The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 19

Chapter 19: Scratches

Her vision came back, but it was hazy.

Huh? What was I doing, again?

Maomao sat up slowly; her body felt heavy.

“H’lo there! You awake?” said an upbeat voice. It was accompanied by a familiar face.

“M-Master Lihaku?”

It was the big, friendly mutt of a soldier. Maomao looked around, trying to make her brain work. She wasn’t in a room, but a tent. To one side, she could see Chue stewing something in a pot.

That was all well and good—but then she saw an insect at the edge of her vision. She jumped to her feet. “Grasshopper!” she cried, immediately crushing it underfoot. Having only just woken up, however, the motion nearly made her fall down.

“Whoa! Hey, young lady. Killing one grasshopper won’t make any difference, okay? And you’ve got to take it slow,” Lihaku said.

“He’s very right, Miss Maomao. Here, eat this.” Chue sat her back down on the bed and offered her a bowl of something. She took it and ate a bite. It was a rice pudding, faintly salty.

Once Maomao had some warm food in her, the memories started to come back. There was a swarm of grasshoppers, and then a hailstorm, and then...

“How long was I out?” she asked.

“One whole day,” Chue replied. “You took a good whack on the head from a big piece of hail. I was afraid it would be dangerous to move you, so we put you here in this tent.”

Maomao thought she had made the right choice. She also felt downright pathetic, falling unconscious right when they needed her most.

Sounds like I was in pretty bad shape.

Maomao was only human. No one would blame her if the unprecedented situation had pushed her over the edge. But it was still true that in succumbing she had made life harder for the others.

And to think, the taibon didn’t bother me. The locked room full of snakes and venomous insects in the Shi clan fortress had been no problem at all.

“There’s no need to feel down, Miss Maomao. You just got a little confused and took the bug-killing a bit too far. Your Cat-brand pesticide is on the strong side. Might poison the earth, you know. But it worked! We’ve thinned it down and now they’re using it to kill the rest of the bugs.”

“The rest of them?”

“The short version is, we’re on the other side of this. It helped a lot that the hail came and dropped the temperature. But some of those grasshoppers are hardy little stinkers, so they’re out there dealing with them.”

“I’m helping with that,” Lihaku chimed in, raising his hand. Why was he here? “A swarm of grasshoppers showed up in the western capital too. Not as many as here, but it’s been ugly. Our good buddy Jinshi is beside himself—he ordered me to go to the village you were at right away, little lady. I got here about half a day ago.”

“Meanwhile, my silly little brother went back to attend the Moon Prince. This has been your report on the situation!”

This was probably the most Jinshi could do. Basen, meanwhile, would presumably still be full of vim and vigor, even after a fast ride back.

“Boy, it was something!” Lihaku said. “Those guys in the western capital, it looked like they’d never seen an insect plague before. I mean, neither have I, right? But they warned us something was coming. They warned us over and over!”

Lihaku was, as his appearance suggested, stout of heart. He had been an excellent choice for this expedition.

“Oh, right!” he added. “The old fart was there too—he was all, ‘Maomaoooo! Where’s my Maomaaaoooo?!’ Boy, did he go wild! The poor old doctor was cowering in the medical office!”

“Ugh...” Maomao could imagine the freak strategist’s reaction all too well.

“Our buddy Jinshi, he really thought on his feet I guess, because he said not to worry, because he’d sent you somewhere there’s no plague. Biggest lie I ever heard!”

“When I was literally on the front lines...” Granted, Maomao had volunteered for it, but the lie was convenient, no question.

“The old fart organized a grasshopper extermination squad. He helped control the chaos in the city too.”

Maomao didn’t respond immediately. It actually sounded like things were more or less under control in the western capital. It was the other farming villages that worried her.

Speaking of which...

“Lahan’s Brother—is he okay?” she wondered aloud.

“Ohh, you mean Potato Guy?”

“If he hasn’t sent any letters, that’s probably good news, right?” Chue said.

“I don’t know. The last thing he sent sounded pretty bad, and now here we are with grasshoppers everywhere...”

As ordinary farmers went, he was quite distinguished, but he’d been pressed into service on this expedition, then sent into the teeth of the oncoming swarm.

Thank you, Lahan’s Brother... Maomao looked at the ceiling of the tent. She tried to picture Lahan’s Brother’s smiling face, but then she realized she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him smile. He was usually either angry, or at his wits’ end, or quipping at somebody.

I wonder if he’s even still alive. She knew he’d been sent with trustworthy bodyguards, so she wanted to believe he’d survived all this.

“You wouldn’t happen to know the extent of the damage, would you?” she asked. The swarm had come and gone; that couldn’t be changed now. The question was how they would respond.

