Snake Bite (5 page)

Sherlock bit into the meat. For a second he could taste the goat and the peanuts, but then his lips started to tingle. He debated whether to spit the meat out or swallow it. In the end he
swallowed it, if only so that he didn’t offend the stallkeeper. He could feel the burning sensation all the way down his throat.

‘Sauce is also made with chilli and lime,’ the stallholder added with a big smile. ‘You need drink to cool mouth down? Coconut milk do cooling job really good.’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said, ‘but no thanks. And I admire your technique for getting customers to buy your drinks as well as your food. Very good. Very clever.’

He walked on, waiting for the burning in his mouth to subside. After a while he felt a prickle on the back of his neck. It felt like someone was watching him. He didn’t believe that there
was some kind of sixth sense that meant he could tell he was being watched even though his back was turned, but he was prepared to believe that he might have caught a glimpse of a watcher out of
the corner of his eye and that part of his brain was trying to alert him to something. He turned, letting his gaze roam across the crowd of sailors, Dutch and English settlers and locals.

One man stood out. He was wearing a grubby linen suit and a straw hat, and his white shirt was creased and sweat-stained, but the most obvious, and strange, thing about him was that his face and
hair were completely obscured by a black gauze veil, like the ones worn by beekeepers. The veil was tucked into a silk cravat which was tied loosely around his neck. The cravat was wilting in the
heat and the humidity. He was leaning on a cane and seemed to be staring at Sherlock, although the black veil made it difficult to see anything more than the shape of his head.

‘Can I help you?’ Sherlock called, feeling a shiver run through him. He thought it was just the memories of being watched from afar by the agents of the Paradol Chamber that were
making him edgy, but as the man started to walk across to where Sherlock was standing the feeling became more intense.

The man stopped a few feet away. ‘Are you from the
Gloria Scott
?’ he asked. His voice was thin and reedy, like the sound of an oboe, or a high note from a church organ.

Sherlock nodded.

‘My name is Arrhenius,’ he said. ‘Jacobus Arrhenius. I will be a passenger on your ship. Please to tell me where the Captain may be found.’

‘He . . . he is currently ashore, sorting out our next cargo,’ Sherlock said. ‘I think he intends to be back soon, if you could wait.’

‘Thank you,’ Arrhenius said. ‘I will wait in the shade by the gangway.’ He glanced up at the sky – or, at least, that was the direction his head turned in. The veil
made it impossible to tell what he was actually looking at. ‘The sun and I do not get on well. Not at all.’ He turned away, then looked back so that he could see Sherlock again.
‘You know my name, but I do not know yours.’

‘Sherlock. My name is Sherlock Holmes.’

‘I am pleased to meet you,’ Arrhenius said. He extended his right hand, which was encased in a black leather glove which ran up inside his sleeve so that no flesh was visible.
Sherlock took the hand gingerly. Beneath the soft leather it felt strange – not like a normal hand.

‘I will see you again,’ Arrhenius said before moving off, and Sherlock wasn’t sure if that was a promise or a threat.

He watched the veiled man’s retreating back, then, when Arrhenius had been swallowed up by the crowd, he moved on.

After a while Sherlock got bored by the stalls. The heat and the humidity were weighing him down. He wondered whether to explore the town further, or to go back to the ship. Eventually he
decided to go back: it wasn’t as if he was going to be living in Sabang for any length of time, and being back on board would allow him to continue with his violin practice, Cantonese lessons
and
T’ai chi ch’uan
in peace for a while.

When he reached the gangway he turned and looked around the bustling quay. He could feel the same tickle on his skin as he had earlier. Somewhere, Arrhenius was watching him again. Eventually he
spotted the veiled man in the shadows beneath a palm tree. When he saw that he had been spotted, Arrhenius bowed slightly to Sherlock.

A few minutes later Captain Tollaway and Mr Larchmont returned from their meetings in Sabang, and Sherlock watched from the deck as Mr Arrhenius stepped out of the shade to greet them. Sherlock
couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but neither of the two sailors seemed at all amazed by the black all-encompassing veil or the gloves. Either they had met him before,
Sherlock reasoned, or they had been warned in advance.

The three men came up the gangway and disappeared into the depths of the ship. Sherlock presumed they had gone to the Captain’s cabin. About half an hour later a cart arrived alongside the
ship, pulled by some kind of big-horned cow. When Mr Arrhenius appeared at the side of the ship to watch the contents of the cart being loaded on board Sherlock concluded that it was his
luggage.

