The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 11 - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: The Golden Ratio

“What to do?” Lahan’s Brother was fretting, a large map spread before him on the table in the medical office.

“Yes, whatever to do?” The quack doctor was also fretting. Maomao needed him to do some work, so she placed a mortar and some herbs beside him.

“What are you doing here, Lahan’s Brother?” she asked him. This was the medical office; it wasn’t a place where nonmedical personnel should just settle in and start fretting. Then again, she could understand—of everywhere in the mansion, this was perhaps the least on edge.

“The old guy said I could,” Lahan’s Brother protested.

“Lahans is so tired, young lady. He needs somewhere to rest!” The quack seemed to be under the impression that Lahan’s Brother’s name was Lahans, but it seemed like too much trouble to correct him. Even Lahan’s Brother himself didn’t say anything. Had day after day of grueling fatigue drained him of all desire to argue? Or hadn’t he noticed? Or had he even come to accept this state of affairs?

He’s definitely worked harder than any of us.

His actions might have saved tens of thousands of lives from the insect plague, and he hardly seemed to realize it. Maybe when this was all over, she could ask Jinshi about giving him a reward of some kind.

“What are you looking at, anyway?” Maomao asked, peering at the map. Now that she got a good look at it, she realized it was covered in annotations, describing things like the climate and soil type of each region in considerable detail.

“I kept notes on this map when I went on my grasshopper slaying journey. I wanted to write down any unique qualities of the fields, since I had the chance, but in the end I barely got to half of them.”

Oh, man! This guy is useful!

Unfortunately for him, his job in this case was to be used and used again, only to see others steal his best moments. Maomao vowed afresh that she would see him recognized for his contributions this time if never again.

“From the map, I take it that you’re trying to decide where to grow crops? Didn’t you do that already?”

“This time it’s more concrete. The powers that be want to know what crops can be grown where. We can’t just go on sending food from the central region forever, can we? I’m trying to figure out what we can grow quickly, with an eye toward crops that can be stockpiled.”

“What about your potatoes?”

“I can’t give them anything that I don’t know for certain will grow. The next several years will be an experiment.”

Apparently he didn’t intend to imitate his father.

“What about, you know, ordinary wheat? We could clear out the fields that didn’t get harvested and replant right away.”

“Oh, we’re going to grow wheat. Only in the fields where it was initially planned, though. Planting wheat in the same field year after year reduces the harvest.”

“Oops.” Right. Maomao nodded.

“What’s all this about fields and harvests?” the quack said. He was failing to follow the conversation, as usual, but anyway, he was there.

“Beans might be feasible, but the harvest for those is late. Might not be much we can do about that.” Lahan’s Brother seemed to have an almanac in his head. “The real problem is seeds.”

“Seeds? You mean, like...regular seeds?”

“Yeah. When you have nothing to eat, you don’t have the margin to leave seeds for next year either. And then you’re finished, right? I used some of my supply on the bean sprouts. There’s still some leeway on the burr clover, but when it comes to soy or mung beans, we can’t have people pulling them up by the roots.”

Fair point: if people pulled out the very things the beans grew from, there would be nothing left.

“So I’m trying to think of something we can harvest, and harvest fast, alongside fields that will let us grow wheat.”

It was startling to realize that this man’s thinking would revolutionize the local agriculture, and he wasn’t intimidated by the scale of the project.

Lahan’s Brother wasn’t looking for Maomao and the quack’s input so much as he seemed to be getting his thoughts in order by talking aloud to them. Sometimes when a person asked for “advice,” they weren’t actually looking for a solution.

“The thing is, I need to keep yield, population, and soil quality in mind all at the same time. I was never much for calculating...”

“If Lahan were here, he’d have it done in a second,” Maomao said.

“Don’t you mention tousle-glasses to me!” Lahan’s Brother snapped. His annoyance was understandable; unlike his adaptable, politically astute younger brother, he’d had to live with the short straw all his life.

“He is your younger brother, isn’t he?” Maomao asked.

“He’s your older brother, isn’t he?” Lahan’s Brother shot back.

