Under The Willow Root

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” --Albert Einstein

As we continue traveling, I notice the woods around us become less and less sinister-looking. The trees are less crooked and gnarled, and some are even healthy enough for leaves. I hear one or two birds twitter somewhere unseen, and once I see a rabbit dart across the road. I try counting my sightings for a while, but that gets old fast. Even my flashes of memory bring no comfort now, overshadowed as they are by the knowledge of my grandmother's death. I'm not sure I want to know anymore. I'm not sure I want happy memories of her now that I know she's gone.

I want to cry—really cry. Sobbing, screaming, the whole bit. After Baba Nadia died, I was too numb and then too caught up in keeping it together for the sake of appearances to let myself go. It's so unfair that, now that I'm ready, I have no voice to scream and no room to throw myself down and pound the dirt with my fists.

Instead I watch the trees pass by and drift in and out of consciousness in a mix of sleep, memory, and general confusion punctuated by muscle spasms and hunger pangs. Although we're given small quantities of water fairly regularly, we haven't been given any food. I don't know what our captors want with us, but it seems unlikely that they'd go through the trouble of hauling us around until we die of starvation. They have to feed us eventually. Unfortunately, I know from watching my grandmother's slow decline that you can go weeks without food before your body finally gives up. “Eventually” could be a while.

We spend another cold, awful night in the forest and travel through the next morning until we meet a heavily guarded caravan waiting on the road. Our guards dismount from their horses to greet the newcomers. One comes to unfasten the bindings on the cage door, capturing everyone's attention. The guard begins hauling out those closest to him so roughly that some fall to the ground. The rest of us get the idea and move cautiously out of the Cage. The guards push and shove us into a line along with the men and we stand in our places, unsure of what to expect.

I glance at the men, then quickly look at the ground with my face burning. I’ve long since lost any embarrassment for my own nakedness, but I had never seen a naked man before. I had never seen...you know. One of those. Now that I have, I really wish I hadn’t. It was weird and wrinkly and...sad. Kind of pathetic and helpless, like a turtle without its shell.

A man from the caravan moves along the line, inspecting each person and making notes on a piece of some stiff material, maybe leather, with a funny-looking pen. He looks different from the others. He's not one of the guards, I don't think. He's small and a little chubby, not hard and lean like the guards. Instead of leather and metal, he wears soft, loose robes in shades of red. When he gets to me, he smiles widely, chortling with pleasure, and turns me around in a circle. I stare at the ground, unable to muster the energy to feel offended.

After the inspection is finished, the man in red says something to the guards and shows them his writing pad before toddling off. I watch him go, glaring sullenly at his back, until sudden motion at the end of the line catches my attention. A trio of guards move down the line, two of them grabbing each captive by the arms while the third does...something. I can’t see what’s going on.

As the guards come closer, I find out. I watch as they take hold of a boy barely into his teens. He’s tall, but skinny--the guards’ hands circle all the way around his biceps--and he looks like a little boy. The third guard presses something into the captive boy’s hip, making the boy’s face contort in a silent scream. When the guards move away, I see an angry red star-burst pattern imprinted in the boy’s flesh.

The next captive, well muscled and clearly in the prime of life, stares at the brand in horror for a brief moment. Then he spins, jerking his arms out of the guards’ grasp. He shoulders the third aside and runs for the woods, his legs pumping frantically.

Go, go, I want to shout, my heart in my throat. But the man doesn't make it ten yards before a spear appears in his lower back as if by magic. He staggers and falls to his knees, hands wrapped around the shaft protruding from his stomach. He stares at it almost curiously, like he hasn’t yet realized what it is or what it means.

A guard saunters up behind him, drawing a long, wicked looking knife, and jerks the man's head back by his hair. Now the wounded man knows what’s happening. Even impaled upon five feet of wood and metal, he struggles, right up to the moment that the guard slits his throat.

I gag at the sight of the dark red blood pouring out onto the ground, but there's nothing in my stomach to come up. The guard turns and shouts something at us, pointing at the body with his knife. I can't understand his words, but the message is unmistakable: this is what you get. Don't try it.

