The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 5 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Proficiencies

“I’ll excuse myself, then.”

Maomao didn’t say a word as the man who’d delivered the letter to the apothecary shop exited, his job finished. She read the letter, remaining expressionless the entire time, then put it in a letter box.

It was from Jinshi, but it wasn’t quite the usual business. Maomao crossed her arms and cocked her head, thinking. What to do, what to do? Business from Jinshi always meant trouble, but this one seemed more trouble than most. She could hardly refuse, however, which meant the question was how best to prepare. How am I going to explain this one to Grams?

Her ruminations were interrupted by the jabbering of a couple of noisy kids—Chou-u and Zulin, who were carrying baskets full of fresh herbs.

Oh yeah... They said something about wanting to eat kusa-mochi. She watched them idly for a moment, but when she saw them heading for the kitchen, she hurried to grab them by the collar.

“What’re you doing?!” Chou-u demanded.

“Let me see those,” she said, rifling through his basket and inspecting the plants within. How could he get this so wrong? Maomao glowered at the assembled herbs. “How could you screw up enough to find wolfsbane around here?” She stared at Chou-u, who sat down sullenly. Beside him, Zulin—the younger of the two poor girls who had recently joined them—looked on with worry. She seemed to have embraced her role as Chou-u’s henchman.

“I mean, they look really similar.”

“Make your mochi with this, and you’ll die.”

They must have gone out looking for fresh mugwort for their snack, but they’d managed to find a similar-looking but poisonous plant.

Except I didn’t think there was any wolfsbane around here.

How had the kids found it when even Maomao didn’t know about it? The question wouldn’t leave her alone.

“Boo. So we can’t make kusa-mochi?” Chou-u and Zulin looked at each other, dejected.

“That’s right. Give it up.”

“I know you picked some mugwort the other day, Freckles. You should share with us.”

“That was for moxibustion.”

Chou-u pouted indignantly at her, and Zulin followed suit. Maomao mercilessly jabbed a finger in each of their mouths and pulled at their lips.

“Yow! That hurt! You suck.”

Zulin, though silent, likewise resisted.

“How do I suck? What was your plan, to give the entire Verdigris House food poisoning? I thought I told you not to go wandering around outside by yourself, anyway.”

“We weren’t by ourselves. Sazen was with us.”

That made Maomao frown even harder—and that was exactly when Sazen showed up, ambling in with a cloth bag in hand.

“Don’t go running off without me, kids! I’m not a young man anymore,” he said—a most inauspicious thing to utter at this particular moment. He knew about Chou-u’s past, and even though Maomao kept trying to get him to stop acting like it, he insisted on treating the boy like a young princeling.

“Sazen! It’s your fault Freckles got angry at me. Try to keep up!”

Without a word, Maomao brought her knuckle crashing down on Chou-u’s head. Zulin looked a little panicked, and Sazen’s mouth opened like he wanted to say something, but Maomao only glared at them both. Then she went and got the mugwort she’d picked for the shop the day before. It was a little dry by now, but it was still recognizable. She held it in one hand and Chou-u’s wolfsbane in the other, and stuck them under Sazen’s nose. It wouldn’t do any good trying to tell the kids about this, but she could at least teach the closest thing to an adult in the room how to tell the difference.

“Do you know what these are?” she asked.

“Sure. Mugwort and wolfsbane, obviously,” Sazen said easily. Maomao looked at him, her mouth open. “I thought I’d surreptitiously switch the wolfsbane for some mugwort, but I never got the chance. Why are kids always in such a hurry?” He opened his pouch to reveal some freshly picked mugwort. He also produced another, smaller pouch from inside and handed it to Maomao. She looked at it with curiosity, then opened it to discover some kind of root.

“Is this—?”

“Wolfsbane root. I assume someone brought it down from the mountains and planted it here because they thought it was pretty, but that stuff is dangerous, so I pulled it up. But it would be a shame to let the root go to waste—you can use it for something, right?”

Yes, wolfsbane did have medicinal properties. Expressionless, Maomao grabbed Sazen by the hand.

“Er—?”

Still without a word, she veritably dragged him into the shop and started lining up herbs and medicines from her shelf. Then she said, “What’s this?”

“Huh? Medlar leaves, right?”

“And their effect?”

“They can stop coughs and diarrhea, among other things.”

Maomao pointed to the next herb and repeated the questions. Sazen looked perplexed, but he answered. Chou-u and Zulin watched them from the doorway.

When Maomao had finished interrogating Sazen, she crossed her arms and thought. “So you already know about half the ingredients in here off the top of your head.”

“What I don’t know is what brought this on!”

Maomao didn’t respond directly; instead, she took a book off the shelf and handed it to him. Come to think of it, she reflected, didn’t he say that once he got his feet back under him, he meant to go buy back the encyclopedias?

