The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 20

Chapter 20: Mushroom Congee

The breeze was damp. So much cooler than the climate she came from—she couldn’t seem to get used to the feeling of it on her skin. The sun was less intense here, though. Even indoors, she could tell. She could take slightly longer walks than normal, and that made her happy.

She thought back over the adventures she’d had these past months. Before, she’d spent all her time in her residence, being worshipped. She was accustomed by now to people venerating her, but it could get boring. She’d been prepared to hand over the position to anyone who wanted it—yet her own existence prevented any chance of that happening. Shrine maiden, they called her, and had for so long that she no longer remembered her own name. If she abdicated her seat now, she wouldn’t even know what to call herself.

And now, it was all finally coming to an end. This languid stretch of time had been the last postponement.

Her room was darkened by an array of curtains. There was a rustle of cloth in the dimness. She wondered for a second what it was, but then she saw a girl peeking out at her. Her name was Jazgul. It meant “flower of spring.” The girl, born without a voice, had been brought to her about a year before.

Perhaps it would have been uncouth to ask by what path she had come to be with the shrine maiden. She was quite pretty in her own way, but her long limbs betrayed malnutrition. She couldn’t read or write, but she could hear, and she understood what was said to her. As for the lack of accomplishments, that was in fact just what the shrine maiden had needed.

The shrine maiden beckoned to Jazgul, who came to her happily. There were no visitors today. For some days now the shrine maiden had been sick in bed, unable to entertain Jazgul. Now she felt she had to make up for it.

She smiled at Jazgul as the girl approached her. She slid off the bed and brought her a few items from one side of the room. They included some pigment. The shrine maiden dipped her finger in the red stuff and daubed it on Jazgul’s forehead, fringing the tattoo on her face to emphasize it. Jazgul simply stood and let her work, clearly pleased. Perhaps it was her lack of learning, or the fact that she made no conversation, but she seemed even younger than she looked.

Once she had painted Jazgul’s face, the shrine maiden took out several sheets of sheepskin paper, set up some dye, and gave Jazgul the feather of a waterfowl. “What kind of dream did you dream today?” she asked.

Jazgul began an unsteady illustration. Unable to either speak or write, these crude pictures were her only means of communication. When she was drawing, she became quite absorbed in what she was doing. But she couldn’t stay in the shrine maiden’s room. Indeed, it would soon be time to eat.

“Go back to your room,” the shrine maiden said, collecting the paper and dye and giving them to Jazgul. The paper was too unwieldy for the girl to hold, though, and she dropped some of it. As she scrambled to pick it up, she looked up at the shrine maiden, silently begging to stay with her, but there were things even the shrine maiden could not change. She patted Jazgul’s head, even more gently than usual. “You can’t stay with me forever. I know you can draw pictures on your own.”

Jazgul nodded, and the shrine maiden smiled. A few moments after the child left the room, the attendant with tanned skin entered. The shrine maiden called her “oracle.” The word meant something very similar to “shrine maiden,” and like the shrine maiden, the oracle, too, had forgotten her own name. It had been nearly twenty years now since she had taken over from the last oracle.

The shrine maiden remembered something the last oracle had said to her: that the word for “shrine maiden” was a homophone for another word, one that meant “child of the gods.” It was appropriate that one called an oracle should serve the child of the gods, for was it not the duty of an oracle to hear the gods’ voices?

Somewhere along the line, the “child of the gods” had become the “shrine maiden.” Was it because only women had been chosen for the position? Or because only women had been left? She didn’t know. She did, though, feel that it was right and proper that she herself should be “shrine maiden.” She had been discovered by the previous oracle when she was very young. Indeed, she had lived in the shrine maiden’s palace since before she could remember.

She’d been told she was special. Her white hair and white skin and red eyes. The lack of color in her body, they said, enabled her to hear the gods’ voices more clearly. Her every movement came to be taken as prophecy, read and interpreted by the oracle. Everyone knew that the prognostications of a pale shrine maiden would come true. She was the one person even the king dared not look in the eye; she was hardly even human, but sat amidst the shadows of her palace, enthroned like a god.

A shrine maiden did not need learning. Her very being was supreme. Throughout the ages, the oracles had never given the shrine maidens anything resembling an education. Yet that was what the previous oracle had done for this shrine maiden. Perhaps she’d just been a little...different. She’d taught the shrine maiden to read and write, given her letters.

None of which changed the fact that the shrine maiden knew nothing of the wider world.

She knew the shrine maiden could no longer occupy her office once she began menstruating, but what she did not know was what would happen to her after she had been dethroned. Unable to imagine what fate might await her, she turned ten, then fifteen.

Menses arrived at a different moment from person to person, and she had heard that there had been shrine maidens in the past to whom it never came. So she didn’t question her own lack of menstruation, but simply continued as shrine maiden. Yet she couldn’t help noticing that there were other things about her body that set her apart. For one thing, she didn’t develop as women did. Her chest never grew, though her arms and legs kept getting longer. Even someone as sheltered as she was knew about the differences between men and women. When she asked the oracle, she was told, “You are special.” After that, though, she found she was given new and unfamiliar foods to eat. Her chest began to swell, but still her blood never came.

