Chapter 20: Confirmation
When she got back to the western capital, she found it in a bad state.
Things really were worse here, she thought. She surveyed the city with a sense of detachment. There were still grasshoppers on the roads and crawling along the walls of buildings. Sometimes she saw black clumps squirming, but she chose not to look too closely.
She suspected the actual number of grasshoppers was less than it had been in the village, but she could see chewed-up street stalls and gnawed fruit on the ground everywhere.
City folk don’t cope well with insects.
The people here had probably reacted to the swarm very differently than the villagers. She saw hardly anyone outside. The farmers had their crops to think of, so they tried to exterminate the bugs to keep the plants safe, but simple fear ruled the inhabitants of the western capital.
“How bad was the chaos?” she asked Lihaku, who was sitting on the driver’s bench. Rikuson had said he would stay in the village for a few more days. That was all well and good for the villagers, but Maomao was surprised that he didn’t feel he should return to the western capital to deal with this emergency.
“It was bedlam. Rain and hail!”
“Didn’t anyone warn them the swarm was coming?” If Jinshi had managed to send word even to her, he must have had some plan in place in the capital.
Lihaku, however, said, “This is the western capital. There’s an order to things, y’know?”
“I see...”
Jinshi could hardly run through the streets shouting at the top of his lungs. Unlike Maomao, he had his position to think of. He could do nothing unless he did it through the officials here in the city.
“Looks like he did better than nothing, though,” Lihaku said.
In a large town square, there was what appeared to be a food distribution taking place. Maomao was surprised—had the bugs really caused that much damage and exhaustion? It had been several days, though. Not every household was going to have extensive provisions on hand.
A lot of poor families are living hand to mouth to begin with. Often, it was the best they could do to earn a day’s wage, then spend it at a stall for dinner that night. A handful of places to eat were still open, but in the chaos, distribution networks had dried up, and they didn’t have much to serve.
Maomao could smell the congee being passed out even from where she was. The smell made her think: Lahan’s Brother.
It was the smell of sweet potatoes, maybe from the huge supply that had come with her and the others on the ships. The potatoes were being cooked and served to fill the bellies of the starving townsfolk.
“So they’re using up the potatoes on this distribution,” Maomao observed.
“Oh, Lahan’s Brother, we hardly knew ye... It hurts so much to lose him...” Chue’s eyes brimmed with tears. She was treating him like he was dead?
“I’d say if they’re coming in useful, that’s fine, isn’t it? I’m sure Potato Guy is out there somewhere, smiling,” said Lihaku.
Out there? Where would that be? From the way Lihaku talked, it was hard to tell if he thought Lahan’s Brother was alive or dead.
The carriage arrived at the annex. People gathered at the gate when they heard the whinnying of the horses. Specifically, the people were the quack and Tianyu.
“Young lady! You’re back!” An exhausted-looking, haggard man raced up to Maomao. Lihaku grabbed him by the scruff of the neck before he could collide with her. The little guy struggled and flailed—it was the quack doctor.
“Master Physician, are you all right?” Maomao said with a bow. Lihaku put the quack back on the ground.
“What about you, young lady? You’re all right, aren’t you? I know you were somewhere safe, but you must have been so scared! I certainly was! I would have sworn the world was coming to an end!”
“Yes, sir. I know you faint at the sight of a cockroach.”
He’d come to her white as a sheet more than once after encountering a particularly vicious bug while cleaning. A swarm of grasshoppers must have been a living hell for him.
“It’s not fair, Niangniang. Why did you get to evacuate? Man, it must be great having real connections!” Tianyu was as full of sarcasm as ever, although Maomao wasn’t sure how far he actually believed what Jinshi had said.
“Are you sure it’s all right to leave the medical office empty?” Maomao asked. That was, truly and sincerely, the first thing on her mind when she saw them.
“Ahh, we’re not that busy,” Tianyu said. “Maybe ’cause we’re mostly supposed to take care of the Moon Prince. Dr. You and the others, now, they have a lot to do!”
The two of them have time on their hands because they’re in charge of Jinshi? Something about that seemed strange.
“That reminds me, young lady! Master Lakan was so very worried about you!”
“Oh.”
That was not especially useful information.
