The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 14 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Rabbit and the Dragon

The Shin youth and aide were unable to hide their astonishment at the mistress’s confession.

“What’s the meaning of this, Mother? Explain this instant!” said the aide, finally losing his composure. Apparently, he was the mistress’s son.

“Grandmother... This must be some sort of joke, right?” asked the grandson, his voice small.

The mistress merely shook her head at her two family members. “If there has been any betrayal of the Shin clan, it was by none other than myself.” She looked at the floor.

“Would you perhaps tell us the truth about what happened forty years ago?” Maomao asked.

“I will,” she said.

“That being the case, perhaps you would like to resume your seats?” Lahan asked. It seemed to bring the other two men back to their senses, and they sat down.

“Very well, then,” the mistress said. “Just as the former head of the Shin clan was friends with the leader of the U, so too was I close to the U leader’s wife.” A fond look came over the old woman’s face as she remembered those days. “She and I had both married into good, named families—perhaps that’s why we found we shared similar concerns and could talk to each other about anything. We often took tea together back then.”

While everyone else listened with bated breath, the freak strategist munched on a skewer of hawthorn berries. He’d gone through several already, Erfan clearing away the metal skewers whenever he was done with one.

“My husband could be...hotheaded, and between his continual attacks on the empress regnant’s faction and the fact that her own husband was a partisan of hers, my friend and I gradually grew more distant. Eventually, we not only took no more tea together but hardly even wrote to each other—even though we were both grieved to see the gulf between the Shin and the U growing simply because we belonged to different factions.”

The mistress continued to look at the floor, and now she hid her face with a folding fan, so it was impossible to see her expression.

“My husband was a very direct person. It wasn’t in his nature to be able to respect a woman like the empress regnant, who had allegedly assassinated the emperor and put her own son in his place. It was exactly because of his loyalty to the throne that he felt so strongly about it. However, for political acumen the empress regnant was renowned as one of the best of our recent rulers, and very capable. My husband also understood that the U had aligned themselves with the empress regnant for the sake of the nation.”

The assassination of the emperor was never anything more than a rumor, Maomao thought, but it seemed churlish to point that out now, so she kept quiet.

The mistress could understand both perspectives. That was why she couldn’t oppose either the U or the Shin, even when the clans took two very divergent paths.

“From the time her son, the former emperor, took the throne, the empress regnant was vigorous about punishing those who would not obey. But even she seemed to find it difficult to unleash her wrath upon the Shin clan, since it had begun as a branch of the Imperial family—which made my husband all the more attractive to her opponents as the one to lead their faction.”

In every time and place, there were those who had no interest in leading from the front, but were happy to raise up someone else to do it for them.

“The Shin men became more brazen, and the women more frightened. I needed to let my anxieties out, and finally I turned to her.”

“By ‘her,’ I assume you mean the wife of the U patriarch,” Lahan said.

“Yes. I had no reply from her. She had her own circumstances to deal with. When a political enemy comes to you to ask for a meeting, it’s not so easy to say yes. I confess, I had nearly given up—but then she came to see me in secret.” The mistress let out a long sigh. “She told me that the U had been charged by the empress regnant with searching our estate, and that if any evidence of treason were to be found, it might be used as an excuse to destroy us.”

“Th-Then that’s when you set fire to the storehouse?!” her grandson demanded.

“That’s right. Your grandfather, you see, liked to hide his most important correspondence in the storehouse archives. Even if he had no rebellious intent, those invitations would be enough to see our clan annihilated. I knew he had hidden the letters in the storehouse, but I didn’t know exactly where.”

So the mistress took drastic measures, setting fire to the entire thing.

“Was... Was it you who stole the heirloom, then, Grandmother?”

Maomao answered for her. “No, not quite. The mistress was convinced that the statue had melted and was gone.”

Notably, the freak strategist hadn’t pinpointed that belief as a lie.

“Then where the hell did it go?!”

The grandson seemed very confused by the whole thing, but the mistress herself must have been well aware by now.

“Why did the U clan join forces with the empress regnant?” the mistress asked. “Why did the wife of their leader tell me about secret orders that came from the empress regnant herself? It was then that I finally realized. I never would have dreamed they would steal the heirloom, but this young lady’s words made me understand the possible motive for doing so.”

The old woman had the slightest of smiles on her face.

“In order to protect the Shin clan, the U clan leader pretended to be part of the empress regnant’s faction, didn’t he? Otherwise, the secret orders would never have been leaked, and he would never have made off with the dragon statue that might otherwise have been taken as proof of rebellion. If he had really wanted what the empress regnant wanted, he would have simply given the statue to her.”

