The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: The Farm Village (Part 2)

Lahan’s Brother stared fixedly at the earth. He reached down to check how it felt, and even put a bit of it in his mouth, then spat it out again.

“What do you think?” Maomao asked, watching him work.

A farmer’s day started early. The sun was only just cresting the horizon, but Lahan’s Brother was already up and about. Maomao had been so tired she couldn’t actually sleep well, and then she’d heard the sounds of the farmers up first thing in the morning.

They were in the fields of the farming village where they had arrived the day before. The previous night, they’d asked the headman for permission to come out here, so here Lahan’s Brother was without further ado.

Wheat was beginning to sprout in the field. Maomao wondered if the sheep and goats would eat it, but other than when they were put out to pasture, the animals were safely ensconced within a fence, so maybe it worked out.

“I think the soil is all right, and they keep it watered well. If anything, one could wish for slightly poorer soil around here.”

“It’s better if the soil isn’t as nutritious?” Chue asked, poking her head over.

And to think, she can’t have gone to sleep earlier than I did last night.

She’d returned sometime in the wee hours—her negotiations must’ve gone long. In spite of it, she seemed perfectly energetic.

Maomao figured it was best not to ask what exactly she had been negotiating about. Chue had insisted Maomao treat her the same way she always did, so Maomao kept quiet.

Lahan’s Brother stood up and surveyed the field. “Unlike most vegetables, potatoes actually grow best if the soil isn’t too rich. Sweet potato plants, if there are too many nutrients in the soil, they just grow a bunch of leaves, and no potato. White potatoes become prone to disease.”

“Ah, yes, of course. By the way, bread by itself isn’t much of a breakfast, so I’m going to make some congee too.”

“Please do, that would be wonder—”

Chue was peeling a sweet potato.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” Lahan’s Brother demanded, snatching it away from her faster than lightning.

“Awww,” Chue said, twirling around theatrically.

“This is seed stock! For planting! Not for eating!”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing but wheat around here! There’s hardly even any rice. I thought some potato would bulk it up a bit.”

“Potato congee does sound good.” Maomao realized her stomach was growling. A nice, hardy congee would be better than bread to start the day.

“We’re going to plant this! You can’t eat it!” Lahan’s Brother said as if scolding a child. He sounded strangely like Frizzy-Glasses. Maybe it was because they were brothers. A nearby sheep looked up and gave a reproving “Baa!” as if to say “Keep it down!”

“Argh... I won’t be able to use this for stock anymore,” Lahan’s Brother groaned, looking miserably at the half-peeled potato.

“It’ll make a delicious breakfast, then!”

“Sigh... I guess it had better.”

“Not by itself, though! I’ll need at least three more!”

“No! Absolutely not!” Lahan’s Brother snapped, stopping Chue before she could do any more mischief. Maomao’s fists clenched. Truly, she saw, this most ordinary man had his place to shine: it was when quipping at someone that Lahan’s Brother came into his own.

“Okay, let’s forget about breakfast for a second. Do you think we can grow crops here?” Personally, Maomao would have liked to enjoy observing a bit more of this back-and-forth, but if she didn’t keep things moving they would never get anywhere.

Lahan’s Brother crossed his arms. “This place is a lot like Shihoku Province. Not as far north as that, but weatherwise, it’s more suited to white potatoes than sweet potatoes. It’s colder than Kaou Province.”

“I guess it does feel chilly. Funny, I thought it was pretty warm in the western capital.”

In fact, my ears hurt a little, Maomao thought, pinching her nose and blowing to balance them out.

“We’re a lot higher above sea level here than in the western capital.”

“I guess so.”

“Are we really?” Chue took a map out of the folds of her robe. “Miss Chue is an excellent map reader, but this one doesn’t list the elevations. No wonder the air seems so thin here!”

“I know because my father told me all about it,” the normal person said, puffing out his chest.

“The temperature stays high in the western capital because the desert is so close. Around here, it’s a bit cold even during the day,” Chue said.

Maomao was only now starting to appreciate, on a visceral level, how different the climate could be even within a single province. “You really don’t think the potatoes will grow?”

“I’m not sure. For sweet potatoes, temperatures like what Kaou Province gets in spring and early summer are ideal, and there’s nothing quite like that anywhere here, in the desert or on the heights. It might be worth planting some just to see, but I think regular potatoes might be easier to grow. There’s just one problem...”