One box in particular seemed to concern the Dutchman. It was made of wood and had holes drilled in the top. Arrhenius came down the gangway and walked behind the local labourers as they carried
it on to the ship. The wind changed direction briefly, blowing towards Sherlock, and he caught a whiff of a strange, musty odour. The box vanished down a hatch and presumably towards
Arrhenius’s cabin, as did the rest of his luggage, and the strange smell vanished with it.

More carts began to turn up with crates – bigger ones this time. Rather than being carried on board, the crates were attached to the ropes hanging down from the two nearest bamboo cranes
and then hoisted up into the air. Mr Larchmont had mentioned coffee beans earlier, and Sherlock assumed that was what these were.

It took the rest of that day and a significant portion of the next for the crates to be lifted on board the
Gloria Scott
and lowered into the hold through the deck hatches. Sherlock
watched during the breaks in his violin,
T’ai chi ch’uan
and Cantonese classes. With few sailors on board, and the Captain and Mr Larchmont eating with the local Dutch townsfolk
most of the time, Wu Chung was short of things to do, and so he enthusiastically took Sherlock under his wing.

Sailors began to drift back to the ship in ones and twos at midday on the third day. Sherlock assumed that some kind of message had gone out. There were some that Sherlock didn’t recognize
– it looked as if Mr Larchmont and the Captain had recruited some Dutchmen and Englishmen left there by a previous ship as replacements for the men who had died in the storm. By mid-afternoon
they were fully crewed again, and after Mr Larchmont had signed off some paperwork on the quayside the
Gloria Scott
cast off the lines that were holding her against the dock and began to
manoeuvre out into the clear waters of the harbour.

Next stop Shanghai, Sherlock thought.

There was a different feeling on board the ship on the last leg of their voyage from Sabang to Shanghai. The sailors seemed more eager, happier. They knew that they were close to their
destination, which meant they were close to the point when the ship would turn around and head back to England, where most of them had families. The presence of the new sailors was a factor in this
different feeling, of course, but they quickly integrated into the crew, as Sherlock had done.

And there was Mr Arrhenius, of course. He seemed to spend a lot of time on deck, staring at the distant horizon. Once or twice, when Sherlock passed him by, he nodded in greeting. The other
sailors obviously avoided him, and Sherlock heard mutterings in the evening singalongs that he was not human but some kind of demon beneath the veil. The nervousness of the crew got to such a pitch
that Mr Larchmont had to call a meeting of all the sailors and reassure them – in his usual gruff tones – that Mr Arrhenius was as human as the rest of them, and he merely suffered from
a disease that had disfigured his skin.

Mr Arrhenius always had his meals in his cabin. Wu Chung took him a tray twice a day – usually something better than whatever the crew were having. The crew saw this as another thing to
mutter about, but it seemed only fitting to Sherlock – after all, the man was a paying passenger.

Three days after leaving Sumatra, Wu Chung asked Sherlock to take some food to Mr Arrhenius’s cabin. The tray had two plates on it, one of chicken stew and one of raw fish. Puzzled,
Sherlock manoeuvred his way along the ship’s corridors until he reached the cabin near the front where Arrhenius spent his time. He knocked with one hand, balancing the tray with the other,
and waited until Arrhenius opened the door.

Sherlock’s arrival appeared to have taken Arrhenius by surprise. He wasn’t wearing his hat, or his veil. Sherlock saw that his face and scalp were hairless, but that wasn’t the
most disconcerting thing about him. No, the most disconcerting thing about him was the colour of his skin. It was a silvery-blue, and as the light from the oil lamps in the corridor shone on the
man Sherlock saw that the whites of his eyes were also the same colour. It was as if he was a metal statue come to life, and Sherlock found himself taking an inadvertent step backwards.

‘Yes?’ His voice was as high and as piping as Sherlock remembered.

‘I have some food for you, sir.’

Arrhenius just stared at him. ‘You are the boy from the docks, yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The cook, the Chinaman, usually brings my food.’

‘He’s busy, sir. He asked me to bring it.’

‘Very well.’ Arrhenius seemed annoyed, although Sherlock couldn’t work out why. The Dutchman reached for the tray.

‘Would you like me to put it on a table for you?’ Sherlock asked.

