The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 15 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: A Book Restored

Maomao headed back to the dormitory, her first day of work at the clinic over.

"Hullo, Miss Maomao!"

"Hullo, Miss Chue."

Maomao understood why Chue was there, and when the other woman beckoned, Maomao followed her. As she expected, a carriage was waiting, and she was to get on.

"Who's summoning me today?" she asked. It was presumably either Jinshi or Ah-Duo.

"The Moon Prince today," Chue drawled. "Also, there's someone already in there, so have fun!"

"Someone already in there?"

A pair of eyes goggled out at Maomao from the carriage window.

"Hullo, Niangniang!"

(No reply from Maomao.)

It was Tianyu.

She could think of only one reason why Jinshi might call for her and Tianyu.

Is this about Kada's Book ?! she thought, nearly breaking into a giant grin. Among Tianyu's ancestors was a physician who, although a member of the Imperial family, had committed an unpardonable crime. Just the other day, they had found the book this ancestor had left behind.

He did say they were repairing it ...

Maomao bounced along in the carriage, barely able to contain herself. Before she knew it, she was even humming.

"Is it just me, or does Niangniang seem kind of ... creepy today?" Tianyu asked.

"Now, now, you mustn't say such things," Chue drawled. "Didn't the neighborhood uncles ever tell you that?"

"Dr. Liu has definitely gotten mad at me a few times."

They were having a huddled conversation, but it was very much in character for them that they made sure to have it loud enough that Maomao could hear them.

Say what you want, she thought. Her head was too full of Kada's Book to care about anything else. What might be written in it?

"Okay, from here, we walk," Chue said. The carriage had stopped, but not in front of Jinshi's palace. "We'll be in here today!"

They were somewhere near Jinshi's office. Outside of work hours, Maomao was usually shown to his pavilion, and it had been a long time since she'd come to his office.

"Hey, Niangniang, what are you doing these days?" Tianyu asked, obnoxious as ever. In fact, though, Maomao had exactly the same question.

What's he doing these days?

If he'd passed the selection examination, he had presumably received reassignment just like she had.

'What about you?" she shot back. "What are you doing?"

"Take a guess."

Tianyu showed her the palms of his hands. Maomao studied them intently; Chue imitated her.

I see calluses.

Just as those who wielded the sword could develop calluses on their hands, so could those who wielded the brush get them on their fingers. Tianyu's calluses, however, probably came not from a brush but from a scalpel.

The pad of his pointer finger is red.

A red line ran down the side of the finger, showing that he had been holding a scalpel for a very long time.

Doctors used scalpels when cutting skin. Had he been performing autopsies?

No, I don't think so.

Tianyu's eyes had gone beyond shining to outright sparkling, like a cat who had finally spotted a flesh-and-blood rat instead of a toy fluffball.

"Are you operating on living people?" She asked.

"Wooooh!"

His reaction suggested she was correct.

Maomao wasn't sure they should be discussing surgery right in front of Chue, but it was probably useless to try to hide anything from her, and besides, she had to suspect that doctors did that kind of thing. Maomao decided to just go ahead and entertain the subject.

She thought she could see how this worked: Patients whose condition was not helped by the drug trials were moved on to surgery.

"Are you cutting them open and removing the filth?" she asked.

'Have you learned to read minds since I saw you last, Niangniang?" Tianyu asked, a theatrical expression of befuddlement on his face. It was not as cute as he thought it was. Chue was doing the same, but at least with her it was sort of cute.

The conversation had taken them almost to the doorstep of Jinshi's office.

Wow, this really takes me back.

Maomao saw hallway windows that she had polished the hell out of when she was Jinshi's serving maid. And she'd had more than a few tussles with other palace ladies there.

There were no officials in the halls now; it was almost dark.

Now that I think about it, this is the same office he had back when he was a "eunuch."

She was only now realizing. She might have expected him to find a new place once it was public knowledge that he was the Emperor's younger brother, but not so. The current location was just too convenient.

Two guards stood outside the office. Chue greeted them, and they stepped away from the door in an unspoken command to enter.

"Hellooo! Pardon me?" Tianyu called as he entered the office. The gravity of the moment didn't seem to have any impact on his attitude.

