Motherhood

By Brian Trent

Queen Jingo’s red face twisted, the cords on her neck as taut as bowstrings, while the latest contraction convulsed in her womb. In that moment of agony, she forgot about the battle being waged around her ship, the physician crouched at the end of her bed, and even the resistance awaiting her troops on Korea’s shoreline.

The baby would be born in just minutes!

At sixteen, Queen Jingo was beautiful in the way a sword can be beautiful – lean, radiant, and deadly. Her childhood had been that of a noblewoman; sheltered, dominated by walks in the cherry blossom gardens of their wealthy villas, or under the austere tutelage of mentors skilled in calligraphy, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, poetry, song, and other lady-like proficiencies.

The contraction died, her mind cleared. The room swung back into her awareness and Jingo propped herself on her elbows to regard the room’s gathered crowd. She could feel the ship sway and dip in the choppy waters.

Paper lanterns were affixed to the cabin’s interior, and by their opalescent glow Jingo counted ten people. Midwives flanked her, dabbing her forehead with moistened cloths and clasping her hands for support. The royal physician, an austerely thin man with a balding head and darting, alert eyes, stooped at the foot of her bed counting off the minutes between contractions. Behind him, at the cabin doorway crouched the murmuring priestesses of Ryujin Temple, who by their droning chants were preventing malicious oni spirits from invading the cabin and harming the Empress or her child-to-be. Last of all was the Captain of the Fleet, Taro, who shared the doorway with the priestesses.

Jingo was Empress of Japan, in the waning months of the Year of the Rabbit. On the other side of the world, Rome was desperately defending itself against the swelling tides of bearded barbarians from the chilly north; fanatics had burned the pagan annex of the Alexandrian Library in Egypt; and China had emerged from tyranny into the enlightened leadership of the Han Dynasty. Japan knew nothing of these places, just as they knew nothing of her. Shadows gathered around the edge of every map.

Jingo looked at Captain Taro expectantly, her sweaty face glistening. "Captain Taro? You need not speak to me differently than you did to my husband. What is the status of the battle?"

From beneath the rim of his star-shaped helmet, Taro peered uncomfortably at his surroundings. Sea-spray trickled down his black armor and sectioned skirt.

"We’re driving a wedge through the Korean fleet," he said awkwardly. He was not used to addressing the empress in such a condition — bedridden, her legs spread but covered, and the commotion of the priestesses buzzing like anxious hornets. "Only a thin line of galleys protects the shore now. I’ve ordered the fleet’s core to ram them."

Jingo’s dark eyes glittered in the lantern-light. "Aren’t we part of the fleet, Taro?"

He blinked in confusion. "Of course, Empress."

"Then why have we stopped moving?" she demanded. Her labor pains had preoccupied her, but now she noticed that her vessel’s oarsmen had ceased rowing. The galley drums, beaten to keep the rowers’ timing, were silent.

Taro looked unconcerned. "We have a hundred ships to ram the defenders. This ship doesn’t need to take part." When he saw her outraged expression, he quickly added, "Empress, given your condition I didn’t feel that ramming another ship would —"

"Order the rowers to continue, Taro!"

Risking no hesitation, he bowed, darted onto the deck and gave the command. The steady beat of the drums began again like a war-god’s thundering pulse. The ship cut swiftly through the waters.

"Empress..." the physician started.

Her face betrayed her fear. "Doctor. Where is – "

Agony! The next contraction forked up into her body, shook back and forth, clouded her mind. She grit her teeth, stricken with the strange image of her baby battling a hideous demon.

Slowly, her eyes focused. The pain dimmed, and her attendants were wiping the copious sweat from her face once more.

"Where is Yasahiro?" Jingo gasped.

The physician replied, "He is at the lead ship. They need him to ensure a safe landing."

Is my baby healthy? The thought possessed her with fear. Her husband was dead, and the gods had entrusted the very last seed of his line to her womb. It was a child conceived in love.

Will I be a good mother?

