Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Cardigan’s orders fell on deaf ears, and indeed were quickly crushed beneath the aural insanity of the Russian assault. William’s lone burst ahead was the single domino that collapsed the entire tower of order. With men and horses dropping and tumbling to the ground in swathes beneath the ceaseless Russian cannon and musket fire, a flash-flood of madness tore through the ranks of the Light Brigade. All through the brigade, men began to roar and howl and charge in wild bursts, breaking formation and tearing off toward the Russian forces.

  Cardigan realised that there was no holding back the tide of battle-frenzied men now. With the magma of courage and bloodlust enveloping him in its deadly heat, he raised his sabre to the blackened sky, kicked his horse into a gallop and cried out in as loud a bellow as his lungs could expel, ‘Light Brigade, CHAAARRGGE!’

  Ahead of them all, charging across the shell-torn earth like a knight of old, William stormed alone towards the tightly packed mass of Russian artillery, his lance aimed at their core, its pennant rippling wildly from the speed with which he was tearing through the sulphur-thick air. A billowing pallor of smoke from the cannons and muskets hung over the field ahead of them, and just as he and River King passed somehow unscathed through one more murderous volley of shot, they plunged into the thick of the dense grey gloom.

  It was as if William had crashed through the crust of the earth and descended into hell itself. The acrid smoke that obscured his vision stank of sulphur and fire, and Russian soldiers, screaming and bellowing in their alien tongue, were as demons writhing in the half-light. William was almost upon the first line of enemy troops, his mouth gasping madly, his nostrils flared and his crazed eyes like those of a possessed man undergoing an exorcism. With his lance-tip bright against the grey opacity of the smoke, his eyes focused on a grizzled Russian artillery officer who was trying to rally the suddenly panicking artillery troops. Some of them were abandoning their cannons and running off in disarray at the sight of the hurtling English cavalryman with his cruel lance, but others rallied to the officer, kneeling in a disciplined line with their muskets aimed at the lone fiend who dared to defy the massed might of their army.

  Something inside William understood, like the sudden flaring of a match against the gloom of night, that the death of his body was imminent. This brief and poignant immolation of truth was not, however, enough to stem the tide of his raging adrenalin and the battle-madness that propelled him on, unwavering even in the face of certain death.

  It was at that exact moment, however, as the Russians had their sights trained on the furiously galloping William and River King, that Lord Cardigan and the rest of the troops breached the wall of smoke and plunged headlong into the darkness of this death-arena of men, mud, horses, gunpowder and steel.

  Now, faced with a flash-flood of thundering cavalrymen barrelling straight at them with lances levelled and sabres drawn, half of the Russian troops simply dropped their weapons, turned tail and fled. The officer in front of William, however, stood firm and barked a harsh command at his troops to fire – which they did, in a deafening clap that split the air with its wrathful volume. William felt two powerful blows thump simultaneously into his right thigh and left shoulder as the line of muskets flared and roared. He did not have the time to wonder whether the heavy punches he had just felt were musket balls, for he was bearing down at an incredible speed at the row of Russian troops who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder before him in his kamikaze path, and a collision was imminent. His peripheral vision blurred and faded out at its edges as the adrenalin surged through his system, driving out fear, driving out pain and driving out doubt with its sulphuric acid fury, bleaching and eating away any contaminant in this body that would compromise the raw goal of survival against the hurricane of death whirling all about it.

  William’s tunnel vision focused, crisp and clear, on the Russian officer ahead. Never before had he experienced this degree of intense clarity in his vision, nor had he ever known such a razor-honed sense of focus. Through a blurry, colour-streaked haze on the periphery of his field of sight, he saw the Russian troops struggling to reload their muskets as he closed in.

  Cumbersome.

  Clumsy.

  Panicking.

  Disorganised.

  Weak.

  Frightened.

  Through the storm of musket and cannon fire he could hear the cannonade of hundreds of hooves behind him – faintly, as if remembered from a nightmare fading into the grey of morning – and a rash bravado, a chemical reaction flaring up against this blanket of horror, set ablaze an unearthly fire that rocketed with frenzied speed through his entire body. Through the dim haze at the edges of his vision he was able to perceive the mass of Russian troops who had stood their ground, and he saw that they were raising their muskets to fire.

