The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Disaster (Part 1)

“What? A plague of insects?” a villager said, sounding exasperated.

Maomao had immediately requested the headman to gather the farmers. There were so many people packed in the place where they were meeting that it was almost hard to breathe.

“Yes! It will be here soon—within days!” Maomao said, desperate.

The villagers only laughed. “Yeah, okay, there were some bugs last year, but look at the windfall this year! Everything’s fine!”

“He’s right. The weather will be fine for a while yet. No need to trip all over ourselves getting the harvest in,” said someone else.

Then, however, someone in the group growled, “Ya lazy bastards! We’ll never make it in time with that attitude!”

“Nianzhen...” Maomao said.

It was the old one-eyed man who had lived through a plague of insects so terrible that people had resorted to cannibalism. He made no attempt to hide his anger with the villagers and their blasé attitude. He slammed the table with his right hand, the one that lacked a pointer finger.

“You lot wouldn’t know, because you won’t listen! Nothing can save you now. Me, I’m going out there and I’m going to start harvesting this minute.”

“Is’t really as important as all that, Nianzhen?” the headman asked. In a village full of very newly minted farmers, the former serf was the oldest and most experienced of all. Even the headman couldn’t dismiss him out of hand.

“I haven’t had my lunch yet, headman. Think I could go grab a bite?” asked one of the villagers, sounding entirely unconcerned.

Thank goodness Basen isn’t here. They’d made him wait outside, knowing that anywhere that Basen went, his duck was sure to follow. A quick glance confirmed that the duck was there, playing with the local kids.

Maomao was convinced that talk was futile. They should be spending this time getting started on the harvest.

Just as she was really starting to fret about what to do, Rikuson stepped forward. “Perhaps you would help if you felt there was something in it for you?” He gave them that pretty-boy smile. “We’ll buy your grain. At twice the market price.”

There was a heavy, jangly thump as Rikuson dropped a bag onto the table. It was obviously stuffed with money, easily more than a farmer would make in a year.

The villagers were immediately riveted on it.

“You... You mean it?”

“We’re gonna hold you to that, you know.”

Their eyes were feral.

“Yes, but only whatever’s in excess of your taxes. Furthermore, it only applies to whatever you can gather in the next three days.” Rikuson’s gentle tone never faltered, but what he was asking for was impossible. And yet, the fire that sparked in the villagers’ eyes never went out.

That’s the power of cold, hard cash, Maomao thought.

The villagers streamed out of the meeting place and got to work. They went back home and gave sickles to their wives, their children, their elderly family members.

Once they were alone in the hall, Maomao turned to Rikuson. “Are you sure about this? Are you even at liberty to make a promise like that?”

“If there is a plague of locusts, then grain will fetch far more than twice the average price, and we’ll come out ahead. If there’s no plague, well, I won’t have any complaints about that. Is there a problem here?”

“No, none at all.”

She should have expected him to be quick when it came to calculations like this. He’d said his mother was a merchant, and even more tellingly, he was on good terms with Lahan.

Chue, apparently inspired by what Rikuson had done, was looking highly motivated. “Are we going to work too? I think I’ll help in Mister Nianzhen’s field. What about you, Miss Maomao?”

“Me... I think I’ll get ready to help make food. And I’ll make pesticide too.”

She flipped through the encyclopedia of herbs Jinshi had given her, looking for anything that might help kill bugs. She had some misgivings about producing pesticides right next to the food they were going to hand out for people to eat, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Maomao was virtually certain the plague would occur. The only question was when.

Where was Lahan’s Brother last?

He’d been about to begin the return leg toward the western capital, but he was still deep in the western reaches of I-sei Province. He’d encountered a swarm of grasshoppers there, and had managed to dash off his message and get the pigeon in the air before the bugs were upon them.

But he didn’t have time to find proper writing utensils. The situation had obviously been desperate. The grasshoppers were already starting to carve their swath of destruction. In all likelihood they would begin moving east, toward the western capital, eating everything in their path.

It’s started now. There’s no delaying it any longer. The only questions were how they could bring this to an end, and what that would entail.

First they had to save as much of the grain from the ravenous insects as they could—harvest it, get it inside, and make sure the storehouses were shut up so tight that not a single grasshopper could get in. Now the challenge began. She didn’t have to find the best solution, she just had to keep looking for a better one.

The villagers were in the fields, harvesting grain as fast as they could.

I worry whether it’s going to rot.

Normally, grain would be allowed to sit outside several days to dry—but what should they do here? More than anything, they needed places to store the harvest.

All right, enough. If I’m going to think, I need to work while I’m doing it.

