“You are not, you are only trying to show away and take another prize,” Temeraire said, “when you know perfectly well we are only trying to take the transports, and all we have to do with the frigates is to keep them off until the transports have struck: now pray fire these for me, as I drop them.”
“Oh, very well; if you will come back to this one, after, and tell them in French to strike; I do not think they can understand me,” she said, flying over to him: he shook the caltrop-sacks open, and she blazed away at them mid-air, so the iron tips of the things were half-melted as they fell down upon the deck of the frigate, and all the gun-boats, and so became stuck on to the wood. Temeraire hovered, watching in satisfaction: the crews had dived away to avoid the rain of smoking-hot iron spikes, and now could not easily manage their boats.
He looked up sharp, however: there was a fresh roaring, around the other side of the second transport, but this time of guns and not of dragons: and Maximus was bellowing in pain.
Temeraire leapt into the air: one of the frigates which he had thought disabled by the rocks had managed to turn broadside to the Maréchal’s dragondeck, and had all-too-cleverly reserved her fire until the moment when Maximus had landed to take off the caltrops: all her guns had gone at once, and poor Maximus had been exposed quite: a gaping rent showed in one of his wings, where the membrane hung loose as a piece of cut sailcloth, and he was bleeding black from shoulder and haunch and side. The Maréchal’s foremast also had been badly shattered, and splinters stuck porcupine-like from his head and neck: he swung his head back and forth with his eyes shut tight, bellowing, and meanwhile the frigate was surely reloading all her guns.
But even as Temeraire flew towards them, Lily was already at work: she dived low and spat a long running stream of acid along the deck, directly above the sides which faced the Maréchal, and cries rose up with the hissing steam as the droplets ate their way down into the gundeck and spattered the crews. Temeraire came following in a rush, and roared up the ocean furiously: the frigate reeled away on a great twenty-foot swell, and the second broadside erupted only stuttering, to hurl the cannonballs into the ocean some ten yards ahead of the Maréchal’s keel.
“There!” Temeraire said, triumphantly, and then cried out himself, shuddering, and nearly dropped into the sea: there was a dreadful burning pain just beneath his wing-joint, so that to stay aloft was agony with each stroke; he cried out gasping again, and abruptly Kulingile was there beside him, to take his weight, and saw him down to the deck of the Maréchal beside Maximus.
“But Laurence,” Temeraire said, gulping a breath, “Laurence—”
“He has not got himself shot,” said Gaiters, Maximus’s surgeon, who was laboring away urgently and with his arms bloodied to the shoulder, “so just you hold still there, until one of us can come and look at you; for God’s sake,” he roared up at the young ensign who was temporarily his assistant, and attempting to assist him in stanching the wounds, “pack that sailcloth in harder; stand on it, if you have to.”
“I am not going to sit on deck while we are still fighting,” Temeraire protested, and craned his head around to look at the injury—perhaps it was not quite so severe as all that, and he might—“Ow!” He stopped: even turning so far was dreadfully unpleasant; he could feel the hooks of the ball tearing at his flesh. “Maximus, are you very badly hurt?”
“I am sure I will be perfectly stout when they have patched me together,” Maximus said, with a grunt. “I should not have roared at all, only it took me by surprise.”
“You will be stone-dead in an hour if we do not stop this blood, so you will shut your eyes and keep quiet, damn you,” Gaiters said furiously. “Where is that fire-breather? Why don’t she make herself useful: I will need this cauterized, as soon as I have dug out this ball—”
“Ough,” Maximus said—not really a complaint, Temeraire thought loyally; it was only a startled noise—as Gaiters very nearly put his head into Maximus’s side, and came out dragging the great iron cannonball with him in both hands, hissing himself in pain: it was still hot, and he dropped it on the deck and rolled it away over the side with his foot.
Iskierka landed, in answer to their signal, and heated the iron bar which Gaiters held out to her with tongs; Maximus reared up his head and yelled—not even the most loyal interpretation could call it anything else, sadly—as it was clapped to the wound, sewn up already with catgut.