Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Aye sir.’

  William heard the words pass through his lips, but it did not seem as if he himself had actually uttered them. Where was this thing, this soul, that inhabited this shell of meat and muscle and sinew and bone that was his body? It felt as if it had temporarily fled the flesh-bound confines of limbs, head and torso, or perhaps taken refuge in some dark cave in the depths of his psyche.

  ‘You and your friends sharpened and prepared your sabres and lances last night, as I advised you, did you not?’ Liversage asked.

  William’s grip on the reins tightened, and it felt like a painful tension was spreading through his entire being, as if some malevolent, invisible puppeteer was winding up a powerful spring within him.

  ‘Aye sir, sharp an’ ready,’ he croaked, his hoarse voice barely clearing a whisper.

  The two of them observed a couple of officers trotting out to the vanguard of the mass of cavalry troops.

  ‘There’s Lord Cardigan, who will be leading the charge from the front,’ Liversage commented, his voice flat, and his stiff expression unreadable. ‘I will be with the other captains behind him. You will accompany me on my left. I know that you are close to your friends, so go and say a farewell to them, and then join me immediately at the front. Hurry boy, go!’

  William nodded and trotted quickly through the rows of mounted troops. He stopped next to Michael first.

  ‘We’re tae charge the Russians head-on, Mikey,’ he said, painfully aware of the tremor in his voice.

  Michael, despite hearing this news, looked more excited than anything else; he was raring for battle, and William noticed something in his friend’s eyes that he had never before seen: a strange flare of raw courage, bolstered with a kind of brimming, hissing fury. The sight of this both frightened him and injected a fresh if weak elixir of something like bravery into his own veins.

  ‘Good luck, my friend,’ William said, squeezing Michael’s powerful shoulder.

  Michael nodded and flashed William a grin that verged on the cocky.

  ‘We’ll give ‘em hell, Will. We’ll give those Russian bastards hell! They willnae know what hit ‘em when we lads come charging through!’

  A solid hand clamped suddenly down on William’s forearm from his left, and he spun around with surprise. His eyes ran up the arm gripping his, and he saw that it was Private Watson’s.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night, Cake-, er, Gisborne,’ Watson said sheepishly. ‘You gave me a fair wallopin’, you did. You’re a true man o’ the 17th, you are, a proper Death or Glory boy. Good luck for the charge, lad.’

  Watson abruptly released William’s arm and coughed awkwardly, shifting uncomfortably in his saddle, seeming to regret the words he had just spoken. William, taken aback by his former bully’s unexpected humility and kindness, could only nod his head and mumble an awkward ‘thank you’ as he turned and trotted off. Watson’s eyes followed him as he left, and there was a cutting sadness that tinged the big man’s gaze.

  William reached Paul next, and he gave his friend a nod and a wink as he approached. Paul’s face was ashen, his jaw clenched tight to the point of grinding his teeth, with his eyes shifting from side to side, stark white even against his wan cheeks; fear was painted as plainly across his features as a fresh and copiously bleeding sabre slash.

  ‘We’re-, we’re, we-re—’ he began to stammer to William.

  ‘Charging the Russian forces across tha’ valley head-on,’ William murmured, completing his terror-stricken friend’s sentence for him. He hoped that his own pulsating fear was not splayed as blatantly across his face as it was across his friend’s.

  ‘We’ll make it, Pauly,’ he said, trying to fortify his words with at least some semblance of conviction. ‘We’ll make it there an’ back again, all in one piece, all together, as it has been since we were wee bairns. The good Lord above could surely no’ think tae separate the likes ay we brothers in the prime ay our lives. We’re destined fir greatness, all ay us – you, me, Mikey an’ our beloved artist an’ musician Andrew. Believe in tha’, brother. We will make it through this.’

  ‘God be with us,’ Paul whispered, his face corpse-pale.

  He extended his right hand to William, who gripped it tightly. Each man stared deeply into the eyes of the other, and many words unspoken passed between them. Eventually William slackened his grip on his friend’s hand and gave him a curt nod, turning around with tears rimming the edges of his eyes.

  ‘Steel your will, William,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Steel your damned will. Now is no’ the time fir fear, regret or sadness.’

