* * *
The fields stood empty. No slaves worked their softly undulating waves
of ripening grain.
The water in the irrigation canals was already low and getting lower,
the water ways steadily dropping down to unprecedented levels. The
silent compound stood with it's great gates closed tight shut and
cross-barred through the heavy iron rungs. No confident soldiery
patrolled it's upper walkways. They were all dead.
At the top of the front steps of the House proper, no great Master
stood confidently facing the world on it's own terms as a favorite of
the gods.
Master Rababull was dead.
Prut was dead. Geth the Fieldmaster was dead. All of their able-bodied
male slaves were dead, their blood spilled in the fields surrounding
the hotly contested sluice gates.
It was not a pretty sight, with the vultures already at work on what
the corpse-strippers and ritual mutilators had left.
The compound was filled with quiet groups of motionless women,
solemn-faced and terror-stricken. Their children clustered anxiously
around them, some quiet, some crying, but none laughing. The few
innocent toddlers who occasionally frolicked were quickly spanked into
confounded wailing obedience, if not outright silence.
In the long and seemingly vacant cypress bungalow of the field slaves,
one sang wordlessly, and almost inaudibly.
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