You're a Girl, That's Why
If I'd been a woman, I'd have been so much better at army life.
I definitely said that right before I died. Then I opened my eyes and found I really had become a woman — a sixteen-year-old, no less.
"Arista."
Even the name had been swapped out on me.
Why? I couldn't tell you. My last memory is of headlights flooding my eyes. A horn blared, someone screamed a curse, and the impact that followed — I don't even remember it.
By any sane reckoning I should have died. And yet I opened my eyes alive. No — to be precise, I opened them as a sixteen-year-old girl named Arista.
At first I thought I'd simply gone insane. The problem was that three days on, the insanity refused to wear off.
"Arista. Why do you keep staring at that thing?"
I lowered the bronze mirror in my hand.
"It's nothing."
"You did the same thing yesterday."
The woman who was my mother eyed me strangely. It was absolutely not because I was curious about the face. I had to keep checking whether the person in the mirror was really me — but the conclusion was always the same: an unknown girl of sixteen.
The first time, I checked inside my clothes and regretted it.
'Fuck.'
If I'd been a woman, I'd have been so much better at army life. Why the hell did I have to say that right before dying, of all moments?
The one mercy was that the body itself was sound, and the cloth bound around my head could be unwrapped and rewound morning and night without anyone raising an eyebrow.
The body's original owner, they said, had tripped somewhere a few days back and cracked her head — and since what woke up afterward was me, I could only assume I'd stolen the body. Or maybe I had always been Arista, and the life I'd lived as a sergeant in the Republic of Korea Army was the dream.
I decided to stop thinking about it, though. It was a question with no answer to begin with. Even in the army, unanswerable problems were best shoved off to the side — better for your sanity that way. What mattered was this: right now, I was a living, breathing girl.
"The Helots say they've finished the work in the western fields."
I blinked — and nearly dropped my spoon.
The first time I heard the word Helot, I was sure I'd misheard. But it kept coming up, from the mouths of the household and everywhere I went. And the people here called themselves Lacedaemonians.
Denying reality at this point would just make me an idiot. Helots, Lacedaemon, ancient Greece — put the three together and only one conclusion remained.
'Sparta. This is actually Sparta?'
For the moment that fact hit me, I even forgot the shock of being a woman. Sparta — what man who'd lived in the military wouldn't know that name? The slab-of-muscle warriors from the movie, the three hundred, the bronze shields and those glorious spears.
Of course, I knew the movie took liberties with the history books — that it was fiction. But I hadn't majored in ancient Greece either, and for an ordinary civilian, I probably knew as much as anyone could.
A city that fought Persia, then fought Athens, until Alexander the Great swallowed it whole.
'Of all the places. Sparta.'
Still — at least here, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.
'Maybe in a place like this, I could actually make something of myself.'
That was what I'd thought. It didn't take long to learn that the hope was complete horseshit.
My memories of Arista were strange. It was too ambiguous to call amnesia — when I deliberately tried to recall something, nothing came, but the moment I laid eyes on a person or a place, a fragment would pop up out of nowhere.
Seeing my mother brought familiarity, and riding along with it, fear. When I thought of my father, his face blurred, but I could recall enormous hands and a low voice. And then there was Telekles, my older brother by three years.
Strangely, the memories involving that bastard were the ones with vivid emotion attached. An insufferable piece of work — plus a string of fights from when we were small. Yet underneath it all, the feeling that I didn't actually hate him.
The problem was that I hadn't seen his face once in three days.
"What about my brother? When is he coming home?"
"Who?"
"Telekles. I just haven't seen him around."
My mother's hands stopped.
This time, she was really and truly looking at me like something was wrong with me.
"You saw him only a few days ago?"
'Shit. That was never in the memories.'
"So cracking your head made you fond of your brother, did it?"
"Absolutely not."
Perhaps because my answer came a little too fast, my mother snorted a laugh.
I didn't ask her anything more after that. Instead, I found out the reason when I stepped outside around noon that day.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The rhythmic sound turned my head all on its own. At first I took it for construction work — then I saw the young men. Most looked around my age or a little older. They ran stripped down, crashing into each other body to body, and some of them loped along with spears and shields in hand.
I stopped in the middle of the road and stared.
'Wow. Actual spears. And shields, too.'
Not a movie, not a replica bolted upright in a museum — the real thing. The round shields, the long-reaching spears, even the instructor's bellow ringing across the training yard and the men's drill-perfect movements. Anyone would have stopped to gawk, not just me.
"Arista?"
