Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Memoirs of a Mercenary ❯ Chapter 1

The village where I grew up was very isolated. I suppose that is why we had such unusual customs, but then there might be other reasons. For one thing, we were a warrior village. This is not to be confused with a village of Ninja, where everyone holds a blade. Here, death and life were our religion. The woman gives birth. The man kills. Each gender represents the path of life, each at different ends. It was so ingrained in us; it was the most important thing in our lives.

 

In this village, young children are not referred to by their gender. They dress the same, they wear their hair the same, and even their names do not indicate what lies beneath their clothes. From early on, children are taught to dress, wash, and do other things in solitude so as not to expose themselves to anyone else. At birth, the child is shown naked to the mother, so she knows what it is. After that, it is secret. Even the father does not know, and as time passes he must guess silently. Why all this secrecy? So that an evil spirit will not claim them for their own.

 

It is not until the first blood that it is revealed which gender a child is. For girls, there is no choice. It comes when it will, without warning. Our blood comes from our own bodies, mimicking the sacrifice of childbirth. For boys, it is a thing of age. At 11, when most girls are suffering their first, a mother brings her young child to the temple. She knows he is a boy, and so it is her responsibility to remember. There have been women, perhaps because they were lonely for company and had no daughters, would “forget” and keep their sons with them, pretending they were girls. When they did not bleed, they were inspected by the shaman woman, who would quickly surmise the problem.

 

At the temple, the boy is taken from his mother and handed a short sword. Not a knife, the tool of a woman, but a sword. Women are forbidden to touch the tool of death. He is led to the shaman man, who holds out his arm for the boy to cut. There are no scars on him, his flesh does not remember pain. The boy must only make him bleed, not injure him. When the blood falls to the earth, he is no longer a child but a boy. His hair is cut, and the excess burned. The next morning he begins training with a sword.

 

After the first blood there are boys and girls, not men and women. That comes later. Girls do not have much to learn, children help their mothers around the house as soon as they are able. Instead they must turn their attention to deciding on a boy to marry. That's right, it is the girls who choose. The boys are too busy with their training to be distracted by picking out an attractive young girl. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't spend time trying to convince a girl to choose them. They cannot ask, but they may give gifts, say flattering things, and all manner of foolishness to persuade a girl to like them. When a girl asks, a boy can refuse, but it must be for good reason. He cannot say “she is unattractive to me.” Most often, the excuse is that “Our personalities would make for an unquiet home.” There is no way to dispute this, as a boy who does not wish to be married to a certain girl can make a home unquiet indeed.

 

A girl is not a woman until she has borne her first child. A boy, likewise, is not a man until he has taken his first human life. Both are expected to happen after marriage. The act of creation does not happen until then, and a boy may not go on a mission until then. At this point they represent the dichotomy of existence; they are their essences in full. I was destined for none of this.

 

At the age of 11, I bled as expected. The required rituals were performed, and I began looking at the boys with a different vision. Frankly, I had hoped that I was a boy. I wanted to be a warrior. Therefore I was none too disappointed when I stopped bleeding every month after a half-year or so. Maybe, I thought, they will let me become a boy. But no. I was questioned, examined, and found to not be with child, so I wasn't in trouble. But this was normal, they said. Often this happened in times of hardship and famine, or it ran in certain families. But there was whispering. Times were good, and this was not how it had been for my mother or sisters. Something, it was rumored, was not right.

 

A year later, the rumors came true. I began to bleed again, much to my mother's relief. But it didn't stop. A fortnight later I was weak and pale, and the shaman woman was summoned. She looked me over, clucking her tongue.

 

“This is not good,” she said. “Someone must have mentioned that she was a girl before her first blood.”

 

My mother looked horrified, but I didn't understand.

 

“All this time,” she explained to me, “You have been with child—but not a human child. An evil spirit has claimed you for his own, and come into you. His nothing-child will drain the life from you, and be born only when you die. It must be killed before it kills you.”

 

She drew out her blade, and I fainted.

 

The shaman woman is the only woman allowed to cut human flesh purposely, and then only to save a life. I knew she would cut me, and I was scared. I dreamed frightening things, that there was an evil spirit chasing after me, and I was running from it. I knew that if it caught me, I would die. Suddenly, I saw a sword on the ground. Without thinking, I picked it up and stabbed the evil spirit, which disappeared.

 

I awoke to the sound of my mother sobbing. I thought I was going to die, but when I looked down at my body, there were no gashes. There was blood on the shaman woman's blade, and I hurt very badly on the inside. The shaman woman leaned down next to my face.

 

“Whisper in my ear and tell me what you dreamed,” she instructed.

 

I did. When I was done, she sat back up and nodded. “I thought so. You must tell no one of this, alright?”

 

I nodded.

 

She sat back up, a stern look on her face. “You won't bleed again, Tera, and you will never have a child of your own.” She did not soften the blow, and the words ring in my ears to this day. My mother sobbed louder, but I merely nodded. It was as if I had been expecting it. Perhaps it was just too much to truly understand at the time.

 

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AN: Having a hard time dividing this story up into chapters, since it wasn't written in that format. Some will be really short, some longer. I'm trying to divide them up into little stories though. It was originally one long monologue of sorts, and so the endings of chapters might be a little abrupt. Tell me if you like it though! You know I love those comments!