The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Spring Comes to Basen (Part 1)

“Quack, quack!” said a voice.

Basen looked at the yellow-beaked, moist-eyed, fluffy-feathered white duck in front of him.

“I guess this is goodbye, duck.”

Basen had received several secret orders from the Moon Prince over the past several months. One of them concerned the likes of this domestic white duck. It was a classic bit of livestock: easy to raise, and it frequently laid eggs.

In fact, raising ducks had been the mission in question.

At first, Basen had thought the Moon Prince must be making fun of him. For all the flaws he might have, he hailed from a clan that had historically been charged with guarding the Imperial family—and now he was supposed to look after some waterfowl? He began to wonder if the Moon Prince had abandoned him.

Such, however, was not the case.

“The raising of livestock will save this country from much unhappiness, and I’m confident that you will pursue the duty diligently,” Basen had been told. If the Moon Prince was willing to give him such a vote of confidence, he could hardly decline. This had been near the end of last year.

Once he knew what his mission would be, he knew that the first thing he had to do was seek the advice of someone who knew more about raising ducks than he did.

Thus, early in the year, he’d found himself spending a great deal of time visiting one particular place...

To the northwest of the capital was a place called Red Plum Village. It was a haven for those who had left their homes and families in hope of becoming wayfarers. Wayfarers: usually that word evoked images of monks undergoing harsh training, but here things were a little different. Many here seemed to sincerely believe that their practice could make them true immortals.

Raising animals was one facet of their practice. When Basen had first heard of it, he’d doubted his ears. “I thought monks and nuns were all vegetarians,” he said.

“Immortals are long-lived unto endless life. A person can’t live on vegetables alone” was the prompt and nonchalant answer. The place was run by an old man, as Basen had heard, and if you ignored the fact that his clothes were dirty and covered in feathers, you could see that in fact he had healthy skin and stood very straight. His life might or might not prove to be endless, but he was clearly experienced in how to be long-lived.

The old Basen might have argued the point, but he liked to think he had learned a thing or two over the past several years. He decided to consider the old man to be in the same category as that eccentric apothecary and left it at that.

It turned out he had the right idea. Training wayfarers was a pretense for Red Plum Village; in reality, it was a group of researchers. Much of their practice contravened the precepts normally observed by monks and nuns, but the research was so valuable that everyone above them seemed to turn a blind eye.

“Ducks can lay up to 150 eggs a year. They’re omnivores, so they’ll eat anything, and they can start laying eggs as early as six months after hatching. They’re not so dissimilar to chickens, but if you intend to feed them grasshoppers, you’d be better off with ducks, I think—they’re physically larger. If you feed them one single type of food from infancy, they’ll come to eat that food exclusively, but that carries the risk of adversely impacting their growth, so I don’t recommend it. The only possible problem with ducks is that they don’t incubate their eggs as readily as chickens do, so...”

Basen wondered why people researching a particular field were always such windbags. Even that apothecary, Maomao, could be quite the talker when she warmed to her subject, and the bureaucrat Lahan was the same way.

Red Plum Village sprawled across a substantial area, much of which was devoted to agricultural fields. None of the “wayfarers” here wore the attire of religionists; they were all dressed to work outdoors. Their breath fogged as they worked in the fields.

“...and so as you can see, I’m terribly busy with my research, so I’m afraid I can’t entertain your request,” the old man said, finally winding down to the end of his speech.

“I’m sorry. I don’t quite follow,” Basen said.

“I’m saying that I cannot teach you, but my disciple, whom I currently entrust with the work, can. You’ll find her in that shed. Farewell.”

“H-Hey, wait!”

The old man scampered away with a quickness that belied his age. Left with no choice, Basen went toward the shed, which was periodically emitting steam. “Excuse me?” he said. “I’d like to learn about duck-keeping...” The door barely seemed to be hanging on, and when he opened it, fetid air hit him in the face.

“Y-Yes, of course. Laoshi told me,” came a nervous voice. Basen could see a small figure in the haze.

