This was perfectly true, and did not satisfy Laurence any the better. Mrs. Pemberton had remained aboard the Triomphe as De Guignes’s guest. Laurence had entreated the privilege for her, and could not have wished to subject a gentlewoman to the experience of marooning, but he felt it frustratingly inconvenient that the chaperone should be gone at precisely the moment her services would have proven of any use.
Demane and Roland did not reappear for hours, while the sailors’ rout grew steadily louder and more turbulent, a quarreling noise: they did not have enough food nor liquor to content them. Scuffles broke out of the crowd, a few yells encouraging the brawlers as for entertainment; but in a darker spirit: a spray of blood bright on the sand, and ugly laughter. “Next pull is mine, lads,” Handes shouted, grinning, as he pushed back towards the still; blood was on his fingers.
Laurence turned away, disliking even to look; and it was no fit sight for the young officers. “Gentlemen, I think we will send you into the interior for an hour or two—”
“No, sir,” Ferris said abruptly, interrupting. “Look sharp, fellows,” and he was standing up—a party of the sailors was coming towards them, dividing off the main body with a line of men trailing after, as though some rough beast reached out a paw; Handes was in the lead.
Laurence rose also, and found himself and Granby barred from the advancing men: Cavendish had planted himself directly before Laurence; Granby’s ensign Thorne, only thirteen, was beside him; Bardesley and Forthing and Ferris had put themselves out front, and all in unison were herding them away towards a stand of scrub and thornbrake, with only Gerry and Sipho inside that protective circle with them: to be sheltered from harm as though he and Granby were children, Laurence thought, repulsed in every instinct.
The sailors closed in, loosely half-a-ring around them, eyes stained red and skin glazed with excessive sweat: their brew was not a wholesome one, and more than one man had vomit already in the corners of his overgrowth of beard. Their breath was so thick with spirits Laurence could smell it, even at the distance. Handes was smiling at him over Ferris’s shoulder with a baring of teeth, gleeful and bloody. “Now, there’s no call for arguing, boys,” Handes said. “We don’t mean any harm, only the captains will come along of us; and then I fancy we’ll hear a different song from the beasts, when they are back.”
“They’ll disembowel the lot of you for the crabs, you ass,” Granby said, “and like as not all the fellows who hadn’t anything to do with it just the same; where do you even suppose you are going to put us?”
“Keep off, there,” Bardesley said, sharp, and shoved away one of the sailors who was pressing in on him too closely.
The man crowded back in directly, and his fellows with him—a smothering weight drawing around them, and Laurence was pressed back against the crackling brush even as the young aviators fought to hold off the encroaching bodies. It was a queer wrestling struggle, an irregular pushing and pulling—when the sailors did try to strike blows, these as often landed only slightly and glancing, gone drunkenly amiss. It was nonetheless deadly serious for all that, and hideous. Disembodied hands came pushing through the human wall to clutch at Laurence’s arm, drag upon his clothing, his belt: broken nails and hard-callused fingers caked with sand, which he could not join to any particular face or sentient will; he felt himself the subject of a blind and hungry urgency, groping after destruction with as much eagerness as if for life.
And over shoulders and heads he looked into eyes squinting and inhuman with that same mad urge; but it was there accompanied, Laurence thought, by fear: a fear he had seen sometimes in the faces of enemy soldiers in a desperate and impossible action; men who went to fight because they were in a mass of other men, forced to it, and knowing it a futile act; knowing they courted death for no reason. Only a few eager faces—Handes’s eyes fixed on him full of delight and snarling—and the rest only men frightened enough they must act somehow, their wits loosened by drink.
The aviators had linked arms; they kicked and butted their heads at the uncoordinated assault, an ignominious defense, but the sun was dropping low, and soon the dragons would be—“Temeraire!” little Gerry cried: he crawled out from under their legs and ran out onto the sand, waving his arms, “Temeraire!”