Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The first transaction worthy of the name came to our door in early spring the following year.

It did not come through Old Mo, but through an unfamiliar young eunuch.

Under cover of night, he crept beneath the window and slipped in a note that had been clenched warm in his hand:

“Seeking an effective salve for chilblains. Urgent. Price negotiable.”

The handwriting was crooked, the strokes pressed deep into the paper.

I called Consort Zhao and Attendant Li together.

“Can we make chilblain salve?”

Consort Zhao thought for a moment. “The kind used in the palace is usually made by combining lard, camphor, beeswax, borneol, and the like.

“Lard can be rendered, but camphor and beeswax are hard to come by, and borneol is expensive.

“If we use a folk method, I do have a substitute prescription, but it works more slowly and has a strong smell.”

“Accept it first. Tell them it will have the scent and effect of the kind reserved for palace use,” I told Old Mo.

“Tell the other side we can have one box ready within five days. The price: ten sheets of new paper, one good brush, and one ink stick.”

It was a deliberately particular demand.

Here, paper and brushes were far more useful than gold or silver.

Gold and silver were dead things. Paper and brushes were tools for carving out a way to live.

We spent three days preparing.

The lard was skimmed spoon by spoon from the oily film floating on our daily vegetable soup.

We stored it in an earthenware jar and saved up almost half a jar.

Consort Zhao took Cui’er to the abandoned flowerbeds and the base of the walls in the desolate garden, where they dug up the roots and rhizomes of sophora and ampelopsis, washed them clean, dried them, and pounded them to powder.

The hardest parts were camphor and beeswax. There was truly no way to get them.

Consort Zhao tried substituting dried mint leaves and pine resin. The salve she boiled down was dark green and sharply pungent.

On the fifth night, the payment arrived.

It was not Old Mo who brought it, but another low-ranking eunuch with his neck hunched in. He put the things down and left at once.

A stack of coarse but usable xuan paper, a half-worn wolf-hair brush, and a complete stick of pine-soot ink.

We handed over that plain-looking box of salve.

A few days later, another note came:

“The salve is highly effective. Prepare another box. It must be identical to what the palace issues. Name your price.”

The other side was testing the limits of our ability.

For it to be “identical to what the palace issues” meant we would need real palace medicinal ingredients and the exact proportions of the prescription.

We sat in a circle around an oil lamp no bigger than a bean, its light and shadow leaping over the crumbling wall.

“Eunuch Liu, who manages the medicine storehouse at the Imperial Medical Bureau,” Consort Zhao said, her voice so low it was nearly swallowed by the wind.

“He loves to gamble. He owes a huge sum to Fulai Gambling House in the eastern city. With the interest piled on, he nearly had his hand chopped off before New Year.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“The palace maid he is involved with used to share a room with me at the Bureau of Medicine.

“That maid came crying to me once, wanting to borrow money. What money did I have?”

A long-absent sharpness flashed in Consort Zhao’s eyes. “If we can get money, or something valuable enough to help him pay off the debt, perhaps…”

Money?

Money was exactly what we lacked most.

Attendant Li silently rose and went to the edge of the heated brick bed, where she felt around for a long while.

From a crack in the adobe beneath the very bottom of the bed mat, she pried out a tiny cloth bundle.

When she opened it, a pair of extremely small gold earrings lay inside the red cloth. They were no bigger than grains of rice, but richly yellow, gleaming in the dimness.

“My mother… gave them to me the day she sent me into the palace. I’ve kept them hidden all this time.”

I pressed down on her icy hand. “This is the last thing you have to remember her by.”

“A memory,” she said with a faint smile, the lines at the corners of her mouth very deep.

“It can’t be eaten as food, and it can’t keep me alive.

“If it stays here, it will always be nothing more than a pair of earrings. If we send it out, it might buy us a path forward.”