“Can you read?” she asked him.

“The old man taught me,” he said. The old man—presumably meaning the former physician, the one who would never regain his right mind. If Sazen had also learned about all those medicines from “the old man,” it would all make sense. This was the best kind of surprise.

“All right, then learn this book! And you’ll be spending your afternoons here for a while.” Maomao smacked the book she’d given Sazen.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ll explain everything to the madam and Ukyou.” Sazen still looked confused, but Maomao was feeling magnanimous enough to explain it to him. “You’re not exactly the most gifted bouncer in the world, are you?”

“Er, well... Ahem...”

“I think being an apothecary would fit you much better, don’t you?”

“Well, I...”

Maomao had no intention of retiring, but it had always been her and her father running the place—it wouldn’t hurt if there were another pharmacist or two around here. She’d thought she might be able to lard the physically impaired Chou-u with medical knowledge, but the little shit was only interested in playing around and drawing his pictures. No, it would be much faster to work with Sazen here. Not least because as long as Jinshi was in her life, Maomao was likely to be called away from the shop routinely and on short notice. It would be best if there was someone to hold down the fort.

Only question is...

Did Sazen want to be an apothecary?

At the moment, he was looking down at the book intently. He flipped a page, his expression serious. At length he said, “I’m only a simple farmer. I went to that fortress because I was completely broke, and I only know how to read at all because the old guy taught me. And medicine? The best I can do is pick whatever I’m told to pick.”

Being an apothecary carried a certain amount of prestige; Sazen seemed to be having a crisis of confidence. Too much rejection for too long had started to take a toll on him personally.

In Maomao’s eyes, this was a problem. She’d finally found someone with some knowledge, and she was going to put them to use. So she said, “What about it? Some people in this world make their living by reciting nonsensical spells. Or they dance some ridiculous dance in an attempt to cure a cold, when it would be a lot better to keep the patient warm and administer cough medicine and antipyretics. You can make those at least, right?”

“Well, yes... But what if somebody really sick comes to me?”

“If there’s nothing you can do, then say so. Those who are going to die will die, whether they take any medicine or not. And if you think the prognosis is too grim, send them somewhere else. You already know more about medicine than some doctors out there.”

Like the quack...

To be fair, the physician at the rear palace seemed to have a certain amount of knowledge, as a medical official; he just lacked the ability to apply it. He was very personable, but that wasn’t enough.

“Anyway, it’s settled,” Maomao said.

“What’s settled? Aren’t you moving a little fast?”

“We have to move fast or we’ll run out of time.” Maomao, thinking of the letter she’d received that morning, ignored the still-thunderstruck Sazen, instead turning to the kids. “You two, if you’ve got time to play around, you’ve got time to sweep the entrance to the shop. And be sure to learn what’s in those books, and learn it well.”

This last was directed at Sazen—no sooner had she chased the kids out of the shop than she dropped a pile of books in front of him.

As Maomao had suspected, Sazen turned out to be a fast learner. He picked up simple recipes quickly, and he proved capable of reading the encyclopedia, if slowly and hesitantly. Maomao showed him around the fields near the house as well as those outside the walls, pointing out which medicinal herbs grew where.

Maybe I should teach him which plants are poisonous too.

She wasn’t worried—mostly—that it would provoke any strange impulses in him, but she still wasn’t going to give him every little detail. If he was that interested, he would pick them up in the course of his study anyway; for now, she restricted herself to the most common ingredients and how to handle them. Sazen frowned when she taught him to produce an abortifacient, but he was sensible enough to understand that it was better than the more physical methods of inducing an abortion, like dunking the woman in cold water or simply beating her—both of which occasionally happened to courtesans.

She’d told Chou-u all the same things, but the brat had shown no interest in any of it; it seemed like every time she looked up, he’d run off to play somewhere. His little side business seemed to be filling his pockets, too, to the extent that he was even doing portraits for courtesans from other nearby brothels.

One day, Maomao instructed Sazen to mix up a simple recipe, while she went out to deliver some medicine requested by a courtesan from one of those other establishments. No sooner had she gone outside, though, than she heard a jingling bell. She looked up, wondering what it could be, to find something charging at her: it appeared to be a calico cat running pell-mell.

She might well wonder what the cat was doing there. Calicos were hardly unusual, but this one had a noticeably fine collar, woven of silk and decorated with an imported bell. Not the sort of thing you would see on every feline running around the neighborhood.

“Maomao! Where are you?” called a familiar voice. She soon saw a portly middle-aged man approaching at something between a walk and run. It was the quack doctor.

Maomao picked up the cat, who’d grown substantially in the time since they’d seen each other last, and held her out to the doctor as he finally shuffled up.

