Mulan: The Untold Story

Chapter Five

A dull, throbbing pain occurring on her temples and woke her up from the dark recesses of her nightmares. Her vocal chords felt raw and her mouth was dry.  This was because all night she had been screaming. For freedom. She could also feel that her eyelids were swollen. Her hands were also swollen from repeatedly banging them upon the iron bars which she was contained behind. The pain eluded her so badly that she wanted to scream again, but she didn’t. It had been a long night. Mulan was ungratefully beaten by the guards before she was thrown into her cell. They had shown her no mercy as they threw the frail sixteen year old into prison. On the first night, she was given the nickname “Resister”, for she had struggled and screamed hours before being thrown into her cell. 

Mulan tried her best opening her swollen eyes, but she grimaced and shielded her face from the burning hot sun that showed threw the window of her cell. She ached as she tried rising from the hay that prisoners were given to sleep upon. She hadn’t been given anything but the hay mattress and a scratchy, yet thin wool blanket to sleep under. All night she was freezing, but that didn’t stop her from feeling a fire within her. She was enraged. How could she have been thrown into prison without any mercy shown upon her? It was her first evaluation ceremony.  She was sure that many other girls made worse mistakes than she had. She had not even been given a trial. That was what infuriated her most. By village law, a trial was to be given to every person indicted before being sent to prison. Unfortunately, in times of dire circumstance, such as war, laws were broken ceaselessly by whomever, and Mulan did not catch on to that fact so quickly.

She threw the sorry excuse for a blanket off of her bruised body, and looked outside her cage. She noticed in cells across from her that people were still sleeping.  Mostly, the people in these cells were men. Some had swollen faces, presumably from also being beaten the night before. Some spoke profanities in their sleep. Others looked worried, and held tightly onto their blankets and themselves, as if they were children clutching the legs of their parents. They were afraid of what lay ahead for them.

Mulan thought where those men’s families were and how they had even got themselves into prison. Obviously some were drunkards. But some looked almost as innocent as her. She noticed in one cell a child. He couldn’t have been more than the age of ten years old. He shivered recklessly under the wool blanket and occasionally whimpered in his sleep. She was outraged by this sight. How could the Count have even the heart to arrest a child? This young boy was probably more innocent than Mulan, yet he too had been thrown into the corrupted political system with no mercy. She gazed at his shivering body for a long time, fuming over the injustices this little boy had been succumbed to through his life. She thought long and hard about what it took to be man at this desperate time in her village. He was probably doing something that every normal child would have done, like stealing a piece of bread to feed his hungry sister, but was caught in the act. How could such a petty crime receive such dire punishment?

Just then, the door to the left burst open with fierce exuberance. Mulan dashed under her blanket, yet quickly regretted her move because she had scraped her knee on the dirt ground in the process. A guard entered the room and ran a metal prod alongside the iron bars of the cells across from Mulan.

“Wake up!” he yelled.  The men rose groggily from their makeshift beds. Some cursed themselves awake, others shot straight out sleep of bed as if waking up from a nightmare.

Mulan kept her eyes on the young boy across from her. He was the slowest to rise from his bed. He stared at the ceiling of cell, wide-eyed, as if he had seen a ghost. He clutched his wool blanket in fear and pulled it higher above his head. Through a hole in her blanket, Mulan could still see him shivering vigorously.  He stayed frozen in place.

“That’s right,” the guard continued. “It’s time for your trials. Wake up you dirty scum!” He continued dragging his metal prod across the iron bars. It made a screeching sound which vibrated sharply against everyone’s ears. Some men had already risen to their feet, but slouched over, still dazed from the previous nights’ sleep. Mulan had also noticed that some men were wearing few clothes or none at all. She wondered how they got through such a cold night.