The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 13 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Maamei and Her Inept Brothers

Maamei looked at her little brothers, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a year, and wondered what had happened.

“Long time no see, Miss Maamei! We’re baaack!”

The first one to greet her wasn’t either of them, but Chue, the wife of Baryou, the older of her two brothers. Chue had been an acquaintance of Maamei’s—in fact, that was how she had come into the family—and she had always been the cheerful type, but Maamei had to wonder why she looked the way she did at that moment.

“What in the world happened to you?”

Chue’s right arm hung limply at her side. Moreover, her whole body was covered with injuries, and her slightly muffled speech implied that she had sustained some damage to her internal organs as well.

“Oh, I just made a little oopsie, and now I won’t be able to use my right arm for the rest of my life! Well, don’t you fret. I can still do a few tricks with the other one. See?” Flowers and flags appeared in Chue’s left hand.

Baryou, as usual, was watching his wife with lifeless eyes. Maamei did indeed “fret” about the state Chue was in, but there was another, bigger problem.

“Basen, what is that?” she demanded.

The younger of her little brothers had a duck perched on his shoulder. It hadn’t been there when he’d come to summon Maamei on behalf of the Moon Prince yesterday. Where had he gotten it?

“She’s a duck. Her name is Jofu,” Basen said with a completely straight face. Her brother wasn’t adept enough to tell jokes, which meant he must be serious.

“I didn’t ask what its name was. Ugh, it smells like farm animal. Both of you do.” Maamei covered her nose with her sleeve. Now that she looked closer, she could see that Basen’s robe was streaked with poop.

“Mother, what is going on here?” she asked, turning to Taomei, who had also returned from the western capital.

Taomei squinted her differently colored eyes and gave her youngest son a look of resignation. “I told him to leave it behind.”

“And Miss Chue told him to fatten it up so we can eat it!” Chue chirped.

Basen found himself the subject of glares from both his mother and his brother’s wife. “Nobody’s eating her! Jofu is family. Would you have me eat my own family member? The lowest cur wouldn’t do such a thing!”

“Just tell me what’s happening,” Maamei said. She did remember that before he’d left for the western capital, Basen had been on some kind of “special mission” that had frequently seen him return home stinking of livestock. Had that somehow blossomed into love for a duck? Maamei had seen him frequently lost in thought and had assumed he was besotted with someone, but it never would have occurred to her that the girl was of the avian persuasion.

“Basen, this duck is female?” she asked.

“Yes. She lays an excellent egg once every two days.”

He was puffing out his chest for some reason. It was clear he hadn’t neglected his physical training while he was away; he’d lost some of the baby fat around his cheeks. Just when Maamei had been thinking he looked more valiant than before, she discovered that while his muscles might have grown, his brain had shrunk.

“Miss Maamei, Miss Maamei, it’s so cold outside, maybe we could hurry up and come in? You can see what a sorry state Miss Chue is in, and it’s ever so hard to stand out here!” Chue made a show of nuzzling up to Baryou. He flinched, but then wordlessly allowed her to lean against him. She didn’t seem to be joking; her physical state was clearly less than ideal.

“Very well. Your rooms are clean. I suggest you change your clothes before you pay your respects to our elders. In deference to the strain of travel, no banquets are planned until ten days from now. Incidentally, where’s my father?”

“He’s back with His Majesty.”

Her father Gaoshun was officially the Emperor’s servant, and what with reporting on the western capital and dealing with all the work that had piled up in his absence, he would probably be stuck in the palace for quite a while.

Maamei entered the house with Taomei, Baryou, and Chue.

“You stop there,” she said.

“What is it, Elder Sister?” Basen asked.

“What do you mean, what is it?! I’m not letting any ducks into this house! Go put that thing out in a field someplace!”

“Well said, Maamei.” Taomei nodded approvingly.

It looked like she had had this conversation more than once in the western capital but had come out on the losing end. If Basen could get the better of their mother in an argument, it meant he had grown in more than just his strength, and perhaps not in ways Maamei was particularly glad to see.

“It’s unheard of to keep a farm animal in your room,” Taomei added.

