“Hey! Don’t touch that!”
Milalle reached out to stop the little girl grasping for a basket of precious lichens that Milalle had collected.
“Why?” the girl asked, thrusting out her lower lip.
Whenever they came to the village in the marsh, this little one who called herself Yunacha appeared out of nowhere and tagged along. She seemed particularly attached to Milalle and Makokan. On one occasion, Hohsalle had shooed her away, and now she kept her distance whenever he was around. However, she never went far, watching them with her eager dark eyes.
She was a cute little thing. Her quick, nimble movements and the way she puffed out her cheeks when angry reminded Milalle of a baby squirrel. Evidently, she was an expert escape artist, too. A man who had to be her father or her uncle often came running over, searching for her in a panic. Milalle would look to where the girl had been just moments ago, only to discover that she’d vanished.
Hohsalle and Milalle had been visiting the run-down shack every day to nurse the woman ailing from what appeared to be mittsual. Thankfully, she’d responded well to the new medicine and was already up and about. The villagers seemed to respect Hohsalle and Milalle’s work. Where once they eyed the outsiders warily, now they bowed in greeting. They even invited them into their homes for a meal on occasion.
The villagers’ willingness to talk proved to be an unexpected boon for Hohsalle and Milalle, who sensed that the disease had a strong connection with this region’s environment. If they could identify the link between it and ticks, there was a chance they might discover a major clue leading to a remedy. They borrowed a hut to store medicines and equipment to make their work easier. Humidity was a problem, but the hut was far enough from the marsh that the temperature was sufficiently low, offering good conditions for experiments.
Tohlim forbade them from staying in the village overnight. Although commuting from Otai was a bother, they could work the whole day if they left early enough in the morning. Hohsalle spent most of his time questioning the villagers about the disease while Milalle studied the local vegetation. For someone who specialized in making medicines from lichens as she did, the marshland was fascinating. Hohsalle, worried about her jaunting into the marshes on her own, insisted that Makokan accompany her, but she was so engrossed in collecting lichens that she often forgot he was there.
The wind that whipped up little waves on the gray waters of the marsh brought a cold bite, but the sun’s rays were gradually warming, carrying a faint promise of spring. Many fallen trees lay along the edge of the large marsh, all of them covered thickly in moss. Much of the moss remained a vibrant green even on the withered winter ground.
Although moss and lichens looked similar, they were different plants. Those educated in the unique qualities of both could tell them apart easily. Many varieties grew here: flat gray patches plastered against the tree trunks like scar tissue, clusters of vivid yellow dots flecked with red, and white wispy beards trailing from the branches like algae drifting in a pond.
Since the era when their kingdom had flourished, the physicians of Otawalle had devoted themselves to curing a broad spectrum of diseases. But of all their inventions during their long academic history, none surpassed the microscope. It enabled them to observe the agents that caused sicknesses for the first time. Visible proof that there were myriad living creatures unseeable to the naked eye changed their worldview drastically.
Revolutionary inventions and discoveries were like waves. When the first one surged forward, it generated successive ripples in its wake. The year after the Otawalle created the microscope, there was a dramatic breakthrough in drug research—the discovery of a fungus that effectively killed the agents behind certain afflictions. New medicines derived from the fungus demonstrated such promising results that the Academy of Deeper Learning buzzed with excitement. At the same time, however, the new drugs occasionally caused powerful allergic reactions. The deaths of a few patients sparked a brief uproar. But medical practitioners knew full well the fine line that existed between remedy and poison, and this incident alone was not enough for them to abandon the fungus-derived drugs. Persistent efforts to treat allergic reactions and improve the medicines resulted in the creation of many effective cures.
Antibacterial drugs also caused severe diarrhea, and in the search to understand why, the Otawalle discovered the existence of “good” agents that lived in human bodies and aided digestion. For the Otawalle, a people whose identity was defined by the motto “Live by helping other nations live,” it was truly gratifying to learn that the human body was populated by countless invisible organisms that similarly helped sustain human life. To be without a nation was equivalent to lacking a body. Yet, like these microorganisms, the Otawalle had spread to other countries, contributing to the well-being and prosperity of each.
About ten years ago, the Otawalle made yet another startling discovery: Evidence suggested the existence of disease agents far smaller than bacteria, unseeable even under a microscope. These minute agents, so tiny that they slipped through bacteria filters, were impervious to antibacterial drugs. However, through continued research, the Otawalle found that their virulence could be suppressed by substances in such lichens as ashimi.
When this knowledge was first being tested, Milalle was a new apprentice just beginning her studies. She’d continued this line of study ever since, captivated by the power concealed within such humble plants.
When mittsual reappeared, and it was confirmed that the disease agents extracted from the cadavers collected at the salt mine were too small to be seen under a microscope, the news caused quite a stir at the Academy of Deeper Learning. Different lichen strains that had proved effective in combatting other diseases were immediately tried, and it was found that drugs formed with a substance derived from the secondary metabolites produced by two types of lichen—ashimi and ikimi—were particularly effective at suppressing mittsual disease agents. It was this substance that Hohsalle dubbed the anti-mittsual drug.
Once it became clear that medicines produced from lichens might be effective at combating mittsual, Milalle was reminded of a question that had long been dormant in a corner of her mind: Why did the Aquafaese survive the disease when it wiped out the Kingdom of Otawalle? And why hadn’t any of the people of the Toga Mountains and the Oki region contracted the illness when that’s where the black wolves lived?
Milalle’s senior colleagues told her that fatal incidences had likely gone unreported because those regions were so remote and sparsely populated. However, Milalle questioned this excuse because of the lichens. The Toga Mountain people bred pyuika, while those of the Oki region bred reindeer. Although she knew little about pyuika, she’d heard that during winter, when there was no foliage to be found, reindeer foraged for lichens. Horses and sheep, on the other hand, lacked the stomach bacteria required to digest them. For years, Milalle had wished to study the relationship between lichens and the milks of pyuika and reindeer, which the peoples of western Aquafa consumed daily in some form or other. Although there were no pyuika or reindeer on the Yukata Plains, she’d heard that fire horses, unlike their cousins in other regions, ate lichens as well.