The months and years passed with her still ignorant, still not comprehending. Her fame as shrine maiden increased, and so did the number of those who sought her auguries. She was told that while divining, she could do whatever she wished but must not speak. The oracle would say everything on her behalf.

The oracle who had told her all this, done all this for her, finally met her end when the shrine maiden was twenty years old. It had simply been her time, but having never seen anyone die, the shrine maiden hadn’t fully understood. The ailing old oracle had been replaced by this new one—her granddaughter. Before she passed, the old oracle told the shrine maiden why her menses had never begun, why her body didn’t behave like a woman’s.

The shrine maiden, she said, had been born in a small village, a rare place of lush greenery among the parched lands of Shaoh. It had been established as a haven where shrine maidens who had left their office could retire, and many of the villagers had the blood of generations of shrine maidens in their veins. Some of those maidens must have been pale as well. It was there that the current shrine maiden had been born—a man.

It had seemed ludicrous when the oracle had revealed the truth. Like a bad joke. But the oracle just kept talking in her withered, crackly voice. She said the king at that time was a bad king. Shaoh flourished as a crossroads of trade, but he had outrageous ideas about making war on other lands. His advisers tried to talk him out of them, but he was young and headstrong and would not listen.

The shrine maiden was the other pillar, the one who could check the king. But the shrine maiden at that time had lacked the necessary force of will, and at her age she seemed soon to retire anyway. If a new shrine maiden arose, she might be able to stand against the king. Especially if she were that most sacred thing, a pale maiden.

So the oracle used the shrine maiden to cut the foolish king off at the knees. She made the shrine maiden not a man. He was castrated at the same time as the male goat kids.

Now a woman, the shrine maiden was presented to the king. It seemed she cried at the unaccustomed surroundings—little is unusual about a squalling infant, but the oracle used the moment to pronounce the king unfit.

The revelations seemed to invalidate the shrine maiden’s entire life. In the space of an instant, her twenty years in the office were made a lie. She’d always believed she was special, but now she knew she was nothing but a pawn, used to unseat the king. She wished she could upbraid the dying oracle, vent her fury and shame. The shrine maiden, however, had been so sheltered from the world that she didn’t even know what words to use at a moment like that. What good would it have done her, anyway? Even the modest knowledge she had, the oracle had given her in an attempt to salve her own conscience.

Upon the death of the previous oracle, the shrine maiden had gone to live near the village where she’d been born on the pretext of “recovering.” The now-deceased oracle had been brilliant in her own way. She’d used her puppet, the shrine maiden, to the fullest and stabilized the nation’s politics. Her granddaughter, now the oracle herself, was almost as capable as her grandmother, but she lacked experience. Perhaps it would be fair to say that they had fled until she gained the necessary insight.

There was an unspoken understanding that upon the accession of a new oracle, the shrine maiden would change as well. Several young ladies of excellent background had been sent to the shrine maiden to become apprentices, and she educated them, just as the oracle had done for her. Perhaps she was simply trying to atone for deceiving them, but at least it served to broaden their future prospects.

She knew she could have handed the shrine maiden’s seat over to one of them at any time, yet she couldn’t help but cling to the office. She had, after all, been created to be shrine maiden. She didn’t even have a name to call her own.

Aylin was friendly toward her, but many of the young women saw the shrine maiden as nothing but an obstacle. Ayla was among her enemies—she looked like Aylin’s twin, yet the two women could hardly have been more different. About the time the shrine maiden knew she couldn’t pretend to be recuperating forever, a messenger came from her village. A child had been born. It was brought to her wrapped in white swaddling clothes, its skin pale enough to see the blood vessels beneath.

“Honored shrine maiden,” said a familiar voice, startling her out of her reverie. The oracle was standing before her. The shrine maiden must have been completely lost in her reminiscences. “Are you quite sure about this?” the oracle asked. In front of the shrine maiden was a bowl of rice gruel. Ah, yes. She’d been about to eat.

“It will raise suspicions if I delay any longer,” the shrine maiden said brusquely.

The oracle said nothing, but her expression darkened. How could she make that face when she knew everything? She clenched her fists and looked at the ground, refusing to meet the shrine maiden’s eyes.

“I’ll take my meal alone. You go wait elsewhere.” The shrine maiden smiled. She had to smile. “I know I can trust you with all that comes after.”

She was about to bring the spoon to her lips when she became aware of a commotion outside. Frowning, she and the oracle looked at each other—and then the door burst open.

<Please excuse me!> cried a diminutive woman in the Li language. Quite a request for someone bursting into a dignitary’s room. The shrine maiden knew her, though—she was one of the medical assistants, the one who’d examined her before. But she wasn’t supposed to be here today.

“H-How dare you be so rude!” the oracle said, attempting to block her way, but the young lady darted around her and made her way over to the shrine maiden. What had happened to the guards?!

“Rude, not me. This. My job!” She spoke haltingly in Shaohnese. She took advantage of the shrine maiden’s astonishment to snatch the spoon from her. She stuck it into her own mouth and swallowed. The shrine maiden and the oracle both went white, but the court lady only smiled—in fact, she closed her eyes in bliss. Still grinning, she looked at the shrine maiden. “Very tasty. Mushroom congee.”

She looked downright triumphant.