“Look who’s talking, Mother. You had an owl!” said Basen.

“An owl is not a farm animal! And I didn’t bring it home, so there’s nothing wrong with it!”

Evidently there was some story as to what their mother had been up to in that far land as well, but Maamei didn’t want to make this any more complicated than it already was. She decided to focus on Basen.

“Until you do something about that animal, Basen, you are not coming into this house,” she said, and slammed the door.

“Sister! I promise I’ll feed her and walk her!”

“Yes—at first! But you’ll stop sooner or later.”

“Sister! Jofu is a good girl. She won’t poop in the house!”

“Says the man with his robe covered in bird crap!”

As Maamei was having this absurd conversation through the door with her brother, she felt someone tug on her sleeve.

“Mommy? We have guests?”

It was Maamei’s son and daughter, as well as her younger brother’s son. It had been part of the arrangement with Chue when the marriage had been decided: Sister-in-Law would handle all the child-rearing. The boy was Maamei’s nephew, but she raised him essentially as if he were her own son.

“They’re not guests. It’s Grandma, Auntie, and your uncle. Don’t tell me you forgot them?”

“Grandma?” the boy asked. A year was a long time for such small children. They’d been so close to their grandmother, but now they kept their distance. Only one, the oldest grandchild, seemed to have some memory of her and approached her.

“Welcome home, Grandma,” he said.

“My, you’ve grown so big.” Taomei picked up the boy, Maamei’s son, and stroked his head. At that, Maamei’s daughter and Baryou’s son went over to their grandmother as well. “Goodness, look at these children! When I left, they could hardly say hello.” Taomei patted Baryou’s son on the head and gave him a hug. Then she pushed him toward Baryou. “Here’s your boy. It’s been a whole year—give him a hug, will you?”

Baryou quickly, albeit with clear trepidation, embraced his boy. He might have been a bureaucrat who spent all day, every day glued to his desk, but apparently even he could manage to hug one small child.

Chue, meanwhile, studied her son’s face. “There, there, now, don’t cry,” she drawled, doing some sleight of hand to distract him. She couldn’t pick him up with that ruined arm—but it wouldn’t have mattered if she could, for she had no impulse to touch the child. She’d given birth to him, but she hadn’t, in her mind, become a mother.

“Who are you, Auntie?”

“Ah, I’m Miss Chue! An Auntie, that’s right.” She gave the flags she had produced to the children, then stepped forward. “Miss Chue will go on ahead back to her room, if that’s all right.” She moved with such lightness, but they could tell she was pushing herself.

Maamei glanced at Baryou. “Why are you unharmed? Your wife is wounded from head to toe.” Protecting the Imperial family was supposed to be the role of the Ma clan. “How did Miss Chue end up like that?”

“You’re the one who promised her she could do as she pleased if she would only marry me, weren’t you?”

“That’s some way to talk to your sister.” Maamei gave Baryou a kick in the shin, and he hopped up and down on one leg. “Now, who wants a snack?”

“I do, Mommy!”

“Snackie!”

Her nephew couldn’t talk very well yet, so he just raised his hand. If he was anything like Chue, he would grow up to have quite an aptitude for languages, but at the moment he only knew a few words.

“Mother, Baryou. If you’d kindly inform Grandfather that you’re back home. You’ll find hot water and a change of clothes in your rooms.”

“Very well.”

Taomei and Baryou walked into the house.

Maamei gave the children to their nursemaid. She had more parts to play than just mother. Since the Ma clan men might die defending the royal family at any time, it was always a woman who fulfilled the role of family head, so that the clan could continue undisturbed.

Maamei would have to oversee the reports from Taomei and the others. She couldn’t have them leaving anything out.

She opened a window that faced the rear garden. Basen stood there, clutching his duck and looking thoroughly lost. The fluffy white duck looked quite warm to hold. “I need to be present for the report, and so do you. How long are you going to stay outside?”

“You mean you’ll acknowledge Jofu as part of the family?”

“You weren’t listening. I said you are not to bring that duck in the house. If I let you in with it, then the children will want one. What if they each demand a duckling of their own, eh? What will you do then?”

