The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 12 - Chapter 25

Chapter 25: The Ugly Little Sparrow

The young Beghura—her name meant “sparrow”—was a happy girl. Her father was in the trading business and had married, although he was no longer a young man. He claimed that when he saw her beautiful mother, he’d fallen in love as badly as any besotted boy. And you didn’t have to be Beghura’s father to notice the woman’s beauty. Slim and tall, skin the color of an elephant’s tusk, a body that was all flowing lines and smooth curves.

It was, so Beghura had heard, by pure coincidence that her father had met her mother, who came from another land. Her mother had been on a ship from a neighboring country called Shaoh. The ship had wrecked in a storm, and her mother had been rescued by her father’s merchant vessel. Things weren’t easy at first, for she couldn’t communicate. But Beghura’s father spoke excellent Shaohnese and took her mother under his wing. He gave her a job and taught her the language.

He had every intention of sending her back to Shaoh as soon as he could, but things kept getting in the way. Her husband and child had been on the Shaohnese ship with her and had died in the wreck. She had no family in her native land—even if she went back, there was nowhere for her to go.

Beghura’s father was a merchant, but he was also a thoroughly decent man; his business had grown by the esteem in which people held him. He would never abandon this woman to her fate, alone in the world as she was. And this was when his boyish love, so unbecoming in a man more than forty years old, showed itself.

Beghura’s mother might have been a foreigner with only a modest command of the language, but she was a hard worker. In no time at all, the servants came to accept her as the lady of the house.

Beghura’s mother continued to be an excellent helper to her father after they were married. Beghura especially loved to see them go to church together, hand in hand. The three of them would spend the day of rest praying together, and then they would have a meal somewhere before they went home.

“What I really meant to do, eventually, was adopt a relative’s child or something,” her father said. The year after he was married, however, Beghura was born. She was a girl, yes, but her father, who had never imagined he would have a child of his own, was overjoyed. For ten days following the birth of his daughter, he handed out sweets to everyone who went past his shop.

Her mother chose the name Beghura. It was the name of a small bird, her father said, an adorable little animal. Beghura looked nothing like her slim, lovely mother; she took after her short, stout father. Smallish eyes, a nose so abbreviated it looked like it might have been broken off—and not very tall either. But love is indeed blind, and Beghura’s father bragged about her to everyone in his family.

Beghura was not what could be called beautiful, but at least she had some brains to make up for it. She was walking less than a year after her birth; within two years, she was a voluble talker. After three, her father watched her with a grin and wondered who she would grow up to be.

Yes, Beghura had brains enough. Enough to remember that her mother had vanished before she was three years old—and to remember what she was like just before she left.

Her mother disappeared one day, out of the blue. Her father was inconsolable. The employees, meanwhile, were in an uproar, astonished and confused and desperate to know what was happening.

Her father commissioned portrait after portrait from various artists, and spent his days searching. Maybe, he thought, she had been the victim of a crime. As he searched, however, strange details began to emerge.

For one thing, it appeared that information about her father’s business dealings had been leaked. There was no concrete proof, but suspicious patterns began to appear in his imports and exports from other countries.

Beghura got her quick-wittedness from her father. He might have attracted the business with his winning personality, but that wasn’t enough to build a merchant concern. He wouldn’t ignore even the slightest sense that something was wrong. He checked the patterns in the account books for the several years since Beghura’s mother had arrived—and found a connection with one particular nation.

Li: a country bordering Shaoh. It had no diplomatic relations with Beghura’s country, but it did lie to the east of Shaoh, just as her own land lay to its west. Beghura’s mother had claimed to be Shaohnese, but she looked rather more like someone from Li. It hadn’t raised his suspicions then; there were plenty of people of mixed origins in Shaoh.

“I will find your mother. I swear I will!” he said to Beghura, and then he gave her a copy of the scriptures and told her to study. With nothing else to do, Beghura had one of the servants read them to her.

“Your mother must have had some reason. I’m sure there was something that forced her to do what she did,” her father insisted, and for the first time, Beghura thought he was being stupid.

Years later, her father said he might have found her mother. Someone who matched the portrait exactly had been located in Li. Full of joy, he boarded a boat and sailed for Li at once.

Beghura regretted it later: she should have reached out to him that day. He should have thought of her mother as dead. The two of them could have lived a perfectly happy life together.

