The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 5 - Chapter 14

Chapter 14: The Western Capital—Day Two

The next day, Maomao found herself summoned by none other than Lahan.

“True, true, I did neglect to mention,” the fox-eyed man with the tousled hair said as he sipped some tea. Beside him sat the mild-mannered Rikuson. They were in a bower at the mansion, the nearby oasis making the place breezy and cool. The entire house seemed built to maximize the opportunities to cool off. “I was ordered to come here, myself, for a number of reasons. There are, I guess you could say, business matters to attend to.”

Everyone had their talents, Maomao supposed, and Lahan could be expected to come running any time hard numbers were involved. As for why Rikuson was with him...

“My superior doesn’t want to leave the capital, so I’ve come in his place.”

“Huh,” Maomao observed. “He sounds like a most useless superior, sir, I must say.”

“I do appreciate your frankness, Maomao, but here and now I think a modicum of discretion is in order.” It was one of those rare things: a serious-minded comment from Lahan. Anyway, Maomao understood that perfectly well; that’s why she’d been careful to adopt a polite tone.

It had been late after her encounter with Basen and then Jinshi, so Maomao had gone straight to bed—but apparently everyone else had stayed up, and the results had not been pretty. It all sounded like it had been a lot of trouble, though, and Maomao had done her best to ignore it. She still had red marks where Basen had grabbed her, and her main interest at the moment was getting rid of them.

Speaking of Jinshi and Basen, they had a meeting this afternoon. All this stuff about conducting politics over dinner and constantly trying to sound each other out seemed like a massive headache to Maomao. It would be bad enough dealing with Gyokuen, who now had an empress for a daughter, but throw outlanders into the mix and the thought only became more depressing.

“So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?” Maomao asked.

“Yes, that.” Lahan slid his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with his pointer finger. Then he took out a piece of paper from the folds of his robe. It turned out to be a finely detailed wanted poster.

“Huh...”

The picture showed a woman, still relatively young, with graceful features. That in and of itself made her little different from many women, but the poster also bore further description: “Red eyes; white hair; pale skin.” That narrowed it down quite a bit. In fact, Maomao could think of only one person who fit the description.

“The White Lady? We went to see her together.”

“Yes, we did,” Lahan said, and proceeded to show her a second piece of paper.

“Who’s this?”

Another wanted poster, this one showing a man. Unfortunately, an illustration never quite looked like the real thing—and Maomao rarely bothered remembering the faces of people who didn’t interest her, anyway. In short, she had no idea who the man was.

Lahan lined up the wanted posters next to each other.

Hm? Something teased at the edges of Maomao’s memory, a sense that maybe she had seen the man somewhere.

“We found this man several days ago,” Lahan said.

“That’s right,” Rikuson added, “I’m sure of it.”

“Sir Rikuson never forgets a face.”

“Perhaps my one skill,” he said modestly. All right, so he still didn’t seem exactly suited to soldiering. But given that the eccentric strategist who served as Rikuson’s boss couldn’t distinguish one face from another, having someone with a talent like Rikuson’s around couldn’t hurt. That freak with his monocle had a talent for judging other people’s uses that seemed almost superhuman.

“When exactly was this?”

“About two days ago. I don’t think he expected us to find him—he was posing as one of the porters bringing in cargo from the carriages.” And what’s more... “The cargo in question belonged to a merchant from Shaoh.”

Shaoh: a country beyond the desert region to the west of Li. It was located in a rather precarious place; to the south there were mountains, but on the other three sides it was surrounded by larger nations. As Maomao recalled, the two special emissaries who had visited the court the year before had come from Shaoh.

And one of those emissaries had been supplying feifa firearms to the Shi clan.

Maomao’s face darkened. “That’s a bad thing, right?”

“Generally speaking, I would say so.”

It meant that the same people who’d been causing trouble in the capital were now showing up among the merchants from Shaoh. And if they were connected to the White Lady, then there was every possibility that they were moving opium and were involved with the bandits. Even the politically dense Maomao could understand that if another nation was harboring people like that, it was a bad sign.

“What’s worse, Shaoh likes to keep to itself.” In other words, even if they were out to catch a criminal, they couldn’t simply barge around. “Normally, we wouldn’t be able to get our hands on him,” Lahan continued. And yet it was hard to imagine that someone who’d come to an entirely separate nation was acting totally independently of his government. “But we can’t say anything about it. That’s the problem.”

