The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: An Old Man’s Ramblings

It was over fifty years ago now and there were twice as many nomads as there are today. Maybe more. I was one of them, born into a tribe that was—well, you might say more warlike than many of the others. Being martial-minded sounds good and all, but in truth we were little more than brigands. We mostly raised livestock, but if one of us wanted a wife, he would go to one of the neighboring tribes or a settled village and just take one. Theft and even the selling of people were just ordinary side businesses for us.

Oh, don’t give me that look. I know it was wrong. But at the time, I didn’t question it—I thought that was how life worked. My grandfather had done it, and his father. My grandmother and mother were both abducted women. It all seemed perfectly natural to me. But I know better than anyone just how bad it was.

Moving on.

I was a young man then, just in my teens, but even the chieftain trusted my bow arm. He always wanted me in raiding parties. I knew that if we won our battles, we ate good food, got more things. If the losers didn’t like it, well, it was their own fault for letting us beat them. An easy pride to muster when you’ve never tasted defeat yourself.

That pride spread, until it had infected the entire tribe.

Then one day, the chieftain’s son, he says he wants a Windreader girl.

The Windreader tribe, they were... Hmm. Something like priests, I guess. They were entrusted with rituals for everyone on the plains. They moved about the land, raising birds and reading the wind. They had a lot of very intelligent people in that tribe—they could tell you what the weather would be each year, and they were never wrong.

There were a lot of hard people among our clans. Violent people. But there was an unspoken understanding—no one touched the Windreader tribe.

Until we broke that rule.

We attacked the Windreader tribe to get a wife for our future chief. The Windreaders were right in the middle of one of their rituals, hardly a bow or sword among them. What did they have? Strange things. Seems the ritual involved domesticated birds, and hoes. The women followed the birds around, while the men worked the ground with their hoes.

Funny stuff, right? But that was the ritual, I guess. I remember the chieftain’s boy laughing. How he sneered, “They look like a bunch of farmers.” And then he said, “Fire.”

I remember how my bow creaked just before I let my arrow loose. The way it twanged, the arc the arrow took. The thwack as it found its mark in one of the Windreaders’ heads.

That was the signal to attack.

They were defenseless as babes. They had no weapons; they were just working the earth. It took no skill to kill them—it was as easy as cornering an injured deer.

The pillaging that took place that day was the worst I had ever seen in my life, although it didn’t sink in until later. We didn’t hesitate to kill those who served us as priests. In fact, that made everything worse. Maybe it was the fear of murdering them—the fear that if we left any of them alive, they might tell the gods what we had done.

We killed all the grown men, and the older women too. We left only the young women alive. The youngest children we sold into slavery, and the tribe’s birds? Those became our dinner.

Sickening story, isn’t it? But we did it. It was even exciting, in a way.

That’s why we didn’t notice, not then—even during the looting, one particularly stupid bird kept pecking at the ground. I remember seeing him, but I just speared the creature. Only later did I learn he might have been the only thing standing between us and disaster.

After that, we let our appetites run even wilder than we had before. The chieftain’s son took the Windreader girl against her will, and she became pregnant. About the time she bore her second child, that was when the catastrophe came.

There was a great dark shadow over the whole plain, like a smear of charcoal against the sky. At first, we thought it was an unseasonable rainstorm.

Then we heard what seemed like a ringing in our ears. The livestock were restless. The children clung to us in fear, and the women held them close.

One man rode off on his horse, saying he was going to investigate, but he was soon back, almost fleeing toward us. His clothes were in tatters—but so was his hair, even his skin. His horse was near mad with fright; I tell you, it was a job to calm her down. She looked like she’d been bitten by something. We asked the man if he’d been attacked.

Looks like you already have a pretty good idea of what he found, but let an old man spell it out for you. The villagers, they don’t believe this story at all. There hasn’t been anything that size around here for decades, they tell me.

Anyway, the scout didn’t have to tell us what he’d found—because a moment later, it found us.

Bugs. Bugs all over our camp, more than you could count. Grasshoppers.

They were a black cloud that attacked our tents. The beating of their wings was deafening, and the only thing worse was the sound of them chewing. The sheep grazing in the fields ran off, terrified, and the dogs howled like beasts possessed.

The men swung their swords wildly, but what were they going to do, bat the things out of the sky? We tried swinging torches instead, but we couldn’t have had a worse idea. Burning grasshoppers crawled all over everything and everyone, and the tragedy only got worse.

I started stomping on the insects on the ground; it was the only thing I could think of to do. None of them were bigger than a couple of sun, yet it was like we were in the belly of a giant grasshopper.

The women tried to hide in the tents, but the bugs got in through the cracks. I could hear the children crying inside. I could hear their mothers screaming; they didn’t even stop to comfort their kids. They heaped abuse on their husbands, on the men who couldn’t protect their own families from the insects. These were women who had been snatched away from their own homes to be brides, and now they let out everything they had been storing up until that moment.

