Snake Bite Page 6

  The pirate took a step backwards. Still holding the papers, he twisted around and lashed out with his right foot, raising it high enough that if it connected it would break Sherlock’s nose. His body leaned backwards to maintain balance. Anticipating what was going to happen, Sherlock dropped to his hands and bent left leg, and scythed his right leg around parallel to the floor, knocking the pirate’s own right leg from beneath him. The pirate fell, sprawling clumsily. The papers flew out of his hand and landed beneath the table.

  Sherlock was amazed. It was as if his body already knew what to do without his brain having to tell it. Thank heaven for Wu Chung’s gentle instruction.

  The pirate scrabbled across the deck, heading for the papers. Whatever they were, he wanted them badly. And Sherlock wanted to stop him just as much. He grabbed hold of the pirate’s right foot and pulled him back. The man’s fingers clutched at the carpet, but when it became obvious that he couldn’t stop himself moving he rolled over and kicked out viciously. The heel of his boot caught Sherlock on his cheekbone. A lightning bolt of red-hot agony shot through his head, blurring all of his senses and all of his thoughts.

  Hands grabbed him around the throat and started to squeeze.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Spikes of pain shot up Sherlock’s neck and down into his chest. His heart was pounding but his blurry vision was narrowing into a dark-edged tunnel.

  He brought his hands up between the pirate’s forearms and then, with all his remaining strength, knocked them apart. The grip on his neck loosened. He sucked in huge gulps of air until the pirate’s hands snaked back around his neck and began to squeeze again.

  Sherlock’s vision was restricted to a spot the size of a coin held at arm’s length. His skin and his muscles tingled as though someone was poking needles and pins into every square inch of it. He could hardly raise his hands, they felt so heavy.

  Desperately, blindly, Sherlock reached out for the pirate’s face. He clamped his fingers on either side of the man’s head, and put his thumbs where he thought his eyes were. When he felt his opponent’s eyelids, squeezed shut beneath the pads of his thumbs, he pushed as hard as he could.

  The pirate screamed. His hands vanished from around Sherlock’s throat. He pulled away, leaving Sherlock to fall backwards. Dimly Sherlock was aware of a scuttling, a blundering, as if the pirate had tried to get to his feet and run out of the cabin but had run into the wall and the door frame on the way. Sherlock rolled over and got to his hands and knees, then pushed himself up until he was standing. His vision was coming back now. The cabin was deserted. He put a shaking hand on the table and leaned there for a few moments until he thought his legs could take his weight without crumpling.

  The roll of papers was beneath the table. The pirate hadn’t taken it when he left the cabin.

  When he felt strong enough he bent down and picked the papers up. He was about to put them back on the table and take a closer look when he noticed a box in the corner. It was the one he’d seen loaded on to the ship with Mr Arrhenius’s belongings. There was something in it, scuttling around. Before he could investigate, he heard a voice from the doorway.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’

  Mr Arrhenius was standing in the doorway. He was holding a gun, and frowning.

  ‘One of the pirates got in here,’ Sherlock said, feeling a painful rasp in his throat. ‘I followed him in. We had a fight. He ran off. I don’t know where he went.’

  ‘I saw him stagger out on to the deck,’ Arrhenius said. He raised his gun and tapped it against his forehead, beneath his veil. ‘I . . . stopped him, then I came in to see what he had been doing here.’

  ‘He was trying to take this,’ Sherlock said, holding the roll of papers up.

  ‘Was he now?’ Arrhenius said. There was something strange about his voice, and he was looking oddly at Sherlock.

  ‘What is it?’ Sherlock asked, feeling bolder now that he had got his breath back.

  ‘Nothing for you to concern yourself with.’

  Arrhenius extended his hand for the papers. Sherlock handed them over. He still desperately wanted to know what they were, but he knew that the strange passenger wasn’t going to tell him.

  ‘What’s happening on deck?’ he asked.

  ‘Captain Tollaway and the rest of the crew are turning the tide,’ Arrhenius declared. ‘It seems to me that they are going to repel the boarders. You should go and join them.’ He glanced around the cabin. ‘I must see if anything else is missing.’

