Snake Bite

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sherlock was amazed at how wide the Yangtze was, especially compared to the other rivers he had seen, like the Thames in London or the Hudson in New York. The far bank seemed miles away. Mist wreathed it, rising up from the paddy fields and making it look like some mystical fantasy land. Hills rose up on either side of the river, leaving it to wind through gradual, graceful curves which meant that it was impossible to see for more than a mile or so to either side.

‘Third longest river in the world,’ Cameron said proudly. ‘It starts off in the Tibetan highlands and flows for six and a half thousand miles before it gets to the ocean.’ He glanced sideways at Sherlock. ‘What? I’m not supposed to be interested in the place where I live?’

Sherlock could see hundreds, maybe even thousands of boats on the river. Some of them were so small that they could take only one man with a paddle; others were so large that they had three or four fan-like sails and carried a full crew.

Along the banks were hundreds of flat-bottomed boats that seemed to have houses on board. Or at least shacks. Sherlock realized these weren’t boats for travelling: they were boats for living on. These were villages that had been built out into the river and then built up, bit by bit.

The boys scanned the river for the USS Monocacy, but there was no sign of it. Sherlock was sure that if it had been there then they would have spotted it.

‘There!’ Wu pointed off to their left, at a thin bamboo jetty that projected out into the river past the point where the boat village ended. Three boats were tied up to the jetty. ‘That is where my uncle lives.’

‘Then let’s get down there,’ Sherlock said.

The three of them headed downhill, the earth squishing underfoot. After a few minutes they passed the boat village and were at the jetty. Wu gestured them to stay by the bank and headed out to where three Chinese men were working on a boat. The biggest man, who had an extravagantly long black moustache, grabbed Wu as he came close and gave him a huge hug. He was grinning, obviously pleased to see his nephew.

Wu started to talk, and the men listened. Sherlock looked around. The riverbank plunged into the water pretty steeply just where he and Cameron were standing. Plants grew directly out of the water all the way along the riverbank, some looking like wild rice and some looking like bamboo. There were even flowers floating on the water, and when Sherlock looked closer he could see webs of stems supporting the flowers beneath the surface.

It all looked so beautiful, with the sun low in the sky and the misty hills across the other side of the river. It was difficult to reconcile the beauty with what Sherlock knew was going to happen soon. Somewhere upriver was an American ship crewed by a few hundred American sailors. If the bomb on board went off then they would probably all die, and that would only be the start of it. The US Government would send in the US Navy, there would be a blockade, the Chinese Emperor would probably order his ships to defend the country, and before anyone knew it America would be at war with China, just so some businessmen could get a better price for their imports, and pay less for their exports!

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.