Snake Bite Page 3

  Mr Larchmont was standing a few feet away. He glanced over at Sherlock.

  ‘Enjoy your little sleep?’ he asked.

  Sherlock knew what he was expected to say. ‘Ready for duty, sir!’ he snapped, climbing to his feet.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Larchmont said. He looked up at the foremast. ‘I see some loose lines there. I would be much obliged if you would tighten them for me.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir!’ Sherlock headed for the rigging, but turned back and looked at Larchmont for a moment. ‘How many sailors did we lose, sir?’

  Larchmont shook his head. ‘Too many,’ he said quietly. ‘And good men, all of them.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Despite the exertions of the previous day, Sherlock awoke early. Lying in his hammock, gently swinging from side to side in the relative darkness of the sleeping area – which was barely more than a widened section of corridor with hooks screwed to either side of the wall where the hammocks could be slung – he listened for a while to the gentle background noise of creaking timbers, waves slapping against the sides of the ship, sailors snoring, snorting or talking in their sleep, and the blundering sounds of men either getting out of their hammocks or getting into them. The business of running the Gloria Scott went on all day and all night, of course, and as one shift was rising another was going to sleep. Bells were rung to signal the beginning and end of shifts, and Sherlock’s wasn’t for a while yet.

  Eventually Sherlock slid out of his hammock and dressed in the same clothes he had worn the previous day, and the day before that, and all the days before that leading back to his abduction. The only washing the clothes got was the soaking from the waves which came over the side of the ship. Ducking beneath the line of canvas hammocks that, strangely, almost mimicked the ship’s sails in their swollen, occupied state, he made his way to the galley.

  Wu Chung was absent. Instead, another sailor – a cadaverous individual named Scorby – was dishing out a mixture of hard biscuits, oat porridge and dried meat. Sherlock took a plateful, sat at a vacant bench and quickly scoffed it down. He wondered what had happened to the Chinese cook. The last time Sherlock had seen him, Wu had been going towards the depths of the ship. Had he survived the storm, or had something happened to him? Perhaps he had accidentally hit his head on a low beam when the Gloria Scott had been listing from side to side under the heavy hand of the wind. Or perhaps he had gone down to the bilges – the dark, wet depths of the ship closest to the keel – and somehow fallen over and drowned in the stagnant water that sloshed back and forth down there.

  Sherlock pushed his empty plate away and got up. His place was instantly taken by another sailor. Heading back to where Scorby was still serving, he asked, ‘Where’s Wu?’

  ‘Wu Chung?’ Scorby asked, as if there was another Chinese sailor named Wu on board who Sherlock might have been asking after. ‘Up on deck, mate. ’E’s doin’ some kind of strange dance.’

  Sherlock felt a sense of relief wash over him. Wu wasn’t exactly a friend, but he was one of the few sailors to have taken an interest in him. If Wu had died then who else was going to teach Sherlock Cantonese?

  He headed up the ladder towards the deck. The bright light made him blink and screw up his eyes. When they had adjusted he looked around, checking for any damage that the storm had left. It was as if nothing had happened. The sails were full, the masts and yards were intact, and the deck was as dry as it ever got. The sailors on shift were moving around normally. Despite the violence of the previous night Sherlock got the impression that tropical storms were something that happened, were dealt with and were then forgotten. Everyone and everything moved on.

  Wu Chung was standing in the centre of the deck. He was poised with his weight on his bent right leg. His left leg was extended straight to the deck in front of him. His right arm was raised in a hooked shape, almost cradling the back of his head, and his left arm was extended to match his left leg. The fingers were together and curled, with the palm facing upward, as if he was gesturing someone to approach him. The pose looked as if it was putting significant stress on the muscles of Wu’s right leg and back, but he kept as stationary as a statue for a minute or more before moving slowly to another pose.

