The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 12 - Chapter 21

Chapter 21: Serving Dinner

Maomao was preparing potatoes again.

“What is this new dish you’re proposing?” the middle-aged woman was asking.

The bandits had complained about the meager quantities of food, so the women had been trying to think of ways to quiet the grumbling when Maomao had raised her hand.

“We cut up steamed potatoes,” she said.

“Peels and all?”

“Peels and all.”

Using the huge pot, they fried meat in oil, then added the quartered potatoes and flavored everything with wine and soy paste. Plenty of spices too. And although they didn’t have much to spare, they even added some honey to make the whole thing glisten.

Wow!

The smell alone was enough to make the mouth water. The flavor would be perfect to entice the diners to drink some more wine.

“It certainly seems like it will be popular,” said a woman holding a potato.

“Mm... I’m only sorry it has to go to that bunch of louts,” said another.

“Don’t say that, auntie! If they caught you, they’d beat you to death!”

“Don’t you think I know that? Sigh! Why, oh why must we constantly give them our best food?”

Maomao would have loved to sample the dish herself, but meat was monitored closely here: hardly anyone except One-Eyed Dragon and his men got any. The rest of them might get the scraps in their soup if they were lucky, or maybe whatever was left on the bandits’ proverbial table.

“All right, I’m going to make more of this,” Maomao said.

“Yes, thank you. We’ll have to steam some more potatoes,” one of the aunties said.

“Oh, I’ve got that covered,” Maomao replied. That was when Xiaohong appeared with a basket full of midsize potatoes. “We can use lots of smaller potatoes to make them easier to steam. After they’re steamed, it won’t be so hard to chop them.”

Maomao plopped the potatoes into a steamer. They had to keep cracking or they wouldn’t be in time for dinner.

“Listen,” said one of the women as Maomao was frying some more meat. “I know the two of you are going to serve One-Eyed Dragon tonight. Will you be all right?” She looked at Maomao and Xiaohong. Serving duty came to everyone on the kitchen staff equally, regardless of age. “That bear usually contents himself with widows and the nonbelievers, but once in a while he makes a move on the poor ladies serving his dinner. You... Your husband is still alive, isn’t he?”

She was worried what might happen to Maomao if the outlaw took her. Presumably there was a chance that, from a religious perspective, such an incident would be considered adultery.

“I’ll watch myself,” Maomao said, concentrating on her frying. She didn’t think there could be that many freaks in the world who would go for someone like her, but it couldn’t hurt to be careful.

They took the bandits’ dinner to the church. Everyone ate breakfast whenever they felt like it, but dinner was taken in the church, as a group, and doubled as a chance for everyone to report in.

Maomao had estimated there must be about fifty bandits in the town, but it looked like it might be closer to thirty. A surprisingly small number.

She and Xiaohong sat beside One-Eyed Dragon. Dinner tonight was Maomao’s potatoes-and-meat creation along with butter, bread, and a lamb-and-vegetable stew, which included goat’s milk to give it some body. As for the alcohol, it was a fermented horse milk and gave off a very unique smell. One-Eyed Dragon also got something extra: a patty made of vinegared horse meat, ground and worked with pepper and aromatic herbs.

“All right, eat up!” One-Eyed Dragon said, and his gang commenced doing exactly that. The meat and potatoes dish got rave reviews and was quickly consumed, although a few people who didn’t like it reached for one of the other offerings.

Oh, don’t be picky, just eat the damn stuff! Maomao thought, but her thoughts were never going to reach these selfish, self-interested marauders.

“You eat too.” One-Eyed Dragon piled potatoes, bread, butter, raw horse meat, and plenty of stew onto Maomao’s and Xiaohong’s plates, shoveling it on as if he were feeding livestock.

“Gladly, sir.” Maomao picked up a potato with her bare hands; she couldn’t even use chopsticks. The meat was messy but delicious. It ought to be—Maomao was the one who had prepared it, and she’d made sure to mix in copious amounts of spices.

One-Eyed Dragon watched her eat intently. He might look like he was generously giving her food, but really he wanted to see if it was poisoned. When Maomao finished the food and still looked hale and hearty, he patted the jar of alcohol.

Maomao poured some of the horse-milk brew and was about to drink it when the bandit leader growled, “Not you. Give it to her.” He held the cup toward Xiaohong.