“You’re saying...the U clan leader...did steal the statute?”

“Their patriarch was quite a man in his own right, in a way,” said Maomao. “He essentially acted as a spy, betraying the nation’s absolute ruler even as he stood at the very top of his own family’s hierarchy.” She was genuinely impressed.

“Did you know that, Grandmother? Is that why you stood up for the U clan all those years? But then why didn’t you tell Grandfather?”

The old woman shook her head at her grandson’s question, and spoke gently to him. “Your grandfather was a stubborn man—and if I spoke of the matter without care, there was a chance it would get back to the empress regnant. I was only able to tell him after she had died, when he was bedridden himself, at a moment when he suddenly seemed to look fondly on the past.”

The reason the Shin’s former leader had said they no longer had to search for the heirloom must have been because he finally knew the truth.

“My husband was so sad. He’d been so sure that the U leader was a man of greater conviction than to simply toady to the most powerful person around for the sake of expediency. My husband couldn’t believe, he said, that he had stooped to being the empress regnant’s handmaiden. He told me he’d wanted to have one good argument with the leader of the U, to get everything off his chest.”

That didn’t seem very realistic, in Maomao’s opinion. It was one thing for a couple of kids to have a fight, but two clan leaders? That would amount to a civil war.

I guess there are exceptions, she thought with a sidelong glance at the freak strategist eating his hawthorn berries. It never ceased to amaze her that there were people out there who could try to smash through the walls of the rear palace and somehow end up with nothing but a fine.

“It’s possible one reason my husband was so adamant about saying the U had stolen the heirloom was in an effort to start that fight.”

He’d wanted to argue it out and then make up, the way they used to.

“But the U didn’t rise to the bait,” Maomao observed.

“No, they didn’t.”

Instead of getting a confrontation, the Shin patriarch had been shadowboxing. He’d tried to start a fight so that he and his old friend could talk again, while the U patriarch had stayed silent precisely to protect his dear friend.

What a clumsy friendship.

The grandson murmured, “Then we... We...”

“Yes. You constantly spat on people you really should have been grateful toward,” Maomao said.

The young man slumped in his chair.

“What we’ve said here is ultimately speculation. It’s not necessarily the truth,” Maomao said. She felt she had to clarify. It was always possible that someone from the U clan had eyed the statue for potential profit, in which case it had almost certainly been melted down long ago. But that was beyond Maomao’s purview.

A voice came from beside Maomao. “Hmm...”

The freak strategist had stretched out on the table, his head lolling from side to side. He’d evidently finished all his snacks and had time to kill. He was looking regretfully at the very last hawthorn berry.

“If it bothers you that much, why not just ask?” he said, staring hard at one of the room’s walls.

“Just ask?” Maomao repeated. What in the world was he talking about?

She went to the wall and pulled back the soundproofing cloth that covered it. Behind it she found a small room with several people seated inside.

“What the hell?! A room?! The people in here can hear everything!”

“What is the meaning of this?” the aide said, glaring at Lahan.

“Oh! Yes. Right,” Lahan said, theatrically clapping his hands. “I promised to meet with the U clan as well!”

Maomao glared at tousle-glasses too, also rather theatrically. “In the same room? So that they would be sure to hear what we said?”

The nerve!

It wasn’t even clear that they had really solved the Shin clan’s problem, and now he had sparked a whole new issue.

“Why don’t you go ahead and come in?”

At Lahan’s invitation, the people from the small room piled into the larger one.

“And here I was starting to wonder if anyone from the La clan was ever going to show up. Was this your plan all along?” asked the leader of the U clan in annoyance—Maomao took him to be Lishu’s grandfather. She’d heard he was unwell, and indeed he looked like a withered branch. He had a long beard, and sat in a chair with wheels, pushed around by a middle-aged woman.

“I realize how rude this was, and I apologize. I simply couldn’t allow anyone to breathe a word about it.” The leader of the U clan entered the room, remaining seated in his wheeled chair.

“Yes. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to resolve this old dispute, but I thought it might take a drastic remedy.” Lahan had an odd smile on his face and bowed his head deeply.

The Shin mistress imitated Lahan, rising from her seat and bowing. Her grandson looked infuriated to realize someone had been eavesdropping on them, but the aide forced his head down and he had no choice but to bow as well.

“Thank you for your help those forty years ago,” the mistress said.

“Whatever do you mean? Ahem, perhaps my wife decided to meddle a bit, I suppose...”

He was going to play dumb? Maomao decided she wasn’t a fan of this guy.