Lahan’s Brother looked downright stormy. There was clearly something about this situation that he didn’t like. Suddenly he lunged toward the middle of the field and began stomping on the wheat, which was still hardly taller than grass—maybe the farmers had been late planting it.

“What’s that you’re doing? I think they’re going to be very mad at you!” Chue said, although she only stood and watched.

“I’m the one who’s mad! Look how few offshoots there are on this wheat! They haven’t stomped it down at all!”

“Stomped it?” Maomao cocked her head, puzzled, as she watched Lahan’s Brother crisscross the field like an agriculturally inclined crab.

“You have to tread on the wheat to encourage tillers. It makes the roots stronger too, and the wheat more resilient. But look at this field! They haven’t been out here once! And not in any of the other fields either! More tillers means more ears! More ears means more harvest! Yet look at these pathetic crops!”

“Wow. There’s a real farmer for you.”

“Who’s a farmer?!”

Uh... Who else?

Lahan’s Brother continued his ridiculous crabwalk across the wheat field. He might not know it, like it, or want to admit it, but he was a farmer through and through. Chue must have decided the wheat treading looked like fun, because she joined Lahan’s Brother in traipsing back and forth around the field. At which point it became clear that if Maomao didn’t join them, this would never end.

They were still crab-walking as the villagers began to wake up, then began to crowd and gawk, observing the visitors’ bizarre behavior from a safe distance.

Basen popped out from among the crowd. “What are you...doing?” he asked. Personally, Maomao didn’t want to be interrogated about strange behavior by a man with a duck on his shoulder.

“You can’t call what they do around here farming!” Lahan’s Brother exclaimed from his place on the carpet.

“Please keep it down during meals, okay?” Chue said. She was stuffing bread into her cheeks like a squirrel.

Maomao and the others had gone back to their tent and decided to start by getting some breakfast. There was flatbread carrying skewers of sheep meat, and baozi. In the fireplace was a stewpot boiling with a soup of wheat and sheep meat. They were allegedly drinking tea, but it wasn’t like any tea Maomao had ever had. The color was lighter than most and it was made with goat’s milk instead of hot water.

Looks like dairy products and animal meat are the staples here. Not a lot of vegetables. There would probably have been even fewer if this weren’t a farming village.

They all ate together in the large tent. Chue’s congee wasn’t ready in time, so it would be dinner. The peeled potato had been cut thin and was cooking on the hearth.

Basen sat in front of the hearth, so Chue, Maomao, and Lahan’s Brother all got to sit somewhere warm. The others who had come with them, including the soldiers serving as their bodyguards, sat around them in a sort of ring.

The soup was hot but tasted weak; Maomao got some salt from Chue and put a pinch in her bowl. The skewers were far more satisfying than anything you could get from a street stall in the Imperial capital. The bread that served as a tray was tough; you had to break off bits of it and dip it in the soup. Put some warmed-up cheese on top of it, and it was delicious.

As for vegetables, there were a few in the soup and packed into the baozi, but the quantity left something to be desired.

“Why don’t they know how to cultivate the wheat? I’m telling you, that’s the question! Do you realize how much better the harvest would be if they stomped the crop?”

“I’m sure you’re very right. If you’re not going to eat your cheese, can I have it?”

“Hey! I haven’t even answered and you’re already eating it!”

Chue had snatched the cheese from Lahan’s Brother’s plate in a single swift motion.

She doesn’t have to do that. Cheese was one thing there was plenty of. She seemed to be taking from Lahan’s Brother just to get under his skin.

As Maomao and the others ate, they discussed what had happened in the fields earlier that day.

“We’re supposed to be out here for an inspection of the farms. So what did you see, Lahan’s Brother?” asked Basen, who already seemed to regard “Lahan’s Brother” as his name. He might normally have been more punctilious about asking what he was really called—it was almost as if there was some supernatural force at work.

“I’m not... I told you, my name is—”

“You brought those seed potatoes. Presumably you mean to plant them,” Maomao interrupted.

“I told you, Lahan said to plant them if there was anywhere good. And since he asked me, I feel like I have to see his request through, even if he is my no-account younger brother...”

He’s a surprisingly stand-up guy for someone with such a terrible family.

Nonetheless, Lahan’s Brother exuded something that made one want to mess with him.

“Okay, so you mentioned the wheat fields. Is there some sort of problem?”

