The Japanese Princess by Charles Whiting

Author:Charles Whiting
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Six

Outside the hut in the velvet gloom, her captors were drinking what they called ‘Horse-tit wine’, kumess, sour mare’s milk fermented, and talking drunkenly. The wine had loosened their tongues and they were talking about her in the manner of the simple peasants they had once been. They were wondering whether she was built like their women and whether Japanese women had hair between their legs. They had heard that foreign women liked their breasts kissed and nipples sucked. But that was for children. Chinese women wanted the backs of their necks kissed. That was very exciting.

She sat there on the mat, listening and worrying. She had not told them she understood some Chinese when they had kidnapped her. Now her knowledge of their language had improved and she was using it to try to learn what they intended for her, bad or good.

The princess was no longer the fashionably dressed Japanese woman who had stepped off the boat in Shanghai to be so rudely abducted. The lacquered coiffeur had gone as had the white-powdered face. In place of her expensive elegant kimono, she now wore a simple black cotton peasant suit of smock and trousers. But they had not treated her badly otherwise. They had fed her well with the same plain rice diet they ate themselves. They had not attempted to rape or touch her, though once or twice she had caught some of the younger ones spying on her when she had been making water. They, like those outside now, seemed to think that foreign women would be built differently, hence the spying.

All the same she knew that they would profit from her kidnapping one way or another. Was she being held for ransom? Was that it? But if so, why hadn’t the General, her husband-to-be, paid the ransom by now? Surely he had had time enough to do so. Was there something else behind it all, she wondered.

An hour before, she had seen the return of their leader, the one with the pigtail, through a gap in the wood and straw that the hut was constructed of. He had been very excited and they had become excited too when he had slapped the case he had been carrying and said something, which she had not understood, in Chinese. Since then most of her guards had been drinking the fermented mare’s milk, getting progressively more drunk.

She sat back on her heels and thought. She was not afraid. She had never been afraid of anything because she had been taught that discipline overcame fear. Besides she would lose ‘face’ if she ever showed fear. All the same she was apprehensive. The arrival back of the pigtailed leader had changed the atmosphere of the little camp on the river. Up to now her guards had been stern and sober. Why were they getting drunk this night? Were they celebrating something, and if they were, had it anything to do with her?

She bit her bottom lip. She knew she could escape, if she wanted to, especially now when they were getting drunk.

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