“I-It’s you!” Basen exclaimed. The small figure was a young, plainly dressed woman. The fabric of her outfit wasn’t even dyed, let alone embroidered, and her hair, held back with a simple piece of string, had no hair sticks or ornaments. Yet, even without a spot of rouge or whitening powder, she looked so much more full of life than she had the last time he had seen her. “Consort Lishu?”

“I... I’m not a consort anymore, M-Master Basen.”

Standing before him was an ephemeral princess. A member of the U clan, who had twice entered the rear palace as consort of an emperor.

“What are you doing here?” Basen asked. He immediately wished he could have said something more thoughtful. His sister Maamei would have given him a piece of her mind if she knew.

Lishu had once been an upper consort, but she had been banished from the rear palace. True, she had been manipulated by the woman people called the White Lady, but that didn’t change the fact that she had caused quite a commotion at court. Lishu had been obliged to retire from the world.

No one had told Basen so much as where she had gone or what she was doing; the Emperor said only that if he wished to see her, he should focus on doing great deeds. At a loss, Basen had recently made donations in cash and kind to several temples in hopes of making himself feel a little better—they hadn’t even told him which temple she might have been hiding at.

He was so flabbergasted by this unexpected reunion that he could hardly think.

“W-Well, as you know, I was banished from the rear palace. I couldn’t go back to my family, or to my last temple. His Majesty intervened on my behalf so that I could come here to Red Plum Village,” she said.

“Yes, but... Of all the places...”

Lishu’s outfit was filthy in spots, smeared not just with mud but animal dung. Worst of all, there was no one in this shed but Basen and Lishu, and Basen agonized over whether it was appropriate for him to be alone with a young lady.

“Have you no attendants? What happened to that lady-in-waiting who used to serve you?” Basen asked, shaken to see Lishu’s reduced circumstances—almost as shaken as he was to have Lishu right here in front of him.

“You mean Kanan? I released her from my service. She has her entire future ahead of her; she shouldn’t waste it here with me. I asked His Majesty to arrange a good match for her.” Lishu smiled and glanced down, her long eyelashes fluttering.

Basen clenched his fist. “Then you... You’re here alone?”

“You mustn’t worry. I have an old lady to look after me.”

“Just one?”

“Yes. I have no more need for heavy outfits or elaborate hair ornaments, after all.”

To Basen, Lishu’s words carried an air of self-recrimination—and yet, her expression was as clear as a cloudless sky. Basen had never been the best at guessing what a woman might have been thinking, and right now he had no idea what to say or do. Lishu was as retiring and as charming as ever, and appeared to be hard at work despite circumstances far beneath her station. Her slim fingers were caked with mud.

“This is no place for someone like you, Lady Lishu. I’ll talk to them, convince them to give you better work!” Basen said. It was the most helpful thing he could think of.

Lishu, however, shook her head. “N-No, thank you. I’m grateful for the thought, b-but these circumstances...”

“Yes? What about them?” Basen’s question was all but interrupted by quacking. He turned to find himself confronting several dozen ducks. “Gwuh?!”

The birds surrounded Basen, peering at him with their heads cocked in puzzlement. He couldn’t shake the sense that they were taking stock of him.

Then the ducks waddled over to Lishu, nuzzling up to her. She patted their wings. “A-At first, I was sure I couldn’t possibly raise ducks,” she told him. “But I’ve looked after these sweethearts since they hatched, and they think of me as their mother. Laoshi t-told me that’s just the way ducks are...”

When he heard the words ducks, hatched, and Laoshi, he finally realized Lishu was the disciple the old man had been talking about!

“Lady Lishu... You mean, you...?”

“Yes. I was told to teach you about hatching ducks.” Her stutter had vanished; perhaps she was more comfortable surrounded by the animals. “Ahem... Master Basen?” she said.

“Y-Yes? What is it?” he asked, unconsciously straightening up as if addressing one of his superiors.

Lishu glanced at him, then picked up a handful of her skirt. “I kn-know it’s a little late to be asking this, but how are your injuries?”

Basen had completely forgotten that the last time Lishu had seen him, he’d been one big pile of cuts, bruises, and broken bones.

