Red Leech

Chapter Sixteen

Sherlock’s dreams were full of fire, falling from the sky, and the screaming of charred and stick-thin figures running around in chaos. He woke up after a few hours, still tired but unable to sleep any more.

The bedroom was one of three spare ones the hotel manager had found for them to sleep in. Sherlock had wondered if the empty train in the station had meant that the hotel would be full of travellers, but in fact the train had been hired as a special by Amyus Crowe and a small group of Pinkerton’s agents who were monitoring the situation.

As he lay there, his mind kept coming back to what was going to happen in a few hours. It wasn’t as if the men in Balthassar’s Army were necessarily evil — they just had a different idea on how they wanted to be governed. Invading another country was wrong, obviously, but did that mean they deserved to be wiped out like ants?

Mycroft would have found a way to stop it. Sherlock was sure about that. Mycroft was a cog in the machinery of the British Government, of course, but he had beliefs, and morals, and convictions. The same beliefs, morals and convictions that had been inculcated into Sherlock by their father, Major Siger Holmes of the King’s Dragoons. They were both Siger’s sons, and they had inherited his values in the same way that they had inherited his blue eyes.

He had to do something. But what? What could he do to stop the Army Corps of Engineers?

Maybe he could send a telegraph message to Mycroft, in England. He didn’t know how much that might cost, although he suspected it would be expensive, but he still had some money left from earlier. Mycroft could call in the American Ambassador, or something, and get it stopped.

Or could he? Would he? And, more to the point, did Mycroft have enough time? He was several thousand miles away, after all, and perhaps his superiors in the Foreign Office would be more concerned with preventing an invasion of a British territory than in saving the lives of men they had never even met.

Sherlock knew that he needed to get out there, to see Balthassar’s Army and the Army Corps of Engineers balloon force. Maybe he couldn’t do anything, but he certainly wouldn’t be able to here at the hotel. There, out in the grasslands, maybe something would occur to him.

But how to get there?

He could rent a horse here in town, he guessed. He could ride out to where the balloons were being launched from. He’d seen the location, marked on the map that Amyus Crowe had been consulting a few hours before. He hadn’t consciously memorized it but, like so many things that he read, it had just lodged in his brain.

Should he take Virginia and Matty? Their presence would be comforting, but he had a feeling that this was his battle. They cared about it less than he did, and he had no right to drag them into it.

He got up and got dressed in fresh clothes that Amyus Crowe had managed to find somewhere in town. They were still new and made him itch, but the thought of putting on the same clothes he’d been wearing for the past couple of days filled him with horror.

Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two other men in suits. They had guns slung on low belts at their waists. Sherlock assumed they were from the Pinkerton Agency. He slipped past them while they were distracted and headed out into the open air.

The boardwalks along the edges of the street were filled with people wandering back and forth or just standing and talking. Sherlock walked along with the flow until he saw something that looked like a stables. He went inside.

“Can I help you, son?” a voice said. Sherlock looked around. An elderly man came out of the darkness — bald apart from a fringe of white hair around the back of his head, and a bushy white moustache.

“I need a horse, just for the day,” Sherlock said.

“That’s convenient,” the man said. “I got a horse that ain’t had any exercise for a while. Looks like we got ourselves a perfect match.”

“How much?” Sherlock asked.

“Let’s call it a ten-dollar deposit, an’ nine dollars back when you return.”

Sherlock passed the money across, and the man led him to a stall where a brown mare patiently stood. She eyed him speculatively as the elderly man saddled her.

Sherlock glanced around the stables. Apart from the general tack — saddles, reins, stirrups — that was hanging from hooks, there was also a whole load of stuff that Sherlock didn’t recognize. They looked like weapons -bows, spears, axes — but they were decorated with feathers, and leather thongs.

“Mementoes of the fights we had with the natives over the years,” the man said, noticing the direction of Sherlock’s gaze. “The Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes gave us a lot of trouble when we was building this town. They collected our scalps; my grandpa and my pa collected their tomahawks, spears, knives and bows.”

Sherlock thought about what he was heading into — a hostile army, an attacking force and a wilderness where coyotes prowled. He didn’t want to take a gun, and he was pretty sure nobody would give him one, but some kind of weapon might be a good thing. “For another dollar,” he said, “could I borrow a bow, a quiver of arrows and a knife?”

“No,” the man said. He cocked his head to one side. “But five dollars would do it.”

