The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 11 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: A Brother’s Return

It had been ten days since the first wave of the insect plague when a dark shadow appeared in the sky again.

So they’re back.

Maomao had just returned from checking on the girl on whom she’d performed surgery. The child was stable, but this new swarm couldn’t have come at a worse time for her. Maomao hurried back to the annex and locked the medical office.

The people at the estate had already received word via messenger that what appeared to be a grasshopper swarm had been spotted. They were more ready than they had been the last time.

“Heek! Bugs again,” moaned the quack doctor, who was curled up in a corner. Maomao tossed a jacket at him.

“Master Physician, those bugs won’t wait for us. You need to get ready.”

“Wh-What will we do?”

“For starters, you should put on thick clothing that will survive some gnawing. Then lock every window you can lock. After that, I want you to plug any gaps in our building with mud or clay to keep the grasshoppers from getting in that way.” Maomao pointed outside. There was no time. This was so urgent that they would need even the quack doctor to be on the alert.

“Mud? Are you sure we should be getting this nice house dirty? I have plenty of oil paper. We can use that!”

“Don’t waste it. The place is going to get dirty when those bugs show up anyway. No point worrying about it.”

The quack shuffled outside and started scooping dirt from the garden into a bucket. The duck appeared from who knew where and started squawking threats at the sky.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Lihaku, who had already wrapped a cloth around his face.

Maomao glanced in the back of the medical office. “I think we still have some seed potatoes left in the storage room. Spread some of these chemicals around the area to keep the bugs from getting at them.” As there was still no sign of Lahan’s Brother, it fell to Maomao to keep the potatoes safe. She clenched her fist: she was damned if she was going to let the likes of some insects have them.

“Oooh! Your famous poison!”

“It’s pesticide!” Maomao snapped. If she let the mistake go once, everyone would start making it, and then there would be no going back.

The second wave of insects was modest compared to the first. In just a few hours the grasshoppers had left again, and none had penetrated the carefully secured medical office or storeroom.

The people of the western capital were already on edge mentally and physically, however, and this new swarm was more than enough to rob them of any composure they might have regained after the last episode. With each day that went by, they found themselves further drained of what little wherewithal they had left.

Day 13:

Another case of arson. Someone was trying to steal food. The culprit was soon apprehended, but the merchant’s entire store burned down.

Day 14:

Not enough doctors. Dr. You appropriated Tianyu and he hasn’t come back. A very pleasant day indeed.

Day 15:

Food problems. People are hoarding provisions everywhere. Fights are breaking out among the commoners, and there are more and more attacks on rich people’s houses.

Day 16:

Victims of the swarm have started arriving in the western capital from other areas. One of them was supposedly demanding to see the Imperial younger brother.

Day 18:

Summoned by a bureaucrat. Wonder what’s going on.

“So you’re alive.” Maomao stared at the tramp. Tramp might not seem like a very polite word, but it was the only way to describe what she was seeing.

“You’re darn right I’m alive! What else would I be?!”

He had thick facial hair, the hair on his head was unkempt, and his clothing had been chewed in places. He no longer looked as he once had—but it was him. Lahan’s Brother, come home from a far country.

When a man who looked like a refugee had started demanding that they call the Emperor’s younger brother, nobody listened to him. So he’d tried dropping Maomao’s name instead.

That was when the bureaucrat had summoned her and she’d wondered what was going on.

When she arrived, Chue and Lihaku in tow, she had been confronted with the battered, road-weary Lahan’s Brother. He looked a bit roughed up, and they had put him in a cramped little room that stopped just short of a jail cell. It wasn’t a very nice way to treat somebody, but so many had turned to violence recently that the officials were antsy. It was hard to blame them.

“You look like death!” Chue exclaimed.

“Well, excuse me! It wasn’t exactly a personal choice!” Lahan’s Brother said.

“Fine, fine. Kindhearted Miss Chue will get you a change of clothes right away!”

“Thank you,” Maomao said. While Chue was getting the clothes, she hoped she could ask Lahan’s Brother about what was going on. “I’m glad you’re safe. Everyone was worried about you,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Very worried,” Lihaku said politely. The reality was, no one had been that worried. Lahan’s Brother seemed weirdly hard to kill. But Maomao couldn’t say that to him. And she definitely wouldn’t tell him that he’d been the butt of more than one joke during his absence.

“Gods take this swarm! It came way earlier than I expected! I tried to warn you—I tried!”

As angry as Lahan’s Brother was, he failed to be intimidating. Maomao could just imagine his younger brother Lahan passing him off with a “Yes, yes” anytime Lahan’s Brother got upset.

“Yes. We got your report, and the Moon Prince said everything afterward went according to plan. ‘That’s a professional for you,’ I believe he said.”

“Professional, my— Ughhh! I thought for sure I was going to die! And then I almost did die! Maybe I’m dead right now...”

He must have been awfully tired, judging by the thousand-yard stare on his face.

“Don’t worry. I can assure you, you’re alive,” Maomao said, giving him a gentle pat to prove he was really there.

“And pretty thoroughly chewed up around the head region,” Lihaku said, running a comb through the man’s bedraggled hair. It wasn’t really a bodyguard’s place, but he must have felt bad for Lahan’s Brother. Unfortunately, Lihaku was a bit big and more than a little strong, and Lahan’s Brother looked agonized by his ministrations. At this rate, his head was going to be as barren as a grasshopper-ravaged field.