  ‘Gisborne!’

  William spun around to see Private Smythe grinning at him. He couldn’t help but return the smile despite the dire circumstances.

  ‘Smythe! Are you ready fir’ tha’?’ William asked, sweeping an arm in the direction of the Russian army.

  Private Smythe laughed boisterously, and then patted the hilt of his sabre.

  ‘The question, Gisborne, is are they ready for us? They’ve not yet faced the likes o’ the Death and Glory boys, and God ‘elp them poor bastards when we come charging through! We’ll send ‘em all running back to the ol’ Czar wiff their tails between their legs, won’t we!’

  William smiled and winked at Smythe, relishing in this fleeting moment of levity before the inevitable plunge into the chaotic blackness of the tempest.

  ‘Aye Smythe, aye. We’ll show ‘em what fir.’

  ‘Death or glory!’ Smythe cried with a laugh and a wicked grin. ‘Death or glory!’

  ‘Death or glory, aye,’ William muttered, abruptly dropping whatever flimsy bravado he had thus far managed to accrue and tumbling back into an abyss of fear and apprehension. He turned about quickly on his horse, hoping that Smythe had not seen the sudden wash of dread that had bleached his cheeks. He made his way through the ranks to say one last farewell.

  ‘Andy,’ he said as he reached his friend. ‘Oy, Andy!’

  Andrew looked up from the sketch he was furiously shading in his notebook, and he smiled warmly when he saw William.

  ‘Sketching in the saddle now, boyo? Crikey man, you are a true artist!’ William chuckled, his gnawing anxiety and fear temporarily allayed while he observed his friend absorbed in his artwork.

  ‘Wherever an’ whenever I can, Will,’ Andrew said in his gentle voice.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  Andrew shot William a sly smile and shook his head, tucking the notebook away in his coat pocket, along with his pencil.

  ‘No’ yet. When it’s done.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll be waitin’ fir tha’ moment.’

  William’s face clouded abruptly over, and he turned his face away from Andrew.

  ‘We have tae charge the Russians across the valley, Andy.’

  Andrew nodded, still smiling; there was neither fear nor bravery evident in the expression he wore, only a simple radiance of vitality and love for his friends.

  ‘That’s what we’re tae dae,’ Andrew said cryptically.

  William looked up, locking eyes with his friend.

  ‘Does the thought no’ terrify you?’

  ‘The thought ay what, Will? Being wounded? Dying?’

  ‘Aye. Tha’…’

  An eerie light glinted in Andrew’s eyes, and his unwavering smile took on an uncanny edge.

  ‘We’re all here but for a short time. Short at least in terms ay how old our souls really are. Ay how old everything around us is. Maybe we’re here fir eighty years, maybe eighty days. It doesnae matter, fir we all came from the same place, an’ we’re all going back there, eventually – it’s just a matter ay what meanderings our souls take along the way.’

  William released a long, slow sigh, slackening his grip on River King’s reins for a time.

  ‘I … I dunnae understand, Andy.’

  ‘No’ yet,’ Andrew said. ‘But you will.’

  At that moment a bugle call announced the imminent commencement of the charge.

  ‘Gi
sborne! What the ‘ell are you doing back there?! Get back to your bleedin’ place!’ Sergeant Fray shouted from the front of the ranks. ‘Go on, get out of ‘ere! You’re keepin’ your officer waiting, you are!’

  ‘I’ve got tae go,’ William said as he wheeled his horse about. ‘Good luck brother. I’ll see you on the other side.’

  ‘My soul will be with you always, my friend,’ Andrew said with a strange smile. ‘Remember tha’. Where’er our bodies may be, we’ll always be brothers. Dunnae forget me.’

  ‘Get a bloody move on, Gisborne!’ the sergeant bellowed. ‘I’ll have you flogged if I have to say your name one more bloody time!’

  ‘Goodbye Andy,’ William croaked, choking on the raw emotion of the words as he spurred River King on and trotted off to the front, where the officers were.

  He pulled up next to Captain Liversage just as another bugle call announced the commencement of the charge.

  ‘Just on time, my boy,’ the Captain murmured. ‘You’ve said your goodbyes?’

