The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 12 - Chapter 19

Chapter 19: The Bandit Village (Part One)

Maomao and Xiaohong were led to a room full of women and children. The bedrolls and pillows that lined the walls indicated that they all slept here together. A brawny man stood guard outside.

So that’s the situation. The citizens of this town were under the outlaws’ collective thumb, and they were keeping the women and children as what amounted to hostages. That apology earlier—“I’m sorry, sweetheart”—had that been for getting Xiaohong involved? But then, the townspeople were equally victims. Maomao didn’t yet know for certain what the words meant.

Their guide brought them to a plump middle-aged woman who said, “Newcomers? Hmm.” She looked Maomao and Xiaohong up and down. “Beanstalks, both of them. Think we can use them? The laoshi brought them, didn’t he?”

“Yes. They’re fellow believers,” the other woman replied.

That older guy, he’s the laoshi?

He was probably a pastor, or at least someone connected with the church. Which would mean he wasn’t one of the outlaws, but a resident of this town.

In other words, the people here are cooperating with the bandits—or they’re being forced to.

That would explain the woman’s apology. Then again, Maomao should really have known sooner—what kind of bandits carried farm implements?

The pudgy woman looked at Maomao. “Sorry, kid, but I need you to take off everything you’re wearing. It’s all women in this room, anyway. Strip down and then get changed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maomao replied. It didn’t really bother her. She just started taking off her clothes. The room was, like the lady said, all women; and anyway, she was used to this from the routine body searches every time she entered the rear palace.

There was just one teensy little problem.

“What’s this, eh?”

“That’s a coagulant, ma’am.”

“And this?”

“An antipyretic.”

“And what in the world is this?”

“It treats coughs.”

The middle-aged woman was getting more and more inpatient with the mountain of herbal medicine packets that was emerging from the folds of Maomao’s robes.

“What’s this one?” she demanded.

“That’s...an energy tonic,” Maomao replied.

The item in question was the bottle that the biaoshi had given her.

It’s not not an energy tonic, Maomao told herself. Snake venom would certainly spice up your alcohol.

“Just who are you?” the middle-aged woman asked.

“A medicine woman,” Maomao replied. It was the honest truth; no point trying to hide it now. Her makeup was among the items that had come tumbling out, so she would have to judge how far she could push her story about being Xiaohong’s mother.

“A medicine woman, huh? And this is your medicine? Keep it close, then. Better than letting that lot get a hold of it—they’d just throw it away. No idea what to do with it, I’m sure.”

The woman had appeared cold, but deep down, it seemed she wasn’t a bad person. Of course, that might simply be because she believed Maomao shared her faith.

I’m not exactly a nonbeliever in the strict sense, but it would be better if they kept thinking I believe like they do.

“Change into something else; we’ll wash your clothes for you. Are you able to do the washing?”

“Yes, ma’am. Also, if you’ll forgive my asking, I don’t suppose we could get the cargo from the wagon we were riding on, could we?”

“Sadly, no. Was there something important in there?”

“Not as such, but my well-loved copy of the scriptures was in that wagon. I was in the middle of teaching the girl.”

Xiaohong took that as her cue to cling tightly to Maomao.

She’s a fine little actor, Maomao thought. Maybe she was being hopeful, but she thought Xiaohong might just be able to help her pull this off.

To Maomao’s relief, the other woman was sucked right in. “The scriptures? Well, that won’t do. I’ll ask the teacher to help.”

The clothes they were given were rough, but of sturdy weave. The cotton outfits they’d been wearing would have stood out too much in town. Besides, cotton was all well and good for a housewife traveling with a biaoshi, but for a couple of almost-prisoners, the rough-hewn textiles better looked the part.

“All right, I’ve got things to do. See those girls over there about how you can help,” the middle-aged woman said.

“Understood, ma’am,” Maomao said, bowing politely.

“Now, you listen,” the woman added. “If you don’t pull your weight around here, they’ll get rid of you without a second thought. If you want to survive, forget your cozy domestic life and work like you’ve never worked before. Treat nothing as beneath you.”

Maomao and Xiaohong both nodded energetically.