“He seems to have quite a sweet tooth. You should take some mashed sweet potato treats and go say hello to him. He was ravenous for them the other day!”
She wished she could ignore the good doctor’s suggestion, but if she did, she suspected the other party would only come visit her instead. Anyway, she had a bigger problem: the quack was taking advantage of Lahan’s Brother’s absence to cook their seed potatoes.
“Gracious, young lady, you’re hurt! What in the world happened to your hand?”
“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. I was making pesticide. It’s from experiments with that.”
“Experiments? You’re not an insect, young lady!” The quack looked genuinely perplexed.
“If it can kill a cat, it’ll work for sure on a bug,” Tianyu interjected.
“All right, you two, that’s enough chatter,” Chue said as she came into the room. “We have lots we want to tell you!”
“Tell us?” the quack said.
“About this bug-killing concoction.”
“Ahh, yes, of course. Sorry, sorry.” The quack politely made way. Tianyu didn’t look like he was going to be a problem—he’d only shown up to make smart remarks.
Many important people, not just Gyokuen, lived in excessively large houses, but Jinshi’s chambers were located in the innermost sanctum of this one. That was all very respectful to him as a guest, but frankly, it was a real hike.
“All right, nobody’s clothes are rumpled? Excellent,” Chue said, inspecting Maomao’s and Lihaku’s outfits. Maomao saw a stray hair or two on Chue’s head, so she patted it down.
“Excuse me, we’re he—” Maomao said, but she was interrupted by a tremendous crash the moment they entered.
Jinshi was sitting in a somewhat less than formal posture. Suiren and Taomei attended him as usual, while Gaoshun and Basen were there too, both looking a bit uncomfortable. “Quack!” quacked the duck next to them. Would it be better to say something quippy about the bird, or not?
Basen had left the duck behind, and she had returned with Maomao and the others. The way she’d gone straight back to Basen the moment they’d arrived at the annex—she was more like a dog than a duck.
Seems like Gaoshun’s sort of thing, Maomao thought. Contrary to appearances, he had a soft spot for sweet treats and small animals. He probably found the duck’s presence healing.
Okay, can’t spend all my time looking at the duck.
She glanced at Lihaku to ask how they would handle the report. He took a half step back—apparently he wanted her to do the talking. Chue likewise retreated.
“We’ve just returned, sir,” Maomao said, standing a little straighter and talking a little more properly because Taomei was there. If it were just Gaoshun or Suiren, that would be one thing...
“Very good,” Jinshi said with an air of detached authority. He seemed to feel the same way as Maomao, because his face wore his proverbial “Moon Prince” mask. Taomei had been one of Jinshi’s nursemaids, Maomao gathered, but her...approach to child-rearing had been rather different from Suiren’s.
“And how was it?” he asked.
A fair question, but about all Maomao could do was repeat what she had heard from Chue. “The harvest was severely impacted, but not annihilated. As far as the wheat goes, we think there’s about seventy percent of a normal year’s harvest left.”
“Then Lahan’s Brother’s message reached you in time.”
He even calls him that in official meetings?
Maybe even Jinshi didn’t know the man’s name. If he never came back, Maomao wondered what they would put on his tombstone.
“We dispatched messengers to the other villages, but by all accounts, we saved less than half the harvest. And there are some places the messengers haven’t come back from yet—I can only assume things are worse there.”
As hard as he had worked, Lahan’s Brother simply couldn’t reach everyone in time. Worse, no matter how much he had endured for the sake of the villages he did reach, the rest would simply assume the higher-ups had ignored and abandoned them. Struggle as he might, Lahan’s Brother was never going to reach the finish line.
“Lihaku. How many people do you think we need to send to each village?” Jinshi asked.
“I’d say at least ten, sir. We’ll need some to take care of the bugs and some to help rebuild the houses, but the thing that worries me most is...”
“Violence? Or brigandage?”
“Both, really.”
Natural disasters like this turned life upside down for people—and that tended to do the same to the human heart. A ravaged heart could soon turn to thievery or violence. Jinshi was already thinking about what came after the grasshoppers.
Poink! went Chue’s unruly hair—she seemed to think Jinshi might ask her opinion, but she never got a turn to talk.