Ten minutes later, Sherlock was riding out of the stables with a knife in his belt, a quiver full of arrows on his back and a bow strapped to his saddle. He thought he saw Matty and Virginia outside the hotel as he rode past, but they flashed by too quickly to tell for sure, and he wasn’t going to stop.

Remembering Amyus Crowe’s map, Sherlock struck out across country, at an angle to the train line. The landscape he was heading into was more hilly than the plains that the train line had been built across. He cantered along the edge of the foothills that emerged from the grasslands, rising up to a series of low, rounded peaks.

After an hour of riding through a landscape of bushes and small copses of trees he crossed a wide, shallow stream that flowed like a blue, sparkling ribbon from up in the hills. As his horse’s hoofs splashed the water and kicked up small pebbles he wondered if somewhere downstream the water had managed to cut its way through the soft rock to form the ravine that he, Matty and Virginia had crossed over the night before. The terrain in America was very different from what he was used to back in England: younger and more raw.

He had thought to pick up a leather water bottle from the stables before he left, and he stopped briefly to refill it and to let his horse drink its fill.

Judging by the sun it was now mid-afternoon, and judging by the map in his mind he was getting close to where the Army Corps of Engineers was setting up its camp. They would almost certainly post sentries, and he didn’t want to run into any of them. Chances were they would shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

Rather than keep skirting the foothills, Sherlock pulled his horse’s head around and headed up into the hills. If he was right, if he was where he thought he was, then he could get a good view down on to the camp from somewhere up there.

It took him another couple of hours of climbing up shallow slopes and crossing rocky patches before his horse came around the edge of a steeper section of hillside and Sherlock found himself gazing down on what it was he had come looking for.

Leaving his horse out of sight he crept forward, moving on hands and knees, until he could lie in the shelter of a large rock and stare down on the plain below.

The sun was dipping towards the horizon now, and the scene was partly illuminated by its red rays and partly by scattered campfires. By that mixed light he could see the Army Corps of Engineers’ camp spread out beneath him: a series of tents grouped in the centre surrounded by a cleared area of ground. Perhaps a hundred men were moving purposefully back and forth. On one side of the camp the horses had been corralled together in a makeshift stockade. On the other were the balloons.

The sight took Sherlock’s breath away. There were perhaps ten or twelve of the things spread across an area the size of a rugby pitch. Some of them looked like massive versions of the kind of baggy jellyfish that Sherlock remembered seeing from trips to the coast when he was younger, while others had been fully inflated into glossy spheres which gleamed in the waning light of the sun. Ropes and swathes of the same material — varnished silk, Sherlock recalled from his meeting with the Graf von Zeppelin on the SS Scotia — attached them to baskets beneath, and they were being inflated by pipes that led away from them to carts filled with gleaming copper tanks. The tanks were producing hydrogen, Sherlock remembered, from a combination of sulphuric acid and iron filings.

Thinking of the Graf von Zeppelin, Sherlock scanned the camp looking for his upright, Germanic figure. He had come across to America to talk about the military applications of balloons. It would be unusual if he wasn’t here.

The figures moving around were too small for Sherlock to make out faces, but he thought he saw a bearded man in a different uniform from the rest standing near the balloons, watching with fascination as they were being filled.

The campfires were being kept well away from the balloons, Sherlock noticed. That was a good idea — hydrogen was highly inflammable, he remembered from school. On the other hand, hundreds of metal spheres that looked like cannonballs but were almost certainly explosive devices were piled up near them. And in an hour or two, if the wind was still in the right direction, the balloons would be released, each with its own aeronaut, and they would drift silently across the desolate landscape towards the place where Duke Balthassar’s Army was encamped. And then there would be death and devastation on a scale that made Sherlock feel sick.

He had to stop it. He had to. He’d seen too much death in his life already. If he could stop people from dying then he would.

Hydrogen. Inflammable. The answer was there, but how was he going to do anything about it? If he tried to sneak down and set fire to the balloons then he would be caught and probably shot as a Confederate spy. There were guards placed in a circle around the balloons.

But there were no guards around the campfires on the other side of the camp, and from where he lay he could see that most of the tents had oil lamps in front of them, hanging from poles that had been thrust into the ground.

His mind raced as he began seeing connections between things that he’d previously seen as being separate. The solution was there in front of him. He had some of the things he needed, and the rest were down there, in the camp.

And the sooner he started, the sooner he would finish.

