He remained asleep when I wiped off his face and covered him from the rain, and as I went to check on Tähti, and when I went off to gather firewood in order to stoke the fire for breakfast. He remained asleep when the two men from yesterday came upon me suddenly as I was bent over trying to pick up a larger stick without dropping any of the kindling I had already gathered. He remained asleep when they crept up on me from behind and knocked me to the ground, throwing themselves on top of me before I could grasp what was happening. He didn’t wake as Heikki held a drug-soaked rag over my nose and mouth while the other man sat on my legs and pinned down my hands. When he awoke I don’t know, but it was after sight and sound had faded away, and the two men had dragged me off into the woods.
5
The smell of wet wood and dirty cloth filled my nose. There was a strange moaning sound in my ears. I tried to open my eyes and turn my head to find the source of the moaning. My eyes wouldn’t open. Something was in my mouth, which was what was making the moaning sound so strange. The moaning was coming from me. I tried to clench my teeth in order to make it stop. My teeth wouldn’t clench because there was a dirty cloth between them, but the moaning went silent.
I tried once again to open my eyes. They still saw nothing but blackness, but now I could see that was because there was a cloth tied over them. My head ached fiercely, and I could taste vomit rising up the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down. If I threw up now, it would get caught in the gag and I could choke and die. I didn’t want to die. For the first time in my life I was acutely aware of just how fragile and helpless I was. A rock could fall on me, or the cart could overturn and land on top of me, or someone could come up and attack me, and there would be nothing I could do. My body would be smashed to pieces, and I would be able to do nothing but lie there and watch it happen. Only I wouldn’t just be watching it. I would be feeling it too, because it would be happening to me and no one else.
A scream tried to claw its way out of my throat just like the vomit had a moment earlier. I swallowed it down too. Then I swallowed down the next one. I wanted to scream and scream and scream in rage, despair, terror, and the hopeless hope that someone would come and save me, someone would come and rescue me from this terrible thing that had happened to me. Just like an animal trussed for slaughter. But no one ever came and saved them. Including me. So it was wrong of me to hope that someone else would come and save me. If anyone was going to save me, it would have to be myself. How many lambs had told themselves exactly that, a moment before the knife met their throat?
I concentrated on lying as still and as calmly as I could, gleaning what I could of my situation from my nose and ears. I was lying on the bed of a cart—judging by the smell, an old wooden cart. And judging by the creaking I heard and the jolting I felt, a rickety, poorly maintained cart. I could hear the “one-two, one-two” rhythm of shod hooves trotting on a stony road.
“How much longer to the turn-off?” said a voice I recognized as Heikki’s.
“Should be coming up just around the corner,” said the voice of the other man. And indeed, I felt the cart swing around a corner and then swing in the other direction as we turned off the road and started down a rougher, softer road that ran steeply downhill.
I heard one of the men move, and then I was poked roughly in the shoulder.
“Hey,” said Heikki. “I know you’re awake. Sit up.”
I debated ignoring him and pretending to still be unconscious, but he grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me upright. When he tore the cloth from my eyes, they opened of their own accord, and blinked foolishly in the light.
“Don’t try to scream or do anything stupid,” Heikki told me. “Just sit there like a good little dragon, and we won’t hurt you. Well, not anything they wouldn’t do to you anyway.” He grinned a not very nice grin. “You’ll be grateful when it’s over,” he told me. “Now sit there and don’t move.
The not moving proved to be more and more difficult as we jolted along, as along with the nausea I felt an increasingly pressing need to empty my bladder. I considered telling Heikki and asking him to stop. It might make him think of me more kindly, and thus treat me more kindly, and not do whatever terrible thing he was planning to do to me. Or it might make him despise me even more. No, I should ask. Getting him to like me was the best thing I could do. Because although I knew many things, one thing I had never learned how to do was fight off determined attacks by ruthless and desperate people. I knew how to heal others after such attacks. But when they had come for me, I had been unable to do anything, not even scream