  ‘Aye sir.’

  Captain Liversage nodded and drew his sabre. His face was even paler and more haggard now than it had been a few minutes ago.

  ‘Then you are ready. Loosen your sword in its scabbard and ready your lance, for now we ride into battle! Look to Lord Cardigan for the order to move; he is leading us from the front. And remember the training I’ve given you, my boy. You’ll need it to get through this encounter.’

  William drew his sabre a tad from its scabbard, leaving it loose enough to be whipped out rapidly if necessary, and he then gripped his lance with his right hand, pulling it from its boot on the saddle. With his left hand he reached quickly into his jacket and pulled out his pendant with Aurora’s portrait.

  ‘I swear I’ll get through this, my love,’ he whispered, kissing the picture as a stabbing pang of grief and sorrow pierced his core. ‘I swear I’ll come out alive. Fir you, fir us.’

  From the front came a clear, ringing order from the commander of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan.

  ‘The Brigade will advance!’

  Next to William, Captain Liversage began to trot forward on his horse, and William did the same. He found that his heart was hammering in great thumps within his chest, threatening to burst through the flimsy bone-cage of his ribs with the vociferousness of its racing. The morning sun caught the razor-tip of his lance in a brief but dazzling burst of glare, and at once he was reminded of the final night he had spent with his love beneath the shimmering diamond spread of the northern stars and the glory of the Northern Lights. The fluttering of the red and white pennant on the end of his lance suddenly sounded as loud as a madman flailing with fury on a snare drum, and the colours of the heavy grey rain clouds wallowing in the pond of sky above seemed to be stretching, bleeding and blending into a single wash of vomit-smeared murkiness.

  Vomit.

  Shit.

  Piss.

  An overwhelming urge to purge all three contaminants from his body abruptly seized him, and it was all he could do to remain upright in the saddle and not double over and empty his stomach all over the muddy ground.

  ‘Steady yoursel’, boyo, steady yoursel’,’ he muttered as he and River King moved forward. He had to squeeze the words through cracked lips with a tongue that felt like a dirt-caked potato stuffed inside his mouth. Was the rippling of his lance pennant caused by the crisp autumn breeze, or the violent trembling of his hand?

  There was no longer any time to wonder. The horses sensed that something terrible was about to happen, and some began to break formation and accelerate from a trot to a flat-out run. It was all William could do to keep River King under control amidst the rising tide of panic that was spreading across the valley like a rolling, choking fog.

  Abruptly Captain Nolan, who had delivered Lord Raglan’s fateful order for the Light Brigade, galloped out to the very front, outstripping Lord Cardigan, who was set on advancing at a steady, measured pace. Nolan had a deranged look of dread splayed across his face, and he was gesticulating wildly with his sabre at the causeway heights – pointing at the artillery pieces the Russians had captured earlier in the day. Recapturing the guns from the Russians on the heights would have proved an easy, low-risk task for a force capable of moving with speed and agility … a force just like the Light Brigade.

  The sudden realisation of the mistake that the entire Light Brigade was making hit William with the force of a cannonball blasted from a fire-spewing barrel.

  We’re not meant to be charging the whole Russian force across the valley – we’re meant to be retaking the guns on the causeway heights! The whole order was entirely misinterpreted! Because of this misinterpretation, we’re charging into certain death! Oh Lord Jesus, oh God, what will become of us?!

  It was as Nolan was about to cry out, to scream out the blunder that had been made and to hopefully change the direction of the charge, that the Russian forces unleashed their first barrage of fire. A screaming shell burst just above Nolan, and drove its white-hot, razor-twisted shrapnel through his body. Although his arm remained raised above his head, he dropped his sabre instantly. His eyes rolled back in his head, blazing white against the fragile pink of the flesh around them, and whatever words he had meant to utter morphed into an unearthly moan that rose in a crescendo into a bone-chilling scream. Blood began to gush from his mouth, and his horse wheeled about in a panic and galloped blindly off through the ranks, carrying the now-lifeless corpse of Nolan atop it.

  ‘Blast that half-wit!’ cursed one of the officers to William’s right. ‘Galloping ahead of us like that and getting himself killed! Ruddy fool, what a ruddy fool!’