“Big ones! Do these people here actually believe they’ve set up those fields properly?” Lahan’s Brother took a slug of soup.

“I admit I’m no expert, but do they really deserve to be talked about like that just because they didn’t do this wheat stomping or whatever?” Basen asked.

Maomao agreed with him. Wheat stomping improved the crop, no doubt, but it wasn’t as if the wheat wouldn’t grow without it. Maybe these people were busy with other things, and wheat stomping just fell by the wayside. Raising livestock was more important in I-sei Province, anyway.

“It’s not just the stomping. Their planting methods are all over the place. I understand that they’ve done direct sowing, but you need to at least space the seeds evenly! That’s not even to mention that they started planting too late in the season. And they need more fertilizer—lots more! The soil color was so uneven!”

“Wow, you really know your stuff. Potato?”

“I do not know my stuff! And I’m sick of eating potatoes!”

Maomao had no such objections; she was happy to take the baked sweet potato from Chue. It was perfectly sweet and delicious on its own—but spread a little butter on it, and it took on an extra dimension of richness. Chue evidently shared Maomao’s appreciation, because she discreetly took a few of them, cut them up, and started cooking them.

Maomao understood what Lahan’s Brother was getting at, but even she could think of a possible rejoinder. “Don’t farming methods vary from region to region? Maybe with them raising so much livestock here, wheat isn’t considered that important. Why develop refined techniques for working with a secondary crop?”

“You’re not wrong. I’m saying that the problem here isn’t ignorance, it’s indifference. They’ll never get much of a harvest to speak of with what they’re doing now. These people know the techniques, they just aren’t bothering to use them.”

“Because they have other sources of income, right? Is it that big a deal?” Basen asked, sipping some milk tea.

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“You mean, why would they go out of their way to do bad farming when they can just make money other ways, is that it?” Maomao said. She thought she saw what Lahan’s Brother was getting at.

“Y...Yes. That’s what I mean,” Lahan’s Brother said, relaxing somewhat now that he finally felt someone understood him.

“I don’t get it,” said Basen.

“This isn’t making sense to Miss Chue either. Explain in a way she can understand,” said Chue.

“If they can feed themselves entirely with nomadic grazing, why not do that?” Maomao said. “Settling down in one place to plant fields just makes it that much harder to raise livestock. Which implies there was some advantage to settled living that made the trade-off worthwhile.”

“Yeah. You’d run yourself ragged, trying to do this kind of thing while you traveled,” Basen observed.

“That’s right. It’s hardly unusual for nomadic herdspeople to settle down and become farmers—including, it would seem, the owner of this tent. So did they become farmers because they had no other choice, or because they thought there was some specific benefit to it? If they did it voluntarily, for the advantages, wouldn’t you expect them to be more interested in improving their harvests?”

Lahan’s Brother nodded assiduously at Maomao’s explanation, although the other two continued to look baffled.

“I guess I’m not much for explaining. Does that make any sense?” she asked.

“I mean... I get that something is off, here,” Basen said.

“It’s hard to put into words, isn’t it?” Chue said.

Maomao groaned and took a bite of her potato, which had gone cold. There was nothing else remotely sweet around here, so the potato’s sweetness was that much more pronounced.

Just then, Maomao looked toward the entrance of the tent. A couple of kids were peering in at the visitors with interest. A boy and a girl around ten years of age, probably siblings.

“Want some?” Maomao asked.

The kids looked a little intimidated, but reached out for the sweet potato, which they’d never seen before. They each took a bite, and their eyes went wide.

“Can we have more?” they asked.

“You may. But maybe you could answer some questions for me first,” said Maomao. Since the kids had come right to them, this would be the perfect chance to dig up some information.

After breakfast, they toured the village with the kids.

“Are your families looking after the fields like they should? They’re not cutting corners, are they?” Chue asked the siblings, not mincing words.

The brother and sister shared a look.

“But you can’t cut corners in a field, can you?”

“Yeah, can you?”

“I don’t think kids this young are going to understand what you’re getting at, Miss Chue.”

“You think not, Miss Maomao?” She gave the kids another cooked potato.

“The grown-ups say they can get money for starting fields. I don’t know if that’s what it means to cut corners, though.”

“Money? You mean from selling the wheat?”

The older brother shook his head. “Nuh-uh. Um... They say you get the money even if you don’t grow the crops, so life’s easy...”