“About eighty percent of the wheat harvest was in,” Chue informed her. “The unharvested wheat was destroyed, but it was a bumper crop this year, bigger than average. Subtract the wheat from the one house that burned down, and the harvest comes out to about seventy percent of a normal year.”

“Seventy percent?” Considering the scale of the destruction, that sounded almost miraculous to Maomao. Maybe Lahan’s Brother really was that good a teacher and guide. They couldn’t think exclusively in terms of wheat, though. “What about other damage?” she asked.

“Most of the straw was eaten, and so was most of the pasture grass for the animals. The potato fields have pretty much been reduced to stems, but we think they might grow back.”

Chue made it sound so simple, but she must have been uncomfortable with the gravity of the situation, because flowers and flags kept popping in and out of her hands. Lihaku watched her raptly, never seeming to tire of the display.

“Let’s be honest—the other farming villages are probably pretty much annihilated,” said Chue.

“Good old Jinshi keeps sending post-horses to the nearest village every time he gets a letter from Lahan’s Brother, but I’ll bet most places weren’t prepared as well as this one was,” Lihaku added.

“Good point. Things didn’t get too chaotic around here,” Chue said.

So this was “not too chaotic,” huh? Maomao had thought she was inured to a certain amount of pandemonium, but it seemed Chue was even more composed than she was.

And there was still the matter of the person who had done more than anyone on this occasion...

“Where’s Rikuson?”

“Outside, I think. Wanna see him?” Chue asked.

In the midst of the turmoil, Rikuson had remained completely calm. In fact, he had looked downright used to it. He’d done more than simply keep his wits and kill grasshoppers—he’d seemed to understand on a deep level how people in a panic would act. What he’d done, running from one house to another and talking to the villagers, might not have looked like much, but without it, it was possible that much more grain would have burned.

Even after Maomao’s stern warnings not to use fire, the villagers had still done so. Trapped in suffocating, lightless houses, with frenzied voices screaming outside, anyone would have been pushed to the edge. Maomao’s saw now how important it was to have a level voice come from outside.

What’s his story? she wondered as she left the tent. Chue followed, perhaps to keep an eye on her.

It was chilly outside, a lingering effect of the hailstorm. Grasshoppers still crawled along the ground, and a few people were trying to catch those that were still in the air. In the center of the village was a hideous black pile of what Maomao assumed were collected bugs. It seemed to be writhing ever so slightly, and she didn’t want to get too close.

The villagers who had been shut up in their houses were filtering out into the streets, stunned. When they’d left the wheat fields, taking the ears into their homes, they had been full of stalks—but now they were devastated and worthless. Even though she had heard Chue’s report on the damage, Maomao struggled to comprehend the reality in front of her eyes. She passed the potato fields, reduced to stems, and saw for herself the bald pastures.

The grass fields were less thoroughly destroyed than the wheat, but it was a matter of degree. The animals had been let out into the fields, but seemed restive and uneasy. Chickens pecked at the grasshoppers here and there on the ground.

Wonder if they taste good? Maomao had in fact tried some herself once, but she couldn’t get over the way they looked—they just didn’t appear tasty.

The duck was staring this way and that, surveying the area. Looking for Basen, maybe.

“Aren’t you curious how the grasshoppers taste, Miss Maomao?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Chue?”

Maomao had a bad feeling about this.

“I whipped this up—just to see if it was edible!” She produced some sort of stir-fry. It was very Chue-esque, to pull it out of thin air like that, and she seemed to have read Maomao’s mind.

Maomao didn’t say anything.

“I got rid of the heads, carapaces, and legs—didn’t seem good for the digestion. I threw out the innards too—never know what they’ve been eating.”

We need hardly explain what this foodstuff was—although Chue had managed to completely disguise it.

“You made the right choice, taking out the guts. They ate poisonous grasses and even each other. But once you’ve taken all that out, I’m not sure what’s left.”

“You’re so right—there’s so little of them you can eat! Anyway, dig in!”

Maomao took an unenthusiastic bite.

“What do you think?”

“Hmm... Well, it’s not physically inedible...”

“But given the amount of work that goes into preparing it, you’d suggest something else.”

“Yes, I’d say so.”

This was Chue’s cooking, so it was bound to have some pretty nice seasonings. The fact that, in spite of that, it still only rose to the level of “not inedible” did not speak well for the merits of this dish. Nor were the people standing and staring vacantly at fields devastated by the grasshoppers likely to want to turn around and eat them. The nutrition they afforded would be small compensation for the damage they had done.

The rest of Chue’s dish disappeared back into thin air, then she tugged on Maomao’s sleeve as if she had noticed something. “This way, please!” she said.

Maomao followed her along until they stopped in front of one of the savaged houses. She could hear voices inside. When she looked in, she found Rikuson talking with some villagers.

“I understand,” he was saying. “We’ll pretend this never happened.”