  As Sherlock watched, Wu Chung took a series of statue-like poses interspersed with slow movements. As Scorby had said, it was something like a dance, but there was more to it. Sherlock began to detect repeated elements within the poses – blocks and strikes, as if Wu was engaged in a very slow fight with an invisible opponent.

  Eventually, he straightened up, letting his arms fall to his sides. He was breathing deeply, but not heavily. He glanced over to where Sherlock was standing.

  ‘You see me practise, ha?’ he said in English.

  ‘I did. What is it that you are practising?’

  Wu smiled. ‘What you think?’

  ‘I think it was like a fight, like boxing but different. I think it was like shadow-boxing.’

  Wu nodded, and bowed slightly towards Sherlock. ‘Very good. Most people say I am dancing badly.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you do it before.’

  ‘You have never been awake this early before. I do this every morning for one hour.’

  ‘Why?’ Sherlock asked simply.

  ‘Ah, that is a good question.’ Wu came over to stand beside Sherlock. ‘In your country, boxing is something men learn so they can hit other people and make them bleed. In my country, T’ai chi ch’uan is something children learn so they can calm their minds and master their bodies.’

  ‘T’ai chi ch’uan?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘It means “boundless fist”, or maybe “great extremes boxing”.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ Sherlock asked.

  Wu gestured to an empty area of deck over to one side. ‘Let us sit. There is much to tell, and I am not as young as I once was.’ Once they were both settled, cross-legged on the deck, he started to speak, and Sherlock listened, fascinated. ‘I start by telling you that there are two different styles of fighting in China. There is Shaolinquan, which is all –’ he waved his arms around wildly – ‘action and activity, all about the body doing things, and there is Wudangquan, which is all about the mind controlling the body.’ He sniffed derisively. ‘Those who practise Shaolinquan leap about with strength and force, but people who are not good at this kind of training soon lose their breath and are exhausted. Wudangquan is unlike this. We strive for quietness of body, mind and intention. We seek that still point in the centre from which all activity must begin.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sherlock admitted.

  ‘Good,’ Wu said. ‘That is a start.’ He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ‘I have told you a little about China, but you should know more about the Chinese before you arrive.’ He glanced around at the other sailors. ‘These men are all fools. They do not care about where they are going. They want everywhere they go to be the same – same food, same language, same kinds of people. They are not interested in difference, only sameness. You, you are different. You look for differences, and are interested in them. You are more intelligent than them.’

  ‘I’ve always been interested in learning things,’ Sherlock admitted.

  ‘In your country, boxing and God and food and nature – they are different, yes?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ Sherlock admitted, not sure where Wu was going.

  ‘In China, they are all parts of something. We believe that everything is connected. Changes to one thing affect everything else.’ He smiled.

  Wu kept talking, and Sherlock listened, but he wasn’t sure that he understood much of what was said. It didn’t really matter. Wu was obviously passionate about his beliefs, and Sherlock found himself entranced by his friend’s eloquence. On a couple of occasions Wu shifted into Cantonese when he didn’t know the correct English words, and Sherlock found that he was still following the conversation. What Sherlock did understand was that T’ai chi ch’uan was something between a way of meditating and a way of fight
ing, and that it was a reflection of a deeper religious aspect of Chinese life.

  Eventually, when Wu ran out of words, Sherlock asked, ‘Could you teach me?’

  ‘I am already teaching you – Cantonese. You want me to teach you cooking now?’

  Sherlock smiled. ‘No – not cooking. I want you to teach me T’ai chi ch’uan.’

  Wu stared at him for a long moment. ‘You want me to teach you to fight?’

  Sherlock recognized the trick in the question.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to teach me how to control my body with my mind.’

  ‘Right answer.’ Wu smiled. ‘Then I teach you that. The fighting will come with it.’