Things seemed likely to devolve from here, so Maomao stayed quiet and pretended the whole episode hadn’t happened.

“Speaking of...him, there haven’t been any letters from him,” Lahan’s Brother said.

“Really? From Lahan, you mean? I got one just the other day.”

“Not me. I’ve only gotten letters from my father. Lahan loves writing letters—I was expecting to get more from him.”

If Lahan had bothered to write to Maomao, it seemed strange that he wouldn’t write to Lahan’s Brother. Incidentally, the quack seemed to be gradually realizing that Lahan’s Brother wasn’t “Lahans,” but Lahan’s older brother. He still didn’t ask his name.

Maomao paused thoughtfully.

“What is it?” Lahan’s Brother asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She was simply thinking about the letter she’d gotten a few days earlier. She’d dismissed it without much thought then, but now...

She stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

“Hrm? Oh, sure.”

Maomao went up to her room, where she found a small vase of flowers. She’d stripped the place of anything too girlish, but the quack occasionally left little decorations like this.

“Here,” Maomao said, returning with the box in which she kept her letters.

“What’s this?”

“The letter I got from Lahan.”

“Huh. Doesn’t this paper look oddly...nice to you?”

“I initially assumed it was to help it survive a long journey.” Maomao stared at Lahan’s letter. The regular writing paper was reinforced with a backing of oil paper. Yao’s and En’en’s letters, which had come at the same time, had been constructed the same way.

“Hey, what’s this sentence mean?” Lahan’s Brother asked, giving the line Yao and En’en are at my house yet! What do you suppose I should do? very close scrutiny.

“Oh, you know,” Maomao said, giving him a brief rundown on Yao and En’en’s situation.

Just imagine what Lahan’s Brother’s face looked like then! The corners of his eyes, wide and astonished, were raised in fury, his nostrils flared, and he bared his teeth like a beast. His hair stood on end so violently it seemed to stretch up to heaven.

“Yeek!” the quack cried, shrinking back.

Maomao was almost as surprised as he was. She hadn’t even known Lahan’s Brother was capable of looking so angry. If someone had carved his likeness in wood at that moment, it could have passed for a wrathful deity.

“That bastard... He chases me to a piddling field somewhere, while he lives in a mansion with an eligible young woman... Two eligible young women!”

With En’en around, Maomao was sure that there would be no trysts, assignations, or romantic rendezvous of any kind, but she didn’t think trying to explain that to Lahan’s Brother would help at the moment.

“He’s always been like this! Always waltzing in to steal my thunder...”

The quack doctor was still cowering, so Maomao grabbed the duck as it went by. Lahan’s Brother buried his face in its feathers.

Duck therapy...

After a few minutes, Lahan’s Brother’s face was back to normal. The duck, evidently unwilling to work for free, began badgering the quack for some food.

With Lahan’s Brother finally calm, Maomao thought maybe they could get back on track. “Don’t you think there’s something odd about this writing?” she said.

“Oh? Huh. How so?”

He even sounded different now. For all the La blood in his veins, he was a surprisingly normal person, and relatively handsome to boot, but at that moment he looked supremely sullen. If duck therapy wasn’t enough, a cat seemed the next best thing, but unfortunately the little calico furball was far, far away.

“‘Again’ I would have understood, but ‘yet’? That doesn’t make sense. Those two went home once already.”

“What do you mean, they went home once? This is the second time they’ve been there?”

“Lahan’s Brother, please keep your distance when you’re making that face.”

“I told you not to say Lahan’s name in front of me!”

“Yeah, okay.”

Lahan’s Brother appeared to be manfully enraged by his younger brother’s relations with the fairer sex.

Suppose, just suppose, that Yao and En’en had once again sought shelter at Lahan’s house because of things with Yao’s uncle. Maomao could imagine that. But she was also sure that Lahan, of all people, would never write yet when he meant again.

There’s something going on here.

She studied Lahan’s letter. It was stuck firmly to the oil paper backing; there didn’t seem to be any way to separate them.

No, wait. It looks like somebody tried to peel them apart.

