The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: The Bad Dumplings

Ukyou brought Maomao to a mansion in the middle of the city. In the capital, the farther north you went, the better public safety was, and that was where most of the middle-class houses were located.

One of the houses looked more weathered than the others. It must have once been resplendent in its own way, but now some of the roof tiles were missing, and the clay wall had given way in places, revealing the bamboo frame underneath. It looked less like age and more like that the owner didn’t keep up with maintenance.

“Here, this is it.” Ukyou knocked on the door of the tumbledown house. “Sorry, but this is as far as I can go. I’ll catch hell from the madam if I don’t get back,” he said.

“Yeah, I understand,” Maomao said, but when she went into the dilapidated house, it was with a look of some curiosity. Ukyou certainly seemed to be a busy man. “What’s this?” she wondered aloud as she entered. Despite the battered state of the house’s exterior, inside it was remarkably neat and tidy.

That wasn’t what surprised her, though. Instead it was the walls. They were painted white and covered in stucco, on which pictures had been painted. A peach garden spread across one entire wall—but it wasn’t three heroic warriors biting into the peaches, but a beautiful woman. She was shaped a bit like a peach herself, her hair was pitch-black, and white teeth peeked out from between lips that looked as luscious as the fruit she was eating.

She was the very essence of the peach-village immortal.

That’s the sort of thing you only have time to do if you’ve got a patron, Maomao thought. Meimei had said the man did paintings of beautiful women, but Maomao had never imagined something so spectacular. She studied the wall closely—the painted surfaces had a unique sheen to them, not like the paintings she was used to. She was just about to run a finger along the wall in hopes of figuring out what the material was when she heard pounding footsteps.

“Freckles! Hey, Freckles! What are you standing around for? Come look at him, quick!” It was Chou-u, his face pale.

Shit, that’s right. Maomao did have a bad habit of becoming completely engaged in whatever had her attention. She allowed Chou-u to drag her through the house, until they reached what looked like a living room. It was littered with various and sundry objects, though: colorful powders (probably pigments), eggshells (for some reason), a white dust that she took to be stucco, and another substance for thickening it.

Right in the middle of the room, a man lay on a couch. Another man with a worried expression was beside him. The man on the couch was haggard and lacked facial hair, and his pallor had gone beyond pale; he was practically white. The only color in his skin seemed to be on his fingertips, which were covered in paint. The man standing beside him looked fastidious, except that his hands, too, were dirty.

“You have to look at the master!” Chou-u said.

The “master” must be the famous progressive artist. There was a bucket full of vomit beside the couch.

Maomao began to examine the man. His arms and legs twitched occasionally. She opened his eyes and looked at his pupils; she took his pulse. As far as she could tell, he showed every sign of having a case of food poisoning.

“What are his symptoms?” she asked.

“I guess he was throwing up and having diarrhea for a long time,” Chou-u said.

“When it finally subsided, he seemed to be suffering with the chill, so I laid him down,” added the man standing nearby.

“And who’s this?” Maomao asked.

“He’s the master’s work friend! Come on, hurry it up!”

Chou-u could browbeat her all he wanted, but there was only so much Maomao could do. If you didn’t know what toxin was at work, you couldn’t treat it. If it was true the man had been vomiting and having diarrhea, though, there was one thing he would certainly be lacking.

“Chou-u, get me some salt and sugar. If there’s none in the house, get some from somewhere else,” Maomao said. She pulled a coin pouch out of the folds of her robe and tossed it at him.

“Got it,” he said and scurried out of the room. He might not be able to run well because of his half-paralyzed body, but he could be trusted with this much of an errand, at least.

“I’m going to use the kitchen,” Maomao told the work friend, who nodded.

She went to the kitchen and looked in the water jug to make sure the water was still good. She would have preferred to boil it, but there wasn’t time. “Is this fresh water?” she asked.