He made sure that the end of his horse’s reins were secure beneath a rock, and began the slow descent down to the plain. There was only a thin sliver of sun above the horizon now, and the shadows cast by the scattered rocks were long and black. He found he could keep quite effectively to them, only scooting across open ground when he had to.

By the time he got down to the plain the sun had vanished below the horizon and the sky was the colour of a fresh bruise. Most of the balloons were fully inflated, and there was increased activity around them.

Sherlock moved away from the balloons, towards the area where the campfires were clustered. Most of the Army Engineers in the camp were over near the balloons, standing just the other side of the cordon of guards, watching and waiting for the launch. Sherlock crept through the tents until he was looking out on to the campfires. Meat was roasting, stews were simmering, and nobody was looking his way. He looked around, straightened himself up, brushed the dirt from his clothes and then walked over to an unattended tent and unhooked an oil lamp from the pole outside. Then, for good measure, he took a second one from a pole nearby. Not from the tent next door — that would probably be noticed — but from one a little way away. Nobody called out to stop him, or ask what he was doing. His heart was beating twice as fast as normal, but he kept his face impassive and, when he turned to walk back, he walked slowly, keeping the oil lamps upright but wrapped in his jacket so nobody would see the lights moving.

Once in the safety of the tents he speeded up, heading back to the base of the hills. He glanced over towards the balloons as he went. They were all fully inflated now, and he could see activity as the Army aeronauts checked their maps and made their final preparations.

He climbed the hill as fast as he could, aware that he was carrying hot oil and flame, and that if he fell he might set light to himself. The wind was picking up, now that the sun had gone down, and without his jacket he was feeling cold.

His horse made a quiet whickering sound, welcoming him back to the flat area where he had left it. He put the oil lamps down, then crossed over to the horse and retrieved the bow and the quiver of arrows that he’d borrowed — well, rented — from the stable keeper.

He was going to need something to keep the flame going while the arrows flew through the air.

Wadding. Some kind of wadding.

He looked around, cursing himself for not having picked something up in the camp — a uniform jacket, or something. The only things he had up there in the hills were his clothes. He began to rip strips of material off his own jacket then tied them around the arrowheads. It wasn’t as if he was going to be trying to get them to stick in anything, after all.

Once he had ten arrows with their heads wrapped in material, he crossed back over to where he’d left the oil lamps and bought them over to the arrows. He thought for a moment, then snuffed out the flame on one of the lamps and opened it up so that he could dip the wrapped arrowheads in the oil, one by one.

A single lit lamp should be enough. He opened it up, so that the flame was exposed. It flickered in the breeze.

He took the bow and stood upright. It was dark enough now that he couldn’t be seen, and the flame on the remaining lamp was shielded by the rocks.

He took the bow and flexed it experimentally. The principle seemed obvious. A notch in the base of the arrow slotted into the cord, and he could pull the cord back with the fingers of his right hand, holding the bow in his left hand and flexing it as far as it could go. Then he would aim — high, because the arrow would follow a ballistic trajectory — and release the cord.

Time to try. Time for action.

He touched the tied-up strip of jacket at the head of the first arrow to the flame inside the oil lamp. The oil-soaked material caught fire instantly. He raised the arrow up and notched the cord into the base, then took up the tension, pulling the cord back while holding his left hand straight out in front of him, grasping the bow. He aimed towards the balloon that seemed to have fewest people around it, but he aimed over it so that the arrow would fall down on to it.

The cord bit into the fingers of his right hand. He could feel the bow trembling under the tension. The glowing material caused a bright spot in his vision that almost blanked out everything else.

Was he doing the right thing?

Too late to wonder about that now.

He released the cord. The arrow arced high in the air, reaching a peak and seeming to hang there for a moment before falling like a tiny meteor straight down on to the top surface of the balloon.

Nothing happened for several heartbeats; long enough that Sherlock was convinced that the burning material had somehow extinguished itself, or the arrowhead had failed to penetrate the varnished silk, or that the gas in the balloon wasn’t hydrogen at all but something else, something non-flammable, but then the material around the top of the balloon seemed to peel back like the petals of a flower, and Sherlock’s vision was blinded by a ball of flame that leaped up from the balloon and reached up towards the sky.

A tremendous shout welled up from the area of the camp. People were running around, throwing buckets of water and trying to douse whatever burning material was raining down on them, but the inferno was rising up, not falling down. Hydrogen was lighter than air, after all.

Sherlock grabbed another arrow and lit it, then quickly aimed at another balloon and fired. The tiny spark of the flaming arrowhead described a glowing line in the air as it flew, first up into the darkness and then down on to the sloping side of the second balloon.

