"The red stone ritual"
The heartless voice behind her spoke in a tongue she didn't understand and gave her a hard push in the back that nearly made her stumble and fall.
Holding her balance with her hands bound behind her back wasn't easy but she managed to stay upright. Also, she now understood that he was urging her to walk on in his language...
It was unusually cold this morning. It was autumn, she could tell from the colour of the leaves, and it would be her last. It would have taken maybe one or two seasons for her to become a woman, but she won't be around that long, she thought while regret and fear filled her. No rites for her, no fest with good food and singing, no braided hair.
For many years she lived with her tribe high in the hills until those men came and invaded their dwelling, slaughtering everyone but her, her sister and two other young girls. After the attack they took them to a large gathering of their own people, a seven days walk from her home.
The girl wasn't pretty like the other ones. She didn't realize that, with that, her destiny was set.
Along the way it became clear that the men showed a bigger interest in the other girls than in her. At first she found that to be okay but when they arrived at the camp she was locked in with two other girls, who were already there and both of them also not as pretty. It made her worry. The other, pretty, girls were all taken to the tents of the men who took them. Her sister too.
After a few days with almost no food or water but some scraps, one of the girls in her cage was roughly taken by two grim looking men, her hands tied behind her back and a rope around her neck with which they forced her to follow.
Later that day she could hear the sound of drums in the distance with a gradual growing excitement in their rhythms.
The girl didn't come back that evening.
This morning it was her turn. After a short walk through the woods they came to a large clearing in which a circle of large stones rose from the wet grass. Several men and women were gathered there already. Dressed up as grotesque forest animals. One wore the antlers of a big deer on his head, another wore the skin and the head of a bear. Others had skins and feathers of various animals bound to their bodies. Their faces were painted black with red streaks. Animal bones were worn on strings and necklaces and all bore a weapon of some sort.
One of the stones, laying flat in the middle of the circle, was also red. But a different kind of red than the paint she saw on their faces. She knew this colour from the stone in her village where they slaughtered cattle like goats and deer. The dark red color of dried blood. In awe she stopped, the strength left her legs and she had to make an effort to keep standing. With fear in her eyes she turned to the man guiding her, only to be shoved forward again.
She started to cry in despair. 'Please, please, I can work for you!' She pleaded to indifferent ears. The man showed no understanding of her words, showed no emotion, nor mercy.
Suddenly those drums started sounding again, slowly at first, just like the day before when she has heard them when the first girl was taken away. Some of the beastlike figures started dancing around the stone circle, slowly by the rhythm of the drums, their eyes void of humanity, like in a trance. The bones hanging from their costumes clattering in unison with the rhythm of the drums.
With another push the man directed her towards the large stone in the middle of the circle and forced her to lay on it, on her back. Her hands were cut free with a stone knife only to be tied again. This time to the stone. The same thing happened to her legs.
The stretching of her limbs caused her to cry out.
The man with the antlers stood next to the stone to her left and started speaking in that horrible unintelligible language. His hands raised to the sky, his eyes closed.
The sky, to which, as a small girl she looked so often to look for clouds that looked like an animal, or a flower. Some even looked like humans. That sky, now white, grey and empty, as if it looked the other way to just not see what tragedy was unfolding beneath it.
The drums started to speed up, and she could hear the cries from the dancers as they started to speed up their dance.
Ecstatically.
Then, all of a sudden the drums stopped......