“I... I see what you mean.”

“Personally, I’m with Miss Chue. I think the best place for that thing is on our dinner table.”

Basen begged Maamei with his eyes not to do such a thing, hugging the bird close. It was certainly not the behavior of a grown man, but Maamei couldn’t help noticing that in fact it showed Basen had matured.

“You’ve learned to control your own strength,” she observed.

“I’m not a child anymore,” he said.

Basen’s physical strength was overpowering, far greater than your average soldier’s. It was all thanks to his naturally muscular build and his reduced sensitivity to pain. He had the capacity to shatter bones when frustrated, and for many years he had been haunted by his inability to control his own strength. Maamei should know; Basen had broken her arm when he was still little. It might have been his vivid memories of that moment that left Maamei’s youngest brother with so little attraction to women—he had learned in that instant that they were fragile, easily broken.

Maamei looked from Basen to the duck and back. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you take that duck back where it came from?”

“Oh, I could hardly go all the way back to the western capital now.”

“That’s not what I meant! The place you were going before you left for the western capital. Isn’t that where you got it?”

“Oh!” Basen gasped as if he were only just remembering. “No, wait... I don’t have any business there anymore, so I have no reason to drop by...” His face was bright red.

Ah-hah. Maamei’s intuition went into overdrive. Silly her—even Basen wouldn’t actually be attracted to a farm animal.

“If you don’t have a reason, you just need to come up with one. Suppose you’re there to return the duck, and just in passing, you pay a visit to whoever it was that helped you.”

Basen fell into an awkward silence. Just how bad was he at romance? Whatever—Maamei sensed that one more good push would get him talking.

“If she keeps ducks, I suppose she’s a farmer?”

“No!” Basen said firmly.

“A nun, then?” If so, the course of that true love certainly wouldn’t run smoothly.

“She didn’t abandon the world of her own volition...”

Basen was so simple. He might refuse to say exactly who the girl was, but a few leading questions would get it out of him.

Maamei’s information network might not be as extensive as that of the Mi clan, but it was formidable nonetheless. Was there anyone in Basen’s orbit who had been forced to “leave the world” in the past few years? One with whom he might reasonably be expected to have contact? Add in the duck factor and the answer became obvious.

“Tell me... She wouldn’t happen to be a former consort, would she?”

“Wh-Wh-Wh-Whatever do you mean?” Basen asked, clearly shaken.

Lishu, at the time an upper consort, had been pushed to take vows for the crime of sending the court into an uproar. In order to prevent any jealousy, she’d been admitted, so Maamei had heard, to a rather unusual kind of monastery: She’d joined a group of “wayfarers” looking for immortality. They experimented with a wide variety of farming methods and livestock, on the premise that you are what you eat, and so one’s diet might lengthen one’s life.

Lishu herself was a member of the U, or rabbit, clan. Her mother had come from the clan’s main house and was a childhood friend of the Emperor’s. On more than one occasion, His Majesty had assigned members of the Ma clan to guard Lishu’s person. According to the reports Maamei had seen, Lishu’s biological father didn’t treat her particularly well. Rumor described Lishu as a vile woman, so shameless that she had entered the rear palace of two different emperors—but the truth was that she had been simply, blatantly used as a political tool.

Lishu was something of a tragic figure—but at the same time, it was not the place of the Ma to criticize the doings of other named clans, so they had left the matter alone.

The U clan had declined substantially from its zenith. Lishu’s father had been brought into the family as an adopted son, which was all well and good, but he lacked the acumen to carry a great house on his shoulders. Perhaps their status wouldn’t have suffered so much if Lishu had remained an upper consort.

So, the object of Basen’s affections was a girl of high standing, but one whose family was no longer so well regarded, and who herself was twice divorced and a nun.

“You certainly do have...unique tastes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Basen said hotly. The duck had squirmed out of his arms and was pecking at the grass in the garden. “I’ll thank you not to go slandering her when you don’t know anything about her! She’s a perfectly praiseworthy young lady, like a little flower waiting for spring!”

“I haven’t actually said anything about her yet.”