“Say, what were your names, again?” the woman asked.

“Oh, uh, names?” Maomao said, panicking. Was it safe to tell this woman their real names? One-Eyed Dragon obviously had it out for Shikyou, and if he realized Xiaohong was his niece—well, the thought frightened Maomao. But by the same token, if Jinshi was on Maomao’s trail, she couldn’t have him pass her up because he didn’t know she was there.

Hrm...

After a moment’s consideration, she came up with:

“I’m Xiongxiong, and this is Xiaolan.” The names meant “bear-bear” and “little wolf” respectively, but they were the best she could do on such short notice. She shot a look at Xiaohong, whose brow was furrowed as if she were looking at a caterpillar.

“Xiongxiong and Xiaolan? Really? Aren’t those names rather...mannish?” a woman asked in a friendly tone. She was the other woman who had been serving One-Eyed Dragon when Maomao had met him earlier. Her sunbaked skin made her look older than she was, but she said she was seventeen. She already had three children, which at least confirmed that there was nothing incongruous about Maomao and Xiaohong posing as mother and child.

“Yes, they are. Women in my family are given strong names to make them resilient against sickness,” Maomao said. She found the lie as easy as breathing; she could even keep peeling vegetables while she said it. (The other woman had decided that her physique didn’t lend itself to physical labor and had put her to work in the kitchen instead.)

Maomao peeled the vegetables and Xiaohong washed them. If this town had one thing going for it, it was that it was close to a water source, giving them the luxury of using more water than most places.

At the moment, Maomao was peeling an ordinary white potato. She had seen enough of those to last her a lifetime.

“We may not have our freedom, but try to stay strong. At least it’s better than being killed,” said the other woman, who proved to be quite a talker. As they worked on the vegetables, she filled them in on the town’s story. The place used to be bustling, but as soon as the swarm hit, people stopped visiting almost completely. Townsfolk with nowhere to turn joined the bandits, who thereby extended their power. Worse, that no-account “boss” had shown up about a month before and taken over the town. The western capital had sent some soldiers to deal with the situation, but they had been massacred. No wonder the western capital hadn’t had any reports.

It’s been a month?

The situation was worse than they had thought.

“Our strongest villagers tried to fight back, but the bandits killed them all. That clown calling himself One-Eyed Dragon might not be very bright, but he’s got the muscles to make up for it. The laoshi was the one who suggested we should go along with him... He said there was no chance we could stand against One-Eyed Dragon ourselves.”

The laoshi—that would be the man of faith who had captured Maomao and Xiaohong. His suggestion was what had brought them to the present moment.

This can’t go on for long.

Did their “laoshi” understand that? With no way to break out of this situation, maybe he was just hoping to live a little longer.

Maomao was still wondering about it as she tossed the peeled potato into a bucket. “Where should we throw away the peels?”

“We don’t. We stir-fry them and use them as feed for the last of the unbelievers,” the other woman told her with a look of disgust.

“I can’t say the peels taste very good. They make your tongue tingle,” said Maomao, who had sampled them several times herself since hearing that the skin and buds of a potato were poisonous.

“Yes, well, it’s all those bandits will let us do. We try to make it taste a little better with this.” The woman showed Maomao a jar filled with a mix of spices.

“You barely afford them potatoes, but you give them lots of spices?”

It went beyond salt and pepper—the blend included cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron, among other things. Those spices all had medicinal properties as well, so Maomao’s eyes were shining.

“We don’t have anything else to do with them,” the woman replied. “So the men attacked a caravan and brought these to us—great. We have no way to sell them, so they told us to use them however we wanted.”

“What a waste.”

“Ah, but it has its benefits. A bit of spice can do a lot to cover for crummy ingredients. For example, say we were to occasionally slip some rotten vegetables into the bandits’ meals...” The woman was positively grinning. “I’m just so glad you turned out to be fellow believers, Xiongxiong. If you’d been unbelievers, oh, you would have been in for a hard time!”

“How do you mean?” Maomao asked, trying to look as calm as she could.