Their testimony, ultimately, came from just a single soldier who allegedly had a good memory. Regardless of what Rikuson said, people could easily object that he was just one person; he could very well be mistaken about whom he’d seen. Lahan could try to inform the capital, but even if they found the fastest horse in the world, it would take more than ten days to deliver the message—and the same again to bring back any reply.

All this, apparently, was what had brought him to Maomao.

“What are you getting at?” she asked.

“I want you to be at the banquet. That’s why you’ve got a room, isn’t it? Here, at this moment, you’re a princess of the La clan.”

Maomao didn’t say anything, but her expression provoked a knitted brow from Lahan. “Ahem. Please don’t bare your fangs...er, teeth at me. Who knows who might be watching? Look, even Sir Rikuson is afraid of you.”

“I haven’t seen anything at all, sir and ma’am.” Rikuson was looking studiously at the blue sky as if nothing were happening. Maybe he was a better man than Maomao had given him credit for.

In short, the business negotiations in question made this man too important to refuse, whether or not he was a real merchant. But if there was more to him than met the eye, there could be trouble. If he was the real thing, might the White Lady be with him? And if so, could she have cooked up some unknown poison with her alchemy? Or perhaps they might simply use narcotics. They may even have some other plan in motion.

“There might be rare poisons involved. Aren’t you curious?” Lahan said. A dirty trick. If he thought that was going to get Maomao to go along with him... “If we catch the man, you’re free to investigate exactly what kind of poisons they are.”

This time she said nothing, and her face remained neutral.

“Of course, if you’re not interested, then that’s that...”

Maomao heaved a sigh, and Lahan grinned openly. Yes, it was true: he had her. But she hated agreeing for free. She would receive an honorarium, of course, but she wondered if there wasn’t something else she might ask for. Consort Lishu flashed through her mind.

“So you can remember anyone you see once, is that right?” she asked, turning toward Rikuson.

He finally brought his gaze down from the sky. “Yes, ma’am. Not a very interesting talent, I must admit.”

“All right. Then can you determine from people’s faces whether they’re related by blood? Whether they’re parent and child, say?”

“I suppose I could try,” Rikuson said. Every child received some physical features from their parents, and Maomao had thought perhaps Rikuson could see or sense such things. But he said, “However, it would only be my subjective opinion. Without some very good reason, it could hardly be called proof of anything.”

“He’s right,” Lahan interjected, earning a dirty look from Maomao.

“Isn’t there any way, then?”

Lahan, too, seemed to see a world that others didn’t. She wished she could put that to use somehow.

“You think any so-called proof that I discovered would be accepted by anyone else?” he asked.

Maomao was forced to agree with him. Without clear, measurable criteria, there would be no way of establishing the truth of his judgments, even if he was right. Children might receive any of a number of distinguishing physical features from their parents, but they wouldn’t be identical, and anyway, they would only suggest a possibility. If only there was something, some standard everyone could agree on.

“My sincere apologies that I can’t be of more help,” Rikuson said.

“Please, think nothing of it.”

“Forgive me if I’m overstepping myself,” he added hesitantly, “but perhaps you could come to Master Lakan’s mansion sometimes?”

After a long beat Maomao said, “Perhaps I could ask you never to mention that again.” Her face twisted in disgust. This man Rikuson seemed like a perfectly decent human being, but he didn’t seem to understand that there were things one spoke of and things one did not.

“My apologies,” Rikuson said, ducking his head in a bow. “I think I’d better be getting back to work.” Then he hustled out of the bower.

Lahan looked at Maomao, his face not quite settling into any one expression. “Have you no interest in coming?”

“To that banquet of yours? You know what? Forget it.” With Rikuson gone, she began talking rather less politely.

“Oh, don’t get all huffy. This stuff the western merchant is dealing in—don’t you want some of it?”

So he was going to stick with the attempt to bribe her. Well, of course she wanted it. Maomao went silent, and Lahan looked at her closely. He seemed to be thinking about something.

“You know, come to think of it...” he said after a moment.