My mother called, but I couldn't answer right away. Army life had made me sick of rifles, but this was something else. New weapons inspire the purest desire a man can have: to get his hands on them. How heavy was it? How did you grip it? And with a shield strapped on, did it really cut your field of vision down to nothing?
The questions kept piling up — and then a familiar face swam into view. No. Not a face I knew.
'Telekles?'
This body simply remembered him. A man at the edge of the training ground, chatting with the other young men and putting his muscles on display. He wasn't towering, but his body was dense — nothing like the showy bulk you build in a gym. These muscles looked hard as stone, without an ounce of wasted flesh on his shoulders or thighs.
"Damn, that bastard's built."
"What was that?"
"...I said my brother's built."
My mother gave me an odd look.
"Isn't that a given?"
A given? Those were muscles most men couldn't forge in a lifetime of training.
Then the memory resurfaced: Telekles had left home as a child and spent his entire life among boys.
'The Agoge.'
The word arrived a beat too late. Sparta, after all, ran a system that took boys away young and drilled them apart from everyone else. Whether you could call that public education, I couldn't say — but show it to modern-day Korea and they'd shriek about child abuse.
'Hold on. Then that bastard—'
I hadn't entered the army until I was twenty, and this guy wasn't even twenty yet — already more than ten years on the job.
And suddenly I was the one feeling shortchanged? One man ground through eight years and died; the other popped into the world a Spartan male and started army life at seven. ...Then again, thinking it over, there was nothing to envy there at all.
'Poor bastard.'
Still, swinging a spear and shield did look enviable. A little. A very little.
Around the time training was winding down, Telekles spotted us and came over. Up close, the real thing was bigger than the memory — by about a head, I'd say. He looked at my head and grinned.
"Still alive, huh."
Was that any way to greet the little sister you hadn't seen in days?
"You wanted me dead?"
"It would've been quieter around here."
"Why, you little—"
The curse burst out before I could stop it. Telekles's eyes went wide, and I could feel my mother behind me staring too.
Oops. So swearing counts as swearing here, too?
"...You absolute jerk."
Telekles stared at me for a long, long moment.
"Your head really did get scrambled, didn't it? You're even weirder than before."
"Shut up."
Still, small mercies: apparently the original Arista had talked to him exactly this way, because he didn't seem particularly suspicious.
Telekles turned to head back to the training ground, and my eyes snagged on the shield slung across his back. Up close it was even bigger — thick, too, its surface scarred all over as though it had seen years of use.
"Wait! That shield."
"What."
"Can I hold it? Just once?"
I pointed at it. Telekles stared at me.
"What's to be curious about?"
"How heavy it is. How you even hold the thing."
As I spoke, I stretched out my hand — and Telekles swung the shield out of reach. My fingers closed on empty air.
"Looking to get chewed out by Father again?"
Excuse me? I had a prior record?
"You got caught trying to walk off with a spear, remember?"
Arista, you were a far bolder kid than I gave you credit for.
"I've always been interested, that's all."
"Interest isn't permission."
"It's one lift. Why are you being so difficult?"
I reached out again; he dodged again. Irritation crept up my spine, and my voice climbed with it.
"Oh, come on — why not?"
At my raised voice, Telekles looked at me with an expression of genuine incomprehension, then said it like the most self-evident thing in the world.
"Why? Because you're a girl. That's why."
My tongue stopped dead.
'If I'd been a woman, I'd have been so much better at army life.' The words I'd spoken with my dying breath played back in my head, note-perfect.
Sparta. A land where men trained for war from the age of seven — and I was standing on the wrong side of that line.
In this unfamiliar era, I'd finally believed I'd found the one thing I knew. I understood armies. I'd done the training. Handling equipment, moving with a unit — all second nature. And yet I was the one person who couldn't set foot inside it.
"So a woman can't even hold a spear?"
Telekles studied me for a moment, then answered.
"No. Do I have to spell it out again?"
He tapped a finger against his own forehead as he finished.
"You're a girl."
I stood there in silence, looking at him.
A woman cannot become a warrior in Sparta. Which meant there are no female warriors in Sparta.
I got it. I understood the meaning perfectly. And yet my eyes kept sliding back — to the shield on Telekles's back, to the spear gripped in his fist.
It wasn't that I couldn't carry one or learn to use one. It was that I would never even be allowed to find out whether I could.
Somehow, it didn't sit right with me at all.
"...Fuck."
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
Telekles eyed me with suspicion, but I turned away like nothing had happened — and let my gaze settle quietly on the spears racked off to one side.
So they wouldn't give me permission. Fine. Understood. That didn't mean I had to give up.