“It was purchased from the drinking-water vendor just yesterday, so it should be all right,” the man said. Yes, if they’d bought the water, then it should be safe. The same might not hold in the rougher parts of town, but around here, it was unlikely anyone would sell something adulterated. Maomao thought they could more or less safely rule out the possibility that the artist had drunk contaminated water. She took a scooperful, sniffed it, then sipped, but as far as she could tell, it smelled and tasted normal. The house might not look like much, but at least they could afford decent water.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened?” Maomao asked the fastidious man.

“I think so,” he said. Despite his distress, he had enough presence of mind—and enough courtesy—to offer her a chair. He sat on a barrel instead. “He’s more than happy to eat spoiled food—it’s a bad habit of his. I suspect that’s the problem here.”

Food poisoning, then, as Maomao had thought.

“He found some stuffed dumplings that he ate. They tasted spoiled, so we spit them out right away, but he swore up and down that they would be fine if we cooked them, and he ate them up.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Ah, the kid was with us.”’

The kid? That must have been what they called Chou-u.

Bad food didn’t magically become good again just because you cooked it a little more. The poisonous element of the spoilage often remained. A moldy dumpling, for example, could still be toxic even if you scraped the mold off. Not many people worried about it, though. Sometimes they didn’t have the luxury to worry about a touch of poison, when they were facing a choice between eating bad food and not eating at all.

“Argh! What am I going to do? Even if he gets back to work on the painting, it won’t be done in time.” The man brushed his fingers across a large board resting against one wall. It was painted white and bore a sketch, a faint outline of a woman. No doubt the next step would be to color her in, the picture growing ever more lifelike as the colors became more vivid. “He promised it would be done ten days from now!”

Ten days? So there was some sort of deadline involved.

“I’m back!” Chou-u said, coming in with sugar and salt, which he handed to Maomao. She put them in the water she’d prepared, mixing them in, then taking some cotton she had with her and dipping it in the water. She let the water drip from the cloth into the man’s mouth, administering fluid several times.

She was torn about whether to keep him warm or induce a fever. If nothing else, the filthy clothes he was wearing now wouldn’t be able to absorb his sweat. She had them change the artist into a cotton overgarment that could soak up the perspiration. It couldn’t be doing him much good lying on a couch either; she got a proper bed ready and then set about preparing stomach medicine.

The man vomited two more times while she was doing all this, but there wasn’t much to bring up; only the acrid smell of stomach acid pervaded the room.

Maybe keeping the sweat off him and giving him liquids was having an effect, because by nighttime he seemed calmer and his spasming had stopped. Maomao, Chou-u, and the man’s partner were all exhausted. There was nothing in this house except painting supplies, and even getting the bedroom in a usable state had required asking for help from the neighbors. The mattress had been as hard as an old rice cracker and just as moldy. What kind of life had this man been living?

Maomao and Chou-u were each slumped in a chair. The couch on which the master of the house had been lying was now open, but quite honestly, nobody was interested in using it until it had been thoroughly cleaned.

“You think he’ll make it, Freckles?” Chou-u asked, concern in his voice.

“Probably,” she said. It was impossible to be certain, but assuming nothing unexpected happened, she thought the man would regain consciousness. They would have to try to keep him still for a while, and give him food that would aid his digestion. The house didn’t even have enough rice to make thin rice gruel, though; they would have to go and get some. For that matter, there weren’t any decent pots to cook in either.

Adroitly reading the situation, the other man said, “I’ll go get some rice and a clay pot from my place.” It couldn’t have been easy; he was tired too. Was he that close to the man who owned this house?

“What does our patient usually eat, anyway?” Maomao mumbled.

She was sort of talking to herself, but Chou-u answered, “The master always buys stuff from street stalls, or sometimes the neighbors give him food. Today it was those dumplings.”

“That explains the state he’s in,” Maomao said, provoking a look of disgust from Chou-u. “What?”

“Nothing. Just thinking about that stuff we ate today. The other guy and I both shared the dumplings with the master, but they were so disgusting, we spat them out. I thought they were weird before I tasted them, though.”

One thing that was strange about them, for example, was the way the master had said “I don’t remember seeing these around here” when he saw the dumplings on the table. That might seem like a red flag, but the artist had nonetheless offered them to his guests.

