Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  The Russian officer was not expecting a British trooper to veer so far off from the charging wedge, and he only had a split second to spin about in surprise and swing his sabre in a clumsy attempt to deflect the point of William’s lance, which was shooting towards him with the unstoppable speed of a loosed longbow arrow.

  The lance-head struck the officer square in the chest, and the force of the blow drove the point and much of the haft straight through his torso, pitching him backwards off his horse with a vicious surge, as if some titan had thrown him with the vehemence of a brat flinging a toy in a tantrum. The bottom half of the lance haft shattered, and William discarded it as he leaned over and redirected River King to the left, drawing his sabre in a fluid flourish.

  He and River King steamed perpendicularly along the line of panicking enemy cavalrymen, and he leaned out of his seat towards them, slashing, hacking and stabbing as he sped past the Russians. Some of his cuts and thrusts struck home, whilst others pared only the frigid air; none of this mattered to William though, for he was caught up in the primal turbulence of the moment. As he reached the gap opened by his comrades, he steered River King into the sea of grey and joined the melee.

  Now he was really in the thick of it; the driving momentum of the British wedge had finally been broken, and everywhere scattered pockets of blue lancers were fighting in tooth and claw battles against swarming masses of grey-clad Russians who were crowding in, closing tight like the fingers of a gargantuan hand to crush these blue invaders, their formerly faltering courage now bolstered by their sheer weight in numbers and the breaking of their enemies’ momentum.

  As he entered the fray, William saw Michael being set upon by three sabre-wielding Russians just up ahead. With a raw and wordless shout, he spurred River King into a gallop, aiming directly for Michael and the soldiers around him. He ducked under a hacking sabre slash aimed at his head, and the blade whistled through the air just centimetres above him as he flew past.

  When he reached the gang of Russian cavalrymen who had beset Michael, William steered River King with deft agility into a pivoting turn. On the bend, as he passed the outermost trooper, he delivered a vicious backhand sabre cut that caught the man in the side of his head, splitting his ear open and biting deep into his skull. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the trooper clutching at his ear as he tumbled from his horse into the mud below. This, however, registered in his brain only as a half-blurred distraction, for his vision was already focused on his next target, who he reached in the blink of an eye by wheeling River King around a full one hundred and eighty degrees so that he could engage the Russian on his right.

  ‘Get the blighter, Will, get ‘im!’ bellowed Michael, who was bleeding copiously from sabre slashes across his scalp, face and arms. ‘I’ll take care ay this one!’

  The enemy cavalryman redirected his violence from Michael to William, spinning his own horse about so that he could fight William with his right side to the fore. This man was no fresh-faced, frightened conscript, though; no, he was a seasoned fighter, and his ruddy face was crisscrossed with a veritable roadmap of battle scars. Wiry grey hair, matted thick with fresh blood from some Englishman’s sabre cut, topped his cannonball head, mounted upon thickly muscled shoulders, and set in the centre of his broad face were two large blue eyes, burning with a vengeful fury. With a snarl he attacked, and William was only just able to deflect the powerful lunge and attempt a loose and sloppy riposte, which the big Russian parried with ease, laughing in a disdainful tone as he did. He shouted something in his harsh tongue at William, and then with murder in his eyes he reared his horse up and aimed a downward slash at William’s head, intending to cleave his opponent’s skull clean in two. William blocked the blow with a horizontal parry, but the force with which the hulking Russian delivered his attack almost knocked him off of River King and for a harrowing moment he teetered dangerously in the saddle, his arm stinging and partly numb from the shock wave of the clash.

  There was no time to recover though – there was only time to fight for survival, and the Russian gave William not an ounce of room nor a second to spare before aiming a driving thrust at his unguarded chest. It was a well-executed strike that would have impaled a slower trooper than William, but in the nick of time the neurons in his brain fired the electronic command to his muscle fibres to enact a rapid defensive stroke. The movements thereof had been drilled into his mind and muscle memory by Captain Liversage’s rigorous training to the point where reaction and instinct had fused into one, and it was only because of this that William was able to deflect the thrust.

