The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 8 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Harassment

It was a cool autumn morning, and Maomao was just about to head to the medical office for work when she was stopped by a delivery. She would have been perfectly happy with a gift, but that’s not what this was. At least, it wasn’t the kind of gift she wanted.

“Is somebody harassing you? You know you can tell me, right?” Yao said, giving her a rare look of pity. The look was coming from a safe distance, though—Yao had backed up, frowning intensely.

“Not as such, no...” Maomao said, but she couldn’t blame Yao for wondering, for inside the basket she’d received was something brown—a mass of dead bugs.

Grasshoppers, specifically.

Normally, it would have been a challenge to collect so many of them, but here they were—meaning they’d come from somewhere where the collecting wasn’t so challenging.

“I left that there because it came from the higher-ups, but I’d be very happy if you would get it the hell out of here,” Dr. Liu said, thoroughly unimpressed. He was older, the highest-ranking man in the medical office, which meant there were very few people to whom he felt the need to be deferential.

And take it where? Maomao thought. She didn’t want a basket full of dead bugs in her room. She had a good idea who had sent it, but that only left her more puzzled about what to do.

Dr. Liu seemed to sense that she was between a rock and a hard place. He beckoned her over. “Use the empty room in the next building over,” he said. “It wouldn’t normally be mine to give you, but...hrm...just round up a few people with time to kill and do what you have to do. Quickly.” He seemed to consider the matter to take priority over doing chores at the medical office. Very well then...

“Say, uh, what was all that about?” Yao asked, tugging on Maomao’s sleeve. Her lovely features were marred by a look of distress.

Maomao grinned and decided to enlist the cowering Yao to help her with the bugs.

Yao put another insect on the scale, her pallor deathly. En’en observed her with a flush in her cheeks. For her part, Maomao was silent as she measured the grasshoppers’ legs and wings.

“Um, h-how many more...bugs...do you need?” Yao asked, picking up a grasshopper with chopsticks and no small degree of loathing. She did not love bugs. They’d put ten of them on the scale, one by one; they would take the average of their weight.

“I don’t suppose we need to weigh all of them,” Maomao said. “But certainly the more the better.” As she took her measurements, she put any specimens with unusual coloration into a separate pile.

“If you find you can’t stand it, milady, I’ll take over for you,” En’en offered.

Yao, though, said, “N-No, I can do it. It’s p-p-part of the job...” The question could only make her more determined not to be second best—as En’en had known perfectly well. That was why she’d said it.

“Young mistress...” En’en said; the flush was growing deeper, her heart beating harder, and goosebumps standing on her skin as she watched Yao work with the bugs.

Twisted, twisted, twisted, Maomao thought, giving them both something of a scowl. But she didn’t stop working.

They’d gotten through about a third of the pile when a visitor arrived—a small man with round spectacles, tousled hair, and, today, a grin. “Well, hullo.” It was, needless to say, Lahan. Maomao didn’t stop working, but now she looked angry. Lahan appeared unconcerned as he scanned her numbers. “Hmm. Maomao, think you could be so kind as to explain this figure here to your older brother?” She pointedly ignored him—so he whispered in her ear, “I brought your reward from last time. The one I mentioned? I guess maybe you forgot about it.”

Maomao’s eyes flitted to Yao and En’en. Yao appeared not to have noticed; En’en had, but she was pretending she hadn’t. Lahan was referring to Maomao’s investigation of the Shaohnese shrine maiden—which she had conducted without the knowledge of the other two women. She’d assumed the matter had been lost in the shuffle surrounding the attempted poisoning of the shrine maiden, but it seemed Lahan had remembered.

Maomao finally stopped working. “We’ve done about three hundred of them. I measured the length of their legs and wings, and recorded their color and weight, as well as how many eggs the females are carrying. I think these grasshoppers flew in from quite a ways away.”

Lahan made noises of acknowledgment, flipping through the papers. What was he thinking? The collection of measurements might seem meaningless to ordinary people, but to this man, nothing was more interesting than numbers.

Yao was still openly dismayed about the entire thing, but she finally noticed Lahan and did her best to say hello in spite of her fatigue. Maomao, thinking that this might be a good time for a quick break, was about to make some tea, but then she realized that maybe it would be cruel to offer Yao something to drink at this particular moment.

“Here you are.” En’en placed a cup of tea in front of Lahan, and Lahan alone. He sipped it, so absorbed in the numbers that the mountain of dead grasshoppers didn’t even bother him.