  The weather got hotter as they hooked around the bottom point of Africa – the Cape of Good Hope – and headed back towards the equator. The skies returned to their pure blue, and the sun beat down on the deck and on the sailors, drying the one to the point where the wood began to crack while raising blisters on the backs and shoulders of the other. The sea grew quiet again, and porpoises began to accompany the ship, as they had done before, racing ahead of it like a pack of hunting dogs. Sherlock sometimes caught glimpses of other things paralleling the ship, beneath the waves, dark shapes that seemed as big, if not bigger, than the ship itself, but they never broke the surface. Were they sharks? Or maybe whales? He had read about whales. Or were they some other kind of life that nobody had yet given a name to? He didn’t know, but he desperately wanted to.

  The days blurred into one another. When he wasn’t working or sleeping then Sherlock was practising the violin, learning Cantonese from Wu Chung or following the slow-motion movements of T’ai chi-ch’uan that Wu Chung rehearsed on deck every morning. Sherlock was beginning to see that if he took the graceful movements and speeded them up then they really would make an effective form of defensive fighting – blocking punches and then returning blows with either the hands or the feet. He could also see that by practising the movements slowly at first, so slowly that his muscles sometimes began to scream under the strain, he was building up a memory of them. If he ever had the opportunity to use this martial art for real then he could see how his body would automatically follow the movements that it had memorized without him even having to think about it.

  Why had something like T’ai chi ch’uan never been developed in England? he wondered. The closest thing England had to a martial art was boxing, and this thing that Wu was teaching him was so much more effective than boxing. Were there other types of martial art? he wondered. Did other countries have their own, different versions?

  When Sherlock was working he was concentrating so much on his tasks that he could see nothing else around him. But on those occasions when he had some time to himself he sometimes, in the evening or the early morning, noticed the ship’s captain, Tollaway, standing on the rear deck making observations of the sky. He used a brass device that looked like a cross between a small telescope and a large set of compasses. He seemed to be observing stars. Sherlock remembered something that he had read once about navigation at sea, and decided that the thing the Captain was using was a sextant.

  As the ship ploughed on through the waves, the horizon a line that merely separated one shade of blue from another, it was hard to believe that they were making any progress. Maybe the Gloria Scott was sitting stationary on the surface of the ocean, and the sense of movement was an illusion caused by the waves and the feel of the wind on their faces. Only the billowing of the sails indicated that something was actually propelling them forward.

  Sherlock found himself joining in more and more with the sing-songs in the evening. After the sailors received their ration of watered-down rum – something for which Sherlock found he was acquiring quite a taste – they would gather together and sing sea shanties. Sherlock’s developing skills at the violin were much in demand – so much so that a sailor everyone called Fiddler, who had lent Sherlock his instrument, was relegated to the sidelines. Sherlock’s excellent memory meant that he could remember all the words as soon as he heard them, and he discovered to his surprise that he had a fine baritone singing voice.

  Sherlock found that there were whole stretches of time – hours, in fact – when he didn’t think about home, about Mycroft and about his friends – Amyus Crowe, Matty and Virginia. Was he coming to terms with his situation, he wondered, or was it just some kind of mental self-protection mechanism – his mind avoiding subjects that were too painful to think about?

  Sherlock didn’t know how long it was after the storm, but one morning Mr Larchmont called everyone to the stern of the ship, where he stood on the raised area of deck and looked down at them.

  ‘It’s been a long journey, lads,’ he shouted, ‘and there’re more to go, but the Captain reckons we’re just a spit away from Sumatra now. He intends to dock in Sabang Harbour. Sumatra is controlled by the Dutch, of course, which at least means that the food will be edible, they’ll take the Queen’s coins and we’ll be able to make ourselves understood. Some of you have been there before – for those of you that haven’t, all I’ll say is that Sabang is a rat-hole infested with all kinds of tropical diseases that can rot a man’s fingers and toes off within a day, and that you’re far better off staying on the ship than going ashore. The only thing worse than Sabang is the jungle that covers the rest of the island. Not that I expect that to stop you from going ashore. We’ll be there for two days, picking up a cargo of coffee beans and taking on a Dutchman as a passenger.’ He gazed around the crew, who had visibly brightened up at the news they would be hitting land soon. ‘That’s all. Back to work, all of you, and hold off on dreamin’ of those beautiful Sumatran maidens until land is in sight.’ He turned back to the wheelhouse, and Sherlock heard him saying, only slightly less loudly than his previous shouting, ‘Tack five degrees to starboard and then maintain a steady course.’