“Y...Young lady, it’s been quite a while,” he said, smiling even as he struggled to catch his breath.

“Yes, sir, it has. But what in the world is going on?” The cat and the quack should both have been at the rear palace, not here in the pleasure district.

“Yes, a-about that...” The quack couldn’t seem to catch his breath, so Maomao led him back to the apothecary shop and made him some tea. She thoughtfully served it cold, and he drank it down in one gulp.

“If I may ask, what are you doing here? Er... On second thought, never mind.” Maomao felt bad for him: they must have finally let him go. He was a perfectly decent person, but one could only sit around collecting a salary for so long before questions started to be asked about whether one was doing anything to justify it. It would be tough for him to find new employment as a eunuch, but Maomao resolved to be as cordial to him as possible.

The quack, however, looked at her skeptically and said, “I think you’re under some kind of misunderstanding, miss.”

“Please, you needn’t feel embarrassed about it with me. It happens to everyone at some point.”

“No, I’m not certain it does...” The quack stroked his none-too-rich mustache, while Maomao (the cat) yawned on his knees. Apparently he’d continued to serve as her caretaker. Once Consort Gyokuyou had become the Emperor’s bride, she had moved to a palace adjoining that of the Empress Dowager, where many a rule and regulation had to be observed—much to the chagrin of the sovereign’s little girl, Princess Lingli. It couldn’t possibly have hurt to allow her a single pet, could it?

I suppose if it were just the Empress Dowager, she would be fine with it, Maomao thought. But the other palace women living nearby would never have put up with it. And Gyokuyou no doubt had more ladies-in-waiting by now too—even in the rear palace, she’d barely gotten by with her seven women.

Maomao felt a pang of loneliness, but she knew it was the right thing that she hadn’t followed Empress Gyokuyou. Maomao was confident that she could cause more of an uproar than even her feline counterpart, if she might say so herself.

“Ahem, so, the matter at hand,” the quack said, having finally gotten his breathing under control. He drank some more tea. “I’ve been granted permission to return home for the first time in quite a long while, and I was just on my way there...”

“Huh! Finally sending you back, are they?”

“Now you’re just teasing me, young lady,” the quack said with a touch of exasperation. He was right, and since it was preventing the conversation from progressing, Maomao decided to leave it at that.

“So instead of your home, you’re here. Why is that?” she asked.

“Yes, well...” He looked at her with an inscrutable expression. “The permission was granted on a rather unusual condition. You haven’t heard anything about it, miss?”

“Exactly what kind of condition?”

“Nothing major. But apparently there’s someone who wants to travel with me part of the way. This is a personal request from the Matron of the Serving Women, so I’m sure it’s no one...strange.”

This apothecary shop, it transpired, was to be the meeting place.

Maomao thought back to the letter she’d received several days before, a unilateral demand from Jinshi that she accompany him on an expedition he would be undertaking. No duration was specified, nor any destination, nor even when they would leave. Maomao was reluctant to close the shop every time they went on one of these little adventures, and she knew the madam wouldn’t look favorably on it either, which was why she’d been in such a hurry to teach Sazen the ropes.

I thought maybe I’d have a little longer...

Thankfully, Sazen was a quick student, and she’d readied a supply of medicine beforehand. She was left to wonder, though, why they would be traveling with the quack doctor. She would ask later.

“And as for why Maomao is here, I thought maybe I could ask my family to look after her,” the quack said. Considering that he himself was evidently the only alternative, it seemed like a wise choice. He would be lonely, yes, but the kitten had originally stayed at the palace only because of Princess Lingli’s caprice. It would probably be hard to justify keeping her in the medical office much longer. “They’ll be happy to have her catching rats for them.”

“I see,” Maomao said.

The quack seemed jubilant at the idea of seeing his family again for the first time in more than a decade. Maomao recalled that they were producers of paper, supplying even the Imperial court. They certainly would welcome a guard to be on the lookout for any rats that might try to chew on the product. It sounded far away, though, and Maomao (the girl) couldn’t help wondering whether Maomao (the cat) would behave herself on the long journey.

“Oh, look! A cat!” called the courtesans—it was only afternoon, and they still had time before the customers started to arrive. The cat, unfortunately, was startled by the shouting; she gave the quack’s knees a good scratch, then fled the shop.

“Ow! No, Maomao, wait!”

“What a name!” one of the courtesans said, laughing as she watched the cat go.

The animal with the unfortunate moniker ducked through a crack in the door of the shop and made for the entrance to the Verdigris House. Maomao and the quack slipped on their shoes as quickly as possible and went after her.

Maomao (the cat) went weaving among women fresh from early baths (and looking less than made up), ducked between the legs of the menservants preparing the bedchambers, and arrived at the kitchen. She could see four short legs: the kids having a late lunch.

