Maomao
was led to a mansion in the capital. She didn't know whose it was, but the scent of medicine wafted through the air.
"Where is this?"
"This is the home of the
old
physician."
It was a modest mansion, but one that felt steeped in history.
"Keiyong
was stabbed in the stomach, but he's conscious and eating heartily now.
Since he seems to be in good spirits, they had him moved to the capital."
Suzume
explained.
If he'd been stabbed in the stomach, he couldn't be left in the smallpox village full of the sick. Considering they needed to question him, having him in the capital would be easier. At the same time, even though he might have a tolerance for smallpox, it was understandable that they'd want to isolate him once. The old physician had experience with smallpox too, so his family likely understood the disease as well.
"Since Maomao and
Yu
were at the clinic, they had you brought here for the time being."
Maomao accepted the explanation.
The old physician's family and servants bowed their heads and stayed out of the way as Maomao and the others passed through.
(This was the kind of atmosphere where making casual conversation wouldn't be wise.)
If they thought she was involved with the smallpox situation, it was probably best not to interact with her unnecessarily.
She headed toward the room at the back.
"It's in here. Go ahead."
Suzume stopped in front of the room.
"You're not coming in, Suzume?"
"Well now, I wouldn't want to leave Maomao alone with a gentleman, but would it be all right if Suzume stayed with you?"
"......"
Suzume is perceptive.
She must have figured out what Maomao was about to discuss with Keyou.
"If anything comes up, please do let me know. The swift and capable Suzume will come to rescue Maomao in no time."
"I'd appreciate that."
Maomao enters the room alone.
Inside, Keyou was lying on a bed, reading a book.
"Hey there."
"Don't 'hey there' me. I heard you were stabbed."
"Mhm. Want to see the wound?"
"No need. You look fine."
Keyou was the same as ever.
"I just met the person who stabbed you."
"Oh, that was the village elder, wasn't it? His appearance had changed so much I couldn't tell who he was at first."
"He called you"
"Penghou."
"That's what he said."
"Penghou?"
Keyou tilted his head, not understanding.
"It's a yokai. Something about a spirit that parasitizes a tree that's lived for a thousand years, or something like that."
"Huh. I wonder why he'd call me that."
Keyou genuinely didn't seem to know.
Maomao didn't understand the meaning either.
"Do you know what a yamabiko is?"
"I know that one. It's when your voice echoes back in the mountains, right?"
"Do you know that it can also be interpreted as the mountain spirit answering back?"
"Mm-hmm, that's another way to say it."
Keiyou continued the conversation with a smile. Maomao didn't think Keiyou was a bad person. The first time they met was probably at the dock.
Maomao's group had given Keiyou a ride on their boat. In return, Keiyou had given—
Ranhan
—who suffered terribly from seasickness—some medicine for it, as Maomao recalled.
When was the next time they met, after that?
Sazen
had asked to have the pharmacy at Rokuseikan checked on because he was worried. Keiyou had accepted the job with proper payment that time.
Recently, through Maomao's introduction, Keiyou had taken up work similar to that of a court physician. Given the good salary, it seemed Keiyou was doing quality work.
"Your relationship with Yu's family seemed to be good, though."
"Yeah, Yu's family treated me very well."
"So you vaccinated them against smallpox and taught them various medical techniques?"
"Yeah."
Keiyou set down the book he'd been holding. It appeared to be a medical text.
"Then what about the village chief and the other unfriendly villagers?"
Maomao's fists clenched tight.
"I tried to keep my distance from them as much as possible..."
"What about when they harassed you?"
Keiyou let out a long "Hmm..."
"Do I really have to answer that? I'd like to stay on good terms with you, Maomao..."
Maomao's body went rigid in an instant.
"Was it you who spread smallpox through Yu's village, Keiyou?"
"That wasn't me. But I figured that if I were gone, there'd be no need for revenge in the first place. And it's a fact that the village chief drove me out."
Keiyou hadn't done anything to the villagers. He had chosen a revenge of inaction. Everyone assumed the village chief had perished as well, but the chief had survived—aside from Yu's family, he was the only one who had.
It wasn't that the village chief had been lucky. He may have simply had prior experience with smallpox. The pockmarks Maomao had seen on him looked quite old.
Yamabiko. Kodama. Houkou. Maomao was beginning to understand why the village chief had called Keiyou those names.
(Returning kindness for kindness, and malice for malice.)
That was all there was to it. Like shouting toward a mountain and having an echo come back. He merely reflected the other person's heart back at them, like a mirror.
(No wonder he was so good at negotiations.)
The reason Maomao had seen Keiyou as a good person was probably that their own behavior had appeared favorable in Keiyou's eyes.
If that was the case, then Maomao could now see what had become of those who had approached Keiyou with malice.
"When did you catch smallpox?"
"More than ten years ago."
"Then where did you get the smallpox you used to inoculate Yu and the others?"
The scabs from smallpox were highly infectious. But they could only remain viable for about a year at most.
Keiyou smiled sweetly and removed the cloth that had been covering half his face. His refined features were covered in pockmarks.
"See here? Can you tell there are other scars besides the pockmarks?"
"Are those... dents?"
"I was beaten with a club. Stripped of everything I had. They were bandits, you know."
His tone hadn't changed one bit. He was his usual bright self.
"It was spring, so I managed to survive. If it had been summer or winter, I probably would've died. I stumbled around looking for herbs to stop the bleeding. Barely made it alive to a nearby village and begged for help. There was a kind person who nursed someone like me back to health. But the other villagers couldn't stand me and tried to drive me out. Sure enough, one of them turned out to be the very bandit who'd attacked me."
Keiyou's lighthearted retelling of his story was as awful as ever.
