Laurence realized then in sudden horror that Temeraire was not merely buried but helpless to free himself; Temeraire could not move, and the soldiers might carve him at their leisure like a side of slaughtered beef. He drew his sword and leapt for the would-be murderers. The ground was perilously uncertain, a loose slide of pebbles beneath his feet. Still, he scrambled for the top of Temeraire’s back and charged the man jabbing at the great column of the spine.
There were several other men drawing close down the unsteady slope, but Laurence thought for the moment of nothing but the enemy immediately before him. He dived under the man’s swing, that already-bloody blade shaving painfully along the back of his head, taking skin and hair with it; but Laurence came up inside the man’s guard and, seizing his shoulder, drove his sword up between the loose plates of armor, through and through the man’s body to his back. The soldier was a young man, only a scruff of beard yet grown; his eyes and open mouth stared and clouded, and the halberd fell away with a clatter to the rocks as Laurence heaved the body off his blade.
Laurence looked down at Temeraire’s wound: the scales had resisted, but the flesh was hacked enough to let grey bone show through, stained with the dark dragon blood that ran away in rivulets down Temeraire’s back. The enormous lump of the backbone, the size of Laurence’s trunk nearly, had defied the halberd’s strokes so far, but five men more were nearly upon him, and if unopposed they could hack away at it, like woodsmen together felling some great monster of the forest.
“Laurence!” Little called, and Laurence reached down to catch the end of the halberd, which Little had taken hold of, and was holding outstretched to him. Little used it to scramble more easily up the slope of rocks to Laurence’s side; he drew a pistol from his belt, and his own sword.
Above them, Laurence saw Immortalis feinting bravely around the Chinese beast, which outweighed him so greatly. But the red dragon was not merely the stronger but the more maneuverable, its long lanky body snapping with great agility back upon itself almost, allowing it to turn sharp in mid-air, and its wings had something in common with the structure of Temeraire’s own, which allowed him to hover. Immortalis could merely hold it off briefly, and not hope to defeat it.
“If Immortalis went back to camp, to raise the alarm?” Laurence said to Little.
Little looked up at Immortalis with a grim expression, and back at Laurence, shaking his head. “That last day of flying, those fellows could manage twenty knots,” he said. “A Yellow Reaper can’t get above sixteen. If he turns tail, he’ll only be brought down by the hindquarters.”
He spoke with a hard flat tone, as though he were not speaking of the death of his beast, but when one of the soldiers came down off the slope, Little leveled his pistol and fired with a look of very savagery, distorting his face which in ordinary repose bore almost a poet’s half-dreamy look. He hurled the pistol into another man’s face, and sprang forward to meet the halberd and cut him down.
Laurence leapt with him, to take advantage of the unsteady footing the men would have as they came off the slope. He felt all the same useless fury he saw in Little’s face: to see Temeraire brought so low, so hideously, and by a pack of cowards and traitors—murderers indeed—burned through him with an intensity that came from no rational font. Laurence had seen his ship sink; he had suffered that—he was sure he had suffered it, though the name slid from his mind. He remembered sea-water pouring in waterfalls through the gunports; he remembered sitting in a boat rowing, rowing, while the masts slid in ragged tatters beneath the waves.
The Goliath, he suddenly thought, as his sword met the halberd-stave with a clanging; and he jerked his head in a shake to send away the false memory—he had not served on Goliath since the Nile; Goliath had not sunk there. But the feeling stayed on his tongue: black powder ash and the smell of burning sails, and the roaring torrent. And yet that pain, that sorrow, was distant and removed by comparison.
He set his teeth and flung his enemy’s weapon wide by sheer brute force, heaving it up and clear, and risked the brief opening, overbalancing himself for an extra inch of reach, so that the tip of his sword tore open the man’s throat. Blood spilled down his neck along a bloody line, but as Laurence completed the stroke and stumbled away, it suddenly spurted red with ferocious energy. The soldier clapped a hand up to the gush and then fell to knees and toppled away over the side.
Laurence caught himself on Temeraire’s back with one hand and tried to twist himself up to his feet; but not quickly enough, and he felt another blade catch his sword-arm and bite into the meat of the muscle. He jerked away from the hot pain, falling, and rolled along Temeraire’s back hearing Temeraire above roaring in fury.