“Hey! You kids! We told you to stay away from the guests!” one of the adults roared, and the siblings ran off, frightened—although not enough to drop their potatoes.

“No! Wait!” Maomao called after them, but it was too late. They were already gone.

So they get paid even if they don’t grow anything? That sounded fishy. If it was true, it would explain why they didn’t feel any compulsion to look after the crops.

“I’m sorry. Did those children do something wrong?” Maomao asked.

“No, nothing,” the villager said, although he continued to give Maomao and the others an apologetic look. In that case, Maomao wished he wouldn’t have shouted. He’d driven away two very pliant young informers. Maomao would have liked to ask them a little more about the money supposedly in those fields.

It doesn’t look like they’re hiding anything, she thought as they continued to walk around the village. To all appearances, it was quiet, peaceful. Unremarkable. There were no commercial shops to speak of; people mostly supported themselves. They said a merchant came by about once every ten days. The villagers proved to be kind and friendly. It was hard to imagine they were doing anything wrong.

Maybe the kids just misunderstood something, and now we’re overthinking it.

There was one man, however, who seemed to be taking this far harder than Maomao was.

“Poor Gege! You look ready to smash something. Try putting on a smile!” said Chue, ever ready to give Lahan’s Brother some grief.

Lahan’s Brother scowled and looked at the village fields. He carried a bag full of seed potatoes. Nominally they were here on a tour of inspection, but he’d come along seeking a good opportunity to introduce this new crop—and if he was going to give people something new to grow, no doubt he would have liked them to be a little more interested in growing it.

Lahan’s Brother always vehemently denied being a farmer, yet he was deeply devoted to the agricultural arts. He was your ordinary, good, paradoxical man. He might also have denied being ordinary, but the principle that motivated his behavior seemed as normal as the next person’s.

The world is full of elder sons who aren’t actually interested in inheriting family headship, Maomao thought, but she figured that if she pointed that out to Lahan’s Brother, he would only get angry.

The most efficient thing might have been to split up and each start asking their own questions, but they couldn’t make too much of a show of marching around. The patriarchal spirit was alive and well in I-sei Province, and a strange woman going here, there, and everywhere by herself was unlikely to be well received. They could assign a bodyguard, but it would be Maomao doing most of the talking, so it wouldn’t solve the issue.

Chue doesn’t seem to have any problem doing her own thing, though.

She’d claimed to have business to attend to and had disappeared somewhere. She could be a strange one, but Suiren accepted her, so she was probably safe.

Maomao’s best bet would be to convince Lahan’s Brother or Basen to ask questions on her behalf. If she had to choose one of them, she would choose Lahan’s Brother—Basen had a duck following him around, and the villagers were giving him weird looks.

Luckily, Maomao didn’t have to convince Lahan’s Brother to do anything—he was already doing what she wanted. Namely, asking the villagers whether there had been any damage from insects lately.

“Insects, eh?” said one of the villagers.

“Yes. Bugs weren’t especially bad last year?”

“Hmmm... Well, there’re pests that come every year. Last year just like all the others. They did plenty of damage, sure enough, but we pulled through somehow. We can thank the governor that we have food to put on our tables.”

The governor. Would that be Gyoku-ou? So the grasshoppers had been bad, but not bad enough to consume the entire crop?

“Hrm. All right. One more thing, then. That field over there—whose is that? I’d like to meet them.” Lahan’s Brother pointed at one of the wheat fields.

“What, that? Oh, that’s Nianzhen’s field. He’s an old man, lives out on the edge of town. You can’t miss his place—there’s a shrine right next to it.”

“Thanks. I’ll have a look.”

“You don’t actually mean to go see him, do you?” The villager looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“I do. Some kind of problem with that?”

“Well, look, I won’t stop you. It’s just... The old guy can throw you for a loop sometimes. He’s not a bad person, though. If it doesn’t bother you, I guess that’s fine.”

There was something funny in the villager’s tone. If anything, it made them even more curious.

Maomao and the others headed for the edge of town like the villager had told them.

“Excuse me,” Maomao said, tugging on Lahan’s Brother’s robe.

“Yeah?”

“What makes you so interested in that particular field?”

“Can’t you tell? It’s the only pretty one out there.”

“Pretty?”

There might have been better descriptors for a field, or maybe better things to describe as pretty, but Lahan’s Brother was completely serious.