The grass wasn’t enough for the creatures; they set upon our food stores as well. Wheat, beans, and vegetables, sure; but they even went for our dried meat. They chewed holes in our tents. When they finally left, the only things in their wake were people exhausted from screaming, and countless dead grasshoppers.

They had eaten everything, and our livestock had run away.

We somehow managed to find a horse, and we headed to a village to try to procure some kind of food. We knew we were just bandits to them, so we tried to pick someone they wouldn’t recognize. But it wasn’t enough. As soon as he got close, they shot him. We never dreamed they would shoot someone without even trying to find out who it was first.

We ran. He couldn’t keep up with us, but we ran just the same. I remember him reaching out to us, begging for help, but there was nothing we could do for him. Instead we just left him there.

I looked back, just once. The villagers had dragged our friend and his horse into the village. I guess we should have known. It wasn’t as if we were the only ones ravaged and left starving by the grasshoppers.

I just prayed that the man we’d abandoned didn’t suffer before he died. I know. Funny, right? Prayer from the ones who had murdered their priests.

We had nothing else to eat, so we killed the few animals we had left. We made soup, trying to fill it out with some grasses, but all we did was make ourselves sick. Some of the kids were so hungry they resorted to eating the grasshoppers on the ground, then one of them died. Maybe the grasshoppers were poisonous, or maybe they ate the things without tearing off the legs first; I don’t know. They wasted away for want of nutrition, then started dying as they grew too weak to go on.

Then there were the pregnant women—they needed twice as much nutrition as the rest of us, so of course they grew weak too. Their bodies wasted, but their bellies kept getting bigger. The wife of the next chieftain was like that—there was no food for her after the tragedy. Her first child clung to her, sucking its thumb to try to distract itself from the hunger.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the second was stillborn.

The death of his child just about broke the chieftain’s son—and he suffered another blow when his wife died soon after the birth.

With the last of her strength, she said, “You bastards desecrated the ritual, and now there are no more Windreaders to do the offices for you! The insects will menace the people of the plains for the rest of time!”

She must’ve had those words inside her for years, ever since we had killed her people and abducted her. She chortled with laughter and died clutching her withered child to her wasted body.

People began to agree that it was as she said: we were the cause of this disaster, for having interrupted the ritual observance. Everyone on the plains took us as their enemies.

I’m not going to pretend we didn’t deserve it, but just the same, we wanted to survive. We ate grass, we ate bugs, we killed and were killed, and we kept fleeing.

One starving man resorted to eating the flesh of his dead friend. When that wasn’t enough, he started trying to kill the living for food. My left eye? I lost it to an arrow shot by someone who wanted to eat me. I pulled it straight back out and shot him back.

I didn’t want to eat or be eaten, so I ran away. There was nothing to run to, though, and I found myself starving, my throat parched. Unable to bear the hunger any longer, I followed the smell of congee into a city. They were having a food distribution by the grace of the local governor. The congee they handed out was tasteless sludge hardly fit for livestock, but to me it was the most wonderful thing I had ever eaten.

I was still snotty and weeping when the guards arrested me. Seems someone in town recognized me from some act of banditry. I didn’t resist. I was through fighting—I just hoped they would feed me in prison. The thought of a few square meals before I was hanged brought joy to my heart.

I never did get to be hanged.

Instead, in punishment, they cut off my finger so I could never use a bow again. Then they made me a farmer. To this day, I think they let me off lightly, considering what I did.

The governor, as it turned out, knew about the Windreaders and their ceremony. They were allowed to continue with the mysterious ritual for their food because they were under the governor’s protection. We might not know what the ritual meant, I was told, but it did mean something.

What? Who was this governor? He’s gone now—with the rest of the Yi clan, as I’m sure you know. This was back before that upstart Gyokuen made his name.

The Yi clan knew about the Windreaders’ ceremony, which is why they scattered us across the land as serfs—to replace the Windreaders.

Sadly, all a serf can do is work the land. The Yi didn’t know what it was the Windreaders were doing with their birds, and anyway, chickens were about all we had around. So we continued with the ritual, but in an incomplete form.

So you’re right. I was allowed to live purely so the ritual would live on. I’m a human sacrifice that they happen to call a serf.

This village was founded by sacrifices like me. We built that shrine in memory of the Windreaders we killed. I paid with my life, a pittance compared to murdering our priests and bringing disaster upon us. I’m sure no one who paid any attention to us would believe the trade was worth it.

That all takes us up to seventeen years ago. When the Yi clan was wiped out, the farmers disappeared to wherever they liked. A few fools, men who’d always been the rough kind, went back to banditry. Ahh, I know that look. You’ve met a few highwaymen yourself. Who knows? Maybe I’d recognize them if I saw them.

You want to know why I stayed here? Simple—because I never want to have grasshoppers tearing at me again. No, never again...

All right, that’s enough rambling. Got any questions for me?