  Sherlock headed out on to the deck. A crumpled body lay to one side. It was the pirate who had attacked Sherlock in the cabin. Sherlock looked at him for a moment, then turned away. He didn’t feel any grief, or remorse, or fear. In fact, apart from the pain in his throat and the pounding of his head he didn’t feel anything.

  Mr Arrhenius was right – the crew seemed to be beating back the pirates. A handful of bodies were scattered around the deck, contorted in various positions, and a few of the pirates appeared to be withdrawing, injured.

  ‘Avast!’ Larchmont’s voice yelled from the other side of the ship. ‘Withdraw to me, laddies!’

  Sherlock watched in confusion as the crew of the Gloria Scott disengaged from their individual fights and backed across the deck towards Larchmont. They were winning. Why disengage from the fight now?

  The crew shifted, and a path momentarily opened up between Sherlock and Mr Larchmont, and Sherlock suddenly realized what was happening. Larchmont was standing by the rail, and he was holding a strange contraption. It was a metal tube about the length of a man’s arm, sealed at one end and open at the other. It was pivoting on a metal knob which was attached to the rail. The knob somehow fitted into a recess in the tube. Sherlock had seen the metal knob before, while he’d been working on deck, and he had wondered what it was for. Now he knew. Gittens had said they had no cannon on board, but he had been wrong. There was one – a small one – and Larchmont was holding it. He was pointing it at the pirates.

  ‘Light it up,’ he said grimly. A hand holding a lit taper emerged from the throng of crewmen. The taper touched a hole at the sealed end of the cannon.

  Mayhem ripped across the deck.

  Whatever was in the cannon, it wasn’t a cannonball. Sherlock guessed it was probably a length of metal chain, along with nails and bits of scrap.

  Those pirates who, miraculously, were not hit by the blizzard of metal turned and ran. The others . . . well, Sherlock didn’t even want to look. There would be a lot of clearing up to do later.

  The crew let out a ragged cheer.

  ‘Well done, lads!’ Larchmont shouted. ‘Extra rum for everyone! Now make sure the motherless sons of the devil have really gone!’

  Sherlock joined in as the majority of the crew crossed to the other side of the deck. They clustered against the rail, watching in disbelief. It was true – the pirates were casting off the lines that bound them to the Gloria Scott, and their ship was pulling away. The pirates on deck were shouting curses at the crew of the Gloria Scott and shaking their fists, but they were a lot more subdued than they had been earlier. There were fewer of them as well.

  Sherlock felt sick, and his legs were suddenly weak. He leaned on the side of the ship and fixed his gaze on the distant horizon, waiting for the sensation to subside.

  Why was he feeling like this? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in danger before. In the past couple of years he’d been chased, knocked unconscious, drugged, locked up in a lunatic asylum and attacked variously by men, dogs, mountain lions, lizards, falcons and bears. It had been an eventful few years. So why was he reacting this way now?

  Because, the logical side of his brain told him, he was a long way from home. Nobody was going to leap in at the last moment to save him – not Matty, not Mycroft, not Amyus Crowe and not Virginia. He had never relied on their help before, but in the back of his mind he’d always known that if his intelligence and strength weren’t enough to carry the day then one of them would be there
for him. But not now. Not here. And not for a long time to come.

  The full weight of loneliness descended on him like a leaden cloud, and he found his eyes stinging with hot tears. If he died out here, on board the Gloria Scott, thousands of miles from England, then nobody would ever know. Even the other sailors would forget about him within a few weeks.

  ‘Dangerous situation,’ a voice said beside him. ‘I am gratified that you came through it alive.’

  Wu Chung was standing there, gazing out across the water with a faint, enigmatic smile on his face. He had a scratch on his shoulder which had bled on to his cook’s apron, and there were scratches on his face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sherlock asked.

  Wu Chung nodded. ‘There was a fight,’ he said. ‘I won.’

  ‘T’ai chi ch’uan?’ Sherlock asked, imagining Wu Chung in full combat, fighting off an opponent with subtle movements of his hands and feet.

  Wu shook his head. ‘No – I used a frying pan. Unarmed combat is all very well, but if the universe in its infinite wisdom provides a weapon to hand then it would be rude not to use it.’

  ‘I was in a fight as well,’ Sherlock said.