‘No – just give it to me.’

Sherlock handed the tray through the doorway. He turned to leave, but as he did so he saw something moving out of the corner of my eye – a shape, about the size of a dog, rapidly slipping
out of sight in the shadows behind Arrhenius’s back. As the thing moved Sherlock could hear a clicking noise. He glanced at Arrhenius to ask him what it was, but the Dutchman was staring at
him with an expression that clearly indicated that he wanted Sherlock to leave. Confused, Sherlock backed away. The door closed in his face.

Fiddler was walking past as Sherlock stood there, thinking. Sherlock caught him by the sleeve. ‘Does our passenger have a pet of any kind?’ he asked.

Fiddler scowled. ‘What, that devil-creature?’ He shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ he said. ‘But if he does then it’ll be some kind of familiar from the
depths of hell!’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said. ‘Very helpful.’

As he moved away his foot caught something and he accidentally kicked it towards the bulkhead. It made a rattling noise. Curious, Sherlock bent down to see what it was. For a moment he thought
it was a tooth, fallen out of someone’s mouth – a common thing with sailors, he had found – but it glinted silver, like Mr Arrhenius’s skin. He picked it up. It was a
pointed cone, slightly curved, and it appeared to have a hole running through it. He didn’t have a clue what it might be, so he slipped it into his pocket in order to examine it later. If
someone had lost it, maybe he could give it back to them – and find out what it was into the bargain.

It was later that day when one of the crew spotted something on the horizon, and called an urgent warning out to Mr Larchmont.

‘Sails!’ he yelled from his position in the rigging. ‘Sails on the horizon!’

Sherlock was working alongside Gittens at the time, pulling frayed ropes apart into fragments that they would then plug between the planks of the ship to help keep them watertight. He glanced
over at the dark-faced lad. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. ‘There’re all kinds of ships sailing across the ocean. We’ve never had a warning before.’

‘We’re in the South China Seas,’ Gittens said grimly. ‘There’re Chinese pirates all across these waters. They plunder any ship they find, and they ransom the
passengers if they look important.’

‘What if they don’t look important?’

‘I heard a story, once,’ Gittens confided. ‘Old sailor. He’d been on a ship that got boarded by Chinese pirates. They were ransacking the place and they believed the
captain had hidden some jewels from them, so they tied him between the masts, a rope tied tight around his right thumb and a rope tied tight around his right toe, and they hauled him up between the
foremast and the mizzenmast. Then they took turns riding on him like he was a swing.’

‘Ah,’ Sherlock said simply, but inside he was sickened at the casual brutality that Gittens had described.

Gittens grinned, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘They normally start with the youngest,’ he said. ‘That’ll be you, then.’

‘And you next,’ Sherlock pointed out.

He glanced over to where Mr Larchmont was standing by the rail, telescope to his eye. Larchmont turned, and his expression was as black as the storm they had only recently escaped.

‘Sails on the horizon,’ he confirmed. ‘It’s pirates, lads, and we’re in for a fight!’

Larchmont passed by and clicked his fingers at Sherlock and Gittens. ‘You two,’ he snapped. ‘Look lively now, and break out the weapons from the armoury.
Spread them among the crew.’ He slipped a rusty key from around his neck, where it was hanging from a cord, and handed it to Gittens. ‘Get on now – quickly. I’ll send
sailors down to collect them. When you run out of weapons, start issuing belaying pins. When you run out of belaying pins, issue hooks and chains.’

‘Armoury?’ Sherlock questioned as Larchmont stalked away to shout at another sailor. ‘I didn’t even know we
had
an armoury.’

Gittens laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t start getting ideas,’ he said. ‘It’s not like this is a Naval warship. The armoury is just a cupboard near the Captain’s
cabin, and the weapons are things that’ve been collected on various voyages over the past couple of years. There’re some swords, some knives, and a couple of muskets and rifles so
rusted they’ll probably explode in a man’s hands as soon as the trigger is pulled. There’re also the axes that we use to chop timber up an’ splice ropes, and there’re
rumours that the Captain has an Army revolver that he picked up in a bazaar somewhere which he keeps under his pillow in case of mutiny.’ He laughed again, but there was no humour in the
sound. ‘Oh, and I suppose we can count Wu Chung’s cooking knives as well. Let’s hope he’s been sharpening them regular-like.’