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.