The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Strategist Down

Maomao sighed as she stood doing the laundry under the baking sun. This was really a huge pain. Not the laundry, no. The net she’d found herself caught in since Aylin had given them that riddle and they had solved it. All morning, Yao and En’en had been giving her the evil eye, making sure she didn’t sell them out.

I’m in this too, huh...

That explained why En’en was smack next to her, her bucket right beside Maomao’s. She was working industriously on some bandages, and because she’d thought ahead and gotten some soapberry pulp ready, the wrappings came clean nicely.

After the bandages were cleaned, they would be boiled. Blood could have toxins in it, and getting other people’s blood on you or ingesting it could spread infection. Then there were sexually transmitted diseases, whose ravages Maomao was all too familiar with.

Yao was out with the medical officers; they were going to teach her how to shop for medicines.

I wanted to go on that trip, Maomao thought, but she had been left behind, along with En’en, who had felt Maomao shouldn’t be left alone. It was terrifically boring. So boring that before long she found herself wanting to take it out on her companion.

“Here I thought laundry was maids’ work,” she said.

“I never once said such a thing,” En’en replied, and it was true—it was the now-dismissed court ladies who had said it. Maomao wondered how they were getting along these days. Given that neither Yao nor En’en had looked particularly distressed by their departure, it seemed the ladies weren’t so much old friends as sycophants who had been trying to ingratiate themselves with Yao when they heard about her family background. Unfortunately for them, Yao wasn’t soft enough to stick her neck out for such fair-weather toadies.

“I wanted to go on the shopping trip,” Maomao grumbled.

“So did I,” En’en said. “For that matter, they could have just taken you, for all I care.” In other words, she’d just wanted to be with Yao. It turned out neither of them was exactly happy, so Maomao resolved to stop griping about it.

They were just wringing out the washed bandages and putting them in a bucket when several people came running into the medical office. Maomao squinted, trying to see what was happening, and saw they had someone on a stretcher.

“An injury?” Maomao asked as she and En’en went back to the office, carrying the buckets. With the real doctors out shopping, the apprentice physician was the only one watching the place, so they figured they’d better get back and see what was going on.

“Uh! Umm...” The apprentice physician was in a tizzy, lost for what to do. Given their proximity to the military camp, injured men were hardly uncommon here, and even the apprentice should have been more than comfortable with them by now. When Maomao worked her way into the gaggle of people and saw who was lying on the stretcher, however, she couldn’t refrain from a disgusted “Ugh!”

Who should she find but the monocled freak laid out on the stretcher, tossing with pain.

“They say he’s been poisoned,” the apprentice told her, his face pale.

“Unbelievable...” Reluctantly, Maomao took a look at the eccentric strategist. He was pale and shaking, holding his stomach. Which was fine as far as it went, until...

“I c-can’t hold it in...”

At that, needless to say, his stretcher bearers paled, then hefted him up and hurried him off to the toilet. Let us refrain from saying which end “it” came out of.

It came in waves for the next hour or so, until the strategist’s condition finally stabilized. Expelling so much had dried him out, though, so Maomao and the others gave him water with some salt and sugar mixed in to make it easier to absorb. For the record, it was the apprentice physician who administered the drink; Maomao only stood by and watched. She knew it might have been even easier for him to drink if they’d mixed it with a little juice, but she felt no obligation to go that far. At least he was able to get the water down. When it came to vomiting and diarrhea, staying hydrated was key.

When things had calmed down a bit, Maomao got out a pot, intending to boil the cleaned bandages, but she was interrupted when Lahan came rushing in.

“I received word that my honored father collapsed!” he said.

Maomao simply pointed to the room where the freak was sleeping. The crowd of his subordinates had dwindled to just one, left behind to keep an eye on him, and the apprentice had gone to call the doctors back. Maomao didn’t blame the guy for being a little disturbed, but she suspected it wasn’t a great idea to leave oversight of the all-important medical office to two court ladies.

En’en gave Maomao a funny look as she poured water into the pot. “Do you know him?”

“Unfortunately.”