“I’m very sorry. I hate to go back on a promise, even an informal one.” Several villagers, along with the headman himself, bowed their heads to Rikuson.

“No, I understand. Considering the scale of the destruction, I can’t blame you. In fact, I consider us fortunate that the damage wasn’t any worse.”

One look at the bag sitting on the table between the parties was enough to explain what they were talking about. It was the same one Rikuson had used to motivate the complacent villagers before the swarm arrived—the bag full of money. He’d promised to buy their wheat at double the market price.

This can’t be the only village that’s suffered this sort of destruction. And I guess they can’t afford to sell their surplus.

“Good day, sir.” Rikuson put the bag in the folds of his robe and left the house. As he came out, he saw Maomao. “Maomao, you’re awake? Are you all right?”

She showed him her head and palms. Her head felt fine, but her hand still throbbed. Chue had tended to it while she was unconscious, though, applying a salve and bandaging it, so it was better than it could have been.

Chue gave Rikuson a nudge. “You’ve got some guts carrying that thing around, Mister Moneybags! You know there could be bandits around here, right?”

“Oh, heavens. I’m merely a middling bureaucrat. I don’t have the money to buy an entire village’s wheat supply.” He stuck out his tongue playfully and then took out the bag. It was full of Go stones.

“Well, well!” Chue said.

“I carry them with me everywhere. A habit from my last position.”

That, of course, would have been as aide to the freak strategist. Rikuson, Maomao thought, had proved himself to be a first-class con man.

“I’m sorry. Did you need something with me?” he asked.

Need something? Hmm.

She’d mostly just followed Chue. Chue and Lihaku between them had given her a pretty good idea of where things stood, so there was no real need to ask Rikuson about it. She did think, though, that Rikuson was probably the one who had been the most shocked when she was knocked unconscious. She felt she should apologize.

“I’m terribly sorry for getting knocked out like that. I was one more problem when you already had enough to deal with.” She bowed to Chue too, just for good measure.

“Not at all. I’m just glad you’re not seriously hurt.”

“All right, then. See you.”

“What? Is that all?”

“Is that all?” Well, there were other things she wanted to ask Rikuson, but there was no need to rush. There were still a lot of grasshoppers around, and she thought she should stay out of the way. Maybe Rikuson was tired of thinking about grasshoppers, and wanted a change of subject. Unfortunately, Maomao was in no better position than he was to come up with something distracting.

Instead she said, “You seem to have a very good idea what you’re doing here, Rikuson. Do you have some sort of experience with this kind of thing?” The way he had kept his head the whole time—even being the former aide to the freak strategist wouldn’t give you that kind of composure.

Rikuson gave her a gentle smile. “I learned it from my mother. You must never lose sight of yourself no matter what the situation, she said.” Then, for a second, his expression faltered. “Her last words to me were ‘When you most want to break down, that’s when you must be most calm.’”

“Her last words?”

“Yes... Our house was attacked by brigands. My mother and older sister hid me where I wouldn’t be found...and then they were killed before my eyes.”

This conversation had abruptly turned much darker than Maomao had expected.

“If I made a sound, I would have been killed too. But I couldn’t—couldn’t cry out, couldn’t yell. My mother, knowing very well that I would have screamed my rage and tried to jump on the killers, stuffed a gag in my mouth and bound me hand and foot. So it was that, unable to do anything, I watched my mother and sister die—but because of that, I survived.”

That wasn’t an easy story to respond to. Maomao replied in the only way she could think of. “Because you survived, so did this village.”

Whatever had happened in the past was no concern of hers—but if, as a result of his experiences, Rikuson was able to save this village, then she had to be grateful for those experiences. And, too, she had to acknowledge his uncommon courage.

“I appreciate that, Maomao—that way of looking at it.”

“Oh?”

She wasn’t Rikuson. She had no way of knowing how he would have reacted if she’d responded with an excess of emotion. He was a grown man, not some sullen teenage girl, so she’d figured there was no need to shower him with fulsome sympathy.

Rikuson smiled again. “I feel like you and I get along quite well, Maomao. Do you think I could seek your hand in marriage?”

“Surely you jest,” she said. She wasn’t about to take his polite banter seriously.

“Yes, of course. Surely,” Rikuson said, and chuckled.

I’m not sure I realized he was the type to make that kind of joke, Maomao thought, surprised. Then again, he’d said something similar last year, the last time they’d been in the western capital. Maybe this was just another side of him.

Chue poked her head into the conversation. “Wow-ow! Are you going to leave Miss Chue out in the cold? Is there room for one more in your little relationship drama?”

“Miss Chue is a married woman,” Rikuson said mildly.

“Yes! Married with child! But everyone says I don’t look it. How’d you know?” Chue gave him a puzzled cock of the head.

She really doesn’t look it. Chue was far, far removed from Maomao’s idea of an ordinary housewife.