“The other fields are scattershot, not laid out well—only that one is neatly divided into sections. It’s been stomped too—there’s good, strong wheat growing there.”

“If you say so.”

When he mentioned it, she thought maybe she could see it, but sadly, Maomao didn’t have that much interest in wheat.

Doesn’t look like there’s any mondo grass around here...

Thinking of wheat naturally led her to think of medicinal plants. The plant she had in mind, though, sometimes called snakebeard, really had nothing to do with wheat. Specifically, she thought of the roots. Wheat with ergot could be used medicinally, although its toxic properties tended to get more attention. Since there were no ears yet, anyway, it was hard for her to muster much interest.

There are no good plants anywhere around here!

Maomao was on the verge of suffering from a chronic lack of medicinal herbs, a condition made all the worse by the great variety of medicines she’d been able to encounter since becoming a medical assistant.

Drugs! I want to see some drugs...

Just the thought brought on a sudden episode, her breath growing ragged. There hadn’t even been any good medicine along the roadside on the way here.

“H-Hey, are you all right? You don’t look so good,” Lahan’s Brother said, concerned.

“P-Pardon me. It’s nothing...”

Easy enough to say, but she wanted to see some drugs. To smell them. She would take anything, even if it was poisonous. What was there nearby that might serve as a medicine? Maybe the sheep grazing idly in the fields.

Can you use their horns as medicine? I can’t quite remember...

She thought it was called ling yang jiao, and yang meant “sheep.” These must have been a different kind of sheep, however, because their horns didn’t look anything like the medicinal ones Maomao had seen.

Maybe they would still have a similar effect...

Arms outstretched like a hungry ghoul, Maomao reached for the sheep nearest the fence.

“Whoa! Hey! I knew there was something wrong with you!” Lahan’s Brother pinned her hands behind her back. Maomao was perfectly aware that her behavior was erratic, but her body seemed to act on its own. She just needed medicine—any medicine!

“M...Medicine,” she rasped, trying to urge Lahan’s Brother to bring her some sort of drug, anything at all.

“Medicine? Are you sick?”

“What’s going on here?” Basen asked, coming over with his duck.

“She says she needs medicine.”

“She does? Come to think of it, Lady Suiren gave me something before we left.” Basen plucked a cloth-wrapped object from the folds of his robe. “She said that if the ‘cat’ started to act strange, I should show her this.”

The package was marked One. He unwrapped it slowly: it contained something dried.

“S-Seahorse!”

Perhaps known better by the name dragon’s bastard. Bizarre underwater life-forms not quite fish and not quite insects.

Basen promptly hid the dried creature away again.

“No!”

“Hmm, let’s see here,” Basen said, perusing a note that was tucked in the package. “Quack!” quacked the duck, reading over his shoulder. “‘If Maomao starts acting funny, show her the contents of this package. However, you must not let her have them immediately. Once the job is done, she may have one of them.’”

It was Basen reading the note, yet somehow Maomao heard Suiren’s voice.

It’s her and that old hag...

Suiren didn’t handle Maomao quite the same as the madam of the Verdigris House, but she had her ways—and they worked. She’d seen Jinshi dangle medicinal prizes in front of the apothecary enough times that she knew what worked on Maomao. The fact that she’d given Basen this thing, right down to the note, proved that she still saw him as a soft little boy who needed a nanny to show him how to get Maomao to do what he wanted.

“You heard the lady,” Basen said. “Have you recovered from your little attack?”

“Yes, sir! All better!” She flung her hands in the air to demonstrate.

“How can that be? Who ever heard of a medicine that works just by looking at it?!” demanded Lahan’s Brother, not failing to interject.

“They say that sickness begins in the spirit. Anyway, don’t worry about it. We need to hurry up and do our job,” said Maomao.

And get that seahorse!

They did say seahorses boosted vitality.

“No, stop. This doesn’t make sense. Something’s wrong here. Something’s wrong here!”

“I don’t know, Lahan’s Brother. The way you repeat yourself like that reminds me of someone...”

Specifically, someone with tousled hair and glasses.

“I told you, my name isn’t Lahan’s Brother! It’s—”

“Welp, we’d better get going. Time’s a-wasting,” said Basen, interrupting Lahan’s Brother before he could give them his name—it was practically a running gag by now. They would have to be careful it didn’t overstay its welcome.