The girl quailed, but Maomao looked at her and nodded. Xiaohong nodded back.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. Then she took the cup and drained the contents. “Ahh!” She burped. The flavor must have been more agreeable than one might expect. Horse-milk wine was fermented, yes, but the alcohol content wasn’t very high; Maomao had heard that in I-sei Province, even babies drank it, and it seemed that was true.

“I’ll try some as well. Just for form’s sake,” Maomao said, and then she poured herself a cup and drank.

It really is light on the alcohol.

Frankly, she could have done with something a bit drier.

One-Eyed Dragon must have finally been convinced that everything was safe, because he set to eating and drinking. Maomao kept the alcohol flowing, making sure his cup was never empty. The meal felt less like dinner and more like a drunken banquet, and proceeded slowly. The men conducted themselves with abandon, spilling their drinks, throwing bread at each other, and on and on.

Here we’re trying to save every scrap of food. Maomao looked at the meat and potatoes littering the floor and thought about what a waste it was, but she wasn’t going to stoop to eating off the ground. These “leftovers” would go to making the meal for the locals.

In the midst of the revelry, someone stood up from his seat. “Gotta take a dump.” Then he left the church.

Maomao picked up the empty alcohol bottle. “I’ll bring another,” she said.

She called Xiaohong over and was about to step out when One-Eyed Dragon stopped her. “Hold it right there. It don’t take two of you to get a bottle, do it?”

Maomao paused. “Of course not, sir.”

She gave the bottle to Xiaohong and busied herself putting more food on One-Eyed Dragon’s empty plate instead. Most of the meatless dishes hadn’t been touched. She’d observed that One-Eyed Dragon always chewed on the right side of his mouth, while the left side seemed to have an ulcer.

Maybe the bottle was too heavy for Xiaohong, because she tripped and fell. There was a crash as the bottle shattered.

“I’m so sorry! I’ll clean it up right away!” she said.

One-Eyed Dragon had been doing nothing but drinking since he’d finished his horse meat. Meanwhile, the men started leaving their seats one by one.

“I gotta use the toilet.”

“Uh, me too!”

One-Eyed Dragon raised an eyebrow.

Almost there. A little more...

Another man stood up, then covered his mouth. His pallor didn’t look very good. He stumbled along a few steps, leaning on the wall for support, and finally crumpled to his knees.

“Hrrrghhh!”

He spewed sick everywhere. The bandits nearby scuttled away from him, but none of them looked much better than he did. Finally they looked at the food they’d been consuming so greedily moments before. If it had happened to just one of them, it might have been a case of an unlucky drunk, but the sickness took another, and then another.

Maomao discovered she was the subject of a very intense glare.

“You put somethin’ in this!” One-Eyed Dragon said.

“It could be food poisoning. We didn’t have many fresh ingredients to work with,” Maomao said, trying to make it look like she believed this was an act of God.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work on One-Eyed Dragon. She could almost see steam coming out of his ears. She lost no time hiding behind the altar.

“You bitch!” One-Eyed Dragon howled and lunged to his feet—only to come crashing back down. His hands were shaking. “You put somethin’ in my food!”

“We both checked the food for poison.”

Of course we put something in it.

Now, why was Maomao feeling fine while the bandits were sick as a pack of dogs?

Simply put, it was a matter of quantity consumed. Maomao hadn’t eaten enough of the stuff in her tasting to make herself sick.

The sprouts and peels of the potatoes were toxic, with the potential to cause vomiting and diarrhea. She’d had time to kill in the western capital, so she’d conducted some experiments, testing to see how much it took to give herself a stomachache. Much to the exasperation of those around her, of course.

Potato toxins caused tingling. Normally, the bandits would have noticed, but if it was true that the food supply was limited and occasionally included rotten ingredients, they would have grown inured to such sensations. Just to make sure, Maomao had been including potato sprouts in their meals for the past several days.

The sprouts were the most toxic part of the potato, but green peels were fairly potent too. Green indicated that the potato wasn’t ripe yet, and leaving it out in the sun only made the peels greener.

That was the first thing Maomao had asked Xiaohong to do: collect small potatoes and put them where they would get plenty of sun.

She had of course anticipated that some of the bandits would eat the potatoes and some wouldn’t. The people with two taste buds to rub together had preferred other dishes, but Maomao had put something special in those too. Namely, ground nutmeg. They had so much of the stuff that she could have started up a small business with it, so supply wasn’t an issue.

