Drowned out, also, were old Maskron's shouted invocations as he stood in front of them waving his flashing bronze sword.
In the back of the crowd, Si'Wren dropped her head in anguish, for had she not also screamed in the past for the death of their enemies when Master Rababull led the war cry for a neighbor's field? Had not little Si'Wren once prayed to that ugly physical thing to which other babies had been sacrificed in the past, and which the others even now still worshiped so blindly? Would that she might dare to speak and tell them what her heart had learned, reflected from it's own inner pool, upon the graces of the Invisible God.
She, who alone might have spoken truth, stood silently amidst the screaming and drum beating as the shouting went on in a frenzy to kill the enemy. Master Rababull brought on renewed cheers as he mounted his stallion, a half-wild white-spotted gray beauty, and rode to the head of the long riotous formation of shouting men and neighing and stamping horses.
Behind him the drums thundered until the very air seemed to pulsate with the blood-lust, and in the midst of this Master Rababull suddenly raised his sword high in the air and held it up for a long moment as he whirled it around and around, and finally pointed it straight ahead of him in a sudden lunging motion.
"Onward—to the battle!" he cried.
"WHOO-RAH! WHOO-RAH!" chorused the marchers, and at this, the great crowd of men formed a disorganized marching column, many abreast, the men's hoarsened voices bellowing their war cries as they chanted in time to the marching drums and war pipes, over four hundred men-at-arms.
As the ragged formation tromped out the front gates and away down the road in the direction of the sluice gates, which were at the northwesternmost limits of Master Rababull's property holdings, their voices and figures dwindled with distance, and the screams of blood lust from the cripples, women, and children left behind gradually died out.
Si'Wren noticed the boy who had been punished earlier for putting another boy's eye out, by having one of his own put out, and suddenly realized with shock that his other eye had also been put out, and his nose broken. The second eye was so infected that the boy was staggering drunkenly in an extreme delirium. His mouth opened and a hoarse, plaintive croak emitted from the depths of a tortured soul.
Shaken to the core of her very soul, Si'Wren began to approach the boy, when his mother came walking from her left toward the boy. Si'Wren naturally held back, thinking how the mother must yearn upon her savagely punished child. But when the mother sought to walk past the boy without paying any attention to him, she happened to clear her throat involuntarily.
The sound was instantly recognized by the boy, who took a step in her direction and reached out to her with another croaking plea.