“Yes?” Just because Maomao was angry didn’t mean she couldn’t be halfway polite. She took a sip of the tea the server had brought them.

“Last night... You and Sir Basen... Anything going on?”

Maomao had enough maturity not to simply spit the tea out, but it suddenly tasted very bitter. She swallowed it as quickly as she could. What did that have to do with this talk of parents and children?

“Master Basen is a vir—”

“I know, I know, you don’t have to say it. Good heavens, stop already. You don’t have to go blabbing a man’s most embarrassing secrets to everyone you meet.”

He was right; it had been an impolite thing to say. Even if it was patently obvious to look at him, she could understand where a young man of his age might not want to announce such a fact. If he was really that embarrassed about it, she was sure her sister Pairin would be kind enough to teach him. Pairin liked a well-muscled man—why not indulge her?

“You aren’t thinking of anything...inappropriate, are you?” Lahan smirked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She certainly hadn’t been imagining shoving Basen into Pairin’s room.

“I’m sure you don’t. In that case...” He took a half breath, and then he said something unimaginable. “Perhaps you’d be interested in asking the Emperor’s younger brother to plant his seed in your belly.”

It briefly occurred to Maomao that no one would blame her for dousing him with the rest of her tea, but as they were in someone else’s house, she refrained. She did not, however, dignify his comment with a response.

“I know you—you’d like to try giving birth, just for the experience. But you have no interest in children as such. Me, I would be happy to raise the child of the Emperor’s younger brother, and I would do a good job of it. Meanwhile, you could do what you like, or perhaps, not do what you don’t like. I’m not necessarily suggesting you formally become his wife. There only need to be a few...slipups. You get to give birth, I get an heir; everyone’s happy.”

“Then make one yourself,” Maomao growled.

“I would, but for the life of me I simply can’t find the ideal partner.”

Lahan’s “ideal partner” was probably just the female version of Jinshi, the one who would bring the nation to its knees. Such women didn’t grow on trees, after all.

“It truly is a waste, that he should be the Emperor’s younger brother. To think—even with that scar on his cheek, still no one excels him in beauty.”

“Why not just cut off your most prized possession and get a womb transplant? Get some seed planted in you?”

“Can you do that?” It was frightening, how earnestly Lahan asked that. When Maomao replied that no, you could not, he looked down at the ground, actually a little disappointed. So he was straight, but evidently had no issue with sex changes. Maomao didn’t grasp his standards.

So Jinshi might be out of the question—but if someone had Jinshi’s child, the offspring might look like him. Perhaps that was what Lahan was thinking. Perhaps he hoped that with Maomao, who had such an average face, as the mother, Jinshi’s features might remain the more prominent—and now he was trying to come up with an excuse to engineer the liaison. An heir, indeed. They both knew what would become of the child if it were a girl.

“I promise to take care of it and raise it for my entire life,” Lahan said. Meaning, bring her up until he could make her his bride. He was certainly taking the long view, if nothing else.

Maomao might have marked him as a pedophile at that moment, but perhaps it simply demonstrated the depth of his devotion to Jinshi’s beauty. She didn’t doubt his faith that a woman who inherited even a fraction of Jinshi’s looks would be among the most beautiful who ever lived. She also didn’t doubt that Lahan was completely hopeless, totally worthless, and that if anyone ever asked her if she knew any nice men, he was the one person she would never, ever introduce to them. Ever.

“Anyway, give it a whirl!” he said, looking at her with eyes full of hope. Maomao drank the last of her tea and left the bower, making sure to step on Lahan’s toes as she went.

When she got back to her room, a tailor was there. Had Lahan arranged for him to come? He already had some robes ready for her, and wanted to check the fit. The pattern and decorations were a bit different from what Maomao was used to; it had a skirt that almost looked like it belonged on a western dress.

“Now, miss, if you’d be so kind as to change for me.”

The tailor, who was wearing bright-red rouge, put her through a wide variety of outfits. If Lahan was behind this, he was being uncommonly generous. Maomao spent the next hour being treated like a dress-up doll.

When the tailor had at last headed home, Maomao finally laid down on the bed. Only then did she notice something sitting on the table: a paulownia-wood box of excellent quality.