But that dream was destined not to come true.

Her father never returned.

What happens to children who lose their parents? If Beghura had been a little older, things might have been different—but for a girl not even ten years old, there was nothing she could do. In less than a month, her father’s assets had been pillaged; there was nothing left. Funny, how a rich man turns out to have so many relatives the moment he dies. Beghura was left with just a few gold coins, given to her by a servant who felt some modicum of loyalty to her father.

If her father had been in his right mind, he would have appointed a guardian for his daughter. Beautiful her mother might have been, but she had driven her father mad.

“If anything ever happens to me, go to the church,” he had said, and that was what Beghura did, clutching her coins. The pastor there was a basically decent person, and out of compassion he tried to send Beghura to the poorhouse, but she knew that was a bad idea. The moment her handful of gold coins was discovered, they were taken from her.

Beghura knew what her goal should be. There was a teacher in the church who said that he wished to spread the teachings to the east. Indeed, he would be leaving very soon.

“Please, take me with you,” Beghura said.

The teacher, a fortyish man who was somewhat distant at the best of times, said, “I can’t be having a child tag along.” He was well-built; he used to be a bodyguard for the teacher of a particularly large church. Brawn like his would be essential when going to a foreign land full of heretics and unbelievers.

Beghura was just a child. No brawn, no power. She had only one thing:

“O Lord, do You see us?”

She knew the scriptures by heart after hearing them read to her so many times—after asking to have them read to her so many times. She could recite every line without a word out of place, and now she did so.

The teacher listened to her in silence.

“Please,” she said again, “take me with you.”

If she had no value, no one would so much as look at her. She’d been valuable to her father because she was his daughter. Valuable to his servants and employees because she was their employer’s daughter.

So she demonstrated that she could be a useful pawn in the teacher’s campaign of evangelism. Moreover, Beghura was her mother’s daughter as well; her face looked eastern. All she had to do was pick up the language, and she could be all kinds of help on the road.

The teacher looked very reluctant for a very long moment, but finally, mercifully, he caved. Maybe he realized that Beghura no longer had anywhere else to go.

“I won’t be held responsible, even if you die,” he said.

“I know, sir.”

So it was that Beghura went to the east with this teacher. They evangelized as they went, so progress was slow. It took them a full year to cross through Shaoh and finally arrive in Li. Moving through Li, however, turned out to be even more challenging.

Along the way, the teacher received scriptures written in all kinds of languages. “Attend to the words,” he told her. “Remember them. Learn every line, every letter. It might save your life one day.”

The teacher could be brusque, but he looked after her well. He was not by nature a patient man, however, and more than once they found themselves chased by angry crowds of nonbelievers—so that was annoying. Sometimes they were even locked up and subjected to what amounted to torture.

“Accursed unbelievers! I will hold your sins against you until the day you repent and believe!”

Ah, yes. The teacher was very fond of saying that.

It was unclear to Beghura exactly what series of events had driven this man to choose heretic-ridden Li as his mission field, but it also didn’t matter to her.

Although their group had come from a church, they didn’t treat their child servant especially well. Fair enough; they didn’t have much money to spare. At those times, Beghura would remind herself of who she was: not the daughter of a rich merchant. Just a little beggar brat and a servant.

Instead, she used all her wits to put food in her mouth. If she spotted a particularly kind-looking woman in town, she might start weeping nearby, which would sometimes earn her some alms. Sometimes she met kids who would share their snacks with her if she clowned around and made them laugh. Sometimes free food would be put out at celebrations; then, Beghura would eat as much as she could to make up for the times when she wouldn’t be able to eat, and if she spotted something that would keep well, she would quietly abscond with it.

One time, when they happened to be traveling with a party of itinerant performers, she learned sleight of hand. She discovered that if she watched the artists practice too openly, they would beat her, so instead she climbed a nearby tree and spied on them. She was aware that if she could perform these tricks for rich folk, they might spare her a few coins.

The teacher was always angry when he discovered her at these tricks—but he must have felt bad that he couldn’t reliably feed her, for he never took the snacks and small coins she had earned.

After they had been in Li a while, Beghura changed her name to Maachue. She would have a better chance of surviving, the teacher told her, if she pretended to be Linese herself.

