The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: The La Clan (Part Two)

“I wondered what was going on...” Rikuson heaved a sigh. He had eventually made his way into the mansion, and Gramps and Lahan’s mother were now sequestered in a separate room. Rikuson had made the call within moments of seeing the strategist’s beleaguered state. Truly, he was another of the fine subordinates the freak had found for himself.

“I’m very sorry. If my brother Lakan had regained his sanity sooner, this could all have been over much quicker,” Lahan’s father said, sounding tired. Maomao felt a strange affinity for him, perhaps because he so much resembled Luomen—not in his appearance, but in something less tangible.

Figuring the “prison” room wasn’t exactly congenial, they’d moved to another part of the house. At the moment, Lahan, his father, Maomao, Rikuson, and the strategist were all together, along with several men Rikuson had brought with him. Maomao felt a little bad for them having come all this way when ultimately they hadn’t been needed. Rikuson would give only his official story, namely that they’d come to bring their superior officer back home, but there was no question the men were intended to intimidate.

Maomao, meanwhile, didn’t want to be in the same room as the freak strategist, but she knew she couldn’t be pushy about it just then. In the blink of an eye, though, he was beside her and jabbering about something. She wished he would shut up. She knew she ought to take pity on him in his weakened state, but she discovered she just wasn’t able.

“Maomao, we should go have a dress made for you sometime. We’ll get lots of the finest fabric, and we can have a hair stick made too!” the strategist said.

Maomao didn’t say anything.

“And then we should get all dressed up and we can go see a show! Yes, let’s do that!”

Maomao didn’t say anything.

“You like books, don’t you, Maomao? I’ve got an idea—why stop at just reading them? What if you were to make a book yourself?”

Even when she ignored him, he wouldn’t let up. She almost twitched at the idea of making her own book, but she managed to force down the reaction.

“Elder Brother, we’re trying to talk, here. Perhaps you could sit quietly for a moment?” Lahan’s father, the strategist’s younger brother, tried to talk him down, but without much conviction. Neither Lahan—the strategist’s adopted son—nor Rikuson—his subordinate—could be too forceful with him either. So eventually, every gaze in the room settled on Maomao. She frowned mightily, but she was cornered.

She gave a sniff and made a face of exaggerated disgust. “You stink. You smell like a feral dog who’s been out in the rain,” she said.

The strategist brought his own sleeve to his nose and sniffed. Then he looked at Lahan’s father. “Where’s the bath?”

“Take a right out of this room and it’s at the end of the hall. I’ll ask the servants to get it ready for you right away.”

“Yes, please. Right away,” the strategist said, and left the room.

“And don’t forget to brush your teeth,” Maomao called after him. (One for the road.) If they were lucky, they wouldn’t see him for at least an hour.

“I guess it’s tough, having a daughter,” Lahan’s father commented sadly. “Not that I was able to get through to him on my own.”

“Just watching it breaks your heart,” Rikuson agreed, sipping his tea.

“Be that as it may, you got here awfully quickly,” Lahan said to him. “I thought you might take your time yet.”

Lahan had been staying at an inn near the ship’s landing, and Lahan must have known that when he and Maomao failed to return, Rikuson would get suspicious and come to the mansion. But it hadn’t even been an entire day since they’d left—a rather short timeline.

“I had a tip,” Rikuson replied, gesturing at Lahan’s father.

“Not so much from me personally,” the man said. “Someone else went and told them. Someone who doesn’t always own up to his true feelings.” Lahan’s father looked out the window, where Lahan’s older brother could be seen listlessly dragging a green vine around. “He moans about being stuck doing farmer’s work, but you see how devoted he is to it. No, he isn’t always forthcoming about his feelings, but he’s a good boy.”

“He’s just okay. I guess he’s not a bad person,” Maomao said.

“My older brother’s not precisely a paragon of virtue, but he’s not capable of true evil,” Lahan added.

“Erm, the two of you aren’t exactly bursting with praise,” Rikuson said, watching the young man in the fields with a touch of pity.

“They say the father exists for his son and his grandson, but it doesn’t seem like that to me. That boy’s even less cut out for politics than I am,” Lahan’s father said. With his tanned skin and hulking body, he looked like he could have made a very capable soldier, but ultimately one had to reckon with personality. Sometimes a person was more suited to the hoe than the sword or the spear. This man looked every inch the farmer.

“I do have to wonder,” Lahan said, cocking his head. “Why would they bring all this up now? If they were waiting for the evidence of Grandfather’s corruption to be expunged, I would have expected them to move sooner.” Maomao wasn’t sure that was such a smart thing to say with Rikuson sitting right there, but apparently it was all right.

