Emperor's body or the pregnant consort Kwasei, the enemy renew their attack. Having beaten them off, he resolves to save the unborn heir to the throne, and to abandon the corpse.
Meanwhile his own infant child begins to cry for his natural nourishment. "What a nuisance!" he exclaims. But on second thoughts he reflects that the child is his own heir, and that it would be on the whole better to save him. So he binds him firmly to the shaft of his spear and retreats to the seashore with Kwasei, pursued by the enemy. Kwasei is killed by a bullet, and Go Sankei, by an improvised Cesarean operation (coram populo!), rescues her living child, a beautiful boy, which he wraps in his dead mother's sleeve. "But stay! if the enemy find that the child is gone, they will spare no pains to discover it." So he stabs his own child, who, it may be remembered, was all this time lashed to the shaft of his spear, and substitutes it for the infant Prince. Exit Go Sankei.
Enter Go Sankei's wife with the Princess. They hide among the reeds by the seashore. A Tartar officer named Godatsu follows in pursuit. He takes a small boat and searches all the creeks near them. Riuka (Go Sankei's wife) catches his oar and overturns his boat. He goes to the bottom, and Riuka gets into the boat with the Princess. Godatsu comes up from below all dripping, and a combat ensues, in which Godatsu has his head cut off by Riuka. Then, as in her bedraggled and blood-stained condition she is no fit company for a princess, she shoves off the boat containing the latter, which is carried away by the wind and tide, and remains behind on the shore. The chorus describes the situation in poetical imagery.
