There were three specks on the horizon, coming in: coming in swiftly, and half-a-dozen men broke away from the attack and fled, back towards the bonfire and the restless, watching mass of men. Another two followed, and soon the aviators would scarce be outnumbered by their assailants; Handes looked baffled. He struck abruptly at Cavendish—clubbed the boy’s head aside and clawed, his fingers scraping over Laurence’s cheek and tearing at the corner of his lip; he brought them away with bloodied nails, but he could not get purchase, even if Laurence could not strike back.
Handes fell back suffused with choleric red; his fellows were dropping back with him; and then they turned towards the brush at a crackle of branches: Roland and Demane were spilling out onto the beach, panting and in haste. They pulled up in dismay, looking at the sailors: and then Handes said, “He’s captain for that big yellow one; we’ll have him, anyway, boys—”
Roland shoved Demane back at the brush. “Run; run now, damn you!” she said, and stooping snatched up two handfuls of sand and flung them into the sailors’ eyes as they came at her.
Sipho pulled his arms loose from the human chain and ran towards them; Ferris sprang after him. Handes had grabbed Roland by the arm and thrown her to the ground, and Demane was leaping on him: nearly a foot shorter and still slim as wire, but for once Laurence had cause to be grateful for his lack of gentlemanly restraint. Demane struck a clenched fist into Handes’s belly, and an elbow at his throat; the fingers of his other hand went at Handes’s eyes, and the big sailor went down choking, his breath suddenly a rattling wheeze, and blood was running down his face.
“I said to run!” Roland said, rolling up to her feet. “Get away from them, you ass; the dragons are coming.” But the rest of the sailors were on them: some twenty men, and three of them seized Demane at once, heaving him up and off the ground. Roland dived at their legs, and managed to trip them; but one man booted her in the face and knocked her aside bloodied.
Ferris was there, trying to pull Demane free; Sipho had snatched up a dry branch and was beating one of the sailors holding him about the head. “Go, hurry!” Granby shouted at the other aviators; he had Laurence’s arm. “We’ll get into the brush—”
“What?” Laurence said.
“Go!” Granby said to them again, dragging Laurence with him, over-riding protest: “No, damn your stiff neck; haven’t you been an aviator long enough?”
Forthing had reached the sailors also, running hard across the sand; but he and Ferris were out in the open, and there were too many: another man seized Demane’s arm and hauled him from under the pile of men; others were helping him, and the larger crowd gathered around the bonfire began to move as a body towards them.
“O God,” Granby said, slowing to watch. The sailors were yelling in mad triumph as they began to drag a struggling Demane towards the bonfire with them. Sipho was trying to go after, but Roland grabbed him with one hand, holding him back; the other she had pressed up to her nose to keep the running blood from her mouth. Handes got up off the sand and stumbled after the rest, calling hoarsely with a hand clapped over his eye, “Wait for me, fellows—now we’ll make the beast mind—”
Then he was falling to the sand and throwing his arms over his head: Kulingile was roaring, coming in over the water at full speed; roaring so it shook the trees, and his shadow poured over the bonfire like a flood.
It was over very quickly. Then Kulingile had Demane clutched in one talon, and lifting him padded away over the sand, saying, “Demane, you are quite well? You are not hurt?” He put Demane down for a moment only, and shook off a last dismembered arm before picking him up again and proceeding onward away; behind his lashing angry tail the fire had been scattered and crushed into ash, and bodies were strewn upon the sand; some still crawling, and moans carried over the sound of the surf.
The dead departed on a pyre built from the corpse of the bonfire and the palm-trees fringing the beach which had been laid waste. Most of the surviving sailors labored silently alongside the aviators to raise it, and the wounded were laid on makeshift pallets of grass, and bandaged with scraps. They had no surgeon among them, of any kind: Granby’s new dragon-surgeon Mallow had been lost with the Allegiance, and Dorset had remained at the covert in New South Wales. Dewey, the former barber, only could do a little. There was for medicine only the dregs of the liquor.
“The biscuit won’t run short, anyway,” Granby said to Laurence, in a morbid humor. They were seated in state upon a few logs of driftwood, looking over the work going forward at a significant distance: the dragons were in no mood to let them go among the sailors, and the sailors were still less inclined to have the dragons anywhere near.