“Well, you see, the eldest son of the Ma clan is famous in certain circles.”

“Oh, yes! My husband passed the civil service exam when he was in his teens—that’s enough to make anyone famous. Sad to say, he quit pretty quick, though. Thanks to him, Miss Chue had to go right back to work after the birth!” She placed her hands together.

“And what’s become of your child? It can’t be very old yet, can it?” Rikuson asked.

“My sister-in-law is taking excellent care of it!”

Maomao had been aware of the existence of this child, in general terms, but now she found that Chue didn’t seem to be remotely concerned about her offspring. Maomao realized that not only had she never heard the child’s name, she didn’t even know whether it was a boy or a girl. Even knowing that Chue’s sister-in-law, Maamei, would no doubt do an excellent job raising the child, her approach seemed laissez-faire in the extreme.

“All right, I have to get back to helping with the grasshoppers,” Rikuson said with a polite bow of his head.

“Okay. I’ll—”

Just as Maomao was wondering what, in fact, she would do, a voice came from behind her.

“Heeey!” She turned to find Nianzhen waving at her. What did the one-eyed old man want? “Y’have any more of that poison?”

“Poison?” Maomao gave him a questioning look.

“The one that kills bugs! The one you boiled up in that big pot. I’m gettin’ nowhere crushing insects one at a time. I want to scatter that stuff on everything and wipe them out.”

“Oh! You mean the pesticide.” Maomao had a hazy memory of her desperate quest to make the stuff.

“Right! The poison!”

“Poison...”

Maomao wanted to point out that that wasn’t exactly what it was, but Rikuson stopped as he was leaving to say, “Yes, that poison was astoundingly effective.”

“All right, hold on...”

“Oh! It’s the Poison Lady!” said one of the villagers who had spotted Maomao. “Think you could whip up some more poison for us?”

“Yes, I need some poison, please. The kind you have to thin out to keep it from killing anyone!” said another villager.

“That poison worked like nothing I’ve ever seen. What in the world was in it?”

The villagers crowded around her.

It’s not p-p-p...

Before Maomao could get the words out, Chue clapped her on the shoulder. She gave her a knowing look and shook her head. Maomao swallowed hard.

“Please, use it only as directed,” she said.

And so Maomao found herself gathering toxic herbs once again.

About the time Maomao had made a generous quantity of pesticide, Lihaku called, “Heeey, little lady!”

“Yes? What’s the matter?”

“Looks like you’re all set making your poison. I thought maybe instead of sticking around here, we should head back to the western capital to report in. I can leave the soldiers who came out here with me to help clear away the rest of the bugs. Sound all right?”

“Yeah, might be a good idea... And by the way, this isn’t poison, it’s pesticide.”

Maomao looked out at the village. She’d shown the farmers how to make the pesticide, and even written simple instructions for them.

“If we don’t hurry back, that old fart’s gonna figure out he’s been had,” Lihaku said.

“Oh, right. He was told I was somewhere there was no plague, wasn’t he? I’m impressed he believed it.”

However crazed he might have been, the freak strategist’s inexplicable sixth sense always seemed to be up and running. Strange to think someone had successfully lied to him.

“Our buddy Jinshi is no mean tactician himself. He used the ol’ doctor.”

The ol’ doctor. In other words, the quack. Maomao knew Jinshi had been making nice with the physician recently. She wondered how he had used him.

“He explained to the ol’ doctor what was going on with you, and let him let the old fart know. Y’know, he told him indirectly!”

Maomao went quiet: that really was a good idea. Also, the ol’ doctor this and the old fart that seemed like it could get confusing.

The quack doctor was a pudgy, middle-aged man, but in zoological terms he was sort of in the same category as mice or squirrels. He occupied roughly the same place in the hierarchy as Basen’s duck.

“Once things have quieted down, we need to show up in a hurry or the old fart will start to smell something fishy.”

Maomao looked at her palm. It was still visibly marred from making the pesticide. “What do we do about this?” she asked.

“I have a little change of clothes for you!” Chue said, promptly producing them.

“Just tell everyone something went a bit wrong, y’know? You’ve already got all that stuff on your left arm,” Lihaku said, gesturing at the offending appendage, which was covered in scars from Maomao using herself as a test subject for her medicines. She’d never specifically mentioned it, but apparently he had figured it out.

Come to think of it...

As overprotective as the freak strategist could seem, he’d never once objected to her being a food taster, checking for poison. He would instantly put the screws to anyone who threatened to harm Maomao in the slightest way—but maybe he chose not to interfere when it came to threats Maomao chose for herself.

She wondered if Lihaku had one of his instinctive reads on that aspect of the strategist.

“Good point,” she said. She figured he was right: no one would question a minor injury to her hands at this point. “All right. Shall we go home?”

So she put the devastated village behind her.