The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 8 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Ma Siblings

Baryou: Gaoshun’s son, Basen’s older brother.

The Ma clan produced many members of a military persuasion, but Baryou’s talents ran more toward the literary and bureaucratic. As the eldest son, it was actually he and not Basen who should have been Jinshi’s attendant, but Gaoshun knew his offspring too well to do that to him. Instead of forcing him to practice swordsmanship, he gave him a book. Baryou had all the physical prowess of a limp bean sprout, but he took to academic studies like a fish to water.

Then, last year, he had taken the civil service examination, which was held only once every four years—and he had passed on his first attempt. Even the most jaded eye could see that Baryou had all the makings of a superb civil servant. Yet he was unable to get a job. Why? A quick look at his current situation explained much.

“Impressive. As I knew he would be,” Jinshi said. The papers that had been forming mountains on his desk had been reduced in height enough that you could see the other side. He let out a sigh of relief, and looked at where a man was working away silently in a corner of the room. His corner couldn’t be seen from the entrance, and anyway he’d placed a partitioning screen between himself and the room, so visitors wouldn’t know there was anyone there. Quite frankly, the man might have preferred to build four solid walls around himself, but Basen had discouraged that idea. And who was it behind this screen doing all that work?

“Master Jinshi...” said a man bearing an armload of paperwork. He was very slim, of average height, and his skin was so pale it bordered on sickly. He didn’t exactly look healthy, but it was oddly amusing to see how his face—and only his face—looked so much like Basen, the picture of physical fitness, who was standing beside him. This man was perhaps a good sun shorter than Basen, and the way he stooped made him look shorter still. If Basen hadn’t had such a baby face, it would have been hard to tell which of them was the older brother and which the younger.

But the stooped, feeble-looking man was indeed the older brother, albeit only by a year. Gaoshun’s other son, Baryou.

The Ma clan, as we’ve remarked, traditionally produced soldiers. The bodyguards of the Imperial family were typically Ma people, as Gaoshun was for the Emperor and Basen was for Jinshi. By right, it should have been Baryou who acted as Jinshi’s attendant. He was Gaoshun’s second child and oldest son. But this scrawny sprout of a man wasn’t made for guard work. Baryou was given the “Ba” name—the same character as Ma, reflecting the clan—but so was Basen, who was born the next year.

“Quick work. You’re finished already?” Jinshi said.

“I am, sir. With you a statue, the work is done.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

Baryou’s explanation seemed to be elliptical at best, a jump somewhere in the train of thought, and Jinshi didn’t understand what he meant. Thankfully, another person appeared at that moment—a tall and beautiful woman with a hard look in her eyes. For a moment even Jinshi wasn’t sure where she’d come from. Baryou could be seen wincing at her appearance.

“What Baryou is saying is this,” she said. “‘As you are as beautiful as a sculpted statue, Master Jinshi, one can hardly think of you as a human being. Thus even I, who find myself uncomfortable around human beings, can think of you as some creature by no means human, and therefore focus on my work.’”

Jinshi was quiet for a moment, unsure how to take that. He was quite casually being treated as inhuman. Then again, Baryou had always been like this.

The beauty with the cruel eyes who had interpreted for Baryou was his and Basen’s older sister. Her name was Maamei and she had two children of her own. Basen and Baryou resembled their father Gaoshun, but Maamei took after her mother, who had been Jinshi’s wet nurse. For that reason, Jinshi still found Maamei somewhat intimidating.

She resembled her mother in more than looks; she’d also inherited her strong will, and Jinshi was given to understand that Maamei quite dominated her husband. Until a few years before, she’d also regarded her father Gaoshun with all the affection she would feel for a hairy caterpillar, although she claimed that at some point she’d upgraded him to “moth.”

She was, however, also the only person Jinshi knew who could wrangle the otherwise difficult-to-handle Baryou. He might have passed the civil service exam with flying colors, but he had ended up quitting his job due to a combination of poor health and unique ideas. And given his minimal ability to build new relationships, he found himself the target of a good deal of resentment almost before he knew what had happened. His colleagues and superiors had come to dislike him before they’d ever had the chance to get to know him. All of it had ended up giving him a stomach ailment.

Talent Baryou had in spades, but his personality made things difficult. In that respect, he was somewhat like the members of the La clan, although they tended to combine their personal quirks with a forcefulness of spirit that left others with the upset stomachs. It was enough to make a person jealous of their brazen approach to life. If only Baryou could have half—for that matter, even one-tenth—the La clan’s disregard for what people around him thought.

Basen sighed and put the finished work on Jinshi’s desk. Jinshi started to review what Baryou had done, but one of the papers made him stop and frown. It was a circular that Jinshi himself had sent for approval to a series of other departments. Once again, it had been rejected as unfeasible. How many times was this now?

