“That’s Kokuyou,” Sazen said of the swaying, but cheerful, cosmopolitan man. “He showed up yesterday, but because it was late, I let him stay the night. If you’re not looking for me, maybe you’re looking for h—”
“Doctor!” Yo cried the moment she saw him, and rushed over to him...
...only to punch him as hard as she could. There was a thump that sounded loud enough to make Maomao wonder if someone had broken their teeth—or their fist.
As if that wasn’t enough, Yo jumped on the toppled Kokuyou and started pounding him.
“Hey, stop that!” Sazen cried.
What the?! What does she think she’s doing? Dammit!
Maomao and Sazen between them pried Yo off of Kokuyou. She was weeping piteously, dripping snot.
“Ahh! Yo, is that you? My, how you’ve grown,” Kokuyou said, smiling in spite of the blood pouring from his nose. The bandages covering his face had come off, revealing his awful smallpox scars. It was very in character for him to keep smiling even after someone had punched him, but it was also sort of unsettling. “If you’re here in the capital, that must mean...”
“Yes, that’s right. It happened exactly as you said.” Yo’s fists, covered in blood from Kokuyou’s nose, were quivering. Then she said something that Maomao never saw coming. “The village was destroyed.”
Her sleeves had rolled up during the fighting: She had smallpox scars just like Kokuyou.
Maomao decided to start with some talking. They couldn’t very well have their discussion in the middle of the herb patch, so they went into the shed. The shed boasted only the absolute minimum of furnishings, so they turned over pots and buckets to make up for the lack of chairs.
“Sorry it’s so filthy,” Sazen said.
“Well, excuse me,” Maomao replied. She and her old man had once lived here.
“Isn’t there anywhere a little cleaner? Like, maybe we could rent a room in the Verdigris House?” chirped Chue, who had shown up somewhere along the line. She had never met Sazen or Kokuyou before, but inserted herself into the conversation like she belonged there. Very Chue-esque.
Admittedly, the shed was pretty cramped with five people crammed inside. Yo’s eyes were still puffy, but her breathing had calmed. Her hands were a bit swollen as well from hitting Kokuyou.
As for Kokuyou, he had some cuts in his mouth, but none of his teeth were broken. Yes, it had been a woman attacking him, but he hadn’t resisted at all, and getting hit would still hurt—but he himself continued to grin. He had cloth shoved into his nostrils to stop the bleeding; not a very heroic look.
“All right. I take it that you know each other, Yo and Kokuyou. Mind explaining what’s going on?”
Maomao poured hot water into some tea bowls and handed them out. Chue gave her a look as if to ask if she didn’t have any snacks, but, well, she didn’t.
“Shall I do it?” Kokuyou asked. Yo was still sniffling and didn’t seem in any position to tell a story.
“If you would,” Maomao said.
“Maomao, I told you that the village shaman took a nasty dislike to me and chased me out of the place, right?”
Yes, she recalled that he had said that. She’d met Kokuyou maybe two years before, when she’d helped him as he was being refused entry to a ship because of his scars. That had been on the way home from her first trip to the western capital.
“Yo and her family lived in that village,” he said.
“And the village was destroyed?” Maomao felt she couldn’t leave the subject alone. “Was it by a plague of insects? I know you said you were blamed for the plague, and they chased you out.”
“Yeah, yeah... That, uh, may not be the whole truth. I think it was...”
“The disease. Smallpox,” Yo said.
“Smallpox,” Maomao repeated. A highly infectious, highly fatal illness. First came a fever, then patients developed a rash, and even if they survived that stage, the rash would form pustules and leave lifelong scars. “That’s when you got the scars on your face too, Kokuyou?”
“No, I had my encounter with smallpox before I came to their village. Dangerous business, smallpox, huh? I thought for sure I was gonna die!” As usual, he didn’t sound the least bit concerned about it.
“We lived in a small pioneer town far to the northwest of the capital,” Yo volunteered. “We cut down the forest to make fields, but it was a very new village, and the fields weren’t enough to sustain us yet, so we sold the wood we cut down to buy food from outside.”
“I see. One of those frontier towns,” Maomao said, beginning to understand why the village had been lost. “You’d be the first to be hit when there was a shortage of food.”
Many pioneers were poor folk who had no land of their own.
Then a plague of locusts occurred.
Food got more expensive.
The undersupplied pioneer village could no longer afford it.
They starved.
That made everyone weaker.
Which made them sick.
A place like theirs would be the first to be abandoned during an outbreak of communicable disease. It would vanish before its name could even be added to the maps. Soon everyone would forget them, and it would be as if they had never existed.
Hence no word would come to the central government, and there would be no problem.
“I did hear talk that some smallpox cases had appeared in the vicinity just before I left. I did wonder...” Kokuyou said.
“But then you left our village didn’t you, Kokuyou?” Yo said, her voice low. “Why?! Why did you leave us there?! We couldn’t call a doctor, so we just died in droves!” Fresh tears started spilling from her already swollen eyes.
“I was chased out,” Kokuyou said, calmly and placatingly. “The village headman never liked me much—didn’t feel there was enough food to share with me. If I hadn’t beat feet, I probably would have ended up as a sacrifice in some ritual. He even claimed that my treatments were evil spells.”
It hadn’t been Kokuyou’s fault. Yo could blame the headman for chasing him away.
She knew that perfectly well. But for Yo, still in her early teens, her emotions could still overwhelm what she knew rationally.
“So what?! If only you had stayed...”
She stood up, tears plp-plp-plping to the ground.
After Kokuyou’s banishment, the smallpox had spread, and the villagers had succumbed. There had been nothing they could do but watch helplessly. One could only imagine the living hell that Yo had experienced.
“If you... If you had been there for us, Kokuyou...”
Kokuyou had already had smallpox, and supposedly those who had caught it once couldn’t catch it again. With his medical knowledge, Kokuyou might have been able to save lives.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Kokuyou apologized, but it wasn’t his fault. His banishment had been decreed by the headman, and when he was told in no uncertain terms to leave, he’d had no choice but to go. The beating Yo had given him was only a way of acting out. She knew that. But in spite of that knowledge, her impotent helplessness had driven her to take out her anguish on the grown-up Kokuyou.
Still, jumping on him and pounding him? She looked like she was raised better than that.