“Alarme! Alarme!” the boy in the crow’s nest was yelling, and the hands on deck were starting up out of their sleep: starting up and meeting swords and knives, many of them. But one man heaved himself up enormously tall, overtopping six and a half feet with arms like a bear’s: he shouldered aside the waving cutlass of the Allegiance sailor who stood in his way, snatched up with both hands a cannonball from one of the caissons on deck, and turning smashed the British sailor down with it. The cannonball rolled away, leaving a trail of blood and brains, and the Frenchman had the cutlass in his hand: he threw himself over the barrel of the neighboring cannon and cut down another man.
Laurence had the water-barrel at his back, which shivered with the rhythmic thumping from below as the men tried to come up; and French sailors were rushing at him across the deck. He fired both his pistols: one man down, another winged along the arm; then it was sword-work and awkward in close quarters: he planted his boot-heel in one man’s belly and thrust him away, jerked free and slashed down at another who was grappling at his sword-arm. Blood spurted hot from the man’s cheek onto his coat sleeve, and Laurence smashed him across the face with his fist, clenched around the blade-hilt.
The man clutched at Laurence’s sword-arm, dragging it down with him as he slid to the deck, and the enormous Frenchman was charging. Laurence struggled to wrench loose his arm, to meet the swinging overhand stroke of the cutlass descending. The blade came on a mere shadow in the dark, a smattering of rust like black pits on the surface, and Laurence put up his arm to meet it sacrificially to keep it off his skull; then the Frenchman was crumpling onto him a heavy dead weight.
Laurence heaved off the corpse and looked past him in surprise: Gong Su was drawing a long knife from the Frenchman’s side, so sharp barely any blood clung to the blade. There was blue light shining cold off the metal and casting a strange grey color over his face, and a hissing streak overhead: the signal-rocket had gone.
That meant they were fighting aboard the Maréchal also: they had been made, and now the next ten minutes, perhaps not even so many, would determine the fate of their venture. If the deck could not be held, on either ship; if the frigates were already awake and launching their boats—
And then Temeraire was roaring: impossible to mistake, as though the world itself were shattering, and Laurence felt even the great mass of the Polonaise go rocking as the ocean unsettled around her. Away across the water he could hear cries of alarm, and rattling thumps as of a hailstorm, if hail were made of solid rock and the size of a man’s head: the dragons were dropping bushels of rock upon the frigates, going after the gun-boats where they were lashed to their trestles.
Laurence could not spare time to try and see, through the dark, whether the stroke had gone home; behind him, the water-barrel which held down the ladderway hatch was growing suddenly light: the men below had sprung out one of its slats, evidently, to drain it empty and allow them to push their way to the deck. “Hold it down, Wesket,” Laurence shouted at one of the sailors, and moved to protect the man’s back from the French as they came on.
Then the Polonaise rocked again as Temeraire landed on her deck: rearing up he tore the French colors from the mast, and roared again: even most of the British sailors flung themselves flat on the deck in horror at that noise, and Dulcia came darting in amidships and managed to plant herself somewhat precarious along the larboard rail, from whence she began to pluck one Frenchman after another off the deck, and hurl them out into the ocean.
“Laurence!” Temeraire called anxiously, and caught sight of him then: all the way at the far end of the ship, near the stern ladderway, and quite surrounded by Frenchmen—even if most of those were presently lying prone upon the deck for no reason which Temeraire could see. Temeraire snorted reproachfully: so much for promises of caution or of hanging back. “Dulcia!” he called to her. “Pray will you look after Laurence: I must go aloft again, for there are another four frigates to manage.”
“I will; is Chenery there?” she called back, while obligingly lunging out across the deck and seizing a couple of men in her jaws, to throw them overboard, who had risen to their feet and approached Laurence.
“He is, here in the rigging,” Temeraire said, after a quick glance, “and shall I bring him to you, now?”
“Here now, I can get myself across the deck of a ship, I hope!” Chenery said, looking up and wiping sweat off his brow. “Just you take these caltrops, will you, and heave them over.”
“Oh; I will use them instead, I think,” Temeraire said, seizing the makeshift sacks which Chenery and Little had made, tying up the corners of the caltrop-sheets. He carried them away into the air, and flying over to the nearest frigate, which was bringing her guns to bear on the deck of the Polonaise, he called, “Iskierka!”
“I am busy!” she called back, from the frigate which she was circling: she was breathing flame past the rigging, to the leeward side, and yelling at them to strike their colors.