And whatever difficulties should entail on extracting one man, trapped in such a quagmire, were as nothing to the problem of extracting Temeraire, Laurence dismayed realized—and Temeraire was already thirsty.
“This excavation is nonsense,” Rankin said. “We cannot hope to get him out without Granby returns, and that is scarcely likely.”
“If you have any better solution to propose, Captain Rankin, we may hear it at any occasion,” Laurence snapped: he had been looking to the east, vain and unlikely though the hope was, of course, when they had been blown so far off their course and their line of cairns broken by the storm.
“We might rig some ropes as well,” Forthing said, “and do what we can to pull him—”
Rankin snorted, and there was indeed very little to be hoped for, from such an effort: thirty men to drag him out when Temeraire himself could not even presently free one limb. “If you will try and drag him nearer one edge,” Laurence said grimly, “perhaps, Temeraire, you may then draw yourself out.”
The ropes were hurled over, and Laurence secured them about the base of Temeraire’s neck, and through the rings of the harness which he was devoutly glad they had not removed, the previous night. But there was not very much purchase, still, for such an operation; with only a handful of passengers, and no expectation of combat, Temeraire had barely been rigged out with what harness was necessary to support his belly-rigging.
Thirty men hauling, the rope resting upon their shoulders, their hands wrapped around the length: Temeraire did move, a little, trying to help as best he might, with a sort of paddling; but they gained a few inches with the best they could do, and needed perhaps fifty feet. “Sir,” Forthing said to Captain Rankin, “I believe we must rig Caesar up,” politely but firmly: Rankin hesitated, but could scarcely refuse under the circumstances.
“I will help, also,” Kulingile piped up, watching, and seized onto the rope near the edge with his jaws, to pull; Demane said, “Wait—” and to Mr. Fellowes said, “Can you put him into harness?”
“Precious good that will do,” Caesar said, ungraciously submitting to having the ropes secured to his own harness, as Kulingile was hooked in to a makeshift affair of a few straps and buckles: he had grown at least to the size of a respectable cart-horse and, while he might not be anything to Temeraire, or to Caesar, was not wholly inconsequential.
Mr. Fellowes said, “We might send the ropes around a tree, or some of these rocks, to make a bit of a pulley, sir.”
They took up the oilcloths and folded them together to make a pad about an outcropping of rocks, and stretched their two hawsers around it; Caesar and Kulingile were put at the end, and the men hauled on wheresoever they might. The bunyips made an excellent overseer, their small eyes gleaming: if Temeraire were taken so, Caesar could not carry all the men out of the desert; and if any were left behind, there was hardly any doubt of the death-sentence to be read in those eyes.
Muscles strained, and groaning they all pulled together; Temeraire bracing back his neck so the pulling would act upon his body instead. The quicksand glubbed around his breastbone and eddied away, curling in upon itself in thick slow-moving rolls like pudding batter being stirred, and he moved—a little, only a little, but he moved. “Heave, there!” Forthing shouted, and, “Heave!”—one enormous effort after another, each one winning a little more space.
Temeraire tried to paddle a bit, to move himself along; another united heave, and he slid a few more inches through the muck. A few men fell to their knees, panting; all but hanging from the rope. Caesar snapped, “There’s enough of that, we are all pulling, aren’t we? Get up, then.”
They crawled back up. Forthing sent Sipho down the line with a swallow of rum for each man—the last dribbled end of their supply, with nowhere to look for more; but he did not mix it with water, and the taste of the hard liquor heartened them, more a memory of satisfaction than a reality with the sun still beating upon them, but with a great straining effort they drew again upon the ropes, and Caesar, for all his complaining, threw his powerful shoulders fully into the effort.
Kulingile, too, strained; he drew great heaving breaths, and his long claws scrabbled into the earth as he leaned into the harness, and then abruptly his slack and crumpled sides belled out very like sails catching the wind into smooth roundness. He gasped in his thin fragile voice, and clawed furiously at the ground again; Demane was by his head, encouraging and pulling also. “What is the matter?” he said, then catching sight of the swelled-out sides said, “Dorset! Dorset, what is wrong with him!”
“Not now!” Forthing snapped, “all together, heave—” The ropes slid upon the oilcloth and putting their heads down they one and all pulled: feet dug into the sand, driving up dark red hillocks of the damp sand below. One man started to sing, “There were two lofty wyrms from Old England came,” and one after another took it up: awkward voices, dry and cracked with the heat and lack of water, and tuneless; but their feet crept on, little by little the ropes crept after them, and Temeraire was moving.
Then abruptly someone yelled, “Christ, the buggers are coming at us,” and the ropes were falling. Caesar turned in the yoke and was instantly in a tangle as men dropped all the slack of the ropes and began to run, as a couple of the bunyips made a sudden darting-quick lunge down the slope, lean and serpentine, broad splayed feet webbed a little between narrow clawed fingers to give them purchase on the sand.
Roland was too short to get more than her fingertips on the rope; she had her pistol out already, and her first shot caught the advancing bunyip in the thigh. It flinched back, its mouth opening on a peculiar and incongruous sound, a low throaty howl more like the coughing of a hyena than the hiss of a reptile, and then it came swarming on again.
“Roland!” Temeraire called, very anxiously, and Laurence found his hand uselessly clenching upon his sword hilt. “If I should roar,” Temeraire began, but he could not—the divine wind would as surely have killed Roland herself, or more likely brought the whole slope down upon them and buried them bunyips, men, and dragons all together into a single common grave. Temeraire strained his neck, but he was too far to reach.
She held her position coolly; she was already reloading, the cartridge tearing in her teeth, black powder into the barrel and then the wadding and the bullet rammed down hard, powder in the pan, and she took aim and fired again as it drew nearer.
The second shot took it in the throat, and the howl was choked; blood ran deep, near-black from the wound, very like dragon blood, dripping upon the sand and making small wet pockets in the red earth; the bunyip curled over itself coughing. Young Ensign Widener had his small single pistol drawn now: he fired also, though the recoil nearly staggered him, and the second bunyip flinched from the noise; then instead of continuing after the fleeing men, it darted for the ropes themselves.
It moved a little awkwardly, perhaps, over the sand: a quick but skittering motion, the hind legs small and the forelegs enormous and disproportionate, and two strange half-circle stubs rising between the shoulders, small webbed ridges. Seen in profile, it had an enormous lantern-jawed head, built to crush and grip, and the talons of the forelegs were short but hard gleaming-black horn; it seized upon the rope and took a length between its jaws and began to pull.
“Damn you all for cowards!” Roland yelled over her shoulder as she reloaded, “come back here and stop them; or they’ll pick us all off,” and she fired again; Forthing had dragged himself free of the ropes, and Demane, who had been at the end: he dived for Laurence’s pistols, in amongst his things, and fired again at the bunyip.