Her personal soothsayer Yasahiro had told her the child would be born healthy. Everyone liked Yasahiro, as he had served her late husband for eight years. He was fat and cheerful, with a flabby face shaped like a pear. He interpreted dreams and read futures.

Captain Taro returned.

"Captain," Jingo said, "You said we’re breaking through the Korean fleet. Are we fighting our way through, our do they flee before us?"

"Mostly they flee!" Taro said, shouting to be heard above the murmuring priestesses. "We outnumber them three-to-one, after all!"

Jingo did not share his confidence, but before she could contemplate her growing fear the next contraction hit, and she grunted and sweated and felt she would go blind. When it subsided, when the midwives wiped her brow, her thoughts reconstructed the picture Taro was painting for her.

An hour ago, she had stood on the deck of her royal barge and seen the Korean navy for herself. One hundred and fifty wooden vessels floating in the bay, their decks filled with a mix of swordsmen and fire-archers. Behind the fleet waited the muddy beach, and on a high embankment above the beach stood the armies of the three Korean kingdoms with their colorful banners flapping in the sea-breeze.

But the armies were small and didn’t impress her. The Korean navy was different: a congested mass of fortified vessels. At the sight of them, Jingo couldn’t imagine they would flee before the Japanese armada. Why would they break before us? she wondered. Their only hope is to prevent us from landing and unloading our soldiers!

Taro saw her doubt, and tried to reassure her. "We’ll ram straight through their remaining line of defense, My Lady."

Jingo shook her head irritably. She looked at her physician, and said, "My child must wait."

The physician scowled darkly. "Empress, your contractions are thirty seconds apart. Your child —"

"Will wait!" she yelled, and pulled herself to her feet. The midwives protested, but she cursed at them and brushed aside their hands. She stumbled awkwardly to the doorway. She gazed across the deck to the sea.

Escort vessels surrounded her ship to form a protective wall. Each vessel had wooden castles on their bows and sterns from which archers sat, firing at nearby enemy ships. Jingo could see the oarsmen of her escorts, their salty bodies rippling as they rowed in rhythm to the war drums and built up enough speed to ram the Korean ships that still guarded the shore. Below the waterline of each ship’s prow, a bronze ramming-beak jutted. Each one required five strong men to lift it — the ramming-beak could puncture any enemy’s hull. And on each deck, swordsmen crouched behind bamboo and leather webbing. They looked like caged tigers, eager to board the enemy ships that guarded the beach.

But the beach isn’t the problem! Jingo realized. Her sharp eyes saw that the two halves of the Korean navy which had fled before the Japanese were now turning and rejoining the fight. They want us to ram the ships near the beach! she thought in horror. They want us to get stuck in a jam of ships, so that the rest of their fleet can plow into us from the side!

"They’re luring us in!" she told Taro, who that moment had followed her gaze and came to the same realization. "Tell the fleet to push through their net or we’ll be boxed into a massacre!" To the rowers, she screamed, "Give us the speed of the wind!"

Even as she said it, a stray arrow whistled by her head and stuck in the cabin’s doorway. Jingo looked in the direction of where it had come and saw the line of beach defense within archer range. From the tower at the bow of her ship, Japanese archers fired back as the distance to the line shortened.

Fifteen seconds , Jingo thought, counting off the time until her next contraction.. Sixteen. Seventeen.

The Korean line loomed close, their wooden bodies blocking the beach and tempting the fleet to ram. Taro barked a command to the flag-runner, who hoisted a bright blue banner to the top of the mast for the fleet to see. Those colors conveyed the new coded command: Break through the defense, do not ram! Every ship in the armada ran up the same code to spread word.

It was too late. As Jingo watched, the head of the naval column had achieved such a momentum that an evasive turn was impossible. With an explosion of splintering wood, their ramming-beaks burst into the Korean line. Locked in a deadly kiss, defenders and attackers alike swarmed to the rails. Swords clashed, men shrieked, arrows whined overhead like black rain.

