The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 15

Chapter 15: “Mom”

They went to examine the shrine maiden several more times. On the way home from one such visit, the scene outside the carriage looked as lively as a New Year’s celebration.

“It almost would have been faster to walk,” Yao said. Maomao, who knew her father had a bad leg, stayed quiet.

Luomen smiled awkwardly. “My apologies. I can’t go too far on this leg, you see.” Yao looked mortified, but it was too late. She was lucky it had been Luomen. He would take her slip in good humor; any other important personage might well have been offended.

It wasn’t clear yet if there was much point to the examinations they were conducting, but the little crew had at least been able to be of some help. Not Maomao’s medicinal selections, sadly, but rather in terms of life advice. They’d been able to tell the shrine maiden to make sure she drank plenty of water. In Shaoh, water was too precious to drink much of. Besides, the shrine maiden couldn’t exactly excuse herself to use the facilities just any old time, so she wasn’t in the habit of drinking water frequently. When she started to get more fluids, she happily reported that she was having fewer headaches.

She was also pleased, she mentioned in passing, to be able to take more walks. As an albino, she’d only been able to go out at night in Shaoh, but the sunlight was less intense and rain more frequent in Li. During spells of bad weather, she would get an umbrella and take a constitutional.

I guess I’m glad she’s enjoying herself, Maomao thought, but she was almost beginning to wonder if the shrine maiden had come to Li for a simple vacation.

Not that the woman had nothing to fill her hours, of course. She received occasional visitors. Some of them were important people, but there were also those who simply wanted to exchange a few words with the foreign shrine maiden “for the experience.” Much like the White Lady before her, this foreign shrine maiden seemed to attract people intrigued by the color of her skin.

“She said someone who visited her today wanted their fortune told,” Maomao said.

“Prognostication certainly is something a shrine maiden sometimes does, but it’s a bit of a rude request. She is, after all, a foreign dignitary,” Luomen said. Maomao agreed entirely. Not to mention that, publicly at least, she was here for medical treatment. Going to someone in that position and asking them to tell your fortune smacked of a certain lack of empathy, but sadly, many people seemed to be that way.

“They say her fortunes are accurate, but I question living your life based on things like that—letting baseless predictions dictate your future,” Maomao said. That was what bothered her. There was no reason to believe fortune-telling worked. If the shrine maiden’s predictions had any validity at all, it probably just showed that she had a gift for reading people.

“I know you prefer things to be clear-cut, Maomao,” Luomen said.

“You don’t like fortune-telling?” Yao broke in.

“Doesn’t it make you feel funny?” Maomao asked. She knew not everything in the world was black and white, but in her view, most of life’s “mysteries” simply represented a limitation of one’s own knowledge or information. There was always something real behind them. “I mean, scorching tortoise shells and letting that tell you where to locate your capital city? Pretty dubious method.”

“I daresay it’s surprisingly rational, in fact,” her father countered. “Using parts of the local wildlife can give you a sense of how well the animals are eating. In other words, whether the land is abundant. Call it fortune-telling, attribute it to the gods or an immortal—if that’s what it takes to get people to believe it. Perhaps that’s where what we call politics began.”

I see, Maomao thought. She could accept that. Yao was likewise listening intently.

“There’s only one problem. A ritual might have meant something when it was first performed, but if you forget why it began or lose the knowledge of what it means, only the form remains. That, girls, is dangerous.” Luomen looked sad. “I once went to a village where, when there was a bad harvest, they would sacrifice all the infants born that year, burying them in the ground. But one year that failed to improve the crop, so they made more sacrifices, until there was hardly anyone left in the village. That was when I happened to pass through the place on my travels.”

I think I see where this is going. Her father had known much hardship, and by this point in the story, Maomao had a good idea of what he was getting at.

“When they tied me up and threw me in a hole, I thought for sure I was going to die. My good luck that my traveling companion showed up a little later and found me, or I might be nourishing the worms there to this very day.”

Yao was speechless at the composure with which Luomen conveyed this grim tale. As perceptive as he was, he was a bit numb to stories of his own misfortune. (Suffice to say he hadn’t chosen to become a eunuch.)

“We might regard human sacrifice as absurd, but sometime in the past it was effective. In this particular village, they had a habit of planting the same crop in the fields each year. They used fertilizer, but there was a nutrient missing—something produced in the human body.”

That logic, of course, only held if monocropping was the actual problem. When Maomao’s father had visited the village, though, an insect-borne disease had been the cause of the poor harvest; the sacrifices had been entirely in vain.

“Sometimes people continue to do things simply because they worked in the past. Take a place that promotes good harvests with human sacrifices—the harvest happens to improve because the sacrifices were buried in bare earth. Over time, however, the gods or immortals come into it and it becomes a ritual. The divine is a powerful and convenient excuse.”

Perhaps the shrine maiden of Shaoh had become sacred through a similar process.

Their chat brought them to the door of the medical office. Maomao would have liked to hear more from her father, but that would be all for now. She helped him out of the carriage. There were reports to write. Always reports.

They discovered quite a commotion as they entered the office. What was going on?

“Thank goodness you’re here!” said a doctor who came over to them looking very distressed.

“What’s the matter?” Luomen asked.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?! I can’t believe he would show up when you were both out. We told him you weren’t here, but he insisted he would wait until you got back! We didn’t know what to do!”

