"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.
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