The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 15 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: A Man's Romance

Maomao now knew the terrible secret of the Emperor's illness, but the next day, work went on as usual. Today she was with not Short Senior, but Tall Senior.

"Good to be working with you," she said politely.

"Yeah, good to have you," he said. He spoke less formally than Short Senior, but he was tall enough that he was still somewhat intimidating. He and Maomao looked sort of unbalanced when they stood next to each other, but Tall Senior was thinner and less built than Lihaku.

Today, they would spend the day at court, making medicine.

"Keep on your toes," Tall Senior advised her. "They changed the recipe yesterday."

"All right, sure."

They chatted as they ground rice powder in their mortars. Maomao and the others were assigned to this duty to make sure that nothing adulterated the powder while it was being made. She suspected that some of the medicine they were producing would be given to the Emperor himself.

The powder that emerged from the mortars was very fine-so fine that they had to put cloths over their mouths to make sure they didn't inhale it.

"You could almost use this stuff as whitening powder," Maomao observed.

"Ground rice? As whitening powder?" Tall Senior responded.

"Sure. It's a lot safer than powder with lead in it."

"Lead? Actually, didn't they ban that in the rear palace a few years ago?"

"Yes, I believe they did," Maomao said. She would never forget the case.

"Speaking of which, is it true you served in the rear palace yourself, Maomao?"

He knows my name?

Maomao started to feel bad that she hadn't bothered to learn his, but had simply assigned him a nickname at her own discretion.

"It's true. I wasn't even there for two years, though."

Tall Senior's interest was clearly piqued, although he didn't stop working as he said, "Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead."

"Is it true that the rear palace is just bursting with beautiful women?"

It was such a forthright question that she actually rarely heard it, giving it a sort of novelty.

"I suppose," she said. "The consorts are certainly all lovely, and generally the serving women as well."

The rear palace had certain standards for those admitted to it. Of course, there were always those like Maomao who fell short of the mark, but by and large the women there were above average in looks.

"Huh! Wow."

"Don't get your hopes up," Maomao said firmly. "It wasn't just a place where women chortle and play."

Sometimes women found themselves poisoned, and gossip flew everywhere, and sometimes there were hair-pulling catfights. Sometimes there were also affairs between ladies or with the eunuchs- but Maomao saw fit to leave that unspoken.

"You certainly don't pull your punches," Tall Senior said.

"In the rear palace, everyone is vying for His Majesty's Imperial affection, so they can hardly just all hold hands and be friends."

It was, admittedly, a decent enough environment that good sense could still be found among the most important ladies, such as Empress Gyokuyou or Consort Lihua. Nonetheless, it wasn't as if there were no battles there.

Sounds like it was a lot worse under the former emperor, though. Just the thought was enough to give Maomao goosebumps. In fact, grudges and resentments caused by His Former Majesty had created more than one problem in the rear palace in her own time.

"All right, but still," Tall Senior said, unwilling to relinquish his dreams. Maomao found that even her most studious-looking colleagues would reveal a more frivolous side if she talked to them long enough.

One might have expected that chatting on the job like this would get them scolded by their superiors, but that wasn't the case. Doctors had to know how to get information from a person while talking to them, so it was good practice-as long as their hands kept moving and they didn't make any mistakes, it was fine if they talked together.

"Speaking of, the other day I got my first glimpse of the Empress. She's really lovely!" Tall Senior said.

"Isn't she, though?" Maomao replied with just a hint of pride. She still thought of the inhabitants of the Jade Pavilion as her people.

I wonder if Empress Gyokuyou knous about the Emperor's illness.

If she did, would she worry about him and hope for him to recover? More likely, she would consider what the world would look like if and when His Majesty passed on.

It was hard to call the Empress His Majesty's wife in the strict sense -but she was certainly the mother of the Crown Prince.

"That other girl with her, her family member-she was beautiful too. I never knew that foreign blood could give a person hair like that."

A girl in her family?

