Snake Bite (22 page)

Sherlock hadn’t given very much thought to his future when he got back to England. At some stage he would have to get a job, he supposed, but nothing really appealed to him. He
didn’t think he could do what his brother did – work for the Government. He wasn’t diplomatic enough. Going into a business had been a possibility, but now, thinking about the
callousness of these people who would start a war in order to make a profit, he promised himself that he would never work for any company that bought or sold goods.

Which didn’t leave very much, he thought despondently. Cameron must have been having his own dark thoughts about the USS
Monocacy
. He caught Sherlock’s eye and said quietly,
‘We have to try. At least we can get to the
Monocacy
by boat, and at least Captain Bryan knows us by sight. He might give us enough time to convince him.’

Wu waved at them from the jetty. Cameron and Sherlock walked out along the precarious wooden structure, feeling it creaking beneath their weight. At the far end, Wu introduced them to his uncle
and his uncle’s two sons. ‘He’s promised that we can take one of his boats for a journey upriver,’ Wu said excitedly. ‘But first he wants to be sure that we know how
to raise and lower the sails and steer it.’

Sherlock gazed at the nearest vessel. Quickly he traced the various ropes that held the sail back to their fastening points on the boat’s sides. Using the knowledge he’d so painfully
gained from the
Gloria Scott
, he calculated which ropes pulled the sail in which directions. Then, climbing into the boat, he quickly furled and unfurled the sail with precise, economic
movements.

Wu’s uncle nodded approvingly. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘You obviously know your way around a boat.’

‘Which way are the winds going to be blowing tonight?’

‘Upriver,’ Wu’s uncle said. ‘Inland. You’ll have a good steady night breeze pushing you along.’

‘Can I ask you something? Have you seen a large ship with a big wheel on the side? Has it come upriver recently?’

Wu’s uncle nodded. ‘What a strange ship that was,’ he said. ‘We all remarked on it. Its funnel was damaged. Never seen anything like it before, not in all my days.
Someone said it was built by foreign devils and powered by evil spirits.’ He smiled. ‘No offence intended.’

‘None taken,’ Sherlock said. ‘It
was
built by foreign devils, but it’s powered by steam engines.’

The three Chinese men glanced at each other. ‘Told you – evil spirits,’ one muttered.

‘How long ago did you see it?’ Sherlock asked.

Wu’s uncle thought for a moment. ‘Three hours?’ he ventured. ‘Maybe four.’

Sherlock cursed mentally. The
Monocacy
had a good head start on them.

Thinking back to the messages that he and Cameron had decoded, Sherlock asked, ‘Do you know a place called Snake Bite Hill?’

Wu’s uncle looked at his sons. They talked quietly for a moment, then the big sailor looked back at Sherlock and said, ‘Only place we can think of is near Wushan. It’s about,
what, thirty miles upriver? Something like that.’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said. He glanced at Cameron and Wu. ‘That’s where we need to get to,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s where it’s going to
happen.’

Within five minutes they were casting off and setting sail. The breeze pushed them away from the jetty across rippling water. Sherlock manned the sail while Cameron took the rudder and Wu sat at
the front, looking out for sunken tree trunks or other obstructions in the water.

It didn’t take long before they were out in the river itself, and Cameron was adjusting their course to take them in the direction they needed to go. The central channel of the river was
congested, but between them they managed to stay on the outside of the channel, making good speed. There didn’t seem to be any particular rules – sailors headed for wherever they wanted
to go, and dared everyone else to get out of their way.

As night fell something splashed in the water a few feet off the hull of the boat. Sherlock shuffled across the deck to take a look. In the moonlight, he could see a strange fish gazing up at
him with eyes that seemed almost human. The fish’s skin was a rubbery grey, and it had a long, thin mouth – almost a beak – that stuck out from its head. The mouth was full of
very small but very sharp teeth, and was curled up in what looked like a smile. It floated there, in the water, gazing up at Sherlock. Sherlock’s mind flashed back to fish he had seen in the
ocean, off the side of the
Gloria Scott
. Porpoises, someone had told him. Was this a porpoise too?

With a flip of its broad tail, it was gone.

‘What was that?’ Sherlock asked Wu, who was watching him from the front of the boat.