Maomao and her father looked at each other. There was a short list of people who could cause consternation like this.

“I guess I’d better handle this,” Luomen said and walked into the medical office. Inside, no surprise, was the monocled freak, reclining on a couch he’d had brought for himself.

“Uncle! I thought you’d never get here!” the freak said, grinning.

“Come now, Lakan! We’ve talked about bringing your furniture into people’s offices uninvited. As well as throwing your snack wrappers on the floor—they belong in the trash can. And don’t come crying to me if your teeth rot from drinking nothing but juice! You aren’t drinking straight from the container, are you?” Luomen bent over and began picking up wrappers.

“H-He looks like an old grandma,” said Yao, and even those in the office not of refined upbringing probably agreed with her.

The apprentice physicians and the freak’s subordinates scampered to join Luomen at his task. Maomao should probably have helped, too, but if she got anywhere near them the commotion would just start again. Not to mention she simply didn’t feel like it. Instead, she observed from behind a post.

“Uncle! Where’s Maomao? She’s close, isn’t she!” the freak said, his nose twitching like a dog’s.

Maomao couldn’t stop herself from mumbling, “Ugh...”

“Maybe you could do something about your...your face, Maomao? It’s terrifying,” Yao said. If she said so, then. Maomao massaged her mouth and eyebrows until they relaxed somewhat. She couldn’t keep her cheeks from twitching, though.

“Maomao! Give me Maomao!” the freak was shouting.

“Come on, now. I warned you that if you made a fuss there would be lots of carrots in your dinner. It’s carrot congee tonight,” Luomen said. If people didn’t think he seemed like an old lady already, they would now. Several people were holding their stomachs, overcome with mirth. The rest were looking around, not knowing what to do.

“I want egg in my congee, Uncle! I mean—no! Where’s Maomao? I have a legitimate reason to be here today!”

“That’s somewhat hard to believe, with you lying around on a couch you brought yourself, getting snack debris everywhere,” Luomen said. He opened a drawer, took out a toothbrush, and gave it to the freak strategist. The message seemed to be: brush your teeth. “You can start by telling me what your ‘reason’ is. I know you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to Maomao. If I agree with why you’re here, we can go from there.”

The strategist, shoving the toothbrush in his mouth, nodded eagerly. Maomao picked up a basket of used bandages in the hallway. She trusted her father to handle things. If she was lucky, the two of them would finish their little chat while she was still doing the laundry.

It was perhaps an hour later, when she’d gotten through the washing and was beginning to hang the bandages to dry, that they called for her. Her father arrived looking tired.

“What did he want?” asked not Maomao, but Yao.

“Something rather surprising, I must say,” Luomen replied.

“Yes?”

“The prince’s presentation will be soon, and Lakan wants Maomao to be his food taster at the dinner.”

Does he really plan to be there? Maomao thought. Lahan claimed there was hardly a garden party or get-together that the strategist bothered to attend. That included, she was given to understand, the last Imperial garden party she’d been a food taster at.

“Why?” Maomao asked. She knew perfectly well that there must be plenty of people out there with grudges against him, so that explained the need. But to think that he would ask for her personally! Not that he seemed to object whenever anyone else asked Maomao to check their food for poison.

“If he’d asked for you to be his lady-in-waiting, that might be one thing, but a food taster? That’s a harder request to turn down. No one is going to object to him having his own taster, particularly after the incident with the food poisoning. How would you like to handle this?”

“Is that really a question?” Maomao said. When her father said the request was “hard to turn down,” it was as good as telling her they couldn’t say no. Her old man had always been a soft touch, anyway. After what had just happened, people had started calling him “Mom,” not that it mattered to Maomao. Not that it mattered at all.

“May I ask something?” Yao said, raising her hand. Luomen nodded. “Weren’t Maomao and I supposed to attend the shrine maiden at the banquet?”

“Yes, that was the intention. She’ll have to get by with only one of you.” Whether that would be Maomao or Yao had yet to be determined. The shrine maiden was to have two food tasters, one from Shaoh and another from Li; given her status and all the attendants, guards, and others around her, the one from Li was fortunate simply to be able to be anywhere near her.

“All right. You go with him, then, Maomao. It’ll be simplest if I take care of the shrine maiden.”

Yao was firm, but Maomao said, “H-Hold on, don’t I have a say in this?” She was, frankly, frightened of what En’en might do if she let Yao taste food for poison. Besides, she wanted to do it.

“He asked for you specifically, so I think you should accept. Anyway, just think of what would happen if you attended the shrine maiden and Grand Commandant Kan was lurking around.”

To that, Maomao could say nothing. Her father was silent as well. The strategist’s impetuous behavior was, for the most part, politely ignored by his compatriots, but they wouldn’t want him acting like that around a foreign dignitary. Especially one whom not even castrated men were allowed to come into contact with.

“Maomao...” Luomen said, patting her shoulder.

“You can leave the shrine maiden to me,” Yao said, patting the other shoulder.

“A-Are you sure we can’t reconsider?” Maomao asked, waving her hands and looking at them.

“I’m afraid we simply can’t refuse this request, Maomao. Considering the implications for the shrine maiden, you have to attend Lakan. We wouldn’t want an international incident.”

“C-C’mon, pops, you must still have a trick up your sleeve...”

Giving her another pat on the shoulder, Luomen said, “I’m afraid not.”