For a second, Maomao thought maybe he meant Princess Lingli, but she realized it was probably the adopted daughter Gyoku-ou had sent to the capital.

"It's not just about being foreign, though. Red hair in general just isn't very common," Maomao said. Empress Gyokuyou was really the only person with proper red hair that she had ever seen. She'd seen a few people around I-Sei Province with roughly similar hair color, but it had still been unusual. There was less red hair out there than gold or silver hair, so it must have been rare indeed.

"Oh yeah-did you know that you can become a redhead after birth?" Tall Senior asked.

Maomao pricked up her ears. "Is that like how you can go white- haired from psychological shock?"

She'd heard stories of people's hair turning white overnight on account of terrifying experiences. It didn't really happen that fast, but it was certainly true that psychological factors could cause a person to have more white hair.

"No, I heard it's from malnutrition."

"Malnutrition, sir?" Would that suggest, then, that the cause was a lack of nutrients when the hair was being formed? "Would the missing nutrient be meat, by chance?" She knew meat and fish were important sources of nutrition for hair and nails.

"Yes, I think so. The hair can lose its coloration and turn gold or red, or so they say."

So they say: In other words, he hadn't actually seen it for himself. Still, the idea was intriguing, Maomao thought. She'd heard a lot of stories from her father Luomen, and read a lot of books as well, but there were still so many things she had never heard.

"That's a very interesting fact," she said, collecting the powder that came out of her mortar. "Know any others?" Her eyes began to sparkle.

"You sure are demanding of your seniors, huh? I don't know if I've got any other interesting tidbits ... " Tall Senior worked his mortar and pestle, making a thoughtful noise. He was a good senior who wanted to indulge a request from his junior. "Well, speaking of meat and fish ... "

"Yes? Did you think of something?" Maomao's eyes shone brighter.

"I did. But since we've got the time, how about we do this by question and answer?"

"Question and answer, sir?" Maomao nodded; she wasn't concerned about whether she "won" or "lost" the discussion, so she was more than happy even if it turned out she didn't know the answers.

"All right, here we go. Long ago, our land fought against another nation but lost terribly. The soldier in charge of the army was a man of very sharp wits who always grasped the strategic situation and made wise judgments. He sent scouts to reconnoiter the enemy encampment, and determined there was a good chance of victory, on which basis he gave battle. If he was so sure he would win, why did he lose?"

"Military matters aren't really my area of expertise," Maomao said, frowning at what turned out to be quite a different topic from what she had expected. "Help me out."

"Oh, at least try to think it through."

"I told you, it's not my field."

The two of them chatted away, their mortars grinding and the powder collecting.

"Okay, okay. Your hint is: meat."

"Meat?" Maomao cocked her head and hmmed thoughtfully.

Meat, meat, meat ... Maybe he means they were caught in some unique trap or something?

It seemed unlikely that actual meat was the issue at hand.

The state of the army's nutrition? No ...

Maomao dusted the powder off her hands. As she'd said, the ground rice could have served as whitening powder, and it left her hands very white. They were using polished rice so as to be sure no bran got into the mixture.

"Bran ... "

Bran was very fibrous; it helped regulate digestion. (It was Maomao's bad habit to immediately consider the medicinal applications of whatever she happened to be thinking about.)

Digestion ...

She gave a great clap of her hands.

"Figure it out?" Tall Senior asked.

"Yes. Could it be that this quick-witted commander had mistaken the size of the enemy forces? I think perhaps his scouts misunderstood how to judge their scale."

"What makes you say that?"

"I think his foes were people who eat a lot of meat. I've heard that one way of determining the size of an enemy unit is to examine their waste. But people who eat a lot of grains produce more excrement than people who eat mostly meat."

When someone took in a lot of fibrous food, the amount of their stool increased-sometimes by two or three times. And brown rice had more fiber than white rice. If the scouts had judged the quantity of waste based on their experiences from their own camp and had used that to estimate the number of enemy troops, they could have come up with completely the wrong number.