Maomao, meanwhile, tried to steady her breathing as she entered the room. I have to calm down. I don't know for sure that this is about Kada's Book.

As soon as she saw who was inside, however, any thought of remaining calm fled her mind. This was more than enough reason to get agitated, although it had nothing to do with Kada's Book.

"It's been much too long," said the other person in the room. He was a young man, not yet twenty years old, who bowed his head in a show of humility. His deferential attitude might be enough to fool some people, but his name was violent and beastly: Hulan, which meant "tiger and wolf."

Maomao had half a mind to send a flying kick straight into him, and her body was already nearly moving, but Chue took her firmly by the hand. "Dignity, Miss Maomao, dignity," she advised. "I know how you feel, I really do, but we must comport ourselves properly."

Chue was very strong; even with one hand she could keep Maomao firmly in place.

"Just an arm. Just one arm," Maomao begged. If she could just break one of his limbs ...

"That's not dignified," Chue repeated. "Let's at least wait for a moonless night."

Hulan was the reason Maomao had been chased all over I-sei Province and ultimately nearly killed by bandits. And Chue had as much reason to hold a grudge against him as Maomao did: It was because of him that she had lost the use of her arm.

"I must say, you're both looking very frightening tonight," Hulan said. The complete lack of venom in his smile made him all the more grating. Maomao's hackles went up and she gave him a threatening look.

"Ha ha ha! You're even less popular than I am!" Tianyu chortled. Evidently he actually was bothered by the general distaste people had for him.

Maomao had had to see Hulan on the hunt the other day, and she was aggravated to now find him here in Jinshi's office.

"So you've arrived," said Jinshi, who was seated in a chair waiting for them. Basen stood beside him as his bodyguard. A curtain, otherwise out of place, hung across a corner of the room, meaning Baryou must be with them as well.

"Good evening, Moon Prince. Incidentally, I believe there's someone present who has no business being here. Do you not see fit to chase them out immediately?" Maomao asked with her most humble attitude.

'You don't mean me, do you?" Tianyu said, pointing at himself. Sadly, no; today, she did not mean him. There was someone even worse than Tianyu there.

"Why, whomever do you mean?" Hulan asked, looking innocent.

"Now, now, you must be able to see things objectively. Shall I bring you a mirror?" Chue said, backing Maomao up.

"Miss Chue, Miss Chue, I have a mirror," Maomao said, taking a small bronze plate from the folds of her robes.

"I should have known you would be prepared, Miss Maomao."

Jinshi watched this exchange with exasperation. "I fully understand what you're trying to say, believe me, I do, but as I've told you before, this man is capable. So just live with it. Also, I'd rather he be where I can keep an eye on him."

"Wait ... is it moi you've been talking about all this time?" Hulan put on his surprised face. His features were young and cute; they were the only cute thing about him.

Jinshi got a bit of a faraway look in his eyes. Hulan was, after all, publicly the younger brother of the ruler of the western capital, so Jinshi couldn't afford to ditch him outright.

"I'm sorry, but I have no time to chat with people who might as well be animals. Could we get straight to the point?" Maomao asked, collecting herself. "And incidentally, what is the point? I know it's got to be the ... you know. You know."

"It looks like you don't need any help for me to imagine why I might have called you here," Jinshi said. "But in any case, calm down and have a seat." He made a motion as if gesturing to a dog to sit.

Maomao seated herself on the couch, although she fidgeted furiously. Tianyu sat down, too, and Chue planted herself between them.

"Why are you sitting, Miss Chue?" Maomao asked.

"Miss Chue is putting herself on the line-it's very valiant of her," Chue said and winked broadly at Jinshi. He didn't say anything, but he nodded at her.

There were no palace ladies present, so Hulan made tea. Maomao folded her legs to one side and made it her business to look annoyed. She glowered at the tea he gave her and gave it a good sniff, making sure there was no poison in it.

"You're not being very polite, Niangniang," Tianyu said, adding dramatically, "That's not very nice."