The next section of the Japanese column had time to avoid the collision, gliding past the manic fray of conjoined ships. But other Korean vessels floated in their way. Enacting the new orders, Jingo’s vessel swayed and she was pitched from the doorway into the rail. Her mental clock continued counting off the seconds. Twenty-six seconds. Twenty-seven.

"Get us through their line!" Jingo screamed to Taro.

She braced herself behind the deck’s protective shielding. Twenty-nine seconds. Thirty. Thirty-one.

And then it arrived like a lightning bolt, and her legs buckled and she shrieked, and again the world around her ceased to exist beyond the pain. She was dimly aware of her vessel skillfully swerving through a narrow passage between two Korean ships — so close, in fact, that her ship’s hull snapped their oars one by one. Snapsnapsnapsnapsnap!

She lost concept of the next few moments following the contraction. Suddenly she was being laid back on her bed by her physician and the midwives.

Would the baby be a boy or girl?

Her husband had expressed no preference. Our child will be the best of us, regardless of gender, he had told her the night before he left for the peace conference with Korea... the same conference where some assassin had cut his throat late at night, in the White Tent of peace.

"Captain Taro!" she yelled. He sprang into the doorway.

"Empress?"

"Did we make it through?"

He nodded, his face crimson with battle-lust. "Most of the second column got through." He hesitated. "Do we take the beach, or turn round and ram them?"

"The beach can wait!" It was the last she could manage before she felt her baby crowning.

"Bear down!" the physician yelled.

Amid the thunder of colliding ships as the sea became a floating battleground, Jingo heard a soft crying.

Yes! Great gods, please be healthy!

The physician held her baby aloft – a boy! – and slashed the umbilical cord while sword-fighting raged at the deck.

By the time her baby had been washed and placed into her arms, the third and fourth columns of the navy had joined the battle and sunk the defenders’ line. One hour later, the Japanese ships had reached the shallows, released their cargo of soldiers, and conquered the beach. The war was over.

 

How unexpected were her first hours of motherhood! She stared tenderly at the red, wrinkled face of her baby wrapped snugly in little blue linens, and smiled. . . not just for the joy of having birthed him, but for finally understanding the meaning behind the Japanese word for infant: akachan, Red Person. He looks like a newborn bird! she thought in delight.

But again came the worrisome thought: Will I be a good mother?

The beach was a scene of massacre, and she walked carefully on the sand. The physician had chastised her for leaving the bed. She felt weak and in pain, but she had insisted on this shoreline stroll... though she walked with difficulty. Her attendants surrounded her. The scowled physician and trailed her, muttering curses.

"The war isn’t over yet," she told her tranquil baby. His eyelids looked like pink eggs as he slept. Such little features! And the fingers! Her heart lifted and dipped, an earthquake of emotions. She kept wanting to showcase the infant to her husband, but whenever she looked to her side she was reminded of his absence.

Yes, she thought bitterly. The war isn’t over yet.

Ahead of her was a clearing of beach. The White Tent stood there, flapping and billowing.

Her guards stood outside of the tent’s four bamboo posts, for no weapons were allowed beneath its pristine cloth. There was also a portly man in a blue kimono, and when he saw her he clapped his hands delightedly and scurried to her.

"Empress!" he cried. "Your baby! See, I was correct! Your baby is healthy and perfect, My Lady!"

He is that, Jingo thought.

Yasahiro peered at the infant. His flabby cheeks jiggled as his smile grew. "What a beautiful creature! I should like to hold him very much!"

Jingo regarded her silent newborn. "I think he is sleeping. Let him."

Yasahiro’s loose cheeks reddened with delight. "Perhaps later, then? Yes, later. We still have business to attend. The Korean ambassadors are already inside, eager to sue for peace."

Jingo nodded and handed her child to the physician. "Bring him back aboard my ship."

The physician’s scowl deepened. "The ship? But you’ll be separated from him! These peace negotiations could take weeks! The child will need you always near!"