The guard plants a foot in the dead man's back and jerks his spear free. He drags the body off the road with the help of the other two guards, and then they continue on down the line as if nothing happened. No one else moves a muscle, not even to cringe away from the branding iron. When it’s my turn, I almost fall to the ground, I’m shaking so badly. I close my eyes, hoping that it will make the agony easier to bear, but it doesn’t. Oh, it doesn’t at all.

When it’s over, we’re all stuffed unceremoniously back into our respective wagons. I try to make myself as small as possible, nearly biting through my lip in pain every time someone brushes against the wound on my hip. Packed as tightly as we are, it’s impossible to avoid. Everywhere I look, I see tears running freely down faces twisted into expressions of abject misery.

I think of the man the guards killed and wonder if maybe he had the right idea. No. Escape hadn't even occurred to me before, but now that it has, I can't help imagining the wet, meaty impact and the sight of a spearhead sprouting from my own stomach. Maybe I'm a coward, but I know I won't be making any attempt to run. Anyway, where would I go? How far would I get, weak and confused--and now branded like an animal? It’s hopeless.

We descend into a valley and see other people for the first time. Some appear to be farmers, some travelers. Despite our frantic pounding on the bars, they barely look up as we pass, except sometimes to point and laugh. Clearly no one is interested in helping us. Across the valley there's a town surrounded by a high wall. In the middle there's a kind of manor house. Not really a castle, just a house that's large enough to be visible over the town walls.

We pass through fields of some kind of plant--wheat, maybe--and through a little village. The houses are simple but tidy and cheerful looking with gardens planted in front. People turn out to watch us pass, staring with detached interest. I gaze longingly at a tray laden with some kind of pastry that one woman offers to a gaggle of little children.

The woman smiles tenderly at the children, just like any loving mother would. She looks kind and warm and friendly. She looks like she’s a good person. Yet she barely glances at us as we roll by, as if it means nothing to her that we are caged and starved and filthy. How can that be?

Traffic gets heavier as we approach the town. Other wagons travel in both directions bearing people and goods. Some travelers go on foot, some ride horses or mules. No one seems to find anything strange about a cage filled with people. They pay us no more mind than they do the cart of caged chickens ahead of us.

As we approach the town, we're joined by a long procession of men covered in dust who look like they're about to drop from exhaustion at any second. A guard like ours rides beside them on a horse, but it doesn't look like he has much to do except flick his whip at a few stragglers. One man raises his face for a moment and I see the same blank expression that I saw on the Empty Man in the clearing where I woke up. These men are empty, too.

The caravan breaks off from our group as we approach the gates and moves off along the wall. We enter the town accompanied by several more guards from the caravan. I look around uneasily. I have an inkling of what we might be here for, and I don't like it one bit.

The houses in the town seem to jostle for space and attention. Terraces and balconies run into each other and each house is more elaborately decorated than the last. Door frames and windows are trimmed with ornate carvings and many front porches sport columns or statues. Some households have connected their balconies to those of their neighbors across the street with fancy bridges. I twist my neck, trying to take everything in. After days of seeing no one but the guards and my fellow captives, the life of the town is overwhelming.

When we reach the square, the wagons stop and about a third of the men--the strongest, it looks like--are brought out and doused with water. A few of the women are brought out as well, but it looks like only older women. I suddenly realize that none of the captives look like they're more than thirty or forty, and the youngest is maybe thirteen. I think of the bodies left behind in the clearing and feel sick.

The selected men and women are herded into a pen across the square. It's not exactly secure, barely more than a few ropes strung together, but the memory of the man who tried to escape is still fresh in our minds. No one tries to leave. I watch as people wander by and stare at our former companions. Little kids dart under the ropes and touch a knee or a hip and then run away, giggling. Every so often the red man brings one or two of the captives out and has them walk back and forth or turn around, or show their teeth. It's like a dog show.