Nutmeg could be used for its medicinal properties, but by the same token, too much of it was toxic. It could induce nausea, cramps, and palpitations, as well as severe confusion.

And Maomao had included plenty of it in the meat patty she’d made especially for One-Eyed Dragon.

“You filthy little—!” One-Eyed Dragon shook and shivered, but still bared his teeth. He clutched his favored weapon, an axe. Maomao kept moving in an effort to keep herself from being swallowed up by fear. One-Eyed Dragon tried and failed to follow her; he took a few swings with his axe but kept dropping it.

When Xiaohong tripped, Maomao had rubbed oil on the axe’s handle under the guise of cleaning it. If One-Eyed Dragon had been smart, he would have had a cloth or something wrapped around the haft, but it was just plain wood, and very slippery.

“Wh-What’s goin’ on? I didn’t even...eat...that much...”

Ah, but you drank plenty.

Over the past few days’ meals, Maomao had learned that One-Eyed Dragon was a picky eater with a taste for meat and drink. She knew he was unlikely to touch the potatoes, and that he was big enough that the nutmeg wasn’t likely to affect him on its own.

So Maomao had tampered with the alcohol too.

“Th-The drink. It’s gotta be. But wait...the kid... She drank it too, no problem...”

Maomao and Xiaohong were both in perfect health.

I’m glad it had the intended effect.

In the alcohol, Maomao had put the snake venom the lady biaoshi had given her. How was it that she and Xiaohong had escaped its effects unscathed?

He chose the perfect time to have an injured mouth.

Maomao had remembered what the woman had said, that One-Eyed Dragon had bitten the inside of his mouth, and taken it out on the unfortunate villager.

Snake venom was a stamina tonic. If you took it by mouth, it would be dissolved in your gastric juices. Maomao had anticipated the possibility that Xiaohong might be told to try the drink, which was why she’d served the horse-milk alcohol instead of something stronger. She’d checked the inside of Xiaohong’s mouth thoroughly before putting this plan in motion, making sure that she had no sores or bad teeth. This was the second thing she’d requested of the girl.

If the inside of one’s mouth was injured, it was a different story. The wound provided a point of entry for the toxin, which wouldn’t be neutralized but could travel throughout the body. Meanwhile, the unique flavor of the horse-milk alcohol hid the taste of the venom.

“You’ll pay for this...” Swaying, One-Eyed Dragon raised a hand. “Get her! Catch the...the woman!” he ordered. He could barely get his tongue around the words, but he still had it in him to tell his men what to do.

Those bandits who still had the wherewithal approached Maomao. Not all of them had eaten her poisoned food, of course, while variations in body type meant even those who had were each affected differently.

Maomao, however, had planned for a worse situation than this.

I just want a fighting chance.

She had to buy time, somehow. Run, somehow. Then this might work out.

Maomao darted between the pillars, overturning a jar of oil as she went. The bandits, already barely keeping their feet, slipped and fell. It looked like something out of a comedy routine, but for Maomao, it was a matter of life and death.

As she ran, she managed to give the church bell a great ring. That should make it clear that this was an emergency.

Do it! Do it now!

More and more of One-Eyed Dragon’s men joined the chase, and Maomao found herself cornered.

They’re gonna get me! In desperation, she grabbed a nearby plate and flung it at her pursuers.

It was at just that moment that the church door flew open with a bang.

“Wh-Who the hell is that?” One-Eyed Dragon demanded, turning unsteadily toward the door. Could he tell who was there?

Took your damn time about it! Maomao thought at the man who stood there with his companions.

“Long time no see, bear-man,” the newcomer said.

“I know... I know that voice!” One-Eyed Dragon leaned against a pillar. Who did he see with his one remaining eye?

“Looks like you’ve been living it up out here. If I’d known you would sink this low, I’d have taken both your eyes.”

The man making this unsettling pronouncement had a face that looked noble, yet wild.

“Shikyou, you son of a bitch!”

It was Shikyou, accompanied by a group of biaoshi—and Maomao could see her lady escort among them.

“All right, let’s clean up, shall we?!” Shikyou shouted. The biaoshi raised their hands in a cheer of agreement.

Seriously, could they have left it any later?!

Maomao heaved a great sigh and slumped to the floor.