chapter 5

chapter 5

When I returned to Yaozhou, weeds had swallowed the herb garden.

The little courtyard lay in ruins. Wind and weather had caved in one wall of the earthen house.

No one had wanted the place to begin with. Shen Linzhao had patched it brick by brick until it became a home.

When I arrived, he had not lived there long. A crumbling wall stood beside a thin, sickly patch of herbs.

He yanked me out of that patch and accused me of destroying his medicine.

Then he saw the purslane still sticking from my mouth.

He froze, seized me by the nape, and carried me into the house.

The dark vegetable bun he placed in my hands was still warm.

“Eat it and go.”

“Steal my herbs again, and this young master will beat you to death.”

The door creaked shut.

Through it, I heard his stomach growl.

I slept that night leaning against the earthen wall.

When Shen Linzhao shook me awake, the sun was already high.

I bolted upright at the sight of his face so close to mine.

When I slept outdoors, I usually kept one eye half-open. The slightest noise could wake me.

Never had I slept as deeply as I did that night.

“Why are you still here, little beggar?”

“There are no vegetable buns for you today.”

I swallowed. Fear shone in my tearful eyes.

“What right do you have to chase me away? This isn’t your house.”

“This is my territory,” he snapped. “Leave, or I will turn you over to the authorities.”

He truly did not want me.

He was painfully thin, his face sallow. His patched gray clothing was worn and dusty.

Poverty clung to him.

One more mouth might mean that he starved.

I looked up at him, tears welling in my eyes beneath the dirt on my face.

His heart softened at once.

With an angry stamp, he went inside and returned with another bun.

He handed me hope itself.

“Eat. This is the last one.”

I accepted it and whispered, “Thank you, Big Brother.”

He went still.

For a long time, I believed my little trick had captured him.

When I worked as a maid at the brothel, Sister Tanzhi had used the same sort of charms. Man after man spent fortunes upon her.

I was five when I became separated from my family. Traffickers sold me to a household as a child bride.

My husband-to-be was a one-year-old baby.

For five years, I worked their fields, chopped firewood, cut fodder, and slept in the woodshed.

Then the child died of a fever.

His family called me a husband-killer, beat me half to death, and sold me to a brothel.

The madam said I had not yet grown into my looks, so she made me serve Tanzhi, the establishment’s most popular courtesan.

Tanzhi’s surname was Li, so I took it as mine.

She gave me the name Cuicui.

“Flowers wither easily,” she said. “Wild grass cannot be burned away. Next year, it will cover the ground in green again.”

Sister Tanzhi often said I resembled the little sister she had lost, a girl who had also been sold somewhere unknown.

At her side, I had warm clothes and enough food. In less than a year, my body filled out.

The brothel was a den of endless pleasure and painted faces. She never lacked patrons.

By then, I possessed a hazy understanding of what passed between men and women.

A girl’s first night fetched an extraordinary price. For a celebrated beauty like Tanzhi, it could sell for two thousand taels.

She was fortunate. After her debut, she accepted only one patron.

He came from Chang’an, dealt in jade, and appeared very rich.

Later, he promised to redeem her contract and make her his lawful wife.

For a while, she smiled even in her sleep.

“Little Cuicui, would you like to come to Chang’an with me?”

I nodded.

She used five hundred taels of her private savings to purchase my freedom.

Stroking my hair, she spoke partly to me and partly to the wind.

“With your sister here, our little Cuicui will never again trade her body for food.”

But when that man threw himself upon me and tore at my clothes, she did not believe me.

She slapped me.

“Shameless whore.”

“I treated you well, and now that your wings have grown, you dare steal my man?”

The man stood behind her, watching with complete assurance that he had won.

I was thrown off the boat and lost my protector.

Famine raged for the next two years. Even landowners had no grain to spare, and pleasure boats and brothels tightened their belts.

I drifted from place to place. No one wanted me.

At last, I wandered into Yaozhou and met Shen Linzhao.

The first time he spoke, I noticed his accent was not local. The courtyard was so desolate that I guessed he too had come from somewhere else.

He divided his food with me and went hungry himself.

That made him a good man.

I did not want to wander anymore. I could only use a little cunning to make him take me in.