  William, however, understood the dire need that had prompted Nolan to charge out ahead of the pack, and he now knew why the officer had slashed and waved his sword about with such violent urgency above his head – but he, a mere private, was powerless to do or say anything about it.

  ‘Captain Liversage, sir,’ he heard himself utter, his voice sounding as if it were someone else speaking, someone trying to cry out from a faraway valley or mountain peak. ‘Captain, we’re—’

  The Russian forces to their left and right opened fire, and the sound was unlike anything William had ever heard. He had experienced the aural tempest of battle before, from a distance of course, and had been in the thick of mass musket fire during training, but none of that compared to the cataclysmic eruption that enveloped William as the Light Brigade advanced across the valley floor into the mouth of hell itself. To the front, left and right the Russian forces were amassed, their infantry stuffing, loading and aiming their thousands of firearms in utter disbelief at the forest of unmissable targets of horses and men, targets who were coming at them in an apparently suicidal manoeuvre across open ground – ground that was the very intersection of the Russians’ combined and focused fire.

  ‘Steady on boys!’ one of the captains shouted. ‘Steady on now!’

  Every fibre of William’s being urged him to run, to escape, to wheel River King around and flee from the cataclysmic hurricane of cannons and muskets on all sides – yet he gritted his teeth through the feverish washes of terror and panic and held firm.

  ‘Hold this pace!’ Lord Cardigan bellowed from the front. ‘Hold this pace, all of you, hold it until I give the command to charge!’

  A musket ball whizzed past William’s face, missing him by inches, and a cannonball rocketed into the ground just to his left, sending up a brown plume of sod and earth and grass that drenched him and River King. The stallion reared up in fear beneath him, but William was able to comfort and steady the frightened animal and prevent him from bolting.

  ‘Hold steady boy, hold steady!’ he heard his voice murmur, seeming almost as if it were that of a stranger, filtered through a sudden and shrill ringing in his ears, planted there after the cataclysmic boom of the cannonball.

  Another barrage of firing exploded directly from in front of the Light Brigade, and a fresh hail of fiery lead whizzed past William.
This time, however, he heard the projectiles thumping into bodies around him; the Russians had now found and dialled in their range. From just behind William came the blood-curdling cry of a dying man, ripping through the crashing of the guns. The immediacy and horrendous timbre of the man’s cry penetrated William’s brain with the same malevolent force of the shards of shrapnel that were shrieking through the air.

  Through the unfolding Armageddon, a musket ball smashed into the top of William’s hat, tearing it off his head. With this sudden brush with death, something was ignited with the anarchic gluttony of a petrol fire inside William’s core; the battle-fury, of which he had heard so much yet never experienced, now came upon him. Adrenalin mixed with a beastly rage coursed through his veins, driving out fear and replacing it with a heady bravado that pulsed its giddying madness through his entire body, from his head to his toes. Through the red murk that now clouded his vision he heard himself roar, as if in the alternate dimension of a dream or a throttling nightmare, and he raised his lance up high above his head.

  ‘You bastards!’ he howled madly at the mass of steadily firing Russian troops ahead of him. ‘You fucking bastards!’

  A darkness came over him then; not a creeping, cloying, suffocating darkness, but a vengeful electrical surge of vicious lightning that blistered the insides of his veins and boiled his innards with a murderous wrath. Orders and formation and obedience were stripped bare, flogged and flayed, and overpowering these was a deep and ancient insanity that blitzed madly through William’s very core. He gritted his teeth, growling with primal aggression, and lowered his lance. He aimed it at the centre of the Russian horde, the mass of troops who were now around half a mile across the valley – and then he spurred River King into a wild gallop.

  ‘William! What in all blazes are you doing?!’ he heard Captain Liversage shout behind him, but the sound came through only half-heard, filtered through the clumps of muddy sod churning beneath River King’s furiously drumming hooves and the raging aural gale of cannon and musket fire.

  ‘Trooper! Get back into formation, damn you!’ Lord Cardigan howled as William galloped out alone, ahead of the entire brigade, in a wild and suicidal charge at the fire-vomiting enemy mass.