Iskierka came winging back to help look—she had Granby, latched on to her back; she had not lost her captain. And she had Ferris also aboard, even though Ferris was Temeraire’s—but Temeraire could not be properly annoyed by that; there was no room in him for anything so small at the moment.
Gerry piped faintly from his back, “I see him! I see Demane, and the captain, too,” and Temeraire plunged at once to snatch them both from the water, with the scrap of wood that seemed quite shockingly, painfully small to have been their only support.
“Give him here!” Kulingile demanded at once, hard on his heels and circling anxiously. “Demane, are you well?”
“He is too chilled to speak,” Laurence said—at least, it seemed he said it; his voice did not sound at all like himself, very hoarse and grating, and he stuttered a little. “You must wait until he has warmed again.”
“I’ve a tarpaulin, sir, if you will wrap up in that,” Roland said, reaching up to help him and Demane step down from Temeraire’s claw onto his shoulders. “And we might get some of our gear off the dragondeck, I expect, before she goes under: most of it was tied down.”
Temeraire at first wondered what Roland meant; then he looked back at the ship. Water was pouring into the open hole, and the Allegiance was sliding slowly and gracefully beneath the surface.
“Oh!” he said, “but how are we to save her?”
“There is no hope of that,” Laurence said, locking himself onto the harness with slow, precise movements; his hands were shaking. “Temeraire, I cannot shout; tell Iskierka and Kulingile to take up whatever survivors they can, and we will go after the supply: only you can hover over the ship.”
Laurence was very urgent they should work quickly, but it did not speed matters at all that most of the sailors, quite stupidly, tried to swim away when Iskierka or Kulingile reached to pick them up out of the water. And they were able to get a few things only off the dragondeck—some harness and another tarpaulin, fetched by Roland hanging down on a strap from Temeraire’s belly, with a hoist rigged up to get the things into his netting.
Gong Su had managed somehow to climb out of the belly of the ship, his boots tied together by their laces slung around his neck, with a thin oilskin pouch. He stood helping a still-drink-addled O’Dea balance on the ship’s figurehead—a woman with flowing robes and also great feathered wings, which Temeraire had never seen before due to its ordinarily being hidden beneath the dragondeck; she presently pointed almost directly into the air.
Gong Su pulled himself up Temeraire’s side, when put onto the harness. “No, sir,” Temeraire heard him say, when Laurence asked him about Fellowes, “I am sorry, but I did not see him; all the lower decks are full of smoke, and there are many men dead.”
“It is only to be expected, sure,” O’Dea said, and hiccoughed. “The judgment of the ocean—”
“Enough,” Laurence said: that was all he said, but O’Dea subsided, abashed, and muffled his further hiccoughs into his hand.
“Should I try for some of those water-casks, sir?” Roland called up.
“Tell her no,” Laurence said to Temeraire, “but you ought to drink whichever of them you can reach, yourself, and let Iskierka and Kulingile do the same; and you had better eat those sheep.”
“Those fellows in the belly-netting will be thirsty very soon,” Temeraire pointed out, “and so will you, Laurence.”
“Let Roland light along a couple of canteens, and as for those bastards, they may go hang,” Laurence said, and it was not only his altered voice which made him sound grim. “You must travel as light as may be, my dear: we will want land sooner than water.”
An hour passed, dragging up supplies and a few more survivors from the ship, and then Iskierka was winging by. “We aren’t pulling anyone else up,” Granby called over wearily; his arm and his shoulder were bound up tightly against his body. “Not alive, anyway: the water is too cold. We had better go.”
“Set your course northeast,” Laurence said, “and keep as far apart from the others as you can and still be in sight of one another, so we may best watch for land; make sure Iskierka and Kulingile have lanterns for the night.”
It was very strange and lonely to fly away from the remains of the Allegiance for good, out across the open ocean with no destination. She was nearly all beneath the water now and sinking more rapidly; only the dragondeck yet jutted out into the sky. The ship’s boats were pulling away, crammed with sailors. They could not keep in company with them, of course; there had only been a brief shouting back and forth. Lieutenant Burrough was in command of the launch, and Lieutenant Paris, a boy of fifteen, in charge of the one cutter which had survived, with Midshipman Darcy to assist him.