Snake Bite (4 page)

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 fighting, 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 clothes, 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.