Jingo glared. "Do as I say!"

Yasahiro watched the doctor take the baby away. "My Lady, I do not wish to disagree with you, but he is right. Peace negotiations take much time! I watched your husband conduct them for many years among the warring islands of our homeland!"

"Call the ambassadors out here!"

Yasahiro stared. "My... Lady?"

"Call the ambassadors out to the beach."

Jingo turned to watch the small cutter rowing out to her ship, with her baby aboard. She sighed.

When she looked back to the Tent, there was a row of richly dressed ambassadors watching her. They had brought chests of gold, and cups of spice from strange lands over the mountains, and silken liveries.

Jingo took a deep breath.

"My husband was killed eight months ago on this very spot," Jingo said, pointing to the sand at their feet.

The ambassadors stared. For months they had protested their innocence in the matter. Such cries had fallen on deaf ears, and turned to cries for war.

Jingo reached for her scabbard. Slowly, with a terrible grace, she withdrew a long katana sword. The sun was setting, and its dying light reflected like a bloodstain on the blade flat.

Yasahiro’s eyes grew wide. "My Lady," he whispered. "You can’t do this!"

She looked at her trusted soothsayer. "Can’t do what, Yasahiro?"

He leaned very close. "The treasures of these lands are ours now. Everything is ours now! If you kill these ambassadors, we will only encourage more warfare! Accept their surrender and gifts, and then we can squeeze from them much, much more!"

"Is the glitter of gold why we fought this war?"

Yasahiro sighed. "No. We fought it to avenge your husband. I’m simply saying that – "

She stepped past him, approaching the ambassadors. "My soothsayer Yasahiro told me how my beloved husband sat beneath the White Tent, to talk peace and prosperity between our might kingdoms. We are the only civilizations in the known world! My husband sat right there, and negotiated for mutual exchanges and learning. And later that night, Yasahiro told me, an assassin crept up and cut his throat."

The ambassadors were a row of grim figurines.

Jingo bowed to them.

"Gomen nasai," she said, offering the deepest apology her language could allow. "My apologies to you all."

In a blinding flash, her sword swept backwards like a spear of pure silver. Yasahiro gasped, skewered by the blade.

Jingo turned slowly while the ambassadors gaped. "Yasahiro, who was the last to see my husband alive. Who was promised great riches as a result of this war!"

"My..." His eyes bulged. "Not... true."

Jingo’s eyes narrowed with hate. "Oh, it is very true. Everyone assumed I, the young mother-to-be, was a simple creature. The tongues of your conspirators grew lax in the presence of such a simple creature!"

Yasahiro slumped to his knees, staring at his bloody fingers where he had fingered the wound.

"You killed my husband," she said. "And manipulated me into war."

The sword reflected like a milky flash in his eyes, as it was raised high above his head.

"My beautiful Empress," he said. "Let me live! Let me undo the wrongs I have done! I am a soothsayer! If you strike at me, you strike at the greatest guide to the future your kingdom has ever known! Let me live and I will atone for my mistakes! I will call upon all the gods to guide your every action, so that it will yield a golden future for you and your child! I will be your slave, willingly." His eyes quivered, and a small smile formed on his lips. "Let me live!"

"No," she said, and lopped his head from his shoulders.

* * *

An hour later, with peace secured between Japan and the Korean kingdoms, Jingo was back aboard her vessel. The stars burned coldly above, and the ocean reflected it so that the entire fleet seemed to be floating across the heavens.

In her cabin, Jingo looked tenderly upon her sleeping baby boy.

Yes , she thought, tears in her eyes. I will be a good mother.

______________________________________________________________

Brian Trent is a historical novelist and screenwriter with a diverse background in journalism, travel, and education. His award-winning work has appeared in The Humanist (including the May/June '04 Cover Story) Writer's Digest, Elements of Literature, and World News Chronicle, and his novel Remembering Hypatia was nominated for Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. He lives in Connecticut.