“Oh, I’m used to getting a little injured. You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. Privately, he was overjoyed that she was concerned about him (even if that concern was only natural), but he was also a bit embarrassed. He realized Lishu had never exactly seen him at his best.

“But you suffered all that for my sake... And I never even got to thank you...”

“Lady Lishu...” Basen felt strange, simultaneously relaxed and anxious to be with this young woman. He shook his head: no, this wouldn’t do! He had business to attend to. “Well, Lady Lishu. If you would be so kind as to instruct me.”

“Y-Yes, of course,” she said, but she sounded almost disappointed.

There was a story passed down which related that long ago, when there had been a plague of locusts, the ducks had combated it by eating all the bugs. It was a legend, of course, not a serious model for policy, but at the same time, legends often contain a seed of truth. Ducks did eat insects. As omnivores, they frequently ate humans’ leftover food, but during plagues of locusts they could eat those too. A few even preferred eating bugs and sought them out.

Besides, having more livestock could only benefit the farmers. Therefore it had been decided that ducks would be distributed to the farming villages—but therein lay a problem.

How would they get these ducks that they were going to give out? Ducks were living things; one didn’t just snap one’s fingers and make more of them.

“Here, like this. The eggs should always be kept slightly warmer than human body temperature. You can’t just leave them lying there either; you have to turn them once in a while.” Lishu gently turned one of the eggs over in demonstration. It sat on a bed of straw, underneath which was soil as soft as mulch. “The eggs won’t hatch if they get too hot or too cold, so Laoshi told me I should learn the temperature by touch alone.”

“By touch alone?”

“Y-Yes. Also, they need some humidity.”

“Humidity?”

It was sticky as summer in the shed, even though outside it was cold enough for one’s breath to fog. The shed was so full of steam it was almost hard to see.

“There’s a hot spring nearby, so w-we—we get our hot water there.” Lishu rolled back the rush mat on the shed floor to reveal a channel with water, no doubt quite hot, flowing through it. “If it gets too cold, we light a fire in the oven. We have to monitor the eggs constantly, so three of us work in shifts.”

It certainly did seem like too much for one person to handle alone. Even with two others to help, Basen worried that it must be all too much for Lishu, who had spent so much of her life as a sheltered princess.

“Are you sure you’re all right here, Lady Lishu?” he asked.

“A-All right how?”

“Well, a young woman of your station shouldn’t have to be here. You could be somewhere with ladies-in-waiting attending upon you. You may be a wayfarer, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are a princess of the U clan.”

The Emperor, Basen had heard, doted upon Lishu like his own daughter. And anyway, having been caught up in the White Lady’s schemes, she was really a victim herself. In his opinion, she deserved better than this.

“Master Basen...are you worried about me?”

“W-Worried?! No! It’s simply your right, milady...”

“O-Oh. N-No, of course. I shouldn’t have assumed you would be concerned about the likes of me...”

“That’s not what I meant at all!”

Basen cursed his mouth, which couldn’t seem to string two coherent words together. If the Moon Prince were here, he would have known what to say. Basen, however, could only look at the wall of the shed and feel miserable.

“Master Basen, a-are you quite all right?” Lishu peered at him with worry. No, no—Basen was the one who was worried.

“Lady Lishu...” he began. “You’ve suffered enough. You can go ahead and live the life you want now.”

Even Basen wasn’t sure what he was saying. The life she wanted? What was that? Basen’s life was duty to the Imperial family, protecting the Moon Prince. What he wanted didn’t come into it. And he had the temerity to lecture Lishu about choosing her own life? The words sounded hollow in his ears.

“Master Basen...” Lishu seemed like she could hardly speak.

Of course not. She must have been too scandalized. Too deeply offended by the “advice” Basen dispensed so cavalierly. He resolved to learn what he had come here to learn as fast as he could and then go home.

“I... I don’t know what I want yet. What I want has never mattered. I was never allowed to choose my own life.”

“Then start now.”

“I will. And what I want is to...to go on doing this for a while longer.” She squatted down and turned another egg.

Her clothes were filthy, her hair plain, and she wore no makeup at all. Yet on her face was something Basen had never seen there before: a small smile.