No one pays too much attention to those of us still in the cage until a pimply, gangly boy stops near my wagon. He’s eating some kind of kabob which drips with grease. A stray breeze blows in our faces, carrying with it the smell of roasted meat. My mouth fills with so much saliva that some spills out. I can't even spare a thought to be disgusted with myself, though I'm literally drooling like an animal. My every brain cell is trained on the meat.

The boy giggles and holds it just out of reach of the outstretched hands of those closest to the bars. I wish I could feel sorry for them, tell them they're making fools of themselves, but all I can think of is how much I wish I were against the bars so maybe I could reach the kabob.

The boy wiggles the kabob, taunting us in what sounds like the same strange language the guards speak. And then--he wiggles the stick a bit too far, and some lucky girl's fingers catch the tip. The kabob topples to the ground and the girl who touched it licks her fingers madly. The boy scowls and kicks it aside as a woman, likely his mother, swoops in and shoos him away, scolding shrilly. For dropping the food, no doubt. No one seems to care about us. They don't even seem to really see us.

After some time, a platform is erected in the middle of the square. The captives in the pen are pushed one by one onto the platform while the man in red calls out to the crowd, sometimes lifting a limb or prodding a muscle. Some in the crowd call back, waving leather pouches in the air. It's an auction, I realize. We've been brought here to be sold, presumably as slaves. Hopefully as slaves. I think of the boy's kabob and suddenly wonder what it was made of. Please, please let it have been beef.

I wonder how exactly we've been brought here. I’ve let go of my neo-Nazi theory and the renegade Renaissance Faire idea. They were both unlikely to begin with, to say the least. Assuming this isn't all in my head, I'm sure there's no place like this on Earth—the Earth I come from, anyway. I'm almost certain it has something to do with my dream. By now I remember almost everything from the first dream just after my grandmother's death to my last hallucination at the coffee shop, but nothing after except for what I've experienced here.

Logically, the likely explanation is that I'm hallucinating and just can't wake up. But it all seems so real, and it's not the same as my hallucinations. The hallucinations were always just the forest. There was never any wagon or guards or dead people.

My gut feeling is that this is a real place and I was brought here somehow through my dreams. I hope I'm wrong, because how do you travel back through a dream? If I'm just crazy, there’s at least a chance that I'll wake up.

The next man is put on the auction block with a wooden sign around his neck. A symbol is painted on it. It's just a line and a few dots, and I wonder if it's a number or a letter. Or maybe the symbol stands for a whole word?

The man on the block stares stoically ahead, his jaw tight. I wonder how the people in the crowd can look at him with such frank, cold appraisal, like he's a mannequin in a store window. I suddenly realize that's what they see. They don't see a person up on that block. They see a thing.

The bidding is surprisingly quick, and as the auction goes on, I see that nearly all the men sold—about half put up for sale—go to the same buyer. I think of the long line of Empty Men we passed on the way into town. Maybe this man owns all of them. Only two women are sold, one to a sour-looking old lady wrapped in fine purple cloths and the other to a family with young children. The mother, bouncing a shrieking baby on her hip, looks relieved.

I wonder what lies in store for the women. Probably not hard labor, but...what? What will they actually do? What will I do? It suddenly hits me that, at some point, it will be me up on a block like that one. Someone will buy me. Someone will own me. The thought seems ridiculous, unbelievable. I force myself to look around. Believe it, I tell myself sternly. Until or unless I wake up, this is real.

Even though it's late in the day, the unsold captives from the pen are packed up again and we get going. As we roll back through the town toward the gates, I cast a jealous glance at the men's wagons, which are now considerably roomier. The absence of two people hasn't made a whole lot of difference in terms of elbow-room in our wagon.

I find myself thinking that they could have at least taken the fat lady. I know it’s mean, and I want to feel bad for being cruel, even if it is only in my head. But all of my mental energy at the moment is tied up in resisting the urge to break the fingers of the girl next to me. If she pokes me one more time...I take a deep breath and release it slowly, counting to ten.