  In a continuation of the instinct-drilled series of movements, William turned the surprised Russian’s blade aside and got right inside his defences, and then with a deft flick of his wrist cut the back edge of the blade’s tip vertically up, splitting open the Russian’s square chin and jerking the big man’s head back. But that was not the end of the manoeuvre; with one more dexterous swivel of his wrist, William turned his sabre and slashed the blade in a whizzing horizontal cut, paring the Russian’s throat wide open.

  It was at that moment that William heard the clang of two clashing swords right next to his left ear, so close that it sounded as if it had happened inside his head. He threw a surprised glance over his shoulder, and with a nausea-inducing chill of shock he saw, inches from his neck, an enemy blade – which had only been prevented from taking his head clean off by a parry from a masterfully wrought Toledo steel sabre.

  In an instant the Toledo blade whipped the Russian sword up, and in a blitz of a movement skewered its unfortunate wielder, the steel passing through his body as if it were a knitting needle poking through a square of jelly.

  ‘Wheel about, boy, wheel about! We must retreat, we are outnumbered!’ shouted Captain Liversage, who had managed to find William in the madness of the battle.

  ‘You saved my life sir, you saved my life!’ William managed to gasp.

  ‘There’s no time to talk, Gisborne!’ Liversage bellowed, his formerly ostentatious uniform now hacked, tattered and discoloured with patches of blood and mud. ‘Wheel your horse about and follow me! We must retreat! All is lost!’

  Captain Liversage’s voice was hoarse with urgency and his eyes were wild, the whites of them shining with life and madness against the drab hues of the battlefield. Without any further words the captain spun his horse about and kicked him into a gallop, riding down and bowling over two dismounted Russian troops who made a half-hearted attempt to block his path. William wheeled River King around, ducking simultaneously under a clumsy sabre slash from a panicking young enemy cavalryman, who promptly fell off his horse in the aftermath of his overeager attack.

  William’s primary driving instinct had shifted from fight to flight, and fly he did, steering his horse left and right in a madcap slalom course, ducking and dashing between the blurs of enemy horses and men. Somewhere along the way a heavy impact slammed into his left arm, just above the elbow, and another slapped his right thigh as he galloped past a Russian who was wielding a sabre. Then another blow pummelled his left thigh, and one more lashed his ribs. The thumps and bumps did not concern him, however, for escape was his primary objective, and it was all he could do to keep his eyes on the fleeing figure of Captain Liversage, leading the way as he steamed through the drifts of gunpowder smoke and the heaving masses of horses and enemy troops.

  A guttural shout in Russian blasted into his ear from his left, and William turned and saw a Russian officer galloping alongside him. The man was tall, long-limbed and extraordinarily pale; an albino with skin white as sun-bleached bone. In the half-light and billows of smoke his eyes gleamed with an unearthly brightness, and a demon’s grin pared the skin of his long face open, the perimeter of the wound punctuated by two thin, tightly drawn lips. He shouted something in Russian at William again as he raced alongside him and then he laughed metallically; it was obvious that he was the hunter and William the quarry. In his right hand he gripped a lance, and with a wicked gr
in and a shout he thrust it with deadly precision at William’s throat. Utterly gripped in the panic of the flight, William only just managed to deflect the blow with his sabre, and it was all he could do to hang on to River King and try to outstrip the Russian officer, with only a cursory concern now given to evading the other attacks delivered by the Russian troops he was speeding past.

  The albino officer lunged again with his lance, and once more William managed, with a desperate effort, to turn away the strike. Now the officer kicked his mount on with a sharp shout, and his horse, who was far fresher than the exhausted River King, was easily able to pass and then cut in front of them.

  As the officer manoeuvred himself in front of William, forcing him to veer left, he swivelled around in his saddle and attempted to deliver one more vicious thrust. This time William could not deflect the blow, as all his attention was focused on keeping River King under control, but due to the speed of the swerving horses the Russian’s aim was imprecise, and the point of the lance merely grazed William’s scalp.