“So they really won’t do it,” he said.

“Rejected again, sir?” Basen asked.

“It’s the timing. If it were for next year, they would approve it.”

“The martial service exams are next year, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Someone thinks we should wait for those.”

What was this idea of Jinshi’s that was failing to get approved? It was to expand the military. He wanted more troops stationed in the north, but the proposal had been slapped down. The martial service exams were essentially the soldiers’ equivalent of the civil service test. They weren’t as well attended as the bureaucrats’ version, but still they would no doubt attract plenty of strong young men who would make excellent officers.

The military had been shrinking these past few years, for two reasons. One was a simple lack of wars, but the other was a personnel matter. Specifically, the two people who stood at the top of the military hierarchy.

“Grand Commandant Kan and Grand Marshal Lo,” Basen said.

The Grand Marshal was the highest-ranking civil official involved in military matters. The Grand Commandant, for his part, was considered one of the san gong, the three most important leaders of the country, and like the Grand Marshal, his was a military role.

“I must wonder how Grand Commandant Kan attained that title,” Basen said. Jinshi would have liked to know the same thing, but all he had to go on were some unsettling rumors. Some claimed that once Lakan had finished dispensing with all those who opposed him, there were no other high-ranking officials to take the post. Others said that he had been favored by the former emperor’s mother, the empress regnant, and that it was she who had guaranteed his swift rise in the world. Still others held that after ascending the throne, the current Emperor had set Lakan to taking care of any relatives who might envision themselves on the country’s high seat.

“Truth be told, I’m not sure,” Jinshi said. One thing he thought he knew, or at least could guess, was why the man had sought such great power. Maomao had spoken of it once, although with open disgust the entire time. She’d said that there was something he could not get without power. Lakan was a man who would do anything to get what he wanted—but there were not that many things he wanted. He wasn’t the kind to let his greed multiply endlessly.

“A military man ought to want a little more,” Jinshi grumbled. Someone who would make any pretext to have more pawns at his disposal would be easy to understand, easy to work with. But if Lakan had his board games, his family, and some sweet treat to enjoy, then he was satisfied. In fact, he wanted very little out of life, but he was irrepressible in action, and that was what made him such a thorn in the side of those around him.

“Perhaps if you were to try speaking directly with Grand Commandant Kan...” Basen suggested.

“I think that would cause more problems than it solved,” Jinshi said. Lakan did not like him very much, for reasons that should be obvious. Sometimes he would drop by Jinshi’s office and waste his time, eating some snack and filthying up the paperwork. He hadn’t been seen much in these parts recently, and Jinshi knew why—he was busy hanging around the medical office. He could well imagine how displeased Maomao must be.

“Grand Marshal Lo, then,” Basen said. Not just anyone could hope to simply sit down for a chat with the Grand Marshal, but Jinshi was the Imperial younger brother. Basen assumed that would be enough to get him in the Grand Marshal’s door—but it wouldn’t be that easy.

“Have you forgotten where Sir Lo’s allegiance lies?” Jinshi said. Grand Marshal Lo held his position by the personal appointment of the reigning Emperor. And why had the Emperor been willing to push through that appointment? “Do you believe our mother...ahem, I mean the Empress Dowager would ever permit it?”

The Emperor might be substantially older than Jinshi, but the same mother had given birth to both of them. The Empress Dowager had entered the rear palace as only a servant, but the former emperor had chosen to take her into his bed as a consort. Many in the rear palace had sought the Empress Dowager’s life at the time. With all the former emperor’s siblings dead of disease, everyone knew that her son—the one who would later become Jinshi’s older brother and the reigning Emperor—would be crown prince.

Even more sought to curry the Empress Dowager’s favor in hopes of gaining power for themselves, but Lo, it was said, had been her ally since her days as a palace woman. Barely ten years old, she’d become the emperor’s favorite, such that although she was a palace woman, she was permitted to go outside the rear palace at times. Always with a bodyguard, of course—and that guard was frequently Lo.

Jinshi wondered what Lo must have thought of this palace woman whose body was barely developed enough to bear a child. She’d had other guards, but he was the only one she had given such patronage to later. He had clearly earned her trust. And yet, he must have felt some hesitation as well. He would not defy her orders—but she was just too kind a woman.

The system of slavery had already been shrinking, but the Empress Dowager’s influence loomed large in its final abolishment. And in the rear palace, she reached out to those who had become the former emperor’s bedmates and could no longer leave the rear palace. Yet her goodness could sometimes be a liability. She hated war. She rarely spoke about the matter publicly, but she wielded substantial influence with the Emperor and the Grand Marshal.