“I guess I appreciate that he was trying to be hospitable and all, but I feel like there’s a lot of stuff around here that maybe he shouldn’t be eating.” Chou-u sounded unimpressed. One always heard that there were plenty of weirdos among artists, and it seemed to be true.

Maomao leaned her elbows on the armrest and put her chin in her hands. “I’m surprised you were even able to put something like that in your mouth.”

“I mean, the other guy said he would eat one too, and they did look good.”

The other guy; in other words, the work friend from earlier. Chou-u was always hungry, so he was apt to eat anything that seemed remotely edible. It was enough to make one wonder if he had ever really been the son of a fancy household.

“But it was so bitter! I think maybe the bean filling had gone bad or something,” he said.

“Bitter?” Maomao asked.

“Yeah, just awful! I was like, ugh! and spat it out. So did the other guy.”

So it looked fine, but it tasted bitter? Maomao crossed her arms and cocked her head. “Was it really bitter? Not more like sour?”

“Yeah, it was bitter. ‘Sour’ isn’t the word I would use.”

“And the filling didn’t smell funny at all?”

“If it had, I probably wouldn’t have eaten it.” Chou-u had taken off his shoes and was kicking his feet. They had the window open to change the air in the room, and it had gotten humid inside. Night had fallen; Maomao found a lamp lying around and lit it. It was an unusual-looking light—from his paints to his sources of illumination, this artist seemed to like imported stuff—but it burned fish oil, so Maomao was used to the smell. (In fact, Maomao the cat had started lapping up the oil recently; it was proving quite a problem.)

“Did the filling have any threadlike things? Anything stuck to it?”

“Stuck to it? Well, now that you mention it...” Chou-u seemed to have thought of something. “I guess it might have seemed a little slimy. I spat it out so fast that I’m not sure. The other guy said it was rotten and to spit it out. We washed our mouths with water and didn’t swallow any of it.”

Maomao was perplexed.

“But I don’t think those dumplings would’ve tasted better just ’cause you cooked them. I wonder if there’s something wrong with the master’s tongue.” Chou-u looked at the sleeping man with real exasperation.

Something wrong with his tongue, Maomao thought. She was beginning to see a light at the end of this tunnel. “What did you do with your leftovers, then?” she asked.

“Threw them away! They’re in the trash bin outside. The master was all upset about us wasting food, but at least he didn’t go try to take them out of the trash.”

No sooner had Maomao heard that than she grabbed the lamp and went outside, where she located the wooden box for the trash. A disgusting odor emanated from it—the garbage was still inside. Right on top were two half-eaten dumplings. Maomao was glad she’d made it before the men came to take the trash away to be slop for pigs.

“Yikes! What are you doing? That’s gross!” Chou-u said when he saw her digging through the garbage. But Maomao had no compunctions about picking up a mangled dumpling with her bare hands. She looked at the filling and discovered minced pork and several kinds of vegetable. She pulled the dumpling apart, trying to figure out exactly what was inside.

Chou-u watched her. “Freckles... Please stop grinning while you paw through raw garbage. It’s super scary.”

A smile must have come over her face without her even realizing it. If she was smiling, it was from excitement—she couldn’t ignore the rush.

“Is this what your master or whoever cooked and ate?”

“Yeah. I guarantee he’s got no sense of taste or something. It tasted awful, but he kept saying how delicious it was.”

A hypothesis was beginning to solidify in Maomao’s mind. “What about that other guy? What did he come here for today?”

“Probably to stop the master, I guess. The master swore that when he finished the job he was doing, he was going to leave on a trip immediately.” Chou-u looked down, dejected.

“What kind of trip?”

“Well, he said he studied painting in the west once, way back when. He saw this beautiful woman there and he never forgot her. That’s why he only ever paints pictures of women, he says.”

The west? It reminded her of the lamp, the paints—everything had had a strong whiff of the exotic about it.

“The other guy keeps trying to tell him that there’s no way a woman he saw decades ago is still around, but he’s desperate to find her again.”