Thankfully, the girl finally realizes that, no, I can't move over. She stops jabbing me and huffs loudly. For a fleeting moment I'm actually glad that no one can talk. This one has “whiner” written all over her. She's must be twenty at least, but her expression matches exactly the pout sported by my least-favorite ballet student when she doesn't get her way.

My palm itches with the impulse to slap the girl's absurdly protruded lower lip and pinched cheeks. I sigh and squeeze my eyes shut, trying to remember that I'm a nice person who doesn't slap people just for being immature and that we're all miserable. It works...sort of. The murderous rage has passed, anyway.

God, I'm so hungry.

“Excuse me, Ms. Somers?”

Emily leaps to her feet. “That’s me. I’m Sasha’s advocate--I have the papers right here.”

“Are you a relative, or a friend…?” the doctor asks delicately. I don’t think we’ve seen him before.

“A friend,” Emily says. “She doesn’t have any family.”

“I see,” the doctor says. “Well, I’m recommending that she be discharged.”

“You’re not serious,” Emily says flatly.

“There’s no evidence of clotting in her brain, and no sign of a tumor,” the doctor says firmly. “We tested for everything that makes sense and a lot of things that don’t and it was all negative. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing physically wrong with her at all.”

“So keep looking,” Emily snaps. “Obviously something is wrong.”

“I said nothing physically wrong,” the doctor says carefully. “I think you would do better to consult a psychiatrist. All of her symptoms--”

“She is not crazy,” Emily says through gritted teeth. “Keep looking. Something is doing this to her.”

I keep my eyes closed. They don’t realize I can hear them. I don’t want them to know.

The moon is up, so we travel well into the night. I wonder why we didn't just stay in the town. Maybe they were afraid of thieves, or maybe they have a deadline. Whatever the reason, the guards seem determined to cover as much ground as possible. It's easier now that we've left the woods and hilly terrain behind, but now there’s the caravan of supply wagons slowing us down. Unfortunately, none of those supplies are for us. We've also left behind what little protection the trees gave us. The wind cuts right through, and I'm once again grateful that I'm not on the edge. I even manage a lukewarm thought for Pouter, who shields my right side.

The next two days follow the established pattern: we doze throughout the day, exhausted from the previous night's shivering. The water bottle gets passed around just often enough to keep us alive. We tactfully ignore bodily functions but occasionally engage in furious bouts of poking and kicking when the absence of personal space becomes unbearable. We cry and gasp through the pain in our legs and backs and lean against each other to rest.

Then, on the third day, the guards bring food. It's just crusts of stale bread, but it tastes like heaven. Pouter inhales her portion and then tries to snatch mine. I jerk it away and bite her grasping hand, lips pulled back from my teeth. She glares at me and rubs her hand, like I've done something rude, like she has every right to my food. I want to throttle her. The only thing stopping me is the fact that I'd have to let go of my bread to do it. I glare back and chew as slowly as possible, both to make it last and to rub it in Pouter's face. I hope they sell her soon.

With a slightly less empty stomach, I fall into something almost like rest as we rattle along. And, as seems to happen every time my eyes close, I dream. I'm in the dance studio with Melanie and Tara, showing Baba Nadia the trio we choreographed for the spring showcase. We move together flawlessly, so attuned to each other it's like we're limbs of the same body.

With Melanie and Tara's energy feeding my own, I feel I could rise right up into the air. And I do. The three of us fly into perfectly synchronized jetés, arms and legs outstretched like birds in flight. We've been dancing together for so many years that we each mirror the others' movements as easily as we draw breath.

I catch just a glimpse of my grandmother's face glowing with pride before the dream fades into jumbled images of wolves with glowing eyes and corpses scattered in the forest. I grasp desperately for the feelings of freedom and power that were so strong in my brief flash of memory, but they slip away like wisps of smoke. I wander in and out of woods, houses, empty hallways, dark streets...always frightened, always alone.

I wake with tears on my face and a horrible pain in my head. I don't know how long I've been drifting, neither asleep nor awake. I haven't truly slept since waking up in the clearing. How many days has it been? Three days? Five? I don't know, but I guess it doesn't matter.