Maomao borrowed a stove and began making a huge pot of soup. She wished she could make it with some nice, astringent soy paste—her personal preference—but she suspected it might not be to the villagers’ tastes. Instead she fried up some vegetables in oil, put plenty of salt on them to give them some flavor, and then added them to a stew of milk and dried meat.

The ironic thing is, people from the central region would turn up their noses at too much milk.

She added some fragrant herbs to make it less pungent. A bit of flour to thicken it, and she started to think she might have a winner on her hands.

Wish I could do some dumplings, but I think we’d better not. Instead she would get fried bread for the entrée.

Maomao poured the soup into bowls and put the bowls on a tray, then zipped around handing them out to the workers.

“Miss Maomao, Miss Maomao! One for Miss Chue, please!” Chue flounced up to her. She’d practically transformed herself into one of the villagers, carrying a knife in her right hand and a sack in her left. The sack was full of ears of grain.

Maomao gave Chue some stew. “You’re only taking the ears of grain?” she asked.

“It was Mister Nianzhen’s idea! He said if the harvest was the only important thing, it would be faster to collect just the ears.”

Yes, that certainly would be faster than having to bend over and cut down every stalk.

Maomao and Chue sat down on a nearby fence to enjoy their meal. Maomao had already eaten her stew, so she munched on some bread.

“There won’t be time to dry everything, and it won’t fit inside if the stems are still on,” Chue said.

“Good point.”

Wheat straw was used as livestock feed and for daily necessities like reed mats. It was an important secondary product, but right now there were more important things to focus on.

“Oh me, oh my, but money is a powerful thing, isn’t it? All we had to do was whisper in their ears ‘The straw can come later,’ and look!”

The villagers had immediately traded their sickles for small knives. The children went from field to house dragging bags full of ears of grain.

“Now they’re drying them inside because the ears would fly away in the wind out here.”

“You’re quite good at getting your way, aren’t you, Miss Chue?”

“Oh, yes. You should see how I motivate my husband on nights when he’s not in the mood!”

Maomao had a thought: perhaps her brothel humor, which so frequently fell flat, would land with Chue. Sadly, no really good jokes came to mind at that moment.

She finished the last of her modest meal, vowing to work up a routine she could share.

Rikuson had been exactly right to tell the people they had three days to collect the grain: with a firm deadline in place, everyone busied themselves thinking of ways to harvest more efficiently. By the second day, more than half the grain had been taken in.

Basen, with his immense strength, proved his worth now. He could carry a full bag of grain in each hand, doing what would otherwise require several full-grown adults.

However, more delicate work, as always, eluded him.

“Oh no! What are you doing? You are hopeless, little brother-in-law!” Chue cried. Basen, trying to repair a house, had only ended up doing more damage, making himself a target for more teasing from Chue.

We can’t have the storehouses full of holes, Maomao thought. She was patching a house with mud and clay—wood was precious in this part of the country, so earth would have to do.

“I think we were just in time,” Rikuson said, looking up at the sky. Maomao looked too, and saw a small black cloud beyond the hills.

“Isn’t it a little early for the rainy season?” she asked.

“Yes... Yes, it is.” Rikuson looked pained. “A cloud at this time of year is rather troubling.”

That sounded very ominous and all, but Maomao wasn’t sure exactly what he meant.

“What’s that about the clouds?” Basen asked as he passed by, lugging a couple bulging sacks of grain as if they weighed nothing at all.

“I merely meant that it’s not a good thing to see a rain cloud at this time of year,” Rikuson said, pointing to the sky to the east.

“I hear you. There’s another cloud over there. Is that a bad sign too?”

“Over there?” Rikuson looked. Basen was pointing in the opposite direction. “I’m afraid I don’t see anything.”

“Hee hee! My little brother’s eyes are hopelessly good,” Chue broke in. “Regular folk might like to have a telescope on hand, though.” Even Chue didn’t appear to carry one of those, because she leaned forward and squinted.

Maomao joined her, narrowing her eyes and peering toward the western sky. “Clouds, clouds...”

She thought she heard a faint buzz. Then she saw some black specks that wavered in the air. They didn’t look like any rain cloud she’d ever seen.

“Miss Maomao, Miss Maomao!”

“Miss Chue, Miss Chue!”

The two of them looked at each other and nodded.

Maomao grabbed the soup pot and a pestle lying nearby and banged them together. She raced through the village, crying, “Grasshoppers! The bugs are on their way!”

Chue found some men sitting around drinking tea and gave them each a smart smack. “You heard her! Grasshoppers, incoming!”

They had to do anything they could to light a fire under these villagers. Panic would solve nothing, but at that moment, they needed everyone to give everything they had.