No matter how he drove me off, I followed.

One night, thunder split the sky.

Terrified, I crouched beside the wall with my arms around my head. Lightning turned the darkness white, and the thunder was so loud I did not hear the door open.

Shen Linzhao stood over me.

“Hey. Come inside.”

“What, are you waiting for lightning to strike you dead so you can extort money from me?”

On my second day there, the earthen wall collapsed.

Fortunately, Shen Linzhao and I were spreading manure over the herbs and escaped unharmed.

There was a tremendous crash. Dust flew everywhere.

I turned around.

Well. There went the house.

We stared at each other.

Then he stamped his foot in fury.

“I knew taking you in would bring nothing but trouble!”

I did not dare answer. The manure water splashed all the way to my lips.

When I looked up again, he was already beside the rubble.

“Why are you standing there? Come help!”

Once we had cleared the fallen earth, he sent me to fetch water from the edge of town while he formed new bricks.

It was summer, and we were lucky enough to have half a month without rain.

The good news was that we rebuilt the wall.

The bad news was that we had not earned a coin treating patients, and there was nothing left to eat.

In the black night, our stomachs growled at each other.

After a long silence, he asked, “Um…”

“That purslane you ate last time—what did it taste like?”

…

A wooden sign stood at the gate in Shen Linzhao’s handwriting: Pulse Reading and Prescriptions.

Because he was an outsider and the courtyard lay far from town, no patients ever came.

He had no choice but to work as a traveling physician.

Whenever he left, I stayed to fertilize the herbs. Once I finished, I climbed the back mountain to gather more.

I did not yet know medicine from weeds.

We missed four meals out of every three. Hunger made my head swim, and I could never remember his lessons about star anise and poisonous false star anise.

The mountainside was a sea of green. My steps wandered, and my mind filled with visions of braised pork.

I returned with a basket overflowing with pig fodder.

Shen Linzhao struck my head with a ladle.

“I told you to gather medicine, and you cut pig fodder?”

“Do you see a pig in this house?”

He nearly threw both me and the basket outside.

That night, I lay rigid on the heated bed, too frightened to breathe.

In the middle of the night, he rolled over.

“By the way… can people eat pig fodder?”

…

At first, I wanted to catch rabbits or pheasants on the mountain. We could raise them in the yard—chickens laid eggs, eggs became chickens, and the cycle would continue forever.

Shen Linzhao called me a dreamer.

“Forget rabbits. The locals have already eaten every wild boar on that mountain.”

I ate his black vegetable buns for a year.

The second year’s harvest was better.

Shen Linzhao’s Yaozhou accent became almost convincing. Though he limped, he was tall and handsome. As he traveled from village to village, people came to know him.

Gradually, patients began seeking him out.

He was an excellent performer. While taking a pulse, he stroked an imaginary beard and assumed the grave expression of a master physician.

Only I knew he was half-trained.

Everything in the Compendium of General Medicine had been hammered into his memory by rote. Whenever he finished a section, he snapped the book shut and declared, “This young master is terrifyingly powerful now.”

Powerful, my foot.

He tested all his dubious prescriptions on me.

One made my nose gush blood and left me asleep for an entire day.

When I awoke, he accused me of laziness.

I said nothing. I merely stared.

He looked away guiltily and announced that my vegetable bun would receive one extra grain of salt that evening.

The case that made Shen Linzhao famous was Brother Caiqing’s constipation.

The poor man’s bowels had not moved in half a month. His belly bulged as though he were about to give birth.

Instead of writing a prescription, Shen Linzhao soaked a bowlful of croton seeds and made him drink it.

Then he had Brother Caiqing lift his shirt. After oiling his hands, Shen Linzhao began kneading the swollen belly.

He looked exactly like a midwife.

Brother Caiqing screamed as if caught in a difficult labor.

At last, his bare stomach began to ripple, accompanied by tremendous gurgling.

He sprang upright, clamped his buttocks together, and sprinted toward the latrine.

The stench traveled three miles that day.

It took three full mounds of earth to fill the pit.

From then on, the village stopped calling Shen Linzhao a quack.

He became the respected Doctor Shen.