We pass through forests and meadows, over hills, and into valleys. We cross streams sparkling with flashes of sunlight, fields blanketed in wildflowers, forest beds carpeted with ferns and lush greenery. The beauty of the landscape mocks us as we become thinner and dirtier and more hopeless by the day.

We stop in another town. This one isn't as big as the first one, and business isn't as good. I get the impression the stop was more to top up the supply wagons than anything else. It makes me wonder how long the journey is going to last.

One of the littlest girls is sold to a well-groomed man with a young daughter who squeals with delight and throws away a doll made of cloth. Two men are sold and immediately herded away by a man with a short whip like a riding crop. I watch them go, fear tightening my stomach. That's three fewer people between me and the auction block.

We leave town right after the last sale, as before. I try to pay attention to my surroundings as we rattle along in our cage on wheels, but I can't. It's just too tiring. Thinking is tiring. Wondering is exhausting. Worrying...impossible.

It's almost a relief to realize it. I simply don't have the energy to worry, to care what happens next. It won't change anything, and worry is just one more discomfort on top of countless aches and pains. I've lost everything, and I'm probably never going to get it back, so whatever comes next--let it come. I don't care.

With a sigh, I give myself over to the fear and confusion, the hunger and pain, everything. I barely notice the passing days and nights. I accept everything that happens--or doesn’t happen--with the same tired resignation. I take what little food is given to me without wondering when it will come again. When my stomach cramps and my head spins from hunger, I take that, too.

I don't even care that Pouter sometimes manages to swipe my bread crusts. I rouse only to stretch out on the grimy, disgusting floor when suddenly the majority of the women disappear weeks later. They must have been sold, but I can't seem to remember how or where or when. I don't remember much of anything.

With room to lie down, I can truly sleep. I want to sleep forever. I don't even want to wake up for food, and the guards have to jab me with a spear to make me eat. It seems to happen more and more often. At first I think it's simply because I'm asleep in between, but eventually I realize that the guards are in fact feeding us more. They even introduce some kind of carrot-like root to accompany the stale bread.

I almost don't want it—I want to stay in my little bubble of apathy where everything is simple and blank. As I slowly recover a little of my strength, my awareness returns and with it the knowledge that my situation isn't one I particularly want to be aware of. I'm still hungry all the time, but now I have just enough energy to want to not be hungry anymore. And I'm awake enough now to be afraid, not just of what's going to happen to me but of what has already happened to me. My hip bones jut out like the prows of two tiny ships, and I can see each individual rib arcing over the hollow cavity where my belly used to be.

I feel like someone has thrown a bucket of ice over me as I look at my hands and arms and realize that they look like my grandmother's did as she lay dying. I wonder if my apathy-bubble was actually something more sinister. How close did I come? How long have I been like this? The thought scares me so much I actually welcome the hunger pangs and headaches because it means my body is growing strong enough to make its demands heard.

For the first time since those early harrowing days, I take an interest in where we are and what's happening. There are only six of us left, and I can't help but notice that we are all young and at least moderately pretty, or we would be if we weren't filthy and dangerously malnourished. I start to think about what that could mean for us and hastily turn away from that line of thought.

Pouter, unfortunately, is still here. Her long blond hair is no longer blond so much as a dull sand color, almost brown, and it hangs in lank, greasy tangles around her face. I reach for my own hair, then decide I'd rather not know. But of course I can't avoid it forever, tangled around me as it is. It's just as hideous as I feared. Normally a glossy chestnut, my hair now looks—and smells—like something you might find smeared on the bottom of your shoe.

As we proceed along the road to wherever we're going, our rations improve in quantity, if not in quality. As the weeks go by, we slowly put some flesh back on our bones until we're merely scrawny rather than frighteningly emaciated. We live like animals, wallowing in our own filth and gobbling down whatever we're given in the space between one breath and the next.

Not everyone recovers. Though we now receive enough food to look superficially healthy, long weeks of starvation have left us sick and frail. After a night of rain, one of the girls begins to cough and shiver. Two days later, the guards pull her corpse from the Cage and leave her on the side of the road while we look on with dull, listless eyes.