The farmer had spoken of a shrine, but it didn’t quite look like the shrines Maomao was used to. It was made of brick, and there were no windows. Inside hung a cloth, and in place of a statue there was a painting of the gods on the wall.

Beside the shrine was a shack, seemingly the house the villager had mentioned.

“All right, here goes nothing,” said Lahan’s Brother, who still didn’t look like he thought this was a good idea. He knocked on the door. Then he waited. There was no response. “Maybe he’s out?”

“Do you think he’s at work? I’m sure he has to take care of some sheep or his field or something.” It was almost lunchtime, though, so hopefully he would be back soon.

Just then, a low, raspy voice came from behind them. “Can I help you?”

Maomao and the others turned to find an older man with tanned skin standing there. He had a hoe in his hands and a cloth wrapped around his neck—the very picture of a farmer. His clothes, patched in places, were streaked with dark soil.

Yes, he was a farmer all right—but Basen’s hand immediately went to his sword and he settled into a fighting stance. Maomao saw why.

“Hey, now, what do you think you’re doing? Going to assault a simple farmer?”

The man’s tanned skin was covered with discolorations, some from age, others from long hours spent under the blazing sun. Those, however, were not what had startled Basen.

No, that would be the man’s missing left eye. The cavity yawned in his face, the eyeball simply absent. His right hand, wrapped around the hoe, was missing its pointer finger, and his exposed skin was covered with scars from swords and arrows. Maomao saw why the villager had seemed so intimidated, and why Basen had reacted instinctively. This man had the air not of a farmer, but of a soldier.

“Have you been in the military, sir?” Basen asked, careful to sound polite.

“Nothing as fancy as that. I was just a locust making trouble in the plains.”

Locust...

A striking choice of words. And there was something else that nagged at Maomao.

“Have you been working in the fields?” she asked before she could stop herself. There was the hoe in his hands and the mud on his shirt—she recognized the stains.

“What else d’you think I’d be doing?” the man asked, although he didn’t sound particularly bothered.

Maomao’s question had, indeed, seemed obvious—but there was something that had dawned on her as she looked at the village fields. “I just didn’t think one normally got quite so dirty doing fieldwork.”

You wouldn’t get this filthy even tending the wheat, not at this time of year. The dust of the fields was dry; so long as one didn’t go out of one’s way to use damp earth, it shouldn’t have stuck like this.

“Tell me, did a man named Rikuson come this way?”

“Hrm... You friends of his?” The farmer blinked at them with his one eye, then opened the door to his shed. “Come on inside. I can offer you goat’s milk, at least.”

He leaned his hoe against the wall and ushered them in.

The old man was indeed Nianzhen, and his house was as plain inside as it was outside.

It’s a lot like my house, actually, Maomao thought, picturing her shack in the pleasure quarter. Nianzhen had a hearth, a cot, and a very modest table; that was about it aside from farm implements. His house seemed to be dedicated to farming much the way Maomao’s was to medicine.

Judging by this room, he looks like a pretty simple man.

Those scars all over his body, though—those didn’t seem like the marks of a man who’d made his living as an honest farmer.

There were three chairs inside. Nianzhen let the guests sit, while he stayed standing and poured goat’s milk into chipped teacups. The duck pecked at the dirt floor. Some grain must have spilled there.

“You’re right—a man named Rikuson did come through here. Would’ve been about ten days ago.” Just a day before Maomao and the others met him in the western capital.

“Do you know what he was here for?” Maomao asked. She’d originally planned to let Basen or Lahan’s Brother do the talking, but since she had brought up Rikuson, she would handle this conversation.

“What he was here for? All he did was grab a hoe and help me plow.”

“Plow? You mean, to get ready for the spring planting?”

Wheat could be grown in two seasons. Seeds planted in winter could be harvested in spring or early summer, while seeds planted in spring could be harvested in autumn.

“No, no. I do need to do the spring planting, but that wasn’t what this was about.”

Nianzhen put the goat’s milk on the table and slid the cups toward Maomao and the others. Basen looked like he wasn’t too sure about this unfamiliar drink, but Maomao was grateful for the opportunity to wet her throat. It was normal goat’s milk—lukewarm, but without anything weird in it.

“Might sound a little overblown, but I had him help me with the ritual.”

“Ritual?” Maomao asked. Basen and Lahan’s Brother traded a look, as confused as she was. “You mean some sort of ceremony to pray for a good harvest?”

“More like to prevent a bad one.”