The flow of time was not merciful; no matter how beautiful, no woman could ward off the effects of age. Even a lady who once wept tears of pearl could end up as a withered, greedy old hag. If there were such a thing as a woman who didn’t age, she would have to be an immortal or a faerie or something.

“Wh-What in the world are you doing?”

Ah, speak of the devil: the “other guy” had returned with rice and a pot. He was so shocked that he dropped the pot and came running over.

In the darkness, covered in garbage, Maomao must have looked a fright. She still hadn’t wiped the unsettling grin off her face either. Even she found it weird to be smiling so hard—but she couldn’t stop. Instead she grinned at the man, clutching handfuls of trash in both hands. Then she looked at Chou-u.

“Chou-u, you can go home. One of the menservants should be coming for you soon.” She assumed Ukyou, thoughtful as he was, would show up to see what was going on now that the sun had gone down. He could ask someone to cover for him at work.

“What? No way I’m leaving yet!”

“You’ve got to be tired. At least go to sleep until someone comes to get you.”

“Yeah, well... Wash your hands, Freckles.” He had no real comeback, meaning he was tired. He yawned and went inside.

“Honestly... What are you doing?” the painter’s partner asked again, watching Maomao from a safe distance. He was looking at the garbage in her hands.

“Could I talk to you for a few minutes? I’ll wash my hands first.” Maomao put down the garbage and headed for the well.

Maomao and the man were sitting in the kitchen again, Chou-u and the master asleep in the next room. They spoke quietly so as not to wake them.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” the man asked.

“Do you know much about poisonous mushrooms?” Maomao said.

“I can’t say I thought that’s where this discussion was going,” the man said, but he wouldn’t quite look at her.

A few things about this case had struck Maomao as unusual. For one, you’d expect something rotten to taste sour. Sure, some things might turn bitter when they went bad, but a bitter flavor wasn’t enough to be certain you were dealing with rotten food. And if the taste was bad enough to cause the other two to spit it out, why hadn’t it bothered the old master?

Then there was the question of where the dumplings had even come from.

“Did you know that there are certain mushrooms that are bitter when raw, but that the unpleasant flavor goes away when they’re cooked? What’s more, those mushrooms are poisonous—they’re often behind cases of food poisoning at this time of year.”

This particular mushroom was frequently mistaken for an edible variety used in cooking. The surface was slightly slimy, which would fit with Chou-u’s description, as well as the mushrooms Maomao had observed in the filling of the dumplings in the trash.

If they’d gotten the food from a street stall or something, there might have been a public outcry about it—but in any case, nobody would go on eating something that tasted truly terrible.

Had they gotten the food from someone in the neighborhood? But there hadn’t been any talk of people getting upset stomachs—someone would have told them if there were.

Neither the street stall nor the neighborhood explanations seemed very likely.

“May I ask who brought the dumplings?” Maomao said. She looked at the paintings of beautiful women that seemed to adorn every wall. Each looked like a gorgeous female immortal, and each had distinctive, individual characteristics, suggesting the artist had used a different model for each one.

The deadline for the work the artist was doing now was drawing near, and when it was over, the master had claimed he would leave for the west. This man here had been trying to stop him. He claimed to be a colleague, but there was nothing about him that really said artist.

“What are you trying to say? It was just food poisoning,” the man said.

“Yes, it certainly was that. Food poisoning caused by some mushrooms.”

The dumplings weren’t actually rotten—but they were poisoned, and had been from the start.

“Why did you do it?” Maomao asked. “Why did you put poison in the dumplings? Why were you so desperate to make it look like an accident that you even got Chou-u involved?”

“I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t get the impression you intended to kill him,” Maomao said, and the man didn’t respond. “If anything, I think you sincerely don’t want him to die. Am I wrong?”

The man was silent for a moment, then he closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. “The poison proved more potent than I’d expected.” This man was the straightforward type—this seemed as good as a confession. “I was wrong to bring the kid into this, but if it saved him, then I’m glad I did it.”