I begin to have trouble remembering things, but that doesn't surprise me. I barely remember that I'm human some days. I get confused easily, and sometimes I think that I've always been in this cage, that it's a perfectly natural place for me to be. The images in my dreams start to lose focus, and it's not until I dream of Baba Nadia and wonder for a second who she is that I realize something is seriously wrong.

I go back to counting the treasures in my box, just as I did when I first woke up in this miserable place. My name is Sasha. I am—I was—a dancer. My grandmother is dead. I might be crazy. I painstakingly rebuild my reality piece by piece, fitting facts and memories together until I know who I am again. Sometimes I have to shove bits back in place as they come loose, and sometimes I start from scratch.

My crumbling sense of self is more frightening than anything else that's happened so far, even my brush with starvation. I wish I could talk to the other girls. It would be so much easier if I could put who I am into words and make it real. As it is, “me” is nothing but an idea, with no more substance than the thoughts in my head. It's hard to hold onto with no one to help.

I've found that if I let my mind wander, I lose bits and pieces from my treasure box at an alarming rate, and it takes a long time to gather them up again. With nothing to do but watch the trees turn into fields turn into hills and back again, mile after mile, it's not easy. I force myself to go over the facts that hold me together every time I catch myself slipping. I turn it into a game, retracing my steps backward through time, all the way back to my earliest memories. Each time I do it, I try to remember more details.

The combination of boredom and fear is unbearable. Fear drives me to repeat the facts of my life over and over again, and boredom catches my thoughts like sticky tar. I feel like it's tearing my mind in two. But I keep going, mostly because I'm terrified of losing myself again but also because there's simply nothing else to do.

The nights have gotten considerably warmer. We still huddle together at night, but it's not so cold that we can't sleep at least a little bit. I'm never next to Pouter, who seems to dislike me as much as I do her. I'm not sure what it is about her that annoys me so much. I don't begrudge her the food she stole from me while I was...not myself. It's not even the fact that she tried to steal from me that first time. It's just something about the way she looks. Every time I see her stupid, pouting face, I want to slap it.

I realize that this not a good reason to dislike someone as much as I dislike her, but I can't help it. I try to remind myself that I don't know her, she's probably a nice person, etc., etc. Anyway, why shouldn't she pout? If ever there was a situation to warrant a good pout, this is it.

It's no use. Maybe it's the strain of being constantly hungry and afraid and bored and tired, but her every move pisses me the hell off. Every shift of position, every yawn, every cough seems petulant and somehow snobby. Even the way she eats annoys me, though I'm sure I inhale my food with just the same frantic energy. But I don’t shamelessly stare down the other girls with such a greedy, resentful eye as they eat, as if their food by rights should be in my belly instead of theirs.

Definitely not.

By the time an opportunity presents itself, my irrational loathing of this girl is so ingrained that I don't even think twice. The wagon stops and one of the guards hands out our standard fare. Pouter, still groggy from her beauty sleep, is just a hair too slow in snatching up her bread and mystery root. Without even blinking, I scoop up both and shove them into my mouth before she so much as twitches. She glares daggers at me, and I can't help grinning back mockingly around my bulging mouthful of her food.

Pouter lunges at me, only to be stopped by a spear thrust in front of her. I know her frustration shouldn’t make me happy, but it does. Maybe I’m a terrible person, but oh, it does make me happy. If I had a voice, I would laugh. Her face is red with fury under its layer of grime, and I can almost see the steam coming out of her ears. Karma's a bitch, I think at her. Stupid twat.

This little victory, small and petty though it is, lifts my spirits for a full day before reality puts me firmly in my place. We reach the top of the latest large hill or a small mountain and roll along a ledge which affords a magnificent view of farmland peppered with what I suppose must be small villages and farmsteads. But crawling up the side of the mountain, practically right underneath us, is a city. Somehow I know this is our ultimate destination. Our long journey is almost over, and it dawns on me exactly what that means.

By this time tomorrow, I'll be a slave.