I guess I’m supposed to wear whatever’s in there. Maybe it was a sash clip for the belt of her robe, she thought, but when she opened it she discovered a silver hair stick. For just a moment, she thought that somehow the silver hair stick she had never expected to see again had managed to return to her.

It was a lovely piece, carved with an image of the moon and flowers—and poppies. Lovely, yes, but Maomao grinned as she realized what the poppies meant. She went ahead and put the stick in her hair, just because. Strangely, it felt rather fitting, and the way she continued to wear the accessory thereafter was perhaps rather unlike her.

That night was the banquet in the great hall. All the important personages, including the others who had come from the capital, were there. Great men who had looked upon Jinshi either with lust or disdain back when he had supposedly been a eunuch now stumbled over themselves to pour his drink. Maomao had to fight to suppress a chuckle.

Maomao sat down a half step behind Lahan, who was already seated. Men and women didn’t ordinarily sit together, but Maomao was being treated as a guest. Elsewhere in the room Jinshi was seated with Gyokuen, and diagonally across from them was a middle-aged man of medium build.

“He’s—well, you can see it,” Lahan said. Despite his ambiguous choice of words, Maomao knew exactly what he meant. Uryuu, Lishu’s father. One could certainly say he looked like the consort—but then again, one could say he didn’t. Just for good measure, she looked again at Lahan. He understood very well what she meant, but he gave the only appropriate answer: “Whom exactly am I supposed to be comparing?”

He was right; the matter of Consort Lishu shouldn’t be made too public. Maomao had been careless, but then, the fact that Lahan immediately guessed what was on her mind suggested rumors were swirling at the court.

Moreover, because she was outside the rear palace by special dispensation, Lishu covered her face with a veil any time she was in the presence of a man. It wasn’t exactly forbidden for her to show her face, but she was probably trying to avoid doing so as much as possible. Nor was she present at this dinner. Instead, a young woman sat beside Uryuu. She kept stealing glances at Jinshi. From the cut of her robe and the way she hid her mouth with her folding fan, Maomao realized it was the half-sister who’d slapped Lishu.

The half-sister tugged on her father’s sleeve and said something to him, after which Uryuu, in a sort of anything-for-my-dear-daughter way, turned to Jinshi and started chatting, clearly in hopes of introducing his little girl.

Maomao let the scene sink in. The half-sister obviously had a rather pedestrian obsession with looks. Frankly, the entire arrangement, with the men and women all mixed together, struck Maomao as odd. Her own qualifications for being present among all these big shots consisted of nothing more than being related to Lahan, and she wondered whether it was really acceptable for her to be there at all. Maybe that was the point.

Plenty of the other men present seemed to be thinking the same way as Uryuu; they were visibly itching for their chance to introduce Jinshi to their daughters. Gyokuen’s daughter was already an empress, which meant the master of the house could afford to look quite placid about the matter. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying watching how Jinshi responded to the situation. Yes, he truly was Empress Gyokuyou’s father.

Even the serving women blushed when they noticed Jinshi’s looks, but it wasn’t enough to make them forget their jobs. They were always alert that no cup should ever go empty. Whenever a plate had been cleared, the next dish would come out, but sadly, the high officials didn’t do all that much eating. Uryuu, for example: he nibbled on a bit of rice and some lamb on the bone, but he refused everything else except alcohol.

Lahan appeared quite fond of the fish; it seemed to be all he was eating. That seemed to somewhat reassure the chefs.

Maomao tried a bit of the fish too. It was white fish, pickled and salted—that was presumably how they had managed to preserve it here. It smelled a little funny, but it was probably just fermented, not rotten. As someone who was used to being able to get fresh fish in the capital, Maomao felt it left something to be desired, but Lahan, at least, seemed to find the smelly fish preferable to the lamb meat.

Maomao, quite unbothered by any of it, ate her fill. The daughters of the various officials constrained themselves to delicate sips of juice lest the rouge on their lips smudge, but Maomao didn’t care what they did. The finery she’d been dressed in apparently passed muster, but if she’d been wearing her usual clothes, they would have chased her out for a filthy scullery maid. More than one father approached “Sir Lahan” to ask who his “honored younger sister” was, but when they found the young woman greeted them with chicken soup all over her face, they would smile ruefully and excuse themselves. No doubt the rumors would soon start that Maomao’s family were all eccentrics.