“I’m told you’re going to the western capital,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

The teacher and the rest of the group would be staying in a village that had one of Li’s largest churches. It would be the perfect base, they said, from which to spread their teachings.

“You want me to come with you?” Beghura and the teacher had been together for several years now, and he had a certain respect for her.

“I’ll be all right, thank you.”

Beghura was fully twelve years old now—going on marriageable age in Li. Ordinarily, one might consider her traveling alone to be a dangerous idea. However, Beghura had cut her hair short, and her small eyes and crimped nose were hardly beautiful. She joined a caravan to the western capital as a handmaid.

By the time they arrived, the year had turned, and Beghura was thirteen. She parted ways with the caravan and began living as a street urchin.

Playing the clown turned out to suit Beghura’s personality. During the day she would fool around and show off her sleight of hand to earn small change; at night, she slept in an irrigation ditch to shield herself from the cold. She had been living that way for some time when she began to hear talk of a woman who resembled her mother’s portrait.

“I’m sure I saw her at the biggest house in the city. Admittedly, it was only the one time...” someone informed her.

Choosing to trust those words, Beghura made her way to the looming mansion.

It was, indeed, the biggest residence in the western capital, and they were not interested in admitting a filthy wretch like Beghura. So instead, she waited for someone to come out of the house.

“Big Brother! Hold it right there!” she heard somebody cry.

A well-built man stepped out of the gate. Well, only just a man—barely a few years past his coming-of-age ceremony. He was, however, wearing much nicer clothes than Beghura. His crisp eyebrows no doubt made him popular with the young ladies.

He was followed by a girl—presumably the owner of the voice Beghura had heard. She was of marriageable age herself, and she was very beautiful in spite of the piercing look in her eye. The ample fabric of her outfit was silk, the very kind that had passed through Beghura’s father’s hands so long ago. It had been so many years since she’d touched silk, with its distinctive sheen.

“Come back here this instant! Our older brother is kind enough to be your bodyguard. You need to apologize! Argh! He would never do it if Grandfather hadn’t personally asked him.”

Following the imposing young woman came another, younger lady, with striking red hair and emerald eyes. Unlike the first girl, in her eyes there was kindness. Beghura thought this second girl was about her own age—so how could they be so different? One was a dirty street urchin, the other might as well have been a beautiful princess.

Then, Beghura heard another voice: “Yin, that’s quite enough!”

She hadn’t heard that voice in years—and yet it dredged up scenes that she thought had been lost in the abyss of her memories.

“Lady You is going to the rear palace. Think of her station!”

A woman appeared—a beautiful woman, slim and tall with skin the color of an elephant’s tusk and a body that was all flowing curves.

The girl called Yin began to pout. Beghura, however, could not have cared less. She stood there flummoxed, wondering how this beauty who was supposed to have been with her all her life could be here, now.

“Yes, Mother,” Yin said.

Mother. Beghura recoiled. She knew that word; she’d been learning the language of Li for years now, and that was unquestionably what it meant. What she didn’t know was why this foreign girl was using it.

She’d heard that her mother had had a husband and child before she met Beghura’s father, but they were supposed to have died in the shipwreck—weren’t they?

There was yet another voice. “Mommy!” It was a child, younger than Beghura. Not even ten years old. “I wanna go too!”

“Hardly. You and I are going to stay here and study. You can go shopping next time.”

“Aww!”

The child clung to Beghura’s mother’s leg, just the way Beghura herself had once done.

Beghura could hardly process what she was seeing, but one fact she could not escape was that all the children surrounding her mother were far cleaner and lovelier than her. Beghura had only a fuzz on her head, her hair crudely shaved with a razor, and she had been wearing the same clothes for years now. Without the money to pay for an inn, it had been many days since her last bath and she was caked in dust. A filthy street child, and nothing more.

Without thinking of what she was doing, Beghura popped out from behind the wall where she had been hiding. She took one step, then another, toward her mother.

“Hey, there’s something...filthy over there,” the girl called Yin said. She had the look of someone who had spotted a bit of rubbish. Not something with no value—for it was not a question of value—but something the very existence of which was intolerable. Beghura remembered how her father used to look when somebody brought him a piece of real junk and asked him what it was worth.

“Don’t bother yourself with the likes of that, Yin,” the man said.