  ‘I can see. Your neck looks like someone has tenderized it with a meat hammer, and your voice is as hoarse as a man who has been smoking rough tobacco for many years.’

  ‘I used the skills you taught me. They worked.’

  ‘Of course they did,’ Wu said, still gazing out across the sea. ‘I am a good teacher, am I not?’

  He turned away, still without glancing at Sherlock’s face, and walked back across the deck. It was only then that Sherlock realized that he couldn’t be sure whether they had been speaking in English or Cantonese.

  Sherlock spent the rest of the day on activities that he hoped he wouldn’t remember for very long – swabbing blood off the deck, throwing the bodies of pirates overboard, and sewing shrouds of sail canvas around the handful of sailors from the Gloria Scott who had perished in the battle. By the time the sun touched the horizon the deck was clear and there was little sign that anything untoward had happened, apart from the row of canvas-wrapped bodies lined up on the deck. Captain Tollaway read from a Bible, and the bodies were consigned to the ocean. The shrouds were weighted so that they would sink.

  The sailors were in the mood for singing that night. Captain Tollaway had ordered the rum ration tripled, which made the sailors more than usually rambunctious, and they obviously wanted to blot out the memories of the pirate attack by any means they could. Sherlock found himself playing jig after jig on the cracked violin that Fiddler had lent him. He missed notes and sometimes segued from one tune to another without realizing, but the sailors didn’t seem to notice. As long as there were rum and music they were happy.

  Even while he was sawing away at the old violin, surrounded by drunken sailors singing at the tops of their voices, Sherlock’s mind refused to stop thinking. He found himself trying to work out why the pirate who had raided the Arrhenius’s cabin had made straight for the strange spider’s-web diagrams. The implication was that he had known that they were there, and that he had some reason for wanting them. But that would imply either that the pirate had taken advantage of the completely accidental coincidence that his ship and the Gloria Scott were at the same point in the ocean at the same time, or that the whole attack had been deliberate – that the pirates had known in advance which ship they were going to attack. That suggested some kind of conspiracy above and beyond normal piracy. How could the pirates have known that the Gloria Scott was the ship they wanted to attack?

  There was something very strange going on here. He wished he had somebody to discuss it with, but he didn’t trust anybody on board any more than he had to.

  What he wouldn’t give to have Mycroft, or Amyus Crowe, or even Matty to hand.

  A barely concealed sense of tension hung over the Gloria Scott for the remainder of the voyage. The crew kept casting worried glances at the distant horizon, keeping watch for more pirate ships, and both the Captain and Mr Larchmont spent considerably more time pacing up and down on deck than they had before the attack, trying to reassure the men by their presence. The crew were having to work harder as well. At the end of each extended shift, Sherlock climbed into his hammock exhausted, so tired that he slept dreamlessly until the bell was rung for his next shift.

  During a break, a few days after the attack, he was standing at the rail and looking out to sea when he realized that somebody was standing beside him. He turned his head, expecting it to be Wu Chung, or perhaps Fiddler. A shiver ran through him when he saw that it was Mr Arrhenius.

  He was still wearing his black beekeeper’s veil beneath his wide-brimmed hat. Sherlock could just make out the silhouette of his face beneath. His black leather gloves gripped hold of the rail. He seemed to be staring at the same point on the horizon as Sherlock.

  ‘I believe we should be seeing land soon,’ he said.

  ‘According to the Captain, we have only a day or two until we arrive in Shanghai.’

  ‘Landfall can’t come soon enough,’ Sherlock replied quietly. ‘This voyage feels like it’s gone on forever.’

  Arrhenius nodded. ‘It has certainly been eventful,’ he admitted. He was silent for a while, then he said suddenly, ‘I believe I owe you an explanation.’

  ‘About what?’ Sherlock hoped that it might be about the papers the pirate had been after.

  ‘About my appearance. I understand that it shocked you, seeing me without my veil that time when you brought food to my cabin. I apologize.’

  Sherlock shook his head. ‘You don’t owe me anything. I admit that I’m curious, but you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.’

  ‘But still . . . I know how superstitious sailors get. Others have seen me, in unguarded moments, without my veil.’ He laughed sadly. ‘They probably think that I am some kind of supernatural creature – a demon, or a vampire perhaps. If I explain my condition to you, perhaps you can reassure them.’

