gold. What she had done was tantamount to the symbolic ruination of the very economy and foundation of the entire House of Rababull, and moreover, an overt rejection of the very gods themselves.
The unknown few that might have dared befriend her were no doubt too afraid of the others, and especially of Master Rababull himself. Had they even desired to do so, which she suspected none did, not a one dared show sympathy even by so much as the merest wink of an eye.
Si'Wren felt her heart and soul wrenched by the realization that because of what she stood guilty of she was henceforth to be counted by all others as an utter and complete outcast, a living abomination even amongst her own kind—lowly slaves all.
Many hated her, but dared not show that either, lest Slavemaster Habrunt should learn of it somehow and make his displeasure known to them instead. For that, Si'Wren was doubly-taboo. Besides all of this, she would not have dared to give the slightest verbal reply to any of them anyway.
She spent the day in a lethargic state of abject misery, feeling as if her head would split open from aching, an agony which she would have readily traded places with the slaves for their pains instead, as they went out suffering visibly and openly from being so obviously hung-over.
The old slave-woman, L'acoci, a toothless, gray-haired scarecrow of a crone, too old and decrepit to do much useful work out-of-doors anymore, had been instructed by Habrunt to make use of herself and be a nursemaid to Si'Wren. With a lifetime of experience to draw upon, L'acoci gave Si'Wren a tea poultice to sooth her bruises, and some rich broth skimmed from the vegetable stew to strengthen her.