“You seem to have some kind of connection to Grand Commandant Kan too. May I ask—”

“No relation.” Maomao pointedly began preparing the fire.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s all right,” En’en said, but there was something in her voice. She was asking—but she’d probably already looked into it herself.

It’s all that old bastard’s fault, Maomao thought. It would be a lot easier to play dumb about him if he wasn’t constantly lurking around their place of work.

Lahan returned from the sickroom when the bandages were boiling nicely. “I don’t see my granduncle,” he said.

“He’s shopping today. He probably won’t be back for another couple hours. And I think the rest of the doctors are at one of the other medical offices.”

“Hrm...”

Freak though the strategist might be, he was also a rather important person, and it might be best to keep his indisposition quiet. Notwithstanding his injuries, however, they’d probably brought him to the medical office in hopes of summoning Maomao’s old man, Luomen.

“They said something about him having been poisoned,” En’en ventured as Lahan stood with his arms crossed. Maomao realized how unusual it felt to see En’en taking the initiative like that.

“Yes, that’s right,” Lahan said. “But my honored father isn’t just anyone. Who could have managed to poison him?”

“Surely there are more than a few people with grudges against him,” Maomao said, her tone relatively polite. She could have gotten away with speaking less formally to Lahan, but with En’en standing right there, she decided to mind her words. Anyway, when someone climbed as high as the strategist had, and done it in part by deposing his own father, there had to be as many grievances against him as there were stars in the sky.

“My father is an excellent judge of character, if nothing else. I don’t believe he would leave someone in his orbit who would poison him.”

“I agree with you. Take away his ability to judge people, and you’re left with nothing but an old man starting to stink of age,” Maomao said.

“How rude. He can play Go and Shogi, you know.”

“Both of you are positively awful,” En’en said calmly, stirring the contents of the pot with some chopsticks. She was pretty enough that Lahan clearly felt it was worth his while to talk to her. The way his glasses flashed, you could almost see him turning her body into a series of numbers. His gaze was growing dangerously perverted, so Maomao gave him a sound smack on the head.

“My apologies if this question rubs the wrong way coming from an outsider, but for my future reference, perhaps you might tell me what it was he was poisoned with?” En’en said.

“Good question,” Maomao replied. “Everyone is using the word poison, but is it possible this is simply from bad food? Did he eat something he found on the ground?”

“I have a guard watching him at all times to make sure he doesn’t,” Lahan said proudly.

You do? Maomao thought.

“U-Um... Excuse me...”

They turned at the voice to find the soldier who had been stationed by the eccentric strategist. He was rather slim and looked somewhat retiring.

Rikuson was something of a pretty-boy too, Maomao recalled. Aide-de-camp to the strategist was a military position, but no doubt it involved a lot of paperwork. Now that she thought about it, she realized she’d hardly seen Rikuson recently. Had he been prized away from the strategist?

“I wrote down what you asked for,” the soldier said. He handed them a ratty piece of paper, some of the characters smudged and indistinct. They spelled out what the freak had been doing and what he’d eaten over the last several days.

“Let’s see. Immediately before the incident he was... Ahem. Well, I feel sorry for the Moon Prince. It seems my honored father was intruding on him again,” Lahan said.

In other words, immediately before falling ill, the freak had been bothering Jinshi. It sometimes seemed like that weirdo didn’t even have a job, except when it seemed like he did. Occasionally, he would put his stamp on some important paperwork, or make a snap personnel decision. He might be useful if a war broke out, but in peacetime he was less helpful than a lantern at midday. While it was one thing to be useless, he had to go bothering everyone else.

“This says he ate one mooncake and drank some juice, and that he offered the mooncake to the Moon Prince. It also says he was angry that he wasn’t offered tea.”

“That’s right. The prince was as lovely as ever, if I may say so,” the strategist’s assistant replied, his eyes glistening at the memory. Another of Jinshi’s victims.

Anyway, someone might try to poison Jinshi, but Maomao didn’t think Jinshi would try to poison anyone else.

“Maomao, how much poison are we likely to be talking about here?” Lahan asked.

“There’s no single answer. It depends on the poison. Also, with some poisons the victim can appear to get better, only for the effects to recur later and cause death.” She glanced toward the sickroom. The aide’s face was pale. “Although I think he’ll be fine,” she added.

“Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired,” Lahan growled. He put the piece of paper on the table. Before he’d visited Jinshi, the strategist had apparently been lazing around at an open-air pavilion in one of the palace gardens. With its cool breezes and the river flowing by, it was apparently one of his favorite spots. He’d brought along a snack, a steamed bun, which he’d been eating.

“Wage thief,” Maomao grumbled.

“This might be a good moment to not say everything we think,” En’en chided, but privately Maomao was sure she agreed with her. The freak had arrived thirty minutes late for work in the morning, truly the kind of privilege afforded only to the bosses. For breakfast he’d had congee with sweet potato mixed in and a mooncake.

“It’s all sweets,” En’en remarked.

“He’s going to get diabetes,” Maomao said.

“My honored granduncle told him the same thing,” Lahan replied. “Incidentally, Maomao, any ideas yet?” He was looking closely at her. He would normally have turned to her father, but since he wasn’t here, Lahan was left with no choice but Maomao. No doubt the attempted poisoning of a military official was a case they wanted solved as quickly as possible.

“If there’s anything left of the food he was eating, I might be able to figure something out,” she said.

“I’m afraid not. He ate all of it.”

“U-Um,” the aide once again volunteered weakly. “There’s still a few sips of the juice he was drinking...”

“Can you bring it here? Right away?” Maomao asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The aide left the room but was soon back; it took him exactly as long as it took the boiled bandages to dry.

“Here it is,” he said. He gave her a glass drinking vessel with a wooden stopper, about one-third full of a pale liquid. The coloration implied grape juice, diluted with water to make it more drinkable.

“That’s quite large,” En’en said, looking at the vessel with interest. It couldn’t have been easy to carry it around all the time, but since the freak always drank juice instead of water or tea, he probably needed it.

“I don’t believe it’s poisoned,” the aide said.

“What makes you say that?” Maomao asked.

“Because I had some too. Anyway, I should think it would be extremely difficult to slip poison into a container that never leaves his side.”

“Then I guess we can ignore this,” Lahan said, taking the bottle and placing it on the table.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” En’en said.

“Not as beautiful as you,” Lahan replied smoothly. Stupid abacus-face. He was no looker himself, but he never failed to chat up a pretty girl.

En’en only said “Thank you” and smiled courteously. Purely businesslike. It was patently obvious that she had no interest whatsoever in the tousle-haired man.

Maomao, meanwhile, studied the glass bottle, observing the liquid inside. “Hm?” She cocked her head. “This really is quite an impressive piece.”

“I agree, ma’am. I believe Master Rikuson gave it to him. He’s quite fond of it.”

“Speaking of Master Rikuson, I haven’t seen him lately. Whatever happened to him?” The perfect chance to ask the question that had been on her mind.

“Ah. He went to the western capital. This bottle was his parting gift to the strategist. I’m his successor, and I must say, he left big shoes to fill.” The aide bowed his head.

“You didn’t know?” Lahan said.

“I certainly didn’t.” She and Rikuson had both been in the western capital only recently. And now he’d gone back?

“With Master Gyokuen coming to the capital, he requested that someone knowledgeable about matters in the central regions be sent west in his place. Master Rikuson has gone to fulfill that request,” the aide said.

Gyokuen: the father of Empress Gyokuyou. As father of the Empress, he might well be expected to come to the national center. Maomao thought it seemed a bit sudden, but then, she’d heard that Empress Gyokuyou’s son—which was to say, Gyokuen’s grandson and, if things remained as they were, the future emperor—would be formally presented soon.

The Crown Prince’s presentation would be a lavish affair, with even VIPs from other nations present, so Gyokuen could hardly fail to attend, even if he was the most powerful person in the western capital, and even if it was a very long trip.

“He insisted, and I’m afraid we were in no position to turn him down,” Lahan said. “And he was so useful...” Lahan knew Rikuson well and was clearly distressed by his loss. The strategist’s erstwhile aide was able to remember any face he saw even once, which certainly made him an excellent counterpart to the freak himself, who couldn’t even tell one face from another.