Tall Senior formed a big circle with his hands, meaning right answer. Maomao allowed herself a flush of self-satisfaction.

"Any other stories?" she asked.

"Couldn't you ask about something else?" Tall Senior said, sounding like he was tired of the subject.

Let's see ... What else is there to ask?

Suddenly, Maomao thought of the physician she'd encountered at the selection exam-the one who'd been interested in Suirei.

"Have you been managing the medicine for very long, sir?"

"Hmm ... About five years now, I'd say."

"Then, do you know the person who used to be in charge of the management? Until about three years ago, I think?" Maomao had a sense it had been roughly that long since Suirei had faked her own suicideand disappeared.

"Oh, do you mean Tairan? I thought I saw him talking to you after the test."

"So you did. Why didn't you rescue me?" Maomao pursed her lips at him.

"I didn't realize you two knew each other."

"We don't, exactly. He's more an acquaintance of an acquaintance. He was familiar with a palace lady who killed herself some time ago."

"Ahhh. Yes, I remember. Suirei, right?" Surprisingly, Tall Senior seemed to be okay with the whole thing. "He said he was going to propose to her or something."

"You mean, as in marriage?"

Maomao was suddenly filled with a sense of pity for Tairan. Suirei had probably planned to use him for her own ends all along. There was some room for sympathy with Suirei too-she couldn't go against the Shi clan-but it didn't change the fact that Tairan was essentially collateral damage.

"I guess she only got close to him so she could take advantage of him," Tall Senior said. "She was a bit on the tall side, but she certainly had a pretty face. That was a rough time, I tell you. The whole department had to rework the way we were managing the medicines, they made us get rid of the herb garden we'd been quietly keeping on the side, and of course Tairan was demoted ... "

"Herb garden?" Maomao said, biting her lip. She'd actually cherished a slim hope that she might be entrusted with that garden when she became an assistant to the physicians, but now that hope was dashed entirely.

"It was his fault for bringing his personal feelings into his work. Although he was a skilled physician, especially when it came to anesthetics," Tall Senior said.

"Anesthetics?" Maomao asked, her ears pricking up again.

"Yeah. Doctors around here don't use them much; they just tell all those injured soldiers to grin and bear it. But there are some you don't want to use because they're actually quite toxic, or can create dependency."

"I know," Maomao said. That was exactly why she had struggled so much when it came to doing surgery on Xiaohong in the western capital. She'd even been prepared to do the procedure with the girl held down by force if she thrashed from the pain.

"Tairan understood those factors, and had a gift for mixing formulations that would put the least strain on the patient."

"If Dr. Tairan was that good and that knowledgeable about poisons, I wish you would have mentioned it sooner." Maomao was practically snorting with excitement and gradually cornering Tall Senior. Now she wanted to learn everything she could from Tairan. Perhaps Suirei had approached him in part because of the knowledge he possessed.

"Why get mad at me about it?" Tall Senior shot back, but he wasn't actually upset. He was quite even-keeled even for a doctor, Maomao thought.

Even if he does have a soft spot for beautiful women.

That was well within expectations for a young man of his age. It wasn't like he was going to find himself blackmailed by someone he'd hopped into bed with.

"These drug trials have me thinking, someone very important must be very ill," Tall Senior said.

So he has noticed.

He didn't yet think that person was the Emperor, or he never would have brought the subject up so casually.

"If they're going to do surgery, they should really have gotten Tairan to handle the anesthesia," he said. "He would be sure to find the best balance of all the factors."

"I suppose they didn't consider him because he was demoted," said Maomao.

"I guess. It was like the light went out of him ... He just let himself slip. Once upon a time, I wouldn't have been surprised to see him pass that test."

"Oh hoh."

"Oh, uh, not that I mean you're not perfectly qualified, Maomao."

"Why, thank you."

"I think we've been talking a bit too much. Maybe we should pick up the pace."

"Yes, sir," she said, and the two of them started mortaring faster.