“Laurence!” Temeraire cried, and did manage to heave himself a little despite the weight of stones, tumbling all of them off their feet together, and straining he brought his head around and snatched the soldier with the dripping pole-arm in his jaws.
There was something dreadful in watching a man broken between those enormous jaws; Temeraire cracked his body like walnut shells, and flung the wreck of him to the ground. He roared again, that terrible shattering roar, and the soldiers involuntarily cowered back from it.
But he could roar only to the sky. He could not turn that power upon them, not without breaking apart the unstable slope and burying them one and all in a shared tomb, and aloft, the red dragon was closing in on her tiring adversary. Immortalis darted low beneath her, and tried to claw at her belly, but with striking speed she reversed herself again and caught him, claws tearing into Immortalis’s shoulders, driving him with a powerful thrust of her great body into the ground.
“Immortalis!” Little cried, anguished. The red dragon had seized him with her jaws by the back of the neck, just below his skull, and was shaking him like a rat terrier, a great clawed foot holding his thrashing body pinned. She would break his neck in a moment; then she would be free to do as she wished, and Temeraire and Arkady yet pinned into helplessness.
Then a roaring above, and a monstrous shadow falling: Kulingile came down with Demane and Junichiro and Baggy all three upon his back and his claws outstretched, the scarlet dragon an easy target for him. She gave an undignified squawk of alarm and let Immortalis go, but too late: Kulingile smashed her down into the ground. He closed his jaws midway down along her throat and wrenched her neck away from her body with brute force. Laurence heard the audible crack, and she collapsed into dead weight.
“Captain,” Demane cried from Kulingile’s back, his voice sharp and high with anxiety, “where is Sipho?”
“I have not the least idea,” Laurence said, grimly anxious himself; there was no sign of the boy, nor of his officers, and the cascade of rock that had buried Temeraire and Arkady would have crushed them like insects.
The would-be assassins were trying to flee, too late. Laurence had heretofore thought Kulingile of a remarkably placid nature, but that was not in evidence now as the great golden beast turned towards them: having been roused to violence and with Demane’s fear driving him, he hissed and swept the soldiers into a broken heap onto the ground with a few swipes of his massive talons, careless of them as a child with its toys; only a few of them groaned and moved a little, and soon they, too, were still. Junichiro leapt down from Kulingile’s back and drawing his own sword stood over the bodies, while Baggy cautiously collected away their blades.
“Sipho is here,” Temeraire said, “underneath me; I will keep him quite safe, only get Laurence back to the camp where he will be safe, at once; hurry!”
“I am certainly not leaving until I see you freed,” Laurence said.
“Are you sure you hadn’t better go, after all?” Little said to him, doubtfully, and Laurence, startled, looked at him. “Your head is all over blood.”
Laurence reached up to wipe the grime from his face, and finding his hand come away red with gore felt back to where his scalp hung open and wet. “Help me fold it up again,” he said. “A head wound is always a bloody nuisance; but unless my brains are out in the air, I suppose it will not kill me.”
Little gave him his neckcloth, to tie it up with; and Laurence settled himself by Temeraire’s side to wait out the slow, cautious labor. Kulingile scraped away the loose crumbling rock only a little at a time, so as to free Temeraire without risking the death of the trapped men below, if they had survived so long, buried alive; meanwhile Junichiro and Baggy wordlessly helped Little to get thick bandages from Immortalis’s belly-netting, to pack into his sluggishly bleeding wounds; the poor dragon lay heavily and breathing in gulps.
Temeraire also was silent, his head resting awkwardly upon a heap of loose-piled rock, breath wheezing a little through his nostrils; the rocks pressed in upon his sides and drove them inwards, forcing him to struggle for his air. Laurence stroked the soft muzzle while he waited. He had longed for the feelings which might have driven him to treason, having only the stark barren knowledge of it; here, seeing Temeraire so vulnerable to murder and treachery, he had instead been roused to sentiments of great violence, unexplained by reason. He groped after the truth of himself like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, watching shadows.