“A fair question. Lakan called for your grandfather on account of his new bride. And that was fine, as far as it went. Normally, I think my father would simply have ignored him and not gone to the capital. Except...” Lahan’s father took a piece of braided rope from the folds of his robes. Although his earth-stained fingers had darkened it, it was clear that it had originally been white. It was much like the one Lahan’s mother had worn around her wrist.

“I am so sick of those things,” Maomao said, pointedly looking away from it.

“Uh... I haven’t said anything about it yet,” Lahan’s father said, appearing bemused.

“You don’t have to. Let me guess—your wife fell under the sway of some fortune-teller or something.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“And she asked how that freak was doing.”

“I don’t know for certain. But we learned there was no one around him...”

The freak’s adopted son Lahan and his close attendant Rikuson were both in the western capital. Even if the strategist were to disappear, the two people most likely to notice weren’t around.

Frustrated, Maomao picked up something on the table. The servant had evidently brought it to accompany the tea. It looked sort of like a dry, flat daikon with white powder on top. The fact that it was on a plate meant it was presumably food. It was sweet, yet chewy; it was stringy, but not unpleasant.

Is this sweet potato?

Maomao had eaten processed sweet potato before, but almost always stuff that had been steamed and turned into a paste. This one appeared to have been cooked and dehydrated.

“This is pretty good. Am I right that this is sweet potato?” she asked.

“Oh!” Lahan exclaimed, leaning forward as if he had suddenly remembered something. “That’s right! Dad—you said something about an interesting potato?”

“Hm? Potato? Oh! Yes. Yes, I suppose so.”

Lahan grabbed some of the snack off Maomao’s plate. “You said you thought you might have an idea—did you mean this?”

“Mm. It’s steamed and dried potato. No sugar, no honey, but it’s sweeter than chestnuts or pumpkin, isn’t it?” He gestured out the window as if to say, There it is. Maomao had wondered what was in the fields—it was these potatoes.

Lahan squinted and adjusted his glasses. “How much are you growing?”

“We’re trying to expand as much as we can. Wouldn’t want any of the fields to go to waste.”

“You seem to lack sufficient help.”

“Some of the farmers in the area come and help us out. We’ve got more potatoes than we know what to do with.” They seemed happy to help in exchange for all the potatoes they could get. “Oh! But don’t worry. We haven’t sold them in the open market, just like you said, Lahan. When we do sell them, we make sure it’s only product, not raw potatoes.”

“That’s fine, then.”

Maomao found herself perplexed by the conversation. Were Lahan and his father trying to corner the market on sweet potatoes? Was it Lahan’s fault that Maomao had only ever seen sweet potatoes as an ingredient, not raw? She would have gladly grown some sweet potatoes for herself if she could have gotten her hands on a raw one.

“It’s such a waste, though,” Lahan’s father said. “We’ve got more potatoes than we could ever need. The storehouse is full. Well, the pigs are pretty happy to have them for slop, I admit. I think it’s improved their meat too.”

If they had so many sweet potatoes, wouldn’t they just stop growing them?

“Last year, one tan yielded two hundred shin (750 kilograms) of sweet potatoes,” Lahan’s father said.

“Two hundred shin?!” Maomao exclaimed.

“Four times as much as an ordinary rice yield,” Lahan said. “Partly thanks to Dad’s tinkering, I’m sure, but even so—incredible, right?”

“Is the crop unique to this region?” Maomao demanded, leaning toward Lahan’s father.

“Not at all. A long time ago, I bought a sprout that I thought was an expensive but interesting-looking morning glory—but it was from the south. It turned out to be a different plant, although one that looked similar. Something you grow with rootstock, not seeds. I didn’t have any luck getting it to flower, and I became bent on trying to get a blossom out of it.” He gazed out the window. “After we came here, we had plenty of space in the fields. I knew flowers sometimes only bloom under specific conditions, but at times they also produce unusual byproducts. Like this.” He plucked off a piece of the dried potato.

Intrigued, he had started to play around with processing his rootstock in various ways. “When I looked into it, I discovered this was a tuber called a sweet potato—sweeter than chestnuts, and able to grow even in poor soil. I think I might be the only person in the whole country growing these things. Lahan told me not to let any seed potatoes out of the village, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”

By now, Maomao was starting to get a pretty good idea of what Lahan had wanted from his father. It had to do with what the emissary from Shaoh had said: provisions or asylum. Pick one. What was more, it would serve as a countermeasure to the insect plague that would soon strike them. Lahan, she suspected, was hoping to use his father’s potatoes to solve both problems—but no matter how tremendous the yield was from those fields, there was no way they were producing enough to feed an entire country. Even if there were seed potatoes left, it didn’t seem like a viable solution.