“Very well. You’ve done good work, Lihaku. You can return to your post,” Jinshi said.
“Sir,” Lihaku replied smartly, and left the room. The duck, for reasons unknown, followed him. Her rump quivered as she went—maybe she needed to poop.
Can ducks be housebroken?
Maomao would have assumed that was impossible, but then again, if the animal desecrated Jinshi’s chambers, Taomei was apt to roast her on the spot. Maybe the duck, sensing mortal danger, had decided to go outside. If so, it was an impressive trick.
Maomao turned to follow them, but immediately found Suiren blocking her exit.
“Can I help you?” Maomao asked.
“Ho ho ho. Perhaps you’d spare us just a little more of your time.”
When she put it that way, Maomao had no choice but to do an about-face.
Jinshi was no longer wearing his Moon Prince expression. “Is your head all right?” he asked. Basen must have told him about the wayward piece of hail and Maomao’s subsequent bout of unconsciousness. When she looked closely, she could see dark bags under Jinshi’s eyes, and his lips were dry.
“I’m not sure, sir. Sometimes a person drops dead out of the blue a few days after being hit on the head.” Even if there were no external wounds, bleeding inside the head could, apparently, still cause death.
“Then you need to be lying down!”
“No, sir. My time will come when it comes, and about the only person who could do anything about it would be my father.” Him, or perhaps Dr. Liu, but neither was here in the western capital. “So I would prefer to do what I can, while I can.”
“Explain that right hand, then.” He seemed to have noticed Maomao’s bandages.
“Scars from an experiment,” she said slowly.
“I thought you didn’t use your dominant hand for that.” He gave her a long, hard look—the reverse of their usual positions. At length he said, “Hrm. Well, fine. More importantly...you’re all right. That’s what matters.”
Oh...
She saw how his hand clenched and unclenched, and realized the “Moon Prince” had reverted entirely to Jinshi. It was almost childlike—and indeed, distressingly human.
“You must be tired. You should return to your room and get some rest.”
Now that, Maomao was grateful to hear. Chue threw her hands in the air in celebration, until she saw the look on her mother-in-law’s face and put them down again.
Maomao was eager to go back to her room, but there was one thing she needed to know. “Master Jinshi, are you not doing anything about the swarm yourself?”
It might not sound like a very respectful question—and it wouldn’t help that she’d slipped back to calling him Jinshi instead of “Moon Prince.” But after all his planning and preparation for how to deal with the plague of insects, surely he shouldn’t be lounging in his guest suite right now. Maomao pressed the point: “In these unprecedented times, surely there’s much that you could still be doing, sir?”
Her point seemed to get across.
“As you know, I am a guest here,” Jinshi said, returning to his official tone. “What I can personally do on the ground is limited. So I prepared a gift for those who can do whatever they wish.”
Maomao recalled the sweet potato congee being distributed in the marketplace.
“I saw sweet potato congee being passed out,” she said.
“Good to know they’re using it as intended.”
“Using it?”
Jinshi had already given the provisions to the western capital. It would be the capital’s ruler who got the goodwill for handing them out. The townspeople’s gratitude would be directed toward whoever had given them the food.
He’s plucked this moment right out of Jinshi’s hands! Jinshi had done all the work, but Gyoku-ou would get all the credit.
“It’s also clear enough why they allowed me to send messengers to the villages at my will. If nothing happened, they would get to blame the Imperial younger brother for trying to stir the people up. And if something did happen, the western capital would still be seen to have sent word.”
Jinshi was a far more straightforward person than he looked at first glance, and he put the nation first without regard for faction or alliance. He could be a terribly useful pawn if someone knew how to play him.
Then this convenient catastrophe had arrived.
“These westerners seem to have planned all along to use us central visitors as their errand boys and girls. We were at least saved from the worst of it in that the honored strategist took the fore.”
“B-But...”
There were people who found this more painful than Maomao. Basen remained resolutely expressionless, while Suiren and Taomei looked less than cheerful. Gaoshun, meanwhile, was nursing a very deep furrow in his brow.
“This seems to be the true reason I was summoned here—to serve as a convenient foil,” Jinshi said.