“Maomao, what are these figures here?” he asked, pointing to a group that was off on its own.

“Those are the values for our local grasshoppers. They’re green rather than brown. I separated them from the ones that flew in from elsewhere based on their color, form, and weight.”

During a plague of grasshoppers, the insects themselves could experience physiological changes. The ones that had developed short wings were the ones that had flown from afar.

“Fair enough. How far do you think these could fly, if they were to do so?”

Maomao didn’t answer. She was no specialist. At that point, Yao entered the conversation, although she looked as puzzled as Maomao felt. “I can’t imagine it could be very far,” she said. “A few li at most. I mean, they’re just bugs.”

Lahan nodded. “Interestingly, there was no other insect damage in the vicinity of the village where the swarm appeared. But to have so many of them—they must have been getting food from somewhere.” Yet not, evidently, the surrounding area. He produced a map from the folds of his robe, an illustration that encompassed the entire country. “You suggested they would only be able to fly a few li, yes?”

“Yes—and I think I was being generous,” Yao said.

“However,” Lahan said, and here he took out a piece of string that he laid on top of the map. He must not have wanted to write directly on it, and was using the string instead. He oriented it diagonally from the northwest toward the location of the afflicted village. “This is the direction of the seasonal wind,” he said.

“You think they came in on the breeze,” Maomao said.

“Yes. In which case, they could most likely travel tens of li if they wanted.” Next he placed several white Go stones on the map.

“What are the stones for?” Maomao asked, gesturing.

“They represent areas where there was insect damage. I think it’s reasonable to assume that this area is only the latest victim of the swarm as they travel from the northwest.”

“That’s the direction of Hokuaren,” Yao said.

Maomao didn’t say anything; she felt an unpleasant bead of sweat run down her neck. Yao had only stated the fact; she hadn’t seen the implications. Lahan was talking about something more. En’en seemed to see it, but she chose not to say anything; she only watched her mistress fondly.

Lahan bundled up the papers with Maomao’s numbers. “I think we’ve got enough here. Someone else should be able to handle the work after this, yes?”

“I wish you would have let someone else handle it before this,” Maomao grumbled.

Lahan shook a reproving finger at her. “I’m not the one who ordered this grasshopper investigation. I was only asked to see if the numbers were good. I may not look it, but I’m a busy man.” He tried to sound indignant, but it was hard to take him seriously given that he was fiddling with the Go stones while he spoke. As for what he was so busy with, the stones in his hand told the story: he was occupied with a side job. “If the numbers aren’t accurate, then what might otherwise be seen is obscured. We had to make sure we started with good measurements.”

Maomao understood what he was trying to say. He probably already had perfectly good numbers. As he made to leave, however, she grabbed his sleeve. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Oh! Yes, of course.” Lahan theatrically produced a package, inside of which was a root vegetable. Maomao couldn’t help it; she felt the breath start to come hot in her nostrils. “I’ll show myself out, then,” Lahan said. Maomao had gotten what she wanted; she had no more business with him.

“What’s that? Ginseng?” Yao asked, peering at it.

En’en seemed to know the vegetable’s secret. “Yes, it is, but...”

As for Maomao, all she could do was stare intensely at her prize. She couldn’t have looked away from it if she’d wanted to. It was irresistible to her, beautiful. She began to laugh: “Hee hee hee hee hee!”

“Uh... Are you okay?” Yao asked.

“Haaah hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!” was her only answer.

“En’en, I think there’s something wrong with Maomao...”

“You’re just now noticing, milady?”

As far as Maomao was concerned, they may as well not have been talking. Everything else at that moment seemed trivial compared to her ginseng.

“Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!”

“There’s something going on here, I know it! That thing he gave her is some kind of awful drug, isn’t it?”

“It’s all right, young mistress. Yes, it’s a drug, but there’s nothing awful about it.”

Maomao held up the ginseng triumphantly and spun around. “Ginseng!”

Ginseng. Indeed. But this wasn’t just ginseng. This was medicinal ginseng. People had never succeeded in domesticating it; the only thing one could do was to search for it in nature. It sometimes went by the name of bangchui: boiled without peeling, it had become “red ginseng.” Such a large one was quite a rich gift.

For the first time in a long while Maomao danced her happy dance, in a room full of dead bugs, while Yao (increasingly concerned) and En’en (unworried) looked on.