Chapter 112: Brandy and Mandrake Root
For the common folk of Candon, wine was not a luxury; it was a vital tonic. The raw alcohol was a blessed anesthetic, a brief, merciful reprieve from the crushing weight of a day’s labour. It allowed them to forget, for a few precious hours, the gnawing fatigue and the endless worries, to sink into the simple numbness of sleep. And in a Europe that seemed to lack for fresh vegetables, wine also served the purpose of fruit juice, supplementing their grim diets with vitamins, sugars, and other nutrients—a necessary, if crude, balance to maintain their bodies against the constant onslaught of hardship.
So, while the wine stall might be guilty of some false advertising, its cheap vintages were a genuine lifeline for the crowd of commoners lined up to buy it, a balm for both body and soul. A few copper coins would buy a cup; a dozen or so would fill a wineskin or a bottle brought from home. A single, comforting draught back in a cold hovel could quench both thirst and the biting chill, and even offered some small benefit to the body.
In a way, it was an act of sympathy, a form of charity for the impoverished masses. The queue was a grim tapestry of humanity: dust-covered workers with hollow eyes and ragged paupers whose bones seemed ready to pierce their thin skin. To rob them of this, their only solace, was to invite consequences I couldn't begin to imagine.
I had seen the food Jared had brought me these past few days, and it was a diet utterly devoid of balance. Most of the time it was black bread, hard as a brick; a slight improvement was a greasy sausage or a sliver of cured meat. The best meal had been a single salted fish he had stolen.
I had reminded him several times to buy more fruit, even reciting the old adage from my world, “An apple a day keeps the sickness away.” But in Jared’s mind, fruit was still an incredible luxury, a daily indulgence reserved for the gentry who lived in a world apart from our own.
It seemed I couldn’t change his thinking overnight, and I understood he couldn’t accept it so quickly. Once we found a safe, comfortable place to settle down, once we had the leisure to pursue a life beyond mere survival, I would slowly consider making fruit platters and vegetable salads for him.
“Parula, do you want to buy some wine?” Jared asked. He had seen me staring at the wine stall for a long time and thought I had made my choice.
“No, I need it for brewing a potion. I can’t use this kind of wine. I need something with a higher proof, something purer,” I said. As a solvent for a potion, the purer the alcohol, the better. But it couldn’t be pure spirit, since it was meant to be drunk. A high-proof liquor was needed as the base. Brandy, gin, vodka, whiskey—all would do. The witch’s notes mentioned these types of liquor. Vodka was especially suitable; it was originally a medicinal spirit, distilled from barley, with a very high alcohol content.
Unfortunately, we were not near Russia, so vodka was hard to find and very expensive. To use it for a potion would be a terrible waste. In the end, I chose brandy, the easiest to find in the market. Brandy was a distilled fruit wine. Though apple or cherry wine would work, in wine-rich France and on the Iberian Peninsula, distilled grape wine was overwhelmingly the most common, and the cheapest.
So, in the end, I still chose a form of wine. And the price of a refined, distilled spirit like brandy was considerably higher than that of a crudely fermented table wine.
“Sir, how much for the brandy?” I asked, walking up to the stall. The wine was all in barrels; one only had to turn the tap, and it would flow out.
“Little girl, can you handle brandy? Why not have some grape juice instead?” the man behind the counter laughed. There was no malice in it, just a simple jest. It was a rare sight indeed, for a girl so young to ask for brandy by name.
“That’s none of your concern. How much to fill this bottle?” I produced a bottle Jared had scavenged with one hand and flicked a silver coin with the other.
The man’s eyes lit up. “Well now, I didn’t realize. A rich little lady. Forty coppers, and I’ll fill it for you.”
He was definitely overcharging. I tried to haggle with him, and in the end, we settled on a price that was more acceptable to both of us: thirty coppers a bottle.
The man took the bottle, whistled, and held it to the brass tap. With a twist, a stream of reddish-brown liquor gurgled out, quickly filling the bottle to the brim.
Now that I had the base spirit, I took out my list. The next ingredients were spices like rosemary, ginger, and sage. These could be bought directly. There was a spice shop in the market, its shelves lined with small compartments filled with all manner of different spices. But these spices were even more expensive than the wine. This time, it cost me more than three silver coins to buy everything I needed. And the next ingredients were even more troublesome.
The Cat’s Eye Potion required the eyes of a fish. Why a potion called Cat’s Eye needed fish eyes, I had no idea. My main frustration was, did I really have to buy a dozen fish just to go home and gouge out their eyes?
“Well, it’s not out of the question. Parula can eat them all anyway,” Jared joked. I couldn’t believe even Jared was now teasing me about my appetite. Hey, that was going too far!
And the potion required fresh fish eyes. I didn’t know what the notes meant by “fresh.” Did it mean I couldn’t use the eyes of a salted fish, or even a dead one? Did they have to be dug out and boiled on the spot?
In the end, I bought ten small, live fish, each about the size of my hand, and carried them in a water-filled skin. Thankfully, Iberia was a peninsula, so fish were cheap. And since no one really liked to buy such small fish, it didn’t cost much, just a bit of trouble.
The materials for the Potion of Fortitude required powdered Wagreah Ore, but I had no idea what that was. I doubted anyone in this market sold such a thing, so I had to put it aside for now.
The ingredients for the blue mana potion required the root of a Mandrake. In the witch’s sketch, I saw her drawing a serrated-leafed plant being pulled from the earth, but its fat root had a human face, contorted in a cry or a scream. Could such a bizarre plant really be for sale? As I thought this, after wandering around the market for a while, Jared actually found a place that sold Mandrake.
The shop that sold the Mandrake was a plant nursery, or more specifically, a shop that sold strange and exotic flowers. According to the owner, these were all rare and wondrous plants brought over from the New World.
In the shop, I saw a flower shaped like a pouch that could produce music, a thorny vine that writhed in the sunlight, and a mushroom that sprayed a fragrant mist.
This was the first time I had seen a shop openly selling supernatural species, and the customers were all admiring these strange plants as if it were perfectly normal. A few were even listening to the music the plants produced. It truly surprised me. Or was I being too sensitive? Perhaps these plants were just a natural part of this world, a normal existence. Perhaps the customers were long used to them, and it was I who was making a fuss over nothing.
The Mandrake was placed on a table, planted in a pot. I was still worrying if this was the same Mandrake from the witch’s notes when the shopkeeper reminded me, “Customer, if you wish to buy the Mandrake, please be very careful. The Mandrake will scream loudly when it leaves the soil. Hearing it for too long can shake a person to death. Please be very careful not to pull it directly from the pot.”
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