“Where’d you come from?” Chou-u asked as the cat came to a halt in front of him. He chewed on his chopsticks and looked at the calico. Zulin blinked her dewy eyes. Maomao (the cat!) splayed herself over Chou-u’s foot.

“Is this what you’re after?” Chou-u asked, picking up some fish with his chopsticks. It was just grilled blueback, but it had a pleasantly salty taste without the need for any seasoning.

“Mrow!” Maomao batted down Chou-u’s food.

“Hey! Hey, you!”

The fish fell smack on the dirt floor and Maomao gobbled it up. Awfully indelicate table manners for one consuming such a fine feast—rather like a certain someone else.

“No, Maomao, don’t do that!” the quack cried as he arrived, breathing hard.

“Stupid cat! And who’s the geezer?” But that wasn’t Chou-u’s only question. “Wait... Maomao? Seriously?” He grinned openly at Maomao (the girl). Even Zulin seemed to be laughing under her breath, in her own mute way.

Maomao, thoroughly displeased, at least managed to snatch up the calico, although there was no hope of recovering the fish, which the cat kept firmly in her jaws. Chou-u looked ruefully at his meal, but the cat seemed to intrigue him. When he poked her squishy pink toe pads, he exclaimed “Oh!” and his eyes sparkled.

They decided to leave Maomao (the cat) with Chou-u and Zulin, with strict instructions not to let her get away. They alerted one of the menservants, so chances were the kids couldn’t get up to too much trouble.

When they got back to the shop, Maomao finally had a chance to ask the quack what was really going on. Fiddling uncomfortably with his facial hair, he said, “I believe you know about my family’s paper business.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ahem, well, the reason I’m going home is actually because there’s been a bit of an issue.”

Some time ago, he’d received a letter from his younger sister saying that the quality of the paper had suddenly gotten worse. That problem was supposed to have been solved, but maybe something new had come up.

“That’s why I asked to be allowed to visit—but apparently someone important had just been hoping they could see my village themselves.”

Jinshi had been interested in paper production since his days as a “eunuch,” so maybe this struck him as the perfect opportunity to see the process up close. But that still left Maomao wondering what the problem was this time.

“What did her letter say?” she asked.

“I’m not quite sure I can tell you here,” the quack said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Please, let me explain after we get there.”

“Very well,” Maomao said, and as if on cue, a horse could be heard neighing outside.

It was a somber young man who appeared, his face classically lovely, but his bangs worn long to hide a burn scar on his right cheek. Maomao recognized the gloomy visitor.

Not bad, not bad.

It was the customer who’d come to the Verdigris House when all the courtesans had been summoned to entertain. He’d paid no attention to them, just sat there drinking wine. He was one of Jinshi’s alter egos. Jinshi had used the fake burn to hide the real scar on his cheek, and his whole appearance was so much less...well, sparkly than it normally was that he looked like a different person. Maomao had taught him once how to disguise himself; it seemed he’d put the lesson to good use. If she hadn’t seen him in his darker moments as well as a few disguises, she wouldn’t have realized it was him.

As for the quack doctor, he didn’t seem particularly wary even when confronted with the lovely noble. He didn’t recognize him at all.

“Are you ready to go?” Basen spoke in lieu of the disguised Jinshi. His clothing was finer than Jinshi’s, and Jinshi behaved like a servant toward him. It seemed to make Basen slightly uncomfortable—although he was likely even more worried about the possibility of being noticed by Maomao’s sister Pairin before they could get out of there.

“Am I ready? I daresay it’s a little sudden for that,” Maomao said. Yes, the letter had arrived several days ago, but there’d been no specific indication of their departure date. Frankly, she hadn’t gotten anything ready at all.

“I’m afraid it was out of our control. There were issues of timing to consider. We’ve already packed for you.”

True, Jinshi’s appearance suggested they were going to go spying—and going spying suggested they were going to be at it for a while, so Maomao understood that they must have pushed themselves to be ready for this moment. But to say they’d prepared changes of clothes for a woman—did they understand what that meant?

Whatever. Regardless of what their relationship might actually be—brothers or whatever—the Emperor certainly saw fit to work Jinshi like a dog. There were probably still things to clean up at the rear palace, along with plenty of other professional headaches Jinshi no doubt had to deal with. It was his job, so he couldn’t exactly complain, but still...

It’s like he’s grooming a successor, Maomao thought—and then promptly threw the idea away. At the moment it was Consort Gyokuyou’s—no, Empress Gyokuyou’s son who was the presumptive heir. And what’s more, Consort Lihua had also borne a son. The Emperor was only in his mid-thirties, and still the picture of health. In all likelihood, he would easily remain on the throne until his children came of age. Assuming, of course, that nothing happened to him—but Maomao elected not to contemplate such an unhappy possibility.