Shisu

Little is set down about her looks beyond her fair, blonde hair. She appears as a woman among a company of mercenaries, her health and spirit already frayed by the loss she had endured.

A recent miscarriage had driven her to the edge of madness, leaving her behavior strange and erratic. Even so, a real gentleness surfaced in her willingness to take in an abandoned infant and call him her own, a kindness that set her apart from the harsh men around her.

Shisu came upon the just-born Guts lying in blood and filth under a withered tree hung with the dead, three days after her own baby was lost. Acting on impulse in her grief-clouded state, she claimed the boy as her son. Gambino let her keep him once they saw the infant still breathed, though he and the other mercenaries treated the child as an ill omen.

By the time Guts was three, plague had taken hold of her. In her final moments she gripped his small hand and spoke his name before dying. For all his crude words about her, Gambino had loved her deeply, and her death sharpened his resentment of the boy he blamed for it; while recovering from a lost leg, he called out feverishly for her as though reaching for what he could not save.