The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 12 - Chapter 20

Chapter 20: The Bandit Village (Part Two)

“Xiongxiong, come here. You said you’re a medicine woman, didn’t you?” said the middle-aged woman who oversaw the kitchen staff. She looked troubled. “Could you come with me for a moment?”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

Maomao followed her to the edge of town, where they found a man lying on some dry grass. His breathing was harsh and irregular, and one leg was bent in an unnatural direction. Half his face was swollen from a beating and blood dribbled from his mouth. Broken teeth, Maomao suspected. He was also covered in cuts. She took him to be not even twenty years old—still a boy.

Maomao was already moving even as she asked, “What in the world happened here?”

She elevated the broken leg so it was higher than the young man’s heart. Firewood for cooking lay nearby; she grabbed a piece and improvised a splint to brace the limb. At least the break was a clean one. If the bone had been shattered, she would have had to cut the leg open to extract the shards.

“He earned One-Eyed Dragon’s ‘special attention,’” the woman said.

“That’s some attention.”

If there was a “lesson” here, it looked like it had gone too far. From the anxiety in the woman’s eyes, Maomao guessed that the battered boy was one of the townspeople.

“When he gets tired lying around and gorging himself, he picks someone to beat up. He calls it ‘training.’ This isn’t the worst we’ve seen—sometimes he kills people.” The auntie had a far-off look in her eyes.

“Kills people? That doesn’t sound like what most of us would call training.”

“I heard this young man actually landed a blow. It wasn’t much, hardly more than a scratch, but that bear was so shocked that he bit the inside of his mouth—which was his excuse to beat this young man to a pulp.”

Trying to see if any broken teeth were left behind, Maomao looked into the bloody mess of the boy’s mouth, then inserted a wadded-up rag. She wanted him to bite down on it, since the pressure could help stop the bleeding, but she wasn’t sure he was conscious.

“Can you bite down?” she asked. The boy didn’t say anything, but nodded feebly.

In an effort to stop the bleeding, she ended up using up all of her precious supply of puhuang.

She removed the young man’s shirt and checked him over; thankfully, nothing else seemed to be broken. Any injuries could have caused life-threatening damage to his internal organs.

“This is all I can do with what I have on hand,” she told the other woman. “What he needs now is nutritious food and some rest.”

“He won’t be getting those,” the woman said unhappily. “Anyone who can’t work is thrown in with the nonbelievers. The best he can hope for is thin soup and potato skins. People there frequently have upset stomachs. Maybe it’s because they’re so undernourished.”

Maomao suspected it had more to do with the potato peels and sprouts—she’d tried to remove the eyes when she was peeling the potatoes, but even then, some of the poison could remain.

Maybe I should say something, she thought, but the only outcome of voicing her concerns would be that the nonbelievers wouldn’t have any food at all.

“In any case, thank you,” the woman said. “I’ll get the men to carry this youngster away. You can go back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, but first...” She gestured to Maomao to come closer.

She went, curious about what the woman wanted: it turned out to be the clothing Maomao and Xiaohong had been wearing when they arrived. Maomao had never dreamed they would ever see it again.

“I patched the torn spots. I suggest you hide these somewhere—if anyone sees them, they’ll snatch them for themselves, you can count on that.”

“Thank you very much.” Maomao bowed her head and studied the clothing.

I don’t remember anything that needed patching.

Maybe their clothes had gotten caught on something as they had run through the forest? Her inspection yielded traces of stitching on the sleeves, and she caught her breath. The woman had done much more than patching; she’d added elaborate embroidery in the shape of a bird. On the inside of the sleeves, where you would never find it if you weren’t looking for it, there was a delicately embroidered sparrow.

Could this mean...

The embroidery turned out to be delicate letters masquerading as an elaborate pattern. They were in a foreign language, and Maomao could only just manage to read them.

Dinner...service...create...opening.

She doubted this sequence of words was pure coincidence. She looked up at the middle-aged woman, who had already turned away.

Come to think of it...

“If you want to survive, forget your cozy domestic life.”

At the time the woman had spoken those words, Maomao hadn’t actually told her that she and Xiaohong were a mother and child. Yet the woman had known.

So that’s what’s going on, Maomao thought. Somehow, she was sure of it.

The kitchen staff’s work was done after they had cleaned the dinner dishes. That didn’t require that many hands, so people were assigned to the work on a rotating schedule. Maomao and Xiaohong, as “mother and daughter,” were typically given dishwashing duty together. They worked silently in the light of the moon.

Maomao wasn’t the type to start conversations, for the most part, and Xiaohong was the same, so when they were together, they didn’t talk much. Tonight, however, Maomao spoke up. “I’d like to ask you to do something.” She whispered even though there was no one else around.

“What is it?” Xiaohong was a clever girl; she already seemed to know what Maomao had in mind.