Basen’s face immediately flushed. So he did still have a youthful streak—his impetuous outburst proved that much. He would probably never be able to be a close confidant of the Emperor like their father Gaoshun. He would be a bodyguard and nothing more, Maamei reflected.

“A little flower waiting for spring, eh?” she mused.

To what kind of flower might she or Taomei be compared? Some had told Maamei that she was like a vine, constricting and relentless. Considering that she had gained her husband through sheer tenacity, Maamei could see what they were saying.

Now, here was a problem: As much as Maamei herself was trying to spur Basen on, there was a real question of whether it was appropriate for him to be visiting a recused former high consort.

From a commonsense perspective, the obvious answer was no. Still, Maamei hesitated to confront her little brother with this truth and urge him to give up just when he had finally taken an interest in the opposite sex. Was there nothing she, as his older sister, could do?

A woman of the Ma clan had one major weapon: her mind. She always had to be thinking two or three moves ahead, so that she could take command should anything ever happen to the men.

Purely in the interest of the clan, she should have simply told Basen to forget all about this girl. Yet that would have been to betray her ideals. At the same time, it would have been irresponsible to just thoughtlessly cheer him on.

Maamei was beginning to regret having given Basen such freewheeling advice.

“All right, Basen. For the time being, I want you to take that duck back where it came from. However, you should let them know you’re coming.”

“Let them know I’m coming?”

“Yes, that’s right. Moreover, your work there is already done, so you absolutely must get approval from—was it the Moon Prince? Was he the one who sent you there?”

Any time you did something where there might conceivably be any kind of problem, it was important to have your superiors’ fingerprints on it when the trouble started. That was Maamei’s philosophy.

“Y-Yes, it was.”

“Finally, when you go to give the duck back, I’m going with you.”

“You are? Why?”

“Well, they must have more than just ducks there, right? I’m sure they keep plenty of animals. I’m going to bring the children so that they can get some hands-on experience. If I happen to bump into the honored daughter of a famous house while I’m there, so be it.”

It came down to this: She needed to plant the seeds of a conversation.

The named clans met once every several years, and most of them could usually be expected to attend, except perhaps that band of eccentrics, the La clan. And it was nearly time for the next meeting.

The status of the U clan had declined, and it was largely Lishu’s father’s fault, so Maamei suspected he wouldn’t be there; someone else would attend in his stead. Maamei had an excellent excuse to participate: She would accompany their grandfather. She just had to make contact with the U clan. Then she could help the seeds she had planted grow.

“What did you do during all that time in the western capital? Don’t you have any impressive feats to show for it?”

“Did I say I did in any of my reports? Without a war on, it’s hard for a soldier to distinguish himself, you know.”

In a world at war, Basen would certainly have taken any number of heads (literal or figurative). Then again, with his hard-charging personality, he might not have lived long enough to celebrate it.

“Fair enough. There did seem to be no end of tales, though, that some random farmer did all sorts of good.”

“Yes. He really was a most excellent farmer.”

“They were true?!”

Maamei wondered who in the world this person could have been. He must have been quite something, to make his name known as far away as the royal capital when he was only a man of the soil. Speaking of his name, she didn’t actually remember what it was; it had been so common that it had slipped her mind.

“So what did you do out there?” she asked.

“Got rid of bandits and bugs.”

“Right. That won’t get us anywhere.” Some years ago, the Emperor had gifted a middle consort to a soldier, but that precedent didn’t seem to hold out much hope for them. “In that case, maybe we could lean on His Majesty’s fatherly impulses...” The Emperor, she knew, regarded Lishu like a daughter. In that case, they would probably have to get Ah-Duo involved.

“What are you muttering about, Sister?”

“Oh, pipe down! I’m trying to think. Anyway, just tell the Moon Prince what you’re doing! Got that?”

“Y-Yeah, sure.”

“And make sure you wash and change. Leave the duck in the garden. Mother can’t make her report without you, can she?”

“Yes, all right.”

Basen said something to the duck and then left it with the gardener. As Maamei watched her impossibly naive handful of a brother go into the house, she pondered how to make her next move.