‘We call them “Goddesses of the River”. Seeing one is considered good luck. You should think yourself blessed.’

‘I’ll try.’

Being on water made sounds travel differently, Sherlock found. Every few moments he would hear a voice say, ‘Watch out!’ or ‘Careful there, you fool!’, and he would look
around, expecting to see a boat heading directly towards them, only to find that the speaker was hundreds of yards away and talking to someone next to them.

A sudden
crash
and a jerking of their own boat snapped Sherlock’s attention back to the present. A rough Chinese voice shouted, ‘May the spirits of the river-deeps curse your
descendants, you clumsy fools!’ They had collided with another boat. The owner – an elderly Chinaman with a mass of white hair – was gesturing at Cameron and cursing. Sherlock
grabbed a pole from the bottom of their boat and pushed the other one away, smiling in apology as he did so.

‘What happened?’ he said as the other boat pulled away, its owner still shaking his fist at them.

‘Sorry,’ Cameron said. He looked dazed. ‘I think I dropped off to sleep for a moment.’

‘Look, it’s been a long day,’ Wu Fung-Yi said. ‘A lot’s happened to all of us. If we keep on going like this we’re going to have a serious
accident.’

‘We need to keep going,’ Sherlock said. ‘We have to catch up with the
Monocacy
before that bomb goes off!’

‘If we hit something and sink, we’re not going to do anybody any good,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘And has it occurred to you that the
Monocacy
will probably drop
anchor and stop for the night? If they keep going in the darkness then they might plough right into another boat and sink it, or they might hit rocks by the riverbank and smash their own hull open.
If they stop and we keep going we might go right past them without realizing, and then we’ll never be able to warn them.’

Sherlock had to admit that their logic was compelling. In addition, he realized that he was exhausted. ‘Fine,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Let’s pull over to the side and get
some sleep. But we start again at dawn.’

The other two nodded. ‘Agreed,’ said Wu.

Cameron used the rudder to steer them to the nearest bank while Wu watched the water depth and Sherlock prepared to take the sails down before they ran aground. With the three of them working
together, they managed to guide the boat in safely. Sherlock jumped for the riverbank with a rope and tied the boat up to a twisted tree that was growing at an angle.

Looking out into the darkness of the river, he noticed a boat with two lanterns – one green and one yellow. It seemed to be tacking towards the shore a little way ahead of them. Presumably
whoever was in charge had decided to stop for the night as well.

Sherlock jumped back into the boat, feeling it rock beneath his weight. Cameron was fetching blankets out of the shack that was sat in the back of the boat, while Wu seemed to be unwrapping
something from a bundle of cloth that had been stowed beneath a seat. He handed a package to Sherlock.

‘Food. Uncle told me there was some here. He was saving it for himself for later, but he decided that we needed it more than he did.’

Sherlock looked at the parcel Wu had given him, while Wu handed another one to Cameron. It looked like a large leaf that had been wrapped around something sticky and tied up with string.
‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Lotus leaves filled with sticky rice and dried shrimp.’

Cameron had already unwrapped the lotus leaf and was stuffing rice and dried shrimp into his mouth with his fingers. ‘It’s lovely,’ he said through the food.

Sherlock tried it. Although the rice was cold and sticky it was still tasty, and the salty, fishy flavour of the shrimp gave it an added boost. It really was very good.

After they had eaten, and washed their hands in the river, the three of them settled down to sleep, wrapped in blankets. Sherlock suddenly realized how exhausted he was.

‘Something occurred to me.’ Cameron’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘We haven’t named our boat.’

‘Naming of a boat is a serious business,’ Wu Fung-Yi said. ‘It has to be done properly, with appropriate ceremony. Besides, my uncle may already have named it.’

Cameron wasn’t going to let it go. ‘We could call it the
Hudson
,’ he said, ‘after the Hudson River in New York.’

‘That is not a good name,’ Wu said. There was silence for a few moments, then he added, ‘What about you, Sherlock? Any ideas?’

‘I think we should call it the
Virginia
,’ he said quietly.

Nobody argued. After a few minutes Cameron started to snore, so Sherlock assumed that he had got the last word in.