"I'm simply behaving as befits the person I'm interacting with," she replied. Tianyu was hardly comporting himself with the formality one might have expected before Jinshi. He seemed to have the same attitude as Maomao: that if Hulan could be permitted so much, then so could they.

"I'm sorry to tell you there's no poison in the tea today," Hulan said apologetically.

"Yes, what a shame. It would make Miss Maomao so happy, and give the Moon Prince such a fine excuse to execute you," Chue said.

"My dear older sister Chue. You're so cruel to me."

Sparks flew between Chue and Hulan even more than between Hulan and Maomao. It evidently wasn't the first time this had happened; Basen's expression clearly said, Again?

The discussion was never going to get anywhere at this rate. Maomao looked at Jinshi. He looked back with unusual seriousness. "Before we go any further, there's something I want to say to you, Maomao."

"What is it, sir?"

"First, calm down."

"I am calm, sir."

"Don't fuss."

"I'm not fussing, sir."

"Steady yourself."

"I'm steady, sir."

"You're ready now?"

"Yes, sir."

After all that, Maomao was fairly sure she was actually calm-until the moment Jinshi took out a paulownia-wood box and opened the lid, revealing battered old pages sitting on top of some white paper.

"This is from the restored Kada's Book," he said.

"Ka ... da ...? " Maomao went still for an instant, and then she exploded: "Whhhoooooaaaaaaa!"

Yes, she'd known. She'd understood what they were there for. And yet on hearing the name, she couldn't restrain her excitement.

"She's not very calm," Tianyu said.

"Dignity, Miss Maomao!" Chue added. They looked at her from either side.

Maomao immediately reached for the battered book, but Jinshi slapped her hand away.

“Wh-Whyyy ?! "

"Look at it-this is after we restored it! If you just grab it in a fit of rapture, you'll destroy it, and then no one will be able to read it!"

"Of course, sir, I know that. I'll be gentle with it. So please, please, please, pretty please let me see it!"

Maomao straightened up and looked at Jinshi with her most serious expression. With no small amount of trepidation, he handed her the book.

"It looks like it was originally bound like a sutra," she observed.

"Indeed. We cut it apart so it would be easier to repair."

Sutra construction was also called a folded book. As the name implied, it was made by folding the paper over.

Maomao studied the restored book intently. Tianyu trotted over, but she shoved him aside; he was just getting in the way.

Does it have anything about smallpox?

The book was a hundred years old, so the characters were considerably different from the way they were written today. They were also faded in places, making the text supremely difficult to read. Notwithstanding those hurdles, however, she definitely wanted to read this book.

"There. It talks about the smallpox outbreak a hundred years ago," she said. It was what she happened to be interested in at the moment, so she seized on it immediately. Tianyu, meanwhile, wasn't particularly moved; smallpox wasn't dissection, after all.

What mattered in medicine was quantity of case studies and records of attempted treatments. Anything showing repeated attempts-and often repeated failures-to treat a disease would help bring future medicine closer to the right path. That's what made these old pages so important.

And details there were: how the disease had spread, how it had been treated.

Let's see, they dealt with it by ...

But the page happened to be cut off right where Maomao might have found the answer to her question. They must not have restored that part of it yet.

"Are these all the pages you have?" she asked.

"The rest are still being repaired. Would you like to see for yourself?" Jinshi stood up and crooked a finger at them to follow him. They left the office, but they didn't go far-only about two rooms down the hall.

"What's this?" Maomao asked. The room was filled with a distinctive, pleasant humidity and suffused with the scent of paper.

There was hardly anyone there-one person at the door and another within, working. Considering that it was after hours, these people must have received special permission to be here. They were dipping the paper into what appeared to be water and endeavoring to peel apart stuck pages.

The fire that provided illumination wavered. It was surrounded by metal to make sure the flames couldn't catch any of the paper-a wise choice under the circumstances.

That does not look like easy work, Maomao thought-but the men had been told to work fast, so work fast they would.

"We're having it specially restored, but given what's in this book, we can't exactly have a crowd of people working on it. As you can see, it's rather ... small scale in here," Jinshi said. Neither the contents of the book nor its author could be made public. "The in-progress work is here."