Lahan’s father, though, provided the answer. “You don’t have to use rootstock. You can use stems too. You could probably make it work as long as it had been freshly planted.”

“Stems, sir?” Maomao asked.

There were ways of growing plants beyond just seeds or potatoes—a stem clipping could be made to work, as long as it put down roots. If they could do that, maybe they could hope for, say, ten times as much yield. (Yeah, yeah, counting chickens something something.) But it still wouldn’t be enough. Unlike rice, though, the bugs wouldn’t go after the potatoes. That was a major advantage.

“Dad, I have a favor to ask you,” Lahan said—and then he went on to describe more or less what Maomao had imagined. He wanted to buy up the sweet potatoes, and he wanted seed potatoes and sprouts too. And he wanted his father to tell him how best to grow them, if possible. It turned out he wanted quite a lot.

Maomao thought Lahan was being rather presumptuous—notwithstanding that they were talking to his father—but “Dad” kept smiling. Hardly taking a moment to think, he said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to.” He sat back in his chair, ground some ink, and started writing out the instructions.

Maomao, her brow wrinkling, said, “Are you sure about this? If you don’t lay some ground rules now, you might just get taken to the cleaners here.”

“Watch your mouth!” Lahan objected.

“Ha ha ha! I told you we had more of them than we knew what to do with. If you leave us enough to give to the other farmers, that’ll be fine. And, er, if our taxes weren’t quite so heavy, I’d be happy about that too.”

That only made Maomao frown harder. She glanced at Lahan, but he was grinning, obviously working the abacus in his head.

Maomao grabbed the brush from Lahan’s father.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She began writing a contract, the brush moving in quick, decisive strokes. “First, we have to set the price of the potatoes, as well as the sprouts. If you’re going to teach him the cultivation methods, that’s extra.”

“Of course I’ll pay for that,” Lahan said, as if to say that so much, at least, was obvious even to him. Still, Maomao couldn’t bring herself to leave the situation alone. Lahan seemed too much like his foster father.

Lahan read unhappily over the contract Maomao had produced; he seemed to be reconsidering how to handle the amounts.

Then there was a thump and a man covered in mud entered. “I’ve got it, Father,” he said.

“Excellent. Just leave it there.”

It was Lahan’s older brother, carrying a bucket with a green vine in it. At least one of them must have realized Lahan might be after this—their preparations were very thorough.

Lahan’s father picked up the vine. “They taste better if you don’t let the vines overgrow. You have to cut back the roots periodically.” He showed it to Maomao. “You can boil the excess vines. I think they’re pretty good, but my father doesn’t agree.”

Tasty or not—a crop that would grow even in poor soil, could be grown by vine, and where even the vines were edible? It was like it had been custom-made to prevent famine. Of course, even if they got started now, there was no telling how much they could actually hope to harvest, but given everything that had been said, it sounded like they would certainly get more of this stuff than they ever would of rice, even if it wasn’t enough.

So that was why Lahan had been so receptive to the emissary’s advances.

“We should’ve started selling earlier,” Maomao said, eliciting wry smiles from Lahan and his father. No doubt Lahan had ordered them not to release the crop into the market because he’d known it was going to be a booming business.

“My father didn’t like the idea very much. Complained about having to act like a farmer,” Lahan’s father said. It seemed a little late to be worried about that with all these fields around. “Besides, if you sell a bunch of a new crop, you’re looking at some real headaches with taxes.”

It was true that selling always invited taxation. Staple foods like rice and wheat were taxed as a percentage of yield, the amount varying from region to region.

“Vegetables, though—for those, they only take a percentage of what’s actually brought to market.”

“Because things that rot—well, if you try to store them someplace, they’ll just go bad.”

Better to collect after the goods had been converted into hard cash. Which category would these potatoes fall under? Potatoes as such probably kept, at least for a while. If they carelessly flooded the market with raw potatoes, they could be subject to substantial taxes.

“To be fair, if we’ve got a ton of them just lying around, it doesn’t really matter if they take them for taxes,” Lahan’s father observed.

“Now, Dad, it’s important to economize on your taxes.”