“Yow! Ow! Stop that!” Lahan’s Brother snapped. He usually came across as very much the eldest son that he was, but today there was something of the sullen child about him.

Maomao was brushing the dust off his clothes when she noticed something firm at his back. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Ah! I’m glad you asked.” Lahan’s Brother took off his overrobe, which was little more than rags anyway, to reveal a bundle of actual rags strapped to his back. He opened the little bundle to reveal several bags.

Maomao looked inside one of them. “Wheat?”

“Looks like it,” Lihaku said.

Maomao and Lihaku looked at each other. It was perfectly ordinary, unremarkable grains of wheat.

“Yes, it’s wheat,” Lahan’s Brother confirmed.

“Okay, but... Why is it wheat?”

Yes, she knew how eager he had been to save the wheat from the grasshoppers, but to bring so much of it home, never letting it out of his sight? What was the reason?

“I’m glad you asked that too,” Lahan’s Brother said, and then he began to go back to the past. Clearly taking the first step on a long and winding road that would explain everything.

“Just the gist, please,” Maomao said before he could begin.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Sadly, she didn’t have time for Lahan’s Brother’s Saga of Wheat and Potatoes.

“Bah. Fine, have it your way. This was just before the swarm arrived...”

Lahan’s Brother told them about a certain village he’d been in, a place that grew a lot of wheat. The village headman, Lahan’s Brother said, had come to him for advice.

“He said that one particular family, you see, they always had bigger harvests than everyone else.”

“Oh?”

“He asked me to check this place out, see if they were doing anything different with their fields or how they raised the wheat. The people at the house always swore to the headman that they weren’t doing anything special and they had no secrets to tell him. He was hoping someone with connections to the capital region might be able to get them to cough something up.”

It turned out, however, that the people of this household weren’t doing anything special, nor did their field get much more sunlight than any other, or anything like that.

“You start each wheat crop with seeds from the previous harvest—and it turned out that this was special wheat.”

“Special how?” Maomao gave the wheat a close look, but it didn’t seem unusual to her.

“Clothes are here!” Chue announced as she entered. Lahan’s Brother flung off his ratty old cloak and started changing on the spot.

“Wow! That’s some figure you have!” Chue interjected.

“Don’t stare! I can’t change with you staring at me!” Lahan’s Brother said, shooing her away.

“She’s right; you’re built! You could be a soldier with muscles like those,” Lihaku said.

“A soldier? You think so?” Lahan’s Brother didn’t seem displeased by the suggestion—it must have been very refreshing to him after being treated as a farmer for so long.

“I’m sorry, could we get back on subject?” Maomao said. She was sorry to be a wet blanket, but they didn’t have time for this.

“Fine,” Lahan’s Brother muttered, though he didn’t sound very happy about it. “When I compared their wheat to the rest of the village’s crop, I found it was lower, closer to the ground. Presumably, as they used the same seeds over and over in their fields, the wheat started growing lower and lower and gradually there was more of it. If I hadn’t happened to be there at harvest time, I would never have figured it out.”

“What difference does being low make?” Maomao asked. Chue, meanwhile, was getting caught up by Lihaku, since she had missed the beginning of the conversation.

“Taller crops—not just wheat; this goes for rice too—are more prone to being buffeted by the wind, which can knock them over and break the stems. Then the plant rots, and that’s it. Being closer to the ground, the stalks are more stable and better able to put out ears.”

“Huh!” Maomao said. So by sheer coincidence, this family had stumbled across lower-growing wheat, then continued using it for years and years.

“There’s one other thing—although this is just my guess,” Lahan’s Brother said. He was looking a bit more respectable in fresh clothing, and with a hair tie to secure his disheveled hair. “I think the grains seem stuck more firmly in the ear than with other wheat.”

“Meaning what?”

“A big factor in the size and quality of a harvest is how many grains are left in the wheat ears. Imagine what happens if the grains fall out of the ears before the harvest. The farmers are so busy harvesting, they’re not about to stop and pick them all up, right? If ten percent of the grains drop before the harvest, that’s ten percent of your harvest gone. If twenty percent, then twenty percent, and so on.”

Maomao could see how that would have a significant and direct impact on the harvest.

“I brought these home because I thought that if we could cultivate lower, sturdier varieties of wheat, we might get larger harvests. And if we share the seeds we get from that harvest, then it doesn’t have to be just one field—every field could produce a larger yield. Of course, we’d have to find out if the soil and conditions are right for it first.”

“So that’s why you hauled this here,” Maomao said. Then she, Chue, and Lihaku all chorused, “Wow!” They were impressed.

This is a real farmer, here. One who thinks about the future, no less!

The other two were no doubt thinking much the same thing. So many farmers were bent on keeping their secrets, telling no one when they had a proven method of crop growing so as to keep their own profits high. After all, if food were plentiful everywhere, it would only get cheaper.

I guess this guy wouldn’t make much of a businessman. He didn’t look out for number one enough. Also, he was easily fooled. Some con man in the capital would fleece him in a minute flat.

Now that she thought about it, she remembered that it was also a letter from Lahan’s Brother that had first warned them of the arrival of the swarm. She was beginning to think that maybe it was Lahan’s Brother who had done the hardest work, and the most good, out of any of them since coming to I-sei Province.

We’ll have to make sure we show him we appreciate all his effort. There wasn’t much food to go around, but maybe today, Maomao thought, they could manage to find just a little bit more and make it something of a feast.

Most of all, she was glad to finally get some good news.