  ‘I doubt they would listen to me about anything,’ Sherlock said dubiously. ‘I’m still pretty much an outsider on this ship. But I’m happy to give it a try, if that’s what you want.’

  Arrhenius nodded. ‘I would appreciate that. Thank you.’ He paused, and Sherlock got the impression that he was searching for the right words. ‘My skin has not always been this colour,’ he said eventually. ‘When I was younger, it was the same colour as yours.’ He glanced sideways at Sherlock. ‘Well, perhaps not as tanned. Anyway, business affairs meant that I did a lot of travelling to other countries – Africa, Egypt, South America . . . If you name a port in any country on the globe I can guarantee that I have been there.’

  ‘I used to want to travel,’ Sherlock said. ‘Until I tried it. Now I can see why my brother prefers to stay at home.’

  ‘Travel broadens the mind,’ Arrhenius said, ‘but it has its disadvantages. Hot countries in particular breed diseases more virulent than anything that exists in England, or in Holland. You may have heard about the terrible effects of cholera and typhoid and the bubonic plague, but the effects of the little known black Formosa corruption are horrible to observe, and as for Tapanuli fever . . .’ He shuddered. ‘Watching a man dying of Tapanuli fever is like watching a man whose skin is slowly melting away from his body. Truly a terrible way to go.’

  ‘You’ve never . . . caught any of those diseases yourself?’ Sherlock asked after a few moments’ silence.

  ‘Have you ever heard of silver being used to prevent disease?’

  Sherlock shook his head.

  ‘Silver has had some medicinal uses going back for centuries,’ Arrhenius continued. ‘Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher who is said to have been the father of medicine, wrote that silver could prevent illness and could help in the healing of wounds. The Phoenicians, who sailed the world long before either your country or mine had a navy, are supposed to have stored water, wine and vinegar in silver bottles to prevent them from spoiling. I
have even heard of people putting silver coins in milk bottles to prevent the milk from going off, believe it or not.’

  ‘And you’ve been treating yourself with silver?’ Sherlock asked, fascinated.

  ‘It seemed . . . logical,’ Arrhenius said. ‘It seemed to me, based on everything that I researched, that it made sense. Silver prevents disease. So, every day for the past ten years I have taken a drink of colloidal silver – that is to say, of silver dust suspended in castor oil. In all of that time I have not been ill. Not one single time.’

  ‘But . . .’ Sherlock prompted.

  ‘Yes, there is always a “but”. In this case, over time the silver particles have collected in my tissues – most notably in my skin and my eyes. I am told, by the specialists that I have consulted, that the condition is called argyria. It is apparently quite rare.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘How ironic, that I should avoid so many other diseases only to fall prey to this one.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Sherlock asked.

  Arrhenius shook his head. ‘Not in the slightest. It is . . . what is the word? A disfigurement, nothing more. It does not hurt, and I suffer no ill-effects other than the change in the colour of my skin. To be frank with you, if I knew then what I know now, I would make the same decision. To look strange, as I do, is unfortunate, but to never suffer from any disease, not even a cold . . . that is truly something worth having.’

  ‘What happens if you stop taking the silver? Will your skin recover?’

  It looked as though Arrhenius was shaking his head, behind the veil. ‘Sadly, no. The minute particles of silver have become embedded in my flesh. There is no going back. Not that I ever would.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything Sherlock could say to that, and the two of them stood there for a while in silence, looking out at the ocean. Eventually Arrhenius walked away, leaving Sherlock with his own thoughts.

  Naively, Sherlock had expected there to be a moment when land was sighted as a dark smudge on the horizon, accompanied probably by a strong cheer from the crew and the breaking out of more rum. In fact, first a small island, barely larger than the ship, was seen in the distance. Then another. After a few hours there were ten or twenty islands on either side of the bows, and Mr Larchmont ordered the sails to be reduced to slow the Gloria Scott down and give him more control over the steering. They picked their way slowly among the islands. The mainland seemed to sneak up on them. For a while it looked like another, larger, island. By the time it became clear that it was more than that, distinct hills were visible in the hinterland behind the coves and harbours.