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 isn’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 knows 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 from 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.