Each of the four corners of the oil paper looked like they had been peeled at, although the traces were faint.

Somebody pulled them apart and then pasted them back together.

She examined the other two letters. If something had been done to Lahan’s missive, it seemed more than likely that the other two had been treated the same way.

When she looked closely at the text, she could see the characters were a bit blurred. Probably a product of pasting the oil paper on after the letter had been written, with the glue seeping through to the front.

What had happened to the letters? If someone had given Yao and En’en some idea, some little thing to do to their messages, they might all somehow be connected.

Maybe I’m supposed to put it over an open flame?

No; they were on oil paper. It would burn if exposed to a flame. Maybe the whole reason the letters were backed with oil paper was to fool any would-be tamperers: it would force them to actually look at the letters, whereupon they would discover there was no sensitive information in them. But that was a bluff.

Maomao continued to stare at the letters. Lahan’s Brother joined her. The quack, not wanting to feel left out, assumed a thoughtful expression.

“Are you sure this came from Lahan?” Lahan’s Brother asked at length.

“What makes you say that? That’s his handwriting. I know it pains you, but try to accept reality.”

“That’s not what I mean! You know how obsessed he is with numbers, right?”

“Yes.”

Hoo boy, did she ever know.

“But doesn’t this letter look ugly to you?” Lahan’s Brother spread open his younger brother’s letter.

“I wouldn’t say it seems unusual.”

“No, it is. When he writes a letter, it’s always on paper that’s five lines across by eight lines down.”

“Never knew that.”

Maybe it was what Lahan would have referred to as a beautiful ratio.

Unfortunately, Maomao didn’t have that much interest in Lahan’s letters. “Maybe he just didn’t have enough paper.”

“No, no. You don’t understand how obsessed with numbers he is! Once I gave myself a quick haircut—I just needed it to be shorter, you know?—and in the middle of the night, he came in and cut it all while I was asleep. And if it was uneven by so much as the width of a fingernail, he kept cutting, until there was hardly any left! Can you imagine how I felt?! He was five!”

“Okay, so you don’t have the world’s best younger brother.”

Or family, for that matter.

“That’s who we’re dealing with. If he gave up his perfectly ordered writing style, there’s a reason.” Lahan’s Brother’s gaze nearly bored a hole through the letter.

Maomao, meanwhile, turned to the other two letters. Yao’s was longer than Lahan’s, but substantially shorter than En’en’s. Maomao had read more than enough of En’en’s letter, in fact, which was not only sprawling but written in characters the size of grains of rice. Lahan’s and Yao’s characters were the perfect size—very easy to read.

On a whim, Maomao placed Lahan’s letter over Yao’s. They had the same number of rows. But Yao’s letter had exactly three times as many columns. With their characters being about the same size, they could easily be overlapped. If Yao’s letter was longer, well, she could get emotional sometimes.

“Look at this,” Maomao said.

“Look at what?”

The Verdigris House got more than its share of students who were taking, or who had passed, the civil service exam. They always said that by far the hardest part of the exam was being cooped up in what amounted to a cave for days on end, writing, writing, writing. They had to write in perfectly ordered, balanced characters just like the copybooks.

“The columns and rows,” said Maomao. It wasn’t just the size of the characters: the number of characters running down the page was also identical.

She matched up the edges of the two letters, then noted the word in Yao’s that corresponded to the yet in Lahan’s. Then she slid the letter further along, observing the next word that overlapped with yet.

Yao’s letter was precisely three times longer than Lahan’s. She moved Lahan’s letter one more time and observed the final overlap.

“Find...the...coal.”

“Coal?”

“Yes. It’s a rock that burns. It can be used medicinally, but I’ve heard it can also do a lot of harm.”

Maomao’s father, Luomen, was well aware that any drug could also be a poison, and he strove to use medicines with as few harmful effects as possible. Therefore, Maomao didn’t know much about coal.

“So why are we looking for this, uh, coal?”

“I’m not sure myself. But I think we should report it.”

Maomao put the letters back in the box, hoping it was all just a strange coincidence.