“Ah, yes,” he went on. “I remembered that I have something of yours in my keeping, and I’ve come to return it.” The old man’s nurse reached under the wheelchair and took out a small but heavy-looking package. “This is for you.”

He placed it on the table and opened it. Inside was a stunning gold statue of a dragon.

Holy smokes!

Maomao, as unfortunately was her wont, was already calculating how much it would go for if she sold it. No doubt Lahan was working the abacus in his head at the same moment. From the statue’s size and shape, Maomao estimated how heavy it must be, and concluded that there was an awful lot of gold in there. Factor in the delicacy of the work, and the thing could probably buy a nice house or two.

But it also had fearsome details: The dragon had only four fingers, and it clutched a gemstone of a reddish hue.

The U clan leader’s eyes began to brim with tears as he looked at it. “I’m such a poor student,” he said. “He always bragged so much about his heirloom, but I didn’t really pay attention to what exactly it was. So when I saw it with my own eyes for the first time that day, I was shaken. Maybe the rumors of rebellion really were true, I thought.”

The U patriarch held out the palms of his hands. Both showed old burn scars, as if he had grabbed something very hot. Maomao could practically picture him picking up the statue, which would have been searing with the heat of the fire.

A four-clawed dragon clutching a gemstone the color of massicot... This man had taken the still-hot statue and hidden it. If anyone else had found it and reported it to the empress regnant, there would almost certainly not be a Shin clan today.

“I wanted to give it back to him before he died. Yet I was scared. What if it inspired him to plot rebellion again? He always hated the former empress dowager, even though I knew he thought more highly of the Imperial family than anyone else you could meet.”

Perhaps he’d accepted the command to surveil his friend in part because he’d assumed there was no way he would ever find evidence of treason.

“When I get to the next life, maybe he’ll pop me one for being so quick to jump to the wrong conclusion!”

“No, not at all. You know how he was. I think he’ll be the first to throw himself down and apologize. Although he might be a bit upset with me for having taken matters into my own hands!” the mistress said. “Heh heh—I did try to burn the heirloom, storehouse and all, after all.” She smiled, and one lone tear rolled down her cheek.

“This... This is our family’s heirloom?” The grandson looked at the dragon statue. The aide blinked; maybe he, too, was seeing it for the first time. Both men looked deeply moved, yet it seemed they could also see how one might be suspected of plotting treason if one possessed such a treasure.

“Now you have the statue back, but I suppose you won’t be able to tell anyone about it,” Maomao said.

“I suppose not. The story of how we received it, including a description of the number of claws, was written down, but unfortunately it burned,” the mistress said awkwardly. “The dragon by itself is one thing, but we have to do something about the number of claws and the gemstone.”

The freak strategist abruptly inserted himself into the conversation. “If you take care of those two things, that’s enough, yeah?”

“Do you have an idea?” the mistress asked. Meanwhile, the U clan folks backed away from him. How many people had he inconvenienced over the course of his life?

“With fewer claws and no gemstone there’s no problem, right?” said the strategist. He picked up one of the metal skewers and plucked off the last hawthorn berry. Then he wedged the skewer between the dragon’s claws.

Everyone was too stunned to react, which meant there was no one to stop the freak strategist from giving the skewer a good pull. There was a terrible noise and the claw snapped off. Maomao hardly knew what was happening. In fact, she almost couldn’t believe that metal could break so easily.

The dragon’s thinnest digits were weaker than the others, and the claw that broke had been supporting the gemstone, which went tumbling.

“That should do it.” Where the gemstone had once been, the freak strategist placed the bright red hawthorn berry. A thick rope of sugar followed it from his fingers.

Time stopped.

The scene, so moving until an instant ago, sobered immediately. The mistress’s eyes dried on the spot; her aide’s and grandson’s jaws dropped so far they looked like they might fall off. The members of the U clan likewise looked on in absolute astonishment.

Lahan, meanwhile, looked as if he had burned to ash. Maomao almost thought she could see cracks spidering across his glasses. Everything had been going exactly according to plan—and yet at the bitter end, it had somehow gone completely awry. Even the guards stood frozen. No one in the room had imagined that this conversation would end with someone breaking the heirloom.

So it was Maomao who moved first.

“What the hell are you doing, you moron?!” Completely ignoring the fact that there were people watching, she gave the freak strategist a good kick. He was such an utter weakling that it sent him flying.

Under any other circumstances, such behavior would have been unforgivably rude, but at that moment nobody said a word to Maomao. In fact, it was probably better that she had done it.

Lahan had miscalculated.

The freak strategist, in fact, couldn’t be accounted for in calculations. He would always throw them off.

That was simply the kind of star under which he had been born.