  The next day, land was sighted. It started as a dark line fractionally above the horizon, much as the storm had done, but instead of running from it Mr Larchmont ordered that a course be struck directly towards it. How did he know that it was land? Sherlock wondered. As they got closer, however, it became clear that he was right. Soon the whole crew could see what looked like hills, but which soon resolved themselves into mountains covered with lush green vegetation.

  They arrived in Sabang slowly, and accompanied by a great deal of waving from children on the quayside. In comparison with Dakar – their last port of call – Sabang was a bustling mass of people heading in all directions on all kinds of business. Men wore what looked like brightly coloured sheets wrapped around their waists. Some wore jackets to cover their chests, others went bare-chested. The women wore the same kinds of brightly coloured sheets, but wrapped around their whole bodies rather than just from the waist down. All in all, the place was a riot of colour and activity.

  After they docked, the first order of business was for the Captain, accompanied by Mr Larchmont, to go in search of their cargo of coffee beans. The crew were allowed to disembark, and within a few moments the Gloria Scott was empty apart from the two sailors left behind to guard it, and Wu, who said that he preferred to sleep.

  Sherlock walked down the gangplank with some trepidation. As with the arrival at Dakar, he found that making a transition to walking on a surface that wasn’t moving up and down was pretty tricky. It took him a good few hours to stop feeling queasy. Looking at the men who passed him on the quayside and in the street, he could tell which ones were sailors who had recently disembarked. They were the ones who were staggering from side to side, anticipating waves that never came.

  The quayside was lined with cranes made out of bamboo which had been tied together using some kind of local rope. They looked pretty ramshackle compared with the more substantial cranes that Sherlock had seen in the docks in London and Southampton. He wondered how often they failed, and how many men were injured each time.

  In the shadow of the cranes he noticed stalls selling all kinds of food and other goods, like clo
thes, and knives, and musical instruments, and wooden puppets. Sick and tired of the restricted ship’s rations, Sherlock decided to look at what was on offer. Remembering the advice that Mycroft had once given him about never taking the first hansom cab he saw in case it was a trap, Sherlock went past the first few stalls and stopped at one further down the line.

  The man running the stall was small, brown-skinned and dark-haired. He smiled at Sherlock with a mouth that seemed to contain too many teeth. He held out a stick on which were some chunks of meat coated in a brown sauce. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘You try, yes?’

  Sherlock gazed dubiously at the proffered morsel. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Satay Ponorogo,’ the man replied. ‘Is goat. Goat in sauce.’ He frowned, and turned to the next-nearest stallholder. They talked in what Sherlock presumed was Sumatran, if there was such a language, for a few moments. The stallholder turned back. ‘Is sauce made with peanuts,’ he said.

  Sherlock shrugged. He’d never eaten goat in England, although as far as he was concerned it was no different from eating lamb or mutton. He had tried peanuts when he was in New York a year or so back and liked them. ‘All right,’ he said, and handed over a coin. The stallholder passed the stick to him, along with some change.

  Sherlock bit into the meat. For a second he could taste the goat and the peanuts, but then his lips started to tingle. He debated whether to spit the meat out or swallow it. In the end he swallowed it, if only so that he didn’t offend the stallkeeper. He could feel the burning sensation all the way down his throat.

  ‘Sauce is also made with chilli and lime,’ the stallholder added with a big smile. ‘You need drink to cool mouth down? Coconut milk do cooling job really good.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said, ‘but no thanks. And I admire your technique for getting customers to buy your drinks as well as your food. Very good. Very clever.’