  He didn’t care about them, though. Through the dimness the muzzles of their muskets flashed bright and brief against the tapestry of greys, earthy browns, greens and pallid tones of flesh that was the battlefield. A thought at the back of William’s mind somehow managed to communicate that the volley of musket fire, mere metres away, should have resounded with a clap of earth-splitting thunder – yet his ears registered no sound but the drumming of River King’s hooves beneath him and the roaring of his own blood in his temples and ears, driven so violently through his veins by the furibund heart in his breast.

  In the final seconds before he made the first kill of his life, William saw the Russian officer – a seasoned soldier, no doubt, who was strangely calm in the face of hurtling death – raise his pistol, aim squarely at William’s face, and squeeze the trigger. William did not have time to panic, nor indeed would he have had time to feel anything had the weapon fired, for the man’s aim was true, and the heavy round would have obliterated his skull.

  Had it fired. It did not.

  It was if time froze for just a moment, and to William it seemed that everything pinned to that ever-rolling continuum was suddenly paused, and instead stretched out through minutes and hours like amber sap from some primeval tree, dripping and solidifying against the irresistible suck of gravity.

  William, despite galloping at maximum speed atop the mighty River King, felt as if he had become stationary; a figure transposed from the dynamism of the real world into the eternal prison of some painter’s canvas. The Russian officer before him was an image projected through the lens of his eyeballs and burned forever into his mind, as indelibly as the regimental numbers branded on River King’s rump. William understood at that very moment, at that very split-second there in the middle of the Crimea, that whatever was left of his bucolic stable boy innocence was now utterly shattered and irreparably destroyed. He knew with harrowing clarity that he would never forget this face before him. No. Forever in his dreams hereafter would he recall the thick eyelids that reared up in one final expression of terror as the pistol jammed, and the flaring whites of the eyes, not so different from the almost translucent ice-blue irises they surrounded, and the chubby, hanging jowls, liberally dusted with a sprouting of salt and pepper stubble, and the thick chicken-beak nose, so red against the bone-white tone of the cheeks. And to complete it, the screaming, twisted mouth, wordlessly universal in its expression of horror at the inescapable imminence of death.

  William’s aim was true, and the lance-tip plunged with savage force into the precise area at which he had aimed, just as if he were tent-pegging, at which he had excelled: the flabby throat of the Russian officer.

  The impact threw the man backwards, lifting him off his feet despite his hefty weight. The lance-blade all but tore his head clean off his body, slicing his throat open from ear to ear and smashing into the spine at the very back of it, and as William raced past the half-decapitated officer, yanking his lance with fluid precision out of the now-prone body on his way past, a jet of the Russian’s arterial blood sprayed across the right half of his face.

  The metallic taste of the blood registered on his tongue and he spat in revulsion as he galloped onward
, his eagle-eyes already seeking out the next target in the pell-mell chaos of madly fleeing troops and rioting horses and belching smoke. There was no time to contemplate the life he had just taken. There was only the primordial reptilian mantra echoing its wordless chant through the subterranean caverns of his mind:

  Kill or be killed.

  Kill or be killed.

  Kill

  OR

  BE

  KILLED.

  Two Russian troops appeared out of a billow of smoke directly ahead of William, and both raised their muskets and fired in blind, panicked unison. One of the musket balls missed completely, but the other skimmed William’s outstretched right arm, ripping a vertical tear in his sleeve and opening up a deep cut that ran up the length of his forearm, from his wrist to just below the elbow.

  He felt no pain, however – not yet.

  Having spent their rounds, both Russians sprang out of the way of the steaming horse and cavalryman. As William thundered through the gap between them he managed to spear the one on the right with his lance. The lance-blade caught the man – a short, thick-set fellow with a dense black beard and bushy eyebrows – right between his ribs. The steel sank into the soldier’s tubby body, and he let out a strange, gargling gasp as he fell. The combined force of the impact, the angle at which he was struck and the weight of the Russian’s body snapped the lance clean in two and sent a jarring shock rushing through William’s arm, numbing it temporarily.