Nothing too unfamiliar was offered for dinner, but unlike a typical meal at court, here people served themselves from large communal dishes. If there was going to be poison in anything, it would have to be something put in directly by the servers.

I wonder how exactly this meal is going to look.

She knew about banquets, but the exotic clothing suggested it was going to be different from any banquet Maomao knew. Her old man had told her that banquets in the west were less about food and more about enjoying dancing, but she didn’t quite follow. And it was going to be difficult checking for poison in a situation she could barely picture to begin with.

For one thing, when you never knew who was going to eat from a given dish, you’d have to keep a close eye on the attendants serving out the food. And without knowing the exact ingredients involved, it would be all too easy to mistake a seasoning for a poisonous herb. Thus Maomao tried to take note of the flavors and appearances of the foods as she ate.

Normally, rule number one at a formal banquet like this was to eat as little as possible—but, with all apologies to Empress Gyokuyou’s father, that was simply not something Maomao could do.

As she went along with her eating, someone set a cup of wine down by her. Thinking it was some diligent server at work, she looked up, to discover the cup came from the man sitting next to her. It appeared he didn’t mind being poured alcohol by the servers, but wasn’t going to drink it himself. So it was the pretty-boy who was so thoughtful.

“Thank you very much, Master Rikuson,” Maomao said.

“You needn’t use any special titles with me, Miss Maomao.” The Miss was enough to bring a pronounced scowl to Maomao’s face. But it would have been just as irritating to be outright corrected, and this seemed to be his little nudge. She could just never tell how to talk to this guy.

“Rikuson, then.” She felt funny about it, but she would do anything to keep him from calling her “young lady” again.

Rikuson, seemingly mollified, smiled. “In that case, Maomao. I’m not particularly good at holding my alcohol, so I’d be happy if you would drink it in my place.”

Well, with an invitation like that, how could she refuse?

And we have to be sure there isn’t anything wrong with the wine.

She brought the cup to her lips. It was grape wine, not terribly alcoholic. She took a sip of water to cleanse her palate, then made for her next helping of food. The servers were decidedly not prioritizing Maomao, so she had to help herself. But, again, this mingling of men and women was strange; most people expected a woman like Maomao to remain quietly in the background.

“Is this the one you wanted?”

“Yes, thank you.”

It was Rikuson who reached out and got the dish Maomao had wanted. It looked like he wasn’t assigned to that eccentric strategist for nothing—his decent streak must have helped him survive his service. Rikuson started waving down the servers periodically, saying that he wanted this or was out of that. At first it just looked like he was really putting them through their paces, but then she saw him taking in their faces and bodies.

He’s committing them to memory, she thought. All the more reason for Maomao not to struggle to remember the servants’ faces. She could let him worry about that, while she learned about the food.

“That’s a beautiful hair stick you have,” Rikuson said.

“You think so?”

So he knew how to make polite conversation too. Maomao remembered she was still wearing the hair stick from the paulownia-wood box. It wasn’t flamboyant, but even the untutored eye could tell that it was of fine make. Maomao had thought she’d detected the more well-bred young ladies in the room occasionally glancing at her hair, and now she understood why.

I can sell it later, she thought.

At almost the same moment, there was a crash of shattering tableware. She looked in the direction of the sound to discover a terrified serving woman and Uryuu with his hand in the air. “I told you, I don’t want it!” Uryuu was shouting.

“I... I’m sorry...” The woman began cleaning up the pieces of the dish, still obviously terrified. It had apparently bounced on the floor and smashed against the wall; the contents had scattered everywhere.

What a waste. Maomao did understand: the cooks had gone to all that trouble to prepare the fish, and the server probably wanted to be sure it got eaten. But even so, it had been a little forward of her.

The others in the room looked shocked. Uryuu, realizing the commotion he had caused, endeavored to look calm again. “Gracious, look at me. I’m terribly sorry,” he said, turning a smile on the room, but that didn’t put the food back in the dish. One heard rather unfavorable rumors about Uryuu—but even at that, his reaction here seemed distinctly short-tempered.

Gyokuen stroked his beard and whispered to another server. Presumably instructing that the errant woman be disciplined, or even fired. One could only hope that mercy was one of the things in which he resembled his daughter.