“One-Eyed Dragon wanted to cut the number of villagers in half. The laoshi begged him not to, promised he would get us all to work for him. But...” Tears sprang to the woman’s eyes. “One-Eyed Dragon said, ‘Then we’ll cut ’em down to half of half!’ And... And he made the laoshi choose.”

This laoshi had summoned the nonbelievers to be purged.

“Th-There were little children there! Playmates of my own little one. Everyone who couldn’t possibly be used to do physical labor was...”

She broke off into a sob.

Maomao glanced around, afraid that the man guarding them would think they weren’t working. “I understand. I’m sorry for bringing up such painful memories.”

Maomao rubbed the woman’s back and gritted her teeth, wishing there was something she could do about this terrible One-Eyed Dragon.

After a few days, Maomao had begun to get the lay of the land. The women vented their emotions by talking, which meant there was plenty for a newcomer like Maomao to hear.

The boss might call himself One-Eyed Dragon, but he looked more like a bear, the women said. They went on about how he had muscles for brains and his feet stank—the sort of thing, Maomao reflected, they could all be killed for saying if anyone overheard them.

While One-Eyed Dragon might not have been very bright, he had a sharp intuition and held the outlaws together through his own strength.

“The rest of them are all small fry. If he weren’t here...”

A woman was making rice and talking to Maomao, who was peeling potatoes for all she was worth. The peels were going to be eaten, so she tried to at least get the eyes off.

The room Maomao and Xiaohong had been dumped in was home to some thirty women and children. They were divided up by job: most of the people in this room worked in the kitchen, while others did the laundry or cleaning. The village had once been home to a thousand people or so, but in the wake of the insect swarm about half of them had left for other areas. Most of those were merchants, while the ones who remained behind largely comprised farmers, those with nowhere else to go, and true believers defending their church.

It doesn’t seem like there are actually that many bandits.

Maybe fifty, give or take. But that was more than enough to attack a village of noncombatants. Once the outlaws had dealt with the soldiers sent from the western capital, it was all clerics and farmers here.

Farmers usually have good builds; physically they’re strong. But they didn’t know how to fight. Lahan’s Brother was an excellent case in point.

Considering that the village’s new oppressors had resorted to putting the men to bandit-like tasks, One-Eyed Dragon’s followers probably weren’t much of a force to be reckoned with. A rabble, really.

“You know,” Maomao said, not sure whether she should voice her next question but asking it anyway, “One-Eyed Dragon was going on about someone called Shikyou. Who’s that?”

“Oh, him? He’s apparently the man who put out that bear’s eye years back. That brute brought it on himself by attacking the caravan this Shikyou was protecting, but ‘the boss’ blames him just the same!”

Stupid oldest son! Maomao thought. Okay, it wasn’t actually Shikyou’s fault, but he was still the reason that Maomao was in this fix. Of course, one could argue that Maomao had been dragged into this when Xiaohong had come to get her...

Dammit, she’s too cute to blame.

Maomao discovered she had caught some sympathy for the girl. She’d spent so much time around whiny, obnoxious brats that she couldn’t help being smitten by a kid who actually listened and did as she was told. She could almost believe that she might actually like children, if all the kids in the world were like that.

I guess Princess Lingli was cute too. But that was work.

She suddenly found herself remembering the Jade Pavilion. She wondered if all its residents were doing well.

Seriously, though, if she’d known she was going to end up like this, then she would have been better off just ignoring Xiaohong. And to think, it was Hulan who’d put her up to it!

I knew I didn’t like that guy.

He’d probably been trying to entrap Shikyou.

Pisses me off.

Maomao shook her fist. She didn’t even put down the potato first.

As her mind went around in circles, she finished peeling the potatoes. She put the peels and the vegetables on a cutting board. The potatoes would be steamed for the main course, while the peels would be finely chopped and stir-fried.

Maomao picked up a potato peel and scowled at it.

We need better stuff.

From what Maomao heard, despite the talk of purging a quarter of the town’s population, they hadn’t actually all been killed. Those who were able were put to work. They were treated as little better than slaves, so the food they got was indeed poor. Just stir-fried potato skins with a dash of seasoning. Meanwhile, the bandits got precious sheep’s meat and butter.