Something went
splash
nearby. A fish? One of the ‘Goddesses of the River’, perhaps? Sherlock suddenly appreciated that he didn’t know anything about the local wildlife.
Was there anything dangerous? He raised himself up on one elbow to ask, but then lay down again without saying anything. Wu would have warned them if there was any danger. He should put his trust
in the Chinese boy and get some rest.

He realized, as he lay there, how difficult that was. He had never really trusted anyone – not helped by Mycroft constantly warning him about the dangers of doing so. He always assumed
that he knew best, but out here, in a country he wasn’t familiar with, he was going to have to trust Wu Fung-Yi to get them where they needed to go.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought to go to sleep on.

Stars twinkled in the black night sky. Wisps of cloud scudded across them like cobwebs blown by the wind. For a while he tried to identify familiar constellations and particular stars, but
everything looked different here. He wondered for a while if Virginia was staring at the same stars, but then he realized that she couldn’t be. She was nearly on the other side of the world
from him now. Whatever sky she was looking at was blue and sunny, not black and starlit.

He slipped into sleep so gradually that he didn’t even know it, and his dreams were a confused mish-mash of memories and faces. Matty was in there somewhere, and so was Amyus Crowe, but
they were cheering him on from the sidelines as he ran some kind of race: the problem was that he didn’t know where the finishing line was, or which direction he was meant to be running
in.

He woke up some time later. It was still dark. He wondered what exactly had woken him up – Cameron snoring, perhaps, or Wu talking in his sleep?

Something hit the side of the boat. It sounded like someone’s hand, or foot, brushing against the wood.

Sherlock’s every nerve was suddenly alert. The boat rocked as whatever it was clambered stealthily on board. Was it robbers – pirates, maybe? Local villagers deciding to see if they
could get any food or money from the three boys? Was it an animal, sneaking on board? A snake, perhaps? His imagination ran wild, painting all kinds of pictures of terrible things. He sensed,
rather than heard, whatever it was looming over him, watching him. He tried to breathe deeply, evenly, making it seem as if he was fast asleep. He could feel a gaze fixed on the back of his head
like hot coals. It was the most bizarre feeling.

Eventually he heard the intruder moving away. He yawned loudly, and turned over, keeping his eyes firmly closed on the assumption that the intruder would be looking at him to see if he was
waking up.

Silence for a few moments, and then the intruder started to move again. Sherlock gradually opened his eyes. For a moment everything was blurry and dark, but then he began to make out shapes
– the mast, the edge of the hull, the shack at the back of the boat and the shape of the rudder.

And something that hadn’t been on their boat earlier.

It looked like a person, but smaller. Sherlock could see shoulders, and a small head, silhouetted against the night sky.

It was bending over Cameron.

‘Hey!’ he yelled, sitting bolt upright.

Whatever it was turned suddenly to face him. The clouds chose that moment to move away from the face of the moon, and it was as if someone had suddenly turned a spotlight on to their deck.

It was a child, younger than any of the three of them; a girl. And she was holding something against Cameron’s throat.

Sherlock stared at the girl in amazement. She stared back, eyes full of some boiling emotion that Sherlock couldn’t quite identify – fury perhaps? Or maybe violent
frustration at being discovered?

Her skin was ashen-grey. Sherlock wasn’t sure why. Her hair and her eyes were grey too. Her arms and legs were thin, like sticks, and her body didn’t have an inch of spare fat on it.
Her clothes were the same colour as her flesh: a dusty grey. She looked like a little statue, standing there, poised to run. Only the flickering of her eyes as she looked around for a way to escape
gave away her essential humanity.

Sherlock’s attention shifted to the thing that the girl was holding. It was made of metal, but it looked a bit like a set of dentures – teeth and gums glinting in the moonlight, just
like the girl’s skin. There was some clockwork in there somewhere, and a spring, holding the two sides of the device apart. Sherlock could see something red and rubbery as well, hidden behind
the teeth. What on earth was it?

The girl’s eyes jerked sideways, to Cameron, and Sherlock realized what she was going to do. ‘Get back!’ he yelled, and Cameron threw himself backwards as the girl slashed the
metal teeth at his throat. The teeth passed a hair’s breadth from his carotid artery, snapping like castanets as the girl squeezed them together against the strength of the spring.