  The other Russian on the left jumped forward and lunged a vicious bayonet thrust at William as he sped past. The bayonet caught William in the left thigh, and the force of the thrust drove the thin spike of steel straight through his hamstring. The point jammed, deeply embedded, into the heavy leather of River King’s saddle. All of this happened in a split-second, and the speed at which William was travelling meant that the suddenly embedded bayonet, along with the musket it was attached to, were yanked right out of the enemy infantryman’s hands and carried away, a grotesque wood and metal addition now fused to the speeding horse and rider.

  William had felt the impact of the thrust, but the pain of the wound didn’t register at all due to the free flow of raging adrenalin through his system, and it was only as he reached to his left to draw his sabre from its scabbard that he saw the rifle and bayonet protruding from his upper thigh.

  ‘Whoa boy, whoa!’ he shouted, slowing the careening stallion down.

  In the midst of the mayhem he reined in River King, who reared up on his hind legs, his nostrils flared and eyes white with the deadly malady of brute fury and primal terror, while William fumbled with a trembling left hand at the blistering hot barrel of the musket, trying to pull it out of his leg.

  ‘Oh Lord, oh Jesus, oh Christ oh Jesus Jesus Jesus!’

  The pain was now starting to push through the wall of adrenalin-sanctioned insanity, like a hell-demon trying to force its way through the veil of the now into our world, and with every terrible pump of blood that William’s hammering heart boosted through his veins the pain increased, and the fiend came closer to breaking through the tenuous barrier.

  William started at the clap of a firearm discharged nearby, and a musket ball whizzed through his hair, skimming the top of his scalp. The shock of the shot spurred a new boost of strength into his arms, and with a heave he plucked the bayonet and musket from his leg and flung it off to the side, wheeling about to face the direction whence the shot had come.

  Standing with shock-wide eyes and a gaping mouth was a thin, cherub-faced Russian soldier. The lad had a still-smoking musket pressed against his bony shoulder, and looked as if he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. He gasped with fright as William drew his sabre with a wordless roar and spurred River King into a blitzkrieg charge. The sight of the sword-wielding rider bearing down on him was too much for the fresh-faced neophyte; he threw down his weapon and fled in abject terror, with William hot on his heels.

  As William was about to run down the screaming boy, out of the corner of his eye he saw another Russian troop just a few metres to his right, kneeling behind the cover of a mud-sunken cannon and raising a musket to his shoulder. There was no time to think; actions had to precede thoughts here. William veered right immediately, leaving the boy soldier to flee into the smoke, and instead he bore down on the other Russian. William directed River King to leap, hoping to vault clear over the cannon. The stallion was a strong and nimble enough mount to make the jump successfully, and as they landed, William hung off the side of his saddle, and with a quick, deep lean to his right he managed to slash his sabre at the soldier.

  The sharp edge of the blade caught the Russian square across his face, and the steel bit cruelly into flesh and bone, obliterating the man’s nose and crushing his cheek bones. He fired his musket just as the sabre slash struck him, but the shock of the icy steel paring his flesh was enough to cause his shot to miss both William and River King, and as horse and rider galloped onwards the man fell backwards into the swampy mess of mud and sod, dropping his musket while screaming and clawing at his ruined mess of a face.

  ‘William! Will!’

  William wheeled about at the sound of a familiar voice bellowing out his name through the waterfall-roar of battle noise and saw Michael charging through the fray towards him. His friend’s eyes were wild with the same battle-madness of which William was possessed, and his sabre blade was slick with the crimson of freshly spilled blood.

  ‘Mikey! By God, it’s you!’

  Alongside Michael was a lieutenant of the 17th, a round-faced fellow in his late thirties named Peterson, who was whirling his sabre around his head and rallying the scattered and disarrayed British lancers to him.