“I’m sorry... This is all a little difficult for me to follow. Do you think you could explain more thoroughly?”

In response, Nianzhen sat on the bed, his tongue sticking out of his mouth. His less than refined manners were showing. “You lot willing to listen to an old man prattle for a bit? The villagers sure aren’t.”

“Listen, sir, we don’t have much time to spare,” Basen said, growing annoyed.

“Oh, well, pardon me.” Nianzhen lay down and rolled over on the cot.

Maomao got to her feet, holding up a hand to stop Basen. “Sir, I’m sorry. Please tell us what you have to say.” She bowed her head. Apologies were free, after all. If he was going to get all bent out of shape about this, she might as well say sorry.

“Hrrm, I don’t know,” Nianzhen said. From someone else, it might have sounded playful. From him, it came off as sadistic. “I don’t think I feel like it anymore.”

“You watch your attitude!” Basen was about to surge forward, but Maomao stopped him again. Lahan’s Brother, unused to conflict, had become a bystander.

I know he’s hotheaded, but I wish he would stop picking fights. She knew Basen’s strength, and highly doubted an old man would stand a chance against him. But who knows? Sometimes these stubborn old bastards turn out to be tougher than you’d think. Maybe Basen could best the old man physically, but what if he simply refused to admit defeat and clammed up?

That would be bad for us.

She had a feeling that Nianzhen was just being stubborn. He’d let them into his house when they’d mentioned Rikuson—she suspected there was actually something he wanted to get off his chest.

“What can we do to get you to talk to us?” Maomao said, as humble as she could be.

“Hrm. Well, how about a little guessing game?”

“Sir? What exactly are we supposed to guess?”

“Simple. What I used to be.”

Yeah, simple. If only I knew what he meant.

Basen and Lahan’s Brother were still looking at each other. The duck did what Basen couldn’t and pecked at the old man’s feet.

“All right, I’ll take a shot,” Basen said, but Nianzhen waved his hand with too few fingers.

“I’m not asking you, kid. I’m talking to the girl there.”

“K-Kid?” Basen forced himself to keep it together. To an old, heavily scarred man like this, he really was nothing but a young whippersnapper.

So only Maomao had the right to answer. The question became, what should she say?

Nianzhen... It’s a good, strong name. It meant “to intuit the truth.” I hope he’s as honest as his name suggests, and that everything he’s told us is true, she thought, reviewing in her mind what he had said. Nianzhen had called himself a “locust,” not a favorable bug for a farmer.

So he savages crops?

Nianzhen lacked his pointer finger as well as his left eye.

You don’t usually get hurt that bad as a farmer. But he says he’s never been in the army.

He must at least have been in some kind of battle. Several, judging by the extent of his injuries.

Without his finger, he wouldn’t be able to use a weapon. Especially a bow...

Maomao found herself thinking about the bandits who had attacked them the day before. They and their broken arms were probably in the hands of the authorities by now.

Only a couple outcomes for robbers like them. Hanging, for one. The best they can hope for is mutilation...

Then she remembered Nianzhen saying that Rikuson had helped him with a ceremony of some kind.

“Nianzhen,” she said.

“Yeah?” His attitude defied her to guess. Lahan’s Brother was looking at Maomao with what seemed to be indignation, not that it mattered to her. Maybe he didn’t like that she already knew this random old guy’s name even though they’d met just a few minutes earlier.

Not the problem right now. Maomao took in a breath and let the words out in a rush: “Were you a human sacrifice, sir?”

Everyone froze.

“What kind of answer is that?!” Basen demanded.

“You don’t know the expression? It’s when someone is sacrificed while still alive.”

“Of course I know that! What I don’t know is why you think it has anything to do with this old man. He’s obviously still alive!”

Whereas proper sacrifices tended to end up dead.

Maomao, however, stood by her answer. “He didn’t ask why. Only what.”

She looked at Nianzhen, who showed none of Basen’s disbelief or annoyance. Instead, he looked somehow satisfied. “Yes,” he said, “I see. A sacrifice. Maybe that’s what I was.”

Nianzhen let out a long breath and narrowed his single remaining eye.

“Would the three of you be so kind as to listen to the ramblings of a foolish old man?” His tone was light, but there was deep emotion in his eye.

“If you would be so kind as to let us,” Maomao replied. This time Basen and Lahan’s Brother, mindful not to upset Nianzhen again, bowed their heads respectfully.