The Merry Widower, a merchant brig bound for the Orient, met the rolling waves of an Atlantic storm, leaping and rolling like a wild mount trying to cast off her rider. Her sailors clung to her, soaked by the spray and blasted by the wind, guiding her along the only course that could keep her afloat, her bow aimed at an angle to ride with the waves, bursting through their crests and plunging down into their hollows before rising again. Were she to turn to either side, the waves would roll over her and capsize her in a minute.

Above, she was a mass of straining sailcloth and ropes that held the masts in tension to resist the terrible forces; below decks she was a dark maze of crates and framed canvas partitions, and the sick sour smell of the bilgewater grew thicker as you went down.

Planks squeaked and timbers groaned, and water spurted through the seams as the pitch and oakum caulking was overwhelmed by the relentless assault of the seawater. In a space that was not a cabin but simply a small space between the square crates and the curving hull, in near perfect blackness, the woman lay.

Despite the cold, she sweated. Her hair was stringy and filthy, her clothes ripped and stained, and her belly was swollen like a ripe pomegranate. The waters had broken in her some time ago, fouling her skirt, and now she strained and trembled, her whole world taken up by the pressure and pain of the burden inside her.

Above her, the business of the ship went on, parting shrouds were re-riven, sails adjusted, and the seamen casually performed acrobatic feats aloft in the rigging despite the gusting wind and foul weather, risking death in the normal course of their duties. There were none who could spare time to come below and assist her, had they even been aware of her plight; even the ship's surgeon, who was now functioning as the ship's carpenter.

Time for her was long stretches of dull pain, pierced by brilliant agony as her womb squeezed. It felt as if all her guts and the breath of her body were being expelled at each contraction. The stink of the bilge mixed with her sour sweat and the reek of piss, and if she'd had any more in her to vomit, she'd have been bringing it up now.

There was movement, now. She screamed her throat raw as she pushed and held it, the pain blasting her senses and sanding her attention down to one needle sharp point, the agony of the pressure and the movement...

And at last, the bloody thing was delivered. Gray waves rolled over her vision and her hearing buzzed as she came to the brink of passing out. She breathed in gasping spasms, unable to move, to do anything but hang on, persist somehow...

A choking bubbling cry roused her again. She reached with all of her slowly returning strength, feeling between her legs, until she felt the soft flesh, her own flesh... She drew it up to her breast, blindly scraped at the blood and mucus on the tiny face with a corner of her shirt. It was a boy. He choked, cried and wriggled, his small senses overwhelmed, but between the dark of the womb and of the hold there was no perceptible difference.

She held him to her chest as the ship rocked and bucked on the waves like a horse in a wind-swept meadow. The shouts and cries of the sailors sometimes pierced the rushing winds and the roar of the seawater.

The baby squalled again.

"Think you have it rough, kiddo?" she croaked, with one hand cradling his tiny form as she sank into the sleep of utter exhaustion. She snored, holding the baby to her chest, warming him under her shirt against the chilly air of the hold with not even a blanket to swaddle around him.

And above deck, the sailors screamed into the harsh winds and hauled with every ounce of strength at the ropes, not knowing that the ship now carried two stowaways…