Maomao didn’t know what she would have done had the man turned out to be the violent type. But he stayed calm; more than anything, he sounded worried about the old painter. On his face was a combination of relief and regret.

“I see how glad you are that he’s all right. Why poison him in the first place, then?” Maomao asked.

“Because he was leaving! He wouldn’t shut up about his trip to the west, but he doesn’t mean to come back!”

“He was moving there permanently?”

“Yeah. He’s consumed with the idea...again.”

The man got up from his seat and went into the next room. He gazed lovingly at the assembled paintings, then went to another room deeper into the house. This room, too, had walls covered in pictures of beautiful women.

“These paintings are stunning,” Maomao said, squinting at them. It occurred to her that if a certain elegant beauty had been there, he could practically have blended right in. (An irrelevant thought if there ever was one!) He was probably stuck under an avalanche of work at the palace by now. “I hear there are even merchants who want to collect his work. If he were to take commissions, he could probably make a comfortable living.”

“Yes, but he can’t send the painting out until it’s finished.”

“And this westward journey of his, he talked to you about it?”

“Yes, but he insisted it was just a trip. I guess he felt he had to lie even to me. It must be a lie—otherwise, why would it have taken him the past six months to get ready?”

This man had just wanted to give the artist a bout of food poisoning—a reason to postpone his deadline. Maomao, having been all but dragged to the western capital, understood that any venture even farther west would require substantial preparations. Proof of identification to get you across the border, a caravan to take you. If you missed your opportunity, you’d practically have to start over from square one. That was what this man had been hoping would happen.

“Argh... This is awful. I thought he really might die.” The man put his head in his hands and mumbled, “Please don’t die...” He was genuinely, deeply worried.

“Couldn’t you have used a milder poison?” Maomao asked, although she realized it might sound odd to speak of any poison as being mild.

“No—he’s got an iron stomach and a constitution to match,” the man said. It was that indefatigable stomach that had convinced the artist that anything could be eaten if cooked properly—and which had convinced this man that only a good, strong poison would do the job.

That’s why he had needed Chou-u, to make it look like it really was food poisoning. With a third party to testify that the dumplings were spoiled, nobody would suspect anything else when the painter got sick to his stomach.

Maomao could hardly believe this. “Why didn’t you just talk to him, then?”

“I did! More than once. At first he didn’t even tell me about his plan at all.”

Eventually, though, the artist had hit trouble trying to arrange everything he needed for his trip, and had turned to this man for help. Even then, he’d stayed quiet about his intention to relocate.

This man had claimed to be a painter, but really he was just an assistant on the master’s work. He would mix paints, purchase pigments, and find merchants who wished to acquire the master’s paintings.

“I’m hardly more than a gofer. Without the master, I’m not capable of doing anything!”

“Do you really believe that?” Maomao asked.

The master was certainly a gifted painter, but as a human being he seemed to be missing something—and people like that tended to end up dead in a field somewhere before long. They needed assistants like this.

“I’ve learned things from talking to so many merchants, though, and I tried to tell him about them,” the man said. He’d heard that strange things were happening in the west—that they were still only foreshocks, but if the rumors were true, it would be best to keep their heads down for the time being. “But he insisted that if that were the case, he had to go—that it was now or never.”

Instead of being dissuaded from going west, the master had redoubled his preparations. He’d already met with the leader of a caravan, so there was no way for this man to intervene from that direction.

In the dark room was a large canvas covered with a white sheet.

“He’d given up on the idea of going before—but then he saw this beautiful lady, and it inspired his passions anew.” The man pulled the cloth aside.

Maomao’s eyes went wide. “But this is...”

“A woman much like the immortal he encountered in the west, he says. This isn’t her, but she looked so much like the other woman that the memories came flooding back to him. I guess I don’t blame him. How could you forget someone like this?”

That’s what this is about? Maomao thought, cold sweat running down her neck.

“The master said she was a shrine maiden he’d seen in Shaoh,” the man explained.

The painting depicted a woman with white hair and red eyes.