I Remember {MJ FANFICTION}

Chapter 4

It felt like I'd been made to walk for hours. I was drained and physically exhausted when my assailants finally pushed me down onto the ground, my arms still bound so tightly in front of me that my wrists burned from the friction and they finally snatched the putrid sack from over my head. My curls fell limply down over my eyes. It was still dark apart from a small fire they had lit up a short distance away and it cast a grim glow over them.

Their faces were wrapped up completely in black cloth, except for their ferocious eyes that seemed to stare into my soul when they stood authoritatively over me.

I could feel my heart beat going at a thousand miles an hour.

A small way away, three camels sat lazily looking around. I counted three men in total. And one long machete, dangling from the waist of the plumpest man out of the three.

I swallowed painfully hard when he eventually untied it and lifted the sharp edge up to my throat whilst another one of them approached me with a flask.

"Drink." He demanded. I shook my head, suspicious that perhaps they would try to poison me, but without another word he'd grabbed my face and poured beer into my mouth with a careless haste that had caused it to go up my nose until I coughed and spluttered violently. I gasped to get my breath back.

"We have been following you." The third of the men came up to me. "We have watched you sing and tame 50 people at once. How?"

I was speechless with no real answer to provide to his odd question.

"Answer him!" the larger one to my right screamed. My eyebrows knitted together.

"I-I don't know..."

"You don't know? What are you? An evil enchanter!"

"No I'm not, I-"

"Then how did you silence the people!"

"I really don't know." I said, my voice breaking with panic. "I just sing and they..." my eyes drifted over to the machete, then to the man holding it, and in a way his generous stomach had inspired the end of my sentence. "feed me..." the men glanced around at each other.

I felt tension rising in the air and felt an abysmal stirring in my stomach at the thought of what they might do to me, now that they knew that I was of no use to them. I felt my body shaking uncontrollably as visions of the man taking the machete back and swinging it toward me with a killer's intent danced at the forefront of my mind and I felt paralysis take over my body.

The man standing in the middle took a wild step back, glancing between the men either side of him and then suddenly, without warning, they all burst into the loudest guffaws of laughter I had ever heard. They then proceeded to remove their head scarfs, finally revealing their very regular and extremely amused faces.

"Did you see that Hapi? He was looking at you when he said feed me." He had howled pointing at the big guy who threw his arms out defensively.

"Oh come on!" he whined.

"Aw look at him, he is soiling himself. Go on, put the sword away Hapi." The man in the middle of the two said and I got the sense that they both took their cues from him.

The big guy chuckled hard after that, losing his breath as he began to tie his machete to his waist again and finally removed his scarf too. He used it to wipe the sweat off his forehead and then grinned widely, revealing large gap teeth, and he jerked my shoulder with a firm hand.

"We're just messing with you!" He waved one nonchalant, porky hand my way and went to tease one of the camels resting nearby by tugging at their bindings and talking to it. The man who had given the orders to remove the razor-sharp blade at my neck retreated back a few steps and and approached a pile of sacks strapped to one of the resting camels backs a short way away on the opposite side of the fire and sank down against it throwing his arms in a comfy position behind his head.