"So I was in their way, completely and utterly in their way. I pretended not to notice, so they tried to get rid of me before I caught on. It was pathetic and almost funny, but when they tried to silence me for good, well—a bit of revenge seemed only fair."
"What kind of revenge?"
"I used them as a seedbed."
A seedbed for what—Maomao was perceptive enough not to need that follow-up question. To reduce the risk of variolation, you needed a healthy body and an environment where someone could nurse you through it.
A seedbed certainly wouldn't need either of those things.
"I'd like to say it was mercy on my part, but... they started it first."
Yes, my words would have fallen on deaf ears with the other villagers anyway—"
I didn't entirely deny Kayou's methods. However, Kayou's actions seemed without limit.
"So, you took revenge on the village chief from Yu's village?"
"The one who stabbed me, actually—"
"No, you did, didn't you? Otherwise, there's no way the village chief would have weakened so rapidly. He probably won't last a few more days."
Maomao had a question. The village chief she had just met was so weakened that he reeked of death. His body trembled, his speech was slurred, and he seemed to be hallucinating.
It didn't look like a person who could travel from the capital to a pox-ridden village and have the strength to stab Kayou.
The only explanation was that he'd been poisoned.
"The village chief was making strange incense and drugs too, calling it a curse—"
"Ergot?"
"You're correct. How did you know—?"
"The village chief's fingertips were showing signs of necrosis."
It was unclear whether Kayou had administered ergot or another poison.
"Stabbing me came first—. That's why I took the poison I had and forced it into his mouth. When I was in the village, he poisoned me many times. My little brother always said, 'If someone does it to you, you have to do it back'—"
"Little brother?"
"My little brother. The twin who left me behind and died."
She felt she had heard about this before.
"You were given separate variolations for an experiment, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was inoculated with human pox pus, and my brother with livestock pus. The poison was weak for him, so he was fine, but I ended up like this—seriously ill, hovering between life and death—"
Kayou touched the smallpox scar on his right cheek.
"Our master was an excellent doctor who raised us, but he was timid. He wasn't the type to try variolation on us and then test it on himself. It's amazing, really—he studied pox for years, yet he himself had never caught it."
"He made all his disciples do the dangerous work, then."
Maomao said bluntly.
Kayou was a strange man. There was neither goodwill nor ill will in him. He simply reflected his opponent's actions, like a mirror.
Though he spoke in a bright voice for everything, the story about his brother came out in a slightly more somber tone.
"Whenever I got bullied, my little brother would come and rescue me. Back then, even if I didn't fight back, he'd do it for me. So I have to fight back too, that's why—"
Kayou pressed his palms together.
"I swapped the livestock pus that was supposed to be inoculated into Master with human pus."
"..."
Maomao swallowed hard.
"Master came down with a severe case of smallpox. The variolation he'd been experimenting on using multiple disciples had failed, and in his confusion he burned his research notes. He grew weaker and weaker—. My brother put an end to it so Master wouldn't suffer any longer."
Kayou's voice was not his usual drawl.
"My brother died after that. He killed himself. Probably because I told him about swapping the variolation."
Kayou clenched his fists tight and bowed his head. He looked as though he were confessing.
"I should have just lied. I could have said experiments fail sometimes, said it with a straight face, and swept it all under the rug."
"Can a mirror deceive?"
At Maomao's question, Kayou slowly shook his head.
"I stopped knowing what to do. I'd always let my brother handle everything around me."
That was why Kayou had become nothing more than a mirror, reflecting back only goodwill or ill will.
"...What are you going to do? Maomao, will you—"
"..."
The goosebumps that had risen on Maomao's skin still hadn't subsided. She had her thoughts about Kayou as a person, and she couldn't very well continue associating with him the way she had before.
She shouldn't have tried to expose him, but she needed to understand what kind of man he was.
(A man like the Penghou.)
Just as the village chief had said.
Kayou was harmless to harmless people and harmful to harmful people.
That was probably why the village chief had seen him as someone who had to be eliminated—even by killing.
"One question."
"What iiiiis iiiit?"
"Was the village chief really as awful a man as people say?"
"Hmm... How should I put it? At least before the smallpox outbreak, he was managing the village well enough."
That's probably right, Maomao thought. The children from Lady Hao's household had listened to the village chief when he came.
"I understand that what I did was dangerous and people are right to tell me to stop, but the one who started all the harassment was the village chief."
Maomao didn't really know what kind of person the village chief was. She did feel she had some small sense of what the chief thought of Keyou, though.
(He thought it was unfair.)
Keyou cured illnesses that couldn't be treated with curses. Keyou took measures to prevent smallpox.
So the chief hated Keyou, yet tried to imitate him. He attempted to inoculate children with variolation. Scabs from smallpox that were several years old had virtually no infectious power. But because there was one child who unfortunately did catch it, the whole fuss started.
What he did for the sake of others was treated as the work of a madman, he was chased around, and in the end, he must have come to despise Keyou beyond endurance.
(Oh, what should I do?)
The village chief was still a criminal, and that didn't change.
Even if what Keyou had done was itself criminal, there was no point in pursuing it now.
More than anything, Keyou was going to be someone useful in the field of medicine from here on out.
(I don't want to judge people based on whether they're useful or not...)
Maomao was the scheming type.
This entire conversation was probably being eavesdropped on by Suzume. In that case, she had no choice but to dump the whole thing on her.
"I'll just pray that only good people gather around Keyou."
"'I'll just pray' — that doesn't sound like you at all."
Maomao waved her hand and left the room.
Outside the room was Suzume, her perked-up hair bouncing as she stood there.
"Any reports?"
"No, nothing at all."
"That's a shame."
Suzume followed after Maomao.
"Maomao, you look tired, so why don't we go have dinner together tonight?"
"I'm not really in the mood."
"Too bad."
Maomao continued to harbor a lingering sense of unease.