The woman in charge of the cooking wasn’t happy about that, but there wasn’t much she could do. She did what she could by frying the potato peels after the meat so that they absorbed some of the flavor.

Maomao gathered that it had never been the way of this village to discriminate against people just for believing in a different faith, and the laoshi’s decision had prompted some dissension and resentment.

Maomao heard one person remark, “It’s awful, abandoning little children just because they don’t believe what we do.”

“I agree,” someone else said. “The laoshi’s not the man I thought he was. Just look how he’s cozied up to that big bear!”

At the same time, others took a different view.

“We could have ended up dead ourselves.”

“He had to make some kind of choice. They forced him!”

“Still,” the woman said as she put the potatoes in the pot, “we owe the unbelievers a lot. Even these potatoes were brought to us by a nice man who didn’t share our beliefs.”

A nice man, different religion? Maomao thought. Just one face floated into her mind. Lahan’s Brother!

This must have been one of the villages he’d visited when he was out teaching farming methods. Since they’d adopted potatoes as their staple food, it was fair to say he’d been successful.

“He only stayed for a few days, but he was such a hard worker! If I were ten years younger, ooh, I’d have proposed to him like that!” said another of the aunties.

“Yes, well, ten years ago you were still already married, weren’t you? He would have been perfect for my daughter, though. If he’d just stayed a few more days, I would have told her to sneak into his room one night!”

“Ah, yes, my neighbor said the same thing. Rumor had it that he looked like a farmer, but he actually came from some famous family!”

“Oh, stop with your jokes! You saw how he wielded that hoe. No pampered aristocrat could do that. That man comes from a line of farmers, make no mistake!”

Uh... He technically comes from a military family, Maomao thought, but she listened quietly.

“I know what you mean. Oh, how he handled that hoe!”

Look at you, “Brother”! The ladies love you.

She wondered what Lahan’s Brother would think if he could hear what she was hearing. If she got out of this alive, maybe she would bring him back here to meet some nice girls. He might make someone here a very good son-in-law.

Finally she ventured, “Excuse me...”

“Yes, Xiongxiong? What is it?”

Maomao couldn’t quite get used to that name, even though she had picked it herself. She wished she’d gone with something else, but nothing had come to mind, so she was stuck with Xiongxiong. Even the normally impassive Xiaohong seemed to think it was a dumb name.

“Did a female biaoshi happen to come through here just before we arrived? We’d hired her as our bodyguard...”

She’d been wondering all this time.

“Hmm,” one of the women said as she tasted the food. “I don’t remember any fuss over anything like that. But then, I’ve been in the kitchen this whole time. I don’t always know much about what goes on outside.”

“I’m not sure either,” said another woman. “When they come across a nonbeliever, though, a lot of the time they throw them in jail and figure out what to do with them later.”

“Jail?” Maomao asked. She had trouble believing the biaoshi would get herself caught so easily, but then again, she couldn’t have predicted this situation. Maybe she had run, leaving Maomao and the others behind.

Maomao groaned and set about chopping potato peels.

“I finished washing these,” said Xiaohong, arriving with the potatoes.

“You’re such a good worker for such a little girl,” one of the women said, patting Xiaohong’s head with a leathery palm. Xiaohong smiled shyly.

“We’re so glad you’re the hardworking kind, both of you. If you hadn’t been any use in the kitchen, you would have been left to do some other kind of work.”

“Is that worse than what goes on here?” Maomao asked.

“Cleaning and laundry are such physical labor, and being sent to the fields isn’t any better. There’s no easy work, but at least kitchen service is mostly worry-free. There’s just one thing you have to be careful of.”

“Wh-What might that be?”

The woman pressed right up into Maomao’s face. “We take turns waiting on that big bear, two at a time. When it’s your turn, don’t try anything funny. One girl took a knife with her and tried to kill him when he wasn’t looking. But she...”

The woman didn’t finish her sentence, but her dark expression said it all. The girl in question had not succeeded.

What about poison, then? Maomao thought.

“He never touches his food or drink without making the girls try them first. To make sure they’re not poisoned.”

Bah.

Maomao took the pot, still slick with the juices from the meat, and tossed in the chopped potato peels.