Beghura was unsure what nuance the man intended with “don’t bother.” She was fixated on the beautiful woman.

Like Yin, the woman spared Beghura only a glance, then collected the boy and trundled him back inside as if nothing had happened.

Beghura was at a loss what to do. On some level, she had been following her mother all this time, convinced that when they saw each other, her mother would somehow know who she was.

But no. There hadn’t been so much as a spark of recognition.

Why had Beghura spent all those years in pursuit of her mother? Was it so she could have a joyous reunion of parent and child? No.

She’d just wanted to know what value she held in her mother’s eyes.

That night, Beghura sneaked into the mansion. She had to know. She had to find out what she was to her mother.

She found it a simple matter to infiltrate the house—maybe it was all those years of fleeing mobs of nonbelievers. She moved stealthily from room to room, trying to pinpoint where her mother was.

A voice came from right behind her. “I thought I smelled a rat.”

Panicked, Beghura tried to turn around, but she was pinned before she could move.

“A street urchin, come to do a little burgling? You’re going to leave with two less arms than you came in with.”

The speaker was a man, maybe thirty years old, although Beghura couldn’t turn far enough to get a good look at him.

“I’m no burglar,” Beghura said as politely as she could. It was just what the teacher had told her to do—unfortunately, it backfired.

“You’re an outlander, aren’t you! I can hear it in your voice.” Beghura found her face shoved hard against the floor. Then the man dragged her somewhere no one would see them. “You’re still young. Where are you from? Shaoh? No... Farther west. What did you come here for?”

“My... My mother,” Beghura gasped out. “I came to meet...my mother!”

“Your mother? A filthy little guttersnipe like you has a mother working in a house like this?” He gave a mocking laugh. Let him insult her; Beghura didn’t care. Instead, she pulled the ragged, weathered portrait from the folds of her robes.

“What’s this?” the man said, and he sounded different from before. There was a hint of confusion in his voice now. She felt his grip relax ever so slightly. “You’re her kid?”

Beghura didn’t know who he meant. She knew, however, that the man’s moment of confusion offered her one chance. Escape would not be easy. Her chosen method of exploiting the opening?

“Fourteen years ago, my mother was in a shipwreck and was saved by my father. I’m her daughter, born to her after their marriage.”

Tell him the unvarnished truth.

“Her daughter! Hah! Ha ha... Yeah, yeah! That makes sense. There was supposed to be a daughter.” The man laughed again. “One she abandoned because she didn’t need her anymore.”

The words rang in Beghura’s ears. “Didn’t need...?”

“That’s right. Didn’t need her a bit. Why should she, if she was coming back here? You? You had one purpose: to legitimize her while she was undercover in a foreign nation. That’s all the value you ever had.”

Had. Past tense. She really didn’t need Beghura anymore.

“She couldn’t exactly bring you home with her, could she? She had to do her job, and you were dead weight.”

“Dead weight...” Her head pounded as if she’d been struck.

She’d known, of course. She’d known from the moment her mother had disappeared, leaving Beghura and her father behind.

“So what happened to your old man? Big-name merchant like him probably got himself another wife no problem, eh?”

If only he had. If only her father had been such a man. But no: he had been kind, and a fool.

“When he heard my mother might be in Li, he left to go find her, and died on the journey. His household collapsed. I was left with nothing, so I came after my mother.”

“With only that portrait?”

“That’s right.”

“Hm.”

The man looked like he was thinking about something. He gave Beghura an appraising glance. She had a thought: here, at this moment, he was trying to decide what she was worth. If the answer was nothing, then he would dispose of her like something worthless.

“I’m fluent in my mother tongue as well as Linese and Shaohnese,” Beghura said. “And I speak several other languages as well.”

Calling to mind the scriptures the teacher had given her, she began reciting in a series of foreign languages.

“I know my numbers too. I can go for a week on nothing but water. I can take pain, and I have quick hands.” She showed him a bit of the sleight of hand that she’d learned watching those performers.

She would do anything. To survive, to find some value in her existence.

“What a fool. This is the one with all the tricks,” the man muttered. “All right. I’ll give you a reprieve. Let’s see what you’re capable of. Show me you’ve got some value...” Here he smiled, a sort of leer. “...and I’ll make you my successor.”

So the man became Beghura’s mentor.