The Journey of Terror

         "Xiong Zi-Yan!"
         As the soldier growled out my name, I inched forward from the line of women assembled before the Emperor's henchmen.  My fellow countrywomen looked on with sorrowful eyes as it became apparent that I was to be among the twenty women chosen from my village to be taken captive as prisoners, much to the Emperor's delight.  We were to be slaves, really, but this we would only discover upon our arrival at the Emperor's palace.
         The soldiers marched us along single file, berating us all the while for the filthy whores that we were.  We were worthless, they said, and we wouldn't be missed.  Hot tears dripped from our eyes onto our shackled hands as we trekked, barefoot, along the carved out road, for we were stripped of our shoes.
         Farmers passing by in their oxen-drawn carts looked on wide-eyed, but wisely kept their mouths shut and swiftly averted their eyes back to the road.  We would find no aid with them.
         When I stumbled on the loose gravel, breaking the skin under my foot and falling to my knees, I was harshly scolded for holding up the line.  When I couldn't rise quickly enough, a quick lash of a whip met my back and I cried out as I once again fell to the ground.  Shouting expletives, a soldier yanked me up by the elbow and forced me back into line.  I focused on the ground so as not to fall a third time, and I thanked Quan Yen when I made it an hour without falling.  I wouldn't fall for the rest of the journey, what would become my journey of terror.

*

         The palace was magnificent.  Columns inlaid with gold and jade loomed over us, and we felt tiny in the presence of such a wondrous establishment.  As it turned out, we would not set our eyes upon the Emperor for weeks.  When we did, we were so filthy and worn out that we almost felt ashamed in front of him.
         The Vice Chancellor came out to greet us in a rather cold and disconnected manner, and he separated us into colonies.  We were roughly two hundred in the palace courtyard, packed in like a school of fish.  We weren't all from the same village; as it turned out, we came from many provinces, and would soon discover that we spoke different dialects.  Communication amongst us would prove to be a most difficult feat for weeks to come.
         We were immediately shown our living quarters, outside the palace walls.  There stood meager huts that looked like they would topple over at any minute if one were to so much as blow on them.  We were provided with no furnishings, no blankets, and were told that we would have to work to earn them.  Thereafter we were led to the coal mines some ten kilometers away from the palace walls, and after the oxen-drawn carts had abandoned us, we promptly set off to begin mining.
         We suffered one casualty that day.  A young girl who couldn't have been more than fifteen suffocated deep within the mine after she was deprived of oxygen for too long.  We struggled to remove the body, and some of us wept for a girl we didn't even know.  The soldiers supervising the scene simply rolled their eyes and set off to burn the body a couple of kilometers away.