This time he couldn’t see the material peel back, but the resulting fireball was equally as impressive as the first.

As chaos reigned in the camp below, Sherlock fired arrow after arrow at the remaining balloons. By the time he had run out, the air was filled with smoke and the ground was littered with the smouldering remnants of the varnished silk. And nobody had been hurt! He marvelled at the thought, but he couldn’t see a single person injured. Frantic and frightened, yes, but not hurt. The incandescent hydrogen had risen into the air, and whatever burning fragments of material had fallen to earth had been easily avoided.

He took a deep breath. The balloons would not be flying tonight, and it would take days, perhaps weeks to get more balloons to the area. By that time, Balthas-sar’s Army would either have dispersed or marched on Canada and been intercepted by the Unionist Army. He had succeeded.

Part of him wanted to do something about the pile of explosive devices that was sat at one side of the camp. They had survived unscathed. Sherlock had been worried that scraps of burning material might have fallen on them, setting them off and causing general carnage, but either they were more difficult to ignite than he thought or they were sufficiently far way that they had avoided any falling sparks or flaming cloth. He supposed he could creep back down and do something to them — pull their fuses out, or something — but what would be the point? They were useless, now there was no means of delivering them.

A shout went up from below. He glanced down, towards the camp. A man was pointing at him. The light from the burning hydrogen had revealed his presence. More people stared up at him. Some of them started running towards the slope that led up to his hiding place. Most of them were holding guns.

Ah. He was holding the bow.

Time to leave.

He turned and ran across to where his horse was tied. It was nervous and skittish — the reins to its bridle were pulled tight as it had tried to back away — but it wasn’t panicking yet. Quickly he retrieved the ends of the reins from underneath the rock that held them and pulled himself up into the saddle.

With luck, he could get back to town and pretend that he’d been there all the time. Nobody need know what he’d done.

He pulled the horse’s head around and headed away.

The journey down out of the hills was easier than the journey up. The horse seemed more sure-footed now, and it was glad to be getting away from the fire and the smoke.

The horse could see its way by the light of the stars, now the sun had set, and Sherlock let it choose its own path down. Once they got to the flat grasslands he could work out a course back to town.

As the horse picked its way through the rock-strewn landscape of the foothills, Sherlock found that the gentle rocking motion was causing him to nod off. The tension was draining away from him, leaving him empty and melancholic. He wasn’t looking forward to the long trek back to Perseverance.

Doubts began to set in as he rode. What if the Unionist Army failed to intercept the Confederate invasion force? What if the invasion went ahead and he’d facilitated it?

No, Amyus Crowe had told him that the Unionist forces were already preparing to stop the Confederates, if they advanced, but that Secretary of War Stanton had personally decided that he wanted the Confederates slaughtered. Unless something went badly wrong, Sherlock’s actions had only saved lives. They wouldn’t lead to a diplomatic incident.

Somewhere in the darkness, an animal screamed. The sound startled him. It sounded too much like a person screaming. It didn’t sound like a coyote. More like a big cat of some kind.

The horse was picking its way along the bottom of a gully between two steep slopes now. Sherlock thought they were close to the bottom of the hills, nearly ready to make their way across the open grasslands towards the town. The sides of the gully were just black shapes, with only the stars shining in the sky above marking where their jagged edges cut the night sky.

One of the jagged edges moved.

Sherlock jerked awake. Part of what he’d thought was the top of the gully had suddenly shifted sideways and pulled back.

Something was up there. Something was tracking him.

Nerves stretched and quivering, Sherlock looked around. Nothing. Just darkness, thrown into sharp relief by the starlight filtering down from above.

A pebble skittered down the steep slope, bouncing off the floor of the gully.

Sherlock’s horse was looking around now. It knew there was something else out there. Its ears were pricked up, and Sherlock could feel its muscles quivering beneath his legs.

The gully began to broaden out ahead of them, leading on to a flat section of rock with a sheer drop at the far side stretching down to the grasslands. Light from the low moon cut across from one side like a spotlight. Sherlock recognized where they were: despite the appearance of a sheer drop straight ahead, there was a path off to one side that sloped down to the grasslands. He and the horse had come up it earlier.

Another pebble fell, bouncing from rock to rock. Sherlock’s horse edged to one side, and speeded up. It wanted to be out on the plains as badly as he did.

Something above Sherlock’s head screamed, and leaped down on them from the blackness.