En’en probably couldn’t follow even half of the conversation, but she was listening without too much interest anyway. She seemed like she could be an excellent lady-in-waiting, for she knew how to keep to herself at the right moments—but then again, it was intimidating when you couldn’t be sure how much of the conversation she actually understood.

“All right, let’s get back on topic. As far as who poisoned the strategist...” Lahan said.

“Oh, I’ve already figured that out,” Maomao said offhandedly, her gaze still on the bottle.

“What?” exclaimed all three of the others at once.

“Well, who in the world was it?” Lahan demanded, adjusting his glasses on his face.

“The freak himself,” Maomao replied. She flicked the bottle with the tip of her finger; it produced a delicate ring and the juice inside rippled.

“You’re out of your mind. I think I can say for a fact that my honored father would never attempt suicide. Even if he might drive others to it.”

“Awful,” En’en interjected.

“Nonetheless, he put it here himself—right in this juice,” Maomao said.

“H-Hold on a second. It didn’t look like there was anything in it. Did he put something in there when I wasn’t looking?” the aide said.

“Oh, he put something in it, all right. And he did it right in front of your eyes.” Maomao pointed to the mouth of the bottle, which was closed with the wooden stopper. “Question: I know he always keeps his juice with him, but does he usually have a cup, as well?”

“No, he just drinks straight from the bottle.”

“Did you do the same, drinking directly from it?”

“Absolutely not! When I escorted him back to his mansion last night, we bought the juice on the way home. That’s when he gave me some.” People frequently purchased drinks using their own containers. The strategist had probably washed an empty bottle, then had it filled with juice.

“So you bought this yesterday, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Now she was certain: the strategist had poisoned himself.

“So? What kind of poison did he use? If this is your idea of a joke, then let your dear big brother inform you that it’s gone too far,” Lahan said.

“Who’s my big brother?” Maomao growled, temporarily forgetting to be polite. She stole a look at En’en, who was making an I-knew-it face. She really must have checked Maomao out. Maomao cleared her throat and regained her composure. “It’s the same poison we all carry with us. Right here,” she said, and pointed at her mouth. Or more specifically, at what was inside it. “Saliva.”

“Saliva?”

If the strategist wasn’t drinking from a cup, then he was drinking directly from the bottle, and some of his saliva would get mixed back into the juice.

“What could possibly be poisonous about saliva?” Lahan said.

“You know how if a dog bites your hand and you let it go untreated, your hand will swell up? It’s the same thing. Canine and human saliva aren’t quite identical, but both can be poisonous.” And if the poison had nutrients to feed on, it would multiply. “If he’s lounging around an open-air pavilion on a warm night, carrying that juice everywhere without ever cooling it down, then the poison inside is going to grow, until it gets bad enough to be harmful.”

The glass bottle seemed likely to be especially good at retaining heat. Maomao had once used a goldfish bowl to focus the light of the sun, and she suspected this bottle could do something very similar.

“People know that fish will rot if you leave it out, but for some reason they never imagine that a drink might go bad in as little as half a day. But it does. And then you get...” She gestured in the direction of the indisposed strategist. “...a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble, yes...” Lahan crossed his arms, wondering how he was going to explain this one.

“Should we simply say he ate something he found lying around? It seems easier to believe,” the aide said—sounding reluctant, for his suggestion would certainly not help the strategist’s authority.

“No, when it comes out that the contents of the bottle were poisoned, the situation will explain itself. Maomao, taste the juice for poison. I know that’s your specialty,” Lahan said.

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not? Normally you can hardly stop yourself from sampling a poison.”

“Because I’m not drinking from something that old fart put his mouth on. Do you want to try it?”

Lahan didn’t say anything for a moment, but his expression was one of utter comprehension. At length he said, “Couldn’t you be just a little kinder to him? He is still grieving, you know.”

“I wouldn’t want it to go to his head,” Maomao said flatly.

The entire incident had been an all-around pain in the neck.

Not long after, the medical officers got back.

“My goodness, really?” Maomao’s old man asked in exasperation when he heard the story. En’en, meanwhile, looked dejected; Yao was filling out paperwork regarding their purchases and wouldn’t be back for a while yet.

