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Cheney, Roland Jon

"Si'Wren of the Patriarchs"


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.


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