Astoundingly, the interim ruler of the western capital, Gyoku-ou, was trying to use the Imperial younger brother as his own supporting actor. Is he trying to make himself the hero of this story? Maomao clenched her fist as she realized what was going on.
They were going to be in the western capital for a while. Gyoku-ou might have been Empress Gyokuyou’s brother, but even so, Maomao had the feeling she was never going to learn to like him very much. Meanwhile, Jinshi, who seemed to keep drawing the short straw, couldn’t hide his mounting exhaustion from those closest to him.
He needs to get some sleep, and soon.
Maomao was just about to try to bring an end to the conversation when Suiren called, “Basen, your duck is making a racket outside!”
“Jofu? Is something wrong?”
“That masked owl is back. Maybe returning it to the wild wasn’t so easy...”
“It’s used to humans now,” Taomei said, breaking into a smile at the mention of the owl. Maomao was sure now: Taomei appreciated the bird as a fellow predator.
“Do you think you could go take a look? You know how to handle that thing, don’t you?” Suiren said.
“When you put it that way, I suppose...” Masterpiece of a woman though she might have been, even Taomei had to give in the face of a veteran lady-in-waiting like Suiren. Basen, worried about his duck, hurried outside too. It was already dark, so Chue lit a lantern. The sweet smell of honey floated through the air.
“Miss Chue, perhaps you’d help me with dinner preparations?” Suiren said.
“Oh, yes, certainly!” Chue replied, somehow theatrically.
Suiren gave Maomao a wink.
I get it. Real nice.
Without prompting, Gaoshun trotted out after them. He would be nearby, so as to come quickly if he were needed.
Once the two of them were alone in the room, Maomao took a deep breath, then heaved a sigh. “Master Jinshi.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you think you’re pushing yourself too hard?”
The last vestiges of the Moon Prince vanished. “Is there ever a time when I’m not?”
From the moment he had been born a member of the Imperial family, freedom had not been a word in his vocabulary. Maomao realized she had simply asked the obvious.
“How much more ‘too hard’ can you push yourself, then?” There had to be a limit to how much Jinshi could take.
“You ask tough questions. We don’t know where the limit is until we find it, do we?”
“Most people who ruin themselves beyond repair do it at work, while continually swearing they can keep going.”
That left Jinshi quiet for a moment, but his face darkened. “Isn’t that what an apothecary is for? To make them better?”
“Yes, sir. More or less. Shall I prepare an herbal bath for you?”
“No...” Jinshi held out his hand.
Huh?
Maomao stared at it, trying to decide if it had some significance. His hand was large, the fingers long. The nails were neatly clipped and filed.
The large hand stretched a little farther and placed itself on Maomao’s head.
Yikes!
He mussed her hair as if he were petting a dog. She tried to slap him away, but he dodged her nimbly.
“What the hell, sir?” she asked, patting her disheveled hair back into place. She hadn’t had a chance to bathe for several days, so it felt thick and greasy.
“I simply made myself better. So I wouldn’t reach my limit so soon.” Jinshi held his head high, as if to say he hadn’t done anything wrong.
“There must be better ways to do that, sir.”
“Is that an invitation to utilize these...ways?”
Neither of them said anything.
Maomao backed away a half step and crossed her arms in an X.
“Tell me about these ‘better’—”
“Okay, I’ve reported everything I have to report! If you’ll excuse me!” And then, with an artful dodge, Maomao ducked out of the room.
Outside, she let out a long breath. He’s been so indirect lately that I’d forgotten.
Jinshi’s true personality was to charge ahead. His methods could be brutal. If he had been showing restraint with Maomao, it was only because of the ridiculous way he’d decided to go about this.
Walking around in hopes of clearing her head, Maomao found an owl, a duck, Basen, and, for some reason, even a goat running around outside.
That goat belongs to Miss Chue.
They were turning this annex into a farm.
They have the freedom to do that.
The scene was simultaneously ridiculous and amusing. Maomao felt the edges of her mouth creep upward, and she clenched her fist, vowing to make more pesticide tomorrow.
She was going to be in the western capital for a while yet. If she was going to tell Jinshi not to push himself too hard, then she should take her own advice.
But still, she would do everything she could. She had to.
Looking forward to Volume 11.