The freak strategist had seemed basically fine, so Maomao had sent him home. Specifically, she’d had him carted away while he was still asleep, lest he wake up and cause even more headaches.

At least the medical officers were back, but now she found herself tasked with sorting and organizing the medicine they’d bought. Maomao enjoyed the work, but after the day’s events she was awfully tired.

“Talk about exhausting,” En’en said to her.

“Yeah,” Maomao replied. En’en had seemed unusually willing to talk to her that day, maybe thanks to Yao’s absence. She was fundamentally reticent and not very expressive, so she’d never actually come after Maomao herself, who realized now that En’en didn’t necessarily dislike her. It was just that with Yao around, she probably didn’t talk much for the same reason Maomao didn’t.

Because talking is a lot of trouble.

She was probably a lot like Maomao, actually.

“I think I should apologize for some of what’s happened so far,” En’en said as she organized some medicine in a drawer.

“What do you mean?” Maomao said.

“The way I’ve been acting. I know I haven’t been terribly nice to you. As for Lady Yao... Well, I can only ask you to be generous with her. She was so sure she would enter this job as the top student, but here you are.”

“Top student?”

“Hadn’t you heard? The person who gets the best grade on the test is given a slightly different color of hairband.”

“Ah.” Maomao remembered how her hairband alone had been a darker color. No, I hadn’t heard...

She’d left the matter of her outfit entirely to Gaoshun, and when he’d brought her a change of clothes there had been too much badgering on the part of the madam to leave time for explanations. She felt a bit bad about it now, but she was also surprised. She’d figured she had only barely passed the test.

“Setting aside the general-education portion of the test, when it comes to the specialized knowledge, getting even half the questions right is considered good,” En’en said.

General education? Did that refer to the history and poetry Maomao had choked down so unwillingly? She’d wrung herself out for those questions. Oh, how she had worked!

“Lady Yao swore she got all of the general questions right, so she must have lost out to you in the specialized-knowledge portion. I was confident my grade was as good as anyone’s, too, so I admit that at first I wondered if you’d been hired because of your family connections.”

“Is that what this was all about?” Maomao said. Her only regret was that if she’d really done so well, it meant she could have afforded to study a little less. Not that it would have made much difference; from the moment she’d been sold out to the old lady, she’d been left without a choice. “I’m an apothecary by vocation, you see...”

“Yes, I know. You proved it today. But I don’t think that will take the sting out of it for Lady Yao.”

Maomao could understand, and she didn’t necessarily have a problem with people like that. She certainly liked it much better than if Yao had tried to suck up to her instead. The problem was that it was all too easy for other people to misinterpret such aloofness. Because Yao was from the best family of any of the newly minted court ladies, the others had felt obliged to follow her.

“She’s not a bad person,” En’en said. “I hope you won’t hold this against her.” En’en’s handling of the situation was downright adult. Maomao hadn’t asked how old she was, but she suspected they were about the same age. En’en added, “Lady Yao is just fifteen. She still has some growing up to do.”

“Did you say fifteen?” That made her four years younger than Maomao—yet her body was so developed! “She’s quite large for her age.” (Maomao didn’t specify where.)

“Yes, I’ve worked hard to help her grow,” En’en replied, sounding strangely proud of the fact.

If she’s just fifteen, then I guess I can hardly blame her, Maomao thought, although she suspected that if she said out loud that Yao was still a bit childish, En’en would get upset.

All this still left one issue. Namely, En’en was obviously Yao’s attendant, yet she was also quite intelligent in her own right, as evidenced by the fact that she knew a smattering of the western tongue, which even Yao didn’t speak.

“May I ask you something?” Maomao said.

“Yes? What?”

“If I hadn’t been here, Lady Yao still wouldn’t have been the top examinee, would she? You would have.”

A fixed smile came over En’en’s face. As she was putting away the next medicine in the drawer, she said, “Such a thing would absolutely never have happened.”

Absolutely, huh?

Cheating in order to raise one’s grade was a problem, but deliberately missing questions you knew the answers to? That wasn’t even cheating.

En’en was polite and circumspect, but Maomao saw she had to stay on her toes around her. She was one shrewd young woman.