Maomao's eyes shimmered, but no matter how she squinted, she couldn't read the pages. The paper was yellowed and the characters had begun to run; by the flickering firelight they almost looked hazy. As poor a shape as the pages Jinshi had shown them earlier had been in, it was painfully clear how much work had been done to make them more readable.

"The pictures are pretty easy to see," Tianyu said, and Maomao looked at the other pages currently under repair.

The pages had been lined up one beside the other. They were weathered, with stains and smudged characters, but there were also pictures depicting what appeared to be a human body.

"Oooh!" Maomao said, her eyes making perfect circles.

There were detailed illustrations of medicinal herbs. The most prominent one, however, was of a dissection. It showed the insides of a person in great detail. It was smudged in places, but easier to make out than the writing.

Tianyu said this was one of his ancestors, right?

It was a living demonstration of just how thick blood could be. Tianyu was poring over the illustration, making sounds of amazement. Maomao, too, stared fixedly at it.

She didn't say anything.

He didn't say anything.

Chue didn't say anything.

"Somebody say something!" Jinshi demanded, looking straight at Maomao.

"Sorry, sir," she replied, her eyes still glued to the pages.

What was more, as far as she could tell from the picture, unlike the earlier pages, this one dealt with diseases of the internal organs, and it mentioned typhlitis. Maybe that explained why Tianyu was as silent as Maomao.

At length she told Jinshi, "This is a very interesting book."

"I can't say I find it very engaging," Jinshi said, squinting at the picture of the autopsy.

"They may have ignored common morals to do it, but they didn't do it by half measures-that's what makes the outcome so intriguing."

"And you can sleep at night, thinking like that?" Jinshi shot back.

As Maomao looked at the image of a human being lying there in pieces, she contemplated how different the value of a human life had been a hundred years before. It appeared that if the surgery had been successful, the authors wrote down its subsequent progress, while if it failed, they autopsied the body and made illustrations of it.

They didn't waste anything.

"Do you think their patients were slaves?" she asked.

"It's a likely possibility."

Cutting open someone's belly was almost unthinkable. Even a dead person had to be treated with respect. That, at least, was the common consensus.

In practice, the only people doctors cut up to learn more about how humans were built were criminals. In the same way, if they were going to do experimental surgery, outside of extraordinary circumstances it was unlikely that they would use ordinary people. Maomao didn't know what had passed for "common sense" at the time, but it seemed plausible that the physicians would have been using criminals or possibly slaves in their research.

The only reason it had been permitted to cut open the Empress Dowager's belly to give birth to the current Emperor was because in the worst-case scenario, she was going to die anyway. When Maomao had helped perform a similar procedure for Xiaohong in the western capital, it was because the girl had been on death's doorstep. Maomao understood very well why Xiaohong's mother had objected so strenuously.

But what about now?

"Are you cutting them open and removing the pus?"

"Have you learned to read minds since I saw you last, Niangniang?"

The exchange implied that Tianyu was already operating on living people.

In the late stages of typhlitis ...

The mortality rate was high. By taking out the filth that had collected in the body, they might be able to improve symptoms at least slightly. Hence there would be no real sense that surgery was the wrong move, but she was taken aback that they would use a newly minted physician like Tianyu to do the job. From the color of his fingertips, she got the impression that it wasn't just once or twice that he had done this procedure.

I admit, there's no question about his ability, but still.

She felt like this was more surgeries than would normally be allotted simply to polish a young doctor's skills. He probably wasn't limited to patients who had come from Maomao's clinic.

It's like they're trying to get him as much experience as possible, as fast as they can.

The suspicion had been growing in her mind since seeing the drug trials, and now it came close to certainty.

There in the book repair room, she was with Jinshi, Chue, and Tianyu. Basen stood guard not far away. Maomao thought Chue was being awfully quiet; she looked over and discovered she had a long piece of candy.

"Can we eat in here?" Maomao asked.

"My huthban gabe it to me," Chue replied. So Baryou had been in the office. He knew to give her some candy to keep her quiet-he really was her husband.

Can I bring up this subject here? Maomao wondered. She looked around at those present and pondered how far she should speak. She would have preferred not to talk about it in front of Tianyu. 

Eventually she found their time was up.