Maomao shot Lahan a look: what a thing to say, when he was on the side that was collecting. Lahan’s father, though, seemed to be enjoying his rural life. Given his build, he could have gotten along pretty well as a soldier, Maomao suspected, but here he was.

“It looks like you enjoy your life here,” she remarked casually.

Lahan’s father smiled, his eyes sparkling. “I do. So much so I almost feel bad about it.” He fiddled with the potato vine as he spoke. “With apologies to my mother and father, I’m grateful to my older brother Lakan. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gotten to experience the pleasure of a calm life of fieldwork.”

“Think of the trouble he caused to the people he caught in his wake,” Lahan said. The eccentric strategist had driven his father—the clan head—and his younger half-brother, who would have been next in line, from the capital in order to claim the family headship. Then he’d adopted his nephew Lahan. That was as much as Maomao knew about the situation, but she trusted that it was true.

It turned out, however, that for Lahan’s father, that eviction from the capital had been a blessing in disguise.

“I like it here,” he said. “The more you cultivate, the more you can grow. Back in the capital, about the most you could hope to grow was potted plants.” His smile made him look much younger than his years. “If what we’re doing here can save people from starvation, then I say, take as much as you need! Let the whole country grow potatoes!” He was really getting into this.

“I don’t think Grandfather is going to share your positivity,” Lahan said.

“Well, there’s not much we can do about that. Ten years in exile hasn’t softened his pride at all. His life will just go on the way it has been—painfully boring, as far as he’s concerned.” There was a startling glint of coldness in the man’s eyes.

“He always did like to accumulate unbeautiful numbers,” Lahan said. He was calculating the size of the field and how many potato sprouts he could plant. The vine cutting would last several days if kept in water.

The reality was that even if they started a field right now, there were no guarantees they would be able to harvest this year. Just as there was no cure-all medicine, there were no perfect answers in politics. You simply had to weigh the pros against the cons and decide what would be most advantageous.

Just as they were thinking about what they would do, the door slammed open.

“Maomaaaao! I’ve taken my bath!”

In came the strategist, buck naked except for a minimal layer of underwear. Forget eccentric—this was downright sick. He didn’t even seem to have taken the time to dry himself completely; his skin and hair were still dripping.

Not bothering to hide her annoyance, Maomao poured some of the now-cold tea into a cup, then took a small bottle from her robes and added several drops of its contents to the drink. She held it out to the strategist.

“M... M... Maomao! You’re serving me tea?!”

“Please, have some.”

The strategist’s eyes brimmed with tears of emotion as he took the cup and downed it in a single gulp.

There was a brief moment of silence. No sooner had he drunk the tea than a shudder passed through his body—and then he collapsed to the floor.

“You poisoned him!” Lahan exclaimed.

“It’s just alcohol,” Maomao replied. The strategist was as vulnerable to liquor as he had always been. If anything, she thought he seemed even less able to hold his drink than before.

Thoroughly not interested in seeing any more of the man’s naked body, she brought a blanket from the bedroom and draped it over him. Lahan and Rikuson carried the freak to the couch with looks of exasperation.

“Maybe I was lucky I only have sons,” Lahan’s father said with a droll smile.

The freak was grinning in a most distressing way. “...ake a...” he mumbled, slurring in his sleep.

“What’s that you said, sir?” Rikuson asked, leaning closer.

“I’ll make a...a Go—”

Rikuson looked stricken. “He wants to make a Go book for some reason,” he said, looking like he didn’t really understand. Maomao, though, glanced at the table. Lahan had preserved the earlier match as a game record.

There were, supposedly, many more records of many more games between the freak and his courtesan—enough to fill a book.

Hrmm...

The sleeping strategist looked very peaceful. Maomao had expected him to be more depressed about things, but it seemed not. He gave no hint of being weighed down by grief, but was his usual freakish self, driving ahead.

“Normally, when one buys a courtesan, one makes her a mistress. Then one doesn’t need any approval from one’s parents—which would have been convenient, considering the relationship between my honored adoptive father and my grandfather,” Lahan told Maomao.

“Yeah, so?”

“Even then, he seems to have wanted to make formal introductions, to the point of calling for my grandfather, whom he’d left here for so long.”

This woman is my wife, he’d wanted to say. Clearly, unambiguously.

“Lakan always was a romantic,” Lahan’s father said.

“Yeah, great.” Maomao sat down in a chair as if to make clear that none of this had anything to do with her. She took the potato vine from the bucket and bit into it experimentally. “It’s terrible raw,” she said, and dumped it back in the bucket with a frown.