  ‘To the centre-left, boys, to the centre-left!’ he cried in a hoarse shout. ‘There lies the enemy! We’ve broken through the whole Russian artillery, now let’s give their cavalry what for! Show the buggers what for, I say! Charge them! Charge them and break them! Break them! DEATH OR GLORY! DEATH! OR! GLORY!’

  William steered River King to the left to join the pack of charging lancers, and through the billowing clouds of gunpowder smoke and mist he saw a sight that chilled him to the very marrow of his bones, while simultaneously stoking the fire of battle-fury with fresh gasoline: a line, as far as he could see, of Russian cavalry. The mass of enemy horsemen a made up a vast hedge that bristled with the cruel steel of hundreds of lances and sabres.

  There was nothing to be done now but to charge along with the others, so charge he did, joining the thin stream of blue as it tumbled along its corpse-strewn course to crash into the full menace and might of the grey ocean of Russian cavalry ahead.

  47

  WILLIAM

  Across the valley floor the lancers thundered, steaming with single-minded intent towards the mass of Russian cavalry, that vast grey and brown forest with its thorns of gleaming steel. Boosts of electrifying adrenalin and the red mist of battle-wrath continued to drive William on, pumping an almost superhuman strength into his limbs while giving him a razor-honed focus and numbing the pain of the wounds he had received.

  As he galloped along with his fellow lancers, who were forming into an arrow-shaped wedge to smash into the waiting Russian cavalry, William noticed a corpse sprawled on the ground up ahead with an intact lance embedded vertically in it, so he sheathed his sword and plucked the lance out of the corpse as he sped past it. As soon as he gripped the bamboo of the lance haft in his blood-sticky fingers, a swell of new courage surged through him, due to the reach advantage that the lance offered over his sabre.

  At the head of the wedge of lancers, Lieutenant Peterson held his sabre high above his head and cried out, his voice soaring above the noise of the stampede of hooves and the barrage of gunfire, ‘DEATH OR GLORY! DEATH! OR—’

  It was at that exact moment that a rippling volley of shots rang out from the massed Russian cavalry. As the muzzle flares cracked their violence and lit up the expanse of the grey wall with a brief ripple of candescent fi
re, a handful of lancers cried out and toppled from their saddles, while many horses crashed to the ground as well, throwing their riders. Two shots struck the leader of the arrow-wedge, Lieutenant Peterson; one hit his horse in the head, right between the poor beast’s eyes, and one smashed through his own cranium. As the musket ball travelled onward it blew open a gruesome cavity in the back of his skull, from which blood, brains and splintered bone erupted.

  The momentum of the horse and rider could not be stopped though, and they carried their combined mass of dying flesh like a half-ton cannonball into the midst of the Russians. This smashed open an unobstructed passage into the thick of the enemy position, and it was into this opportunistically hewn portal that the wedge of lancers poured, the British troops roaring and howling like rabid berserkers.

  As soon as the lancers infiltrated their ranks, the Russians were thrown into a chaos of confusion and disarray: half of them began to attack the invading snake of British lancers, while the other half – consisting mostly of raw recruits and conscripted peasants who had no desire to fight whatsoever – turned tail and fled as fast as they could from the battle-crazed Britons.

  As William saw the tip of the wedge cannoning into the Russian forces ahead, his vision again blurred at the edges while becoming crisp and magnified at the centre. He was positioned on the outermost edge of the formation, and his tunnel vision zoomed its focus onto a specific Russian cavalryman, who looked to be an officer. The officer’s detachment appeared to consist mostly of ill-disciplined conscripts who were jostling in a chaotic mass of screaming and colliding horses and flailing bodies, all entangled in a storm of writhing and shoving flesh and steel.

  The officer, a tall and burly fellow mounted on a jet-black charger, was bellowing in a brassy voice and beating the fleeing conscripts about their heads and backs with the flat of his sabre, trying in his red-faced wrath to turn them around to fight the dam-break influx of blue-clad lancers. William steered River King in a sudden manoeuvre to the right, levelling his lance and tucking his body in low as he prepared for impact.