Jinshi could talk to the Emperor; he would understand. Indeed, he already approved of Jinshi’s idea. Still, though he was the Emperor, he was only the Emperor—not an absolute ruler. That was why Jinshi’s memorandum was stuck in limbo: if it never got to the Emperor, he couldn’t officially approve it.

Perhaps he and Lo might have found some common ground had Jinshi held some sort of military position, but he’d spent years as a “eunuch” in the rear palace, performing only his ritual duties as the Emperor’s younger brother. It left people unsure how to deal with Jinshi. He’d been given the rank of Grand Protector, but this was normally an honorary title, something awarded to people who were retiring from the public eye.

Considering that Jinshi was the Emperor’s younger brother, some said he should have been made Prime Minister. In addition to his youth, however, there were other qualified candidates for that position, and so the calls quieted. One might have expected an honorary title to bring with it only a minimum of actual work. That might have been nice, but instead he found himself deluged with papers, every day a rush to get things done. They seemed to take him for some sort of jack-of-all-trades.

“So much time wasted talking about piddling details,” Maamei broke in, replacing their now lukewarm tea with fresh.

“Sister, politics turns on such delicate matters,” Basen said.

“Delicate? Hardly a word I associate with you,” she said with a mocking edge. Basen’s lip twisted, but as hot-tempered as he might be, even he knew that he wouldn’t get the best of his sister. “What it comes down to is, you want to get them to accept your demands,” Maamei said.

“If it were as simple as that, I wouldn’t be losing so much sleep,” Jinshi said. He was no happier than Basen about Maamei’s interjection. She was simply supposed to be an assistant; it wasn’t her job to go pontificating about political matters.

“I’m not saying it’s simple. I’m just saying possibilities arise, if you keep yourself open to them.”

They weren’t sure what she had in mind. She went over to Baryou’s corner and disappeared behind his screen. They heard a series of exclamations—“Sister!” “Hey, you can’t just—” “Argh!” It seemed it wasn’t only Basen who was cowed by Maamei.

When she emerged, lo and behold, she was holding the notorious Go book. She hadn’t needed to steal her brother’s copy; there’d been plenty of them right in Jinshi’s desk drawer.

“Do you recognize this?” she said, taking out a piece of paper tucked into the book. For a second, Jinshi thought it was the promotional leaflet about the book that he’d seen before, but then he realized it was something else.

“A Go tournament?”

“Yes,” Maamei said. The paper announced it proudly.

“I didn’t see that in any of my copies,” Jinshi said. Not in the ones Maomao had given him, or in the ones Sei had bought.

“Did you purchase them yourself, Master Jinshi?”

“No, I sent someone to do it for me.”

“Ah. Perhaps they thought you would object, then.” Maamei pointed to the details of the tournament, outlined on the paper. It would be held at the end of the year. There would be a fee of ten copper coins to participate. And...

Jinshi goggled. The location of the tournament was to be a lecture hall on the palace grounds.

His jaw hung open and he couldn’t seem to close it.

“That is abuse of power if I ever saw it,” Basen said, astounded.

Maamei said, “Go connoisseurs are supposed to make up one percent of the population. If there are 800,000 people in the capital, that would make 8,000 players. How many do you think are going to participate in this tournament?” She made it sound like a riddle.

People wouldn’t have to buy the book to know about the tournament—word would spread among friends. And anyone could pay ten copper coins; even a child could afford it if she saved her allowance. It was impossible to say how widely the book was being read, or exactly how many people might be or become interested in Go. The thought of how many people might show up for the tournament was frightening.

“If they tried to hold the tournament in a marketplace, the venues that could accommodate them would be limited. Most open spaces are given over to markets, so getting permission to use one would be difficult. The Merchants’ Association keeps its own counsel in such matters. Even bureaucrats find it difficult to throw their weight around with them.”

“That doesn’t mean he should hold it in the palace! It can’t be done!”

Maamei pointed a finger at Jinshi as if to say that was precisely her point. “I agree, and I’m sure he’s not happy about having to do it that way. After all, how many potential participants could actually enter the palace grounds? Very few. No doubt he would have been overjoyed to get a proper tournament venue out in public somewhere.”

“I see,” Jinshi said slowly, looking at the pile of paperwork.

“Indeed. Everyone may try to push everything on you, but you may find that once in a while you want to push back, using the rights of your office.” Maamei gave him a significant look.

“I seem to be veritably surrounded by strong and intelligent women,” he said.

“Nothing of the sort,” Maamei replied. “It’s simply that they’re the only ones who can get close to you.”

The remark wasn’t self-deprecating. Jinshi and Basen traded a look, both of them clearly feeling outmatched. Jinshi found himself having to take back what he had thought a few minutes earlier: Maamei understood politics very well.