  The shock of the steel scraping his skull and freeing a wash of blood – blood that quickly warmed his head and left ear with its fast-flowing earthward passage – was enough to spur some fight back into William. With a howl of vengeful rage and adrenalin-mandated strength he slashed at the albino’s lance haft, which was already heavily splintered and damaged, and succeeded in cutting it clean in two. He then ducked and tugged harshly on River King’s reins, steering the horse in an unexpected swing to the right, and, counterattacking, he aimed a furious horizontal slash at the Russian officer’s midsection as he passed him.

  His surprised opponent evaded the whistling sabre blade, but with reflexes as quick as any cat’s he countered with the stump of his severed lance haft, walloping William on the side of the head. The heavy wood struck William’s skull and detonated a percussive flash of light behind his eyes. He slumped in his saddle, stunned and semi-conscious from the impact, but beneath him River King continued to run, breathing hard and sweating out froth from the exertion and madness of the flight.

  An overeager Russian private galloping in on a chestnut mare lunged out at William with his sabre, but the man’s horse collided with that of the albino officer’s, and both men flew off their mounts, tumbling to the ground as William and River King sped away. The officer cursed at the clumsy trooper and shouted with frustration as he saw his quarry escaping into the haze of smoke and massed bodies, both living and dead.

  After a few moments of pell-mell racing, William began to become more cognisant of his surroundings as he came out of the daze brought on by the blow to his head. As his vision started to come into clearer focus, he saw that the blue fabric of his uniform was shredded all over, and was dark with a heavy soaking of blood; the thumps and bumps he had felt during his panicked passage had been sabres hacking at his body. In addition to the sabre wounds, William became aware of a terrible, burning ache throbbing in his left shoulder and right thigh simultaneously. He noticed that two neat holes had been punched in his uniform in these places, and dark blood was oozing from what could only have been wounds from musket balls.

  His vision began to swim as a rising panic clawed its way up the inside of his trachea, like some undead horror heaving itself out of a grave, but then a voice cried out within his head, its timbre ringing loud and clear against the riotous cacophony of panic and pain and fear. The voice told him that this was no time for self-pity, no time for terror, no time for confusion; this moment, right here, right now, held only one concern: survival. Life boosted a bolt of liquid electricity through William’s veins, and he shouted out a wordless battle cry and raised his sabre.

  But then, through the drifting smoke and frothing insanity of men, animals and steel, he perceived two simultaneous scenes of catastrophe unfolding side by side before his eyes.

  To his left was Paul, in the midst of a closing circle of Russian horsemen, fighting in a desperate battle for his life against clamping jaws – jaws studded with merciless steel teeth. And then, ahead to William’s right, there was Captain Liversage, whose flight had been broken by a solid wall of enemy troops, four of whom he was fighting off at once with a furious but faltering freneticism. A crash of hooves approaching rapidly from his rear brought William fully back into the here and now, and he heard Michael screaming out his name in a voice that was at once hoarse and breaking with fear.

  ‘Will! Help! Come with me for God’s sake! They’re killing Paul, they’re killing him! Help! Help me!’

  Then, just as William wheeled his horse about, another familiar voice rang out, slicing through the aural chaos of the battle.

  ‘Private Gisborne! William! To me! We must cut through these enemy troops to clear a path for the retreating lancers to follow, or every last one of us will be slaughtered! To me!’

  Captain Liversage.

  A sickening, plague-yellow flood of bile exploded like a ruptured tumour inside William. He froze, trapped in this awful moment in which the river of time forked abruptly into two entirely divergent streams. Whichever of these rivers he steered his life-vessel onto, there would be regret and pain in the future – if there was to even be a future, if he survived the next few minutes of battle. In the midst of all the madness around him William remained stock-still, stark as a dismembered corpse upon an autopsy table, paralysed utterly by the horror of the choice laid out before him.

  Somewhere to his left a musket cracked its explosive wrath in his direction, and the searing-hot lead ball thumped into River King’s rump. That was it; the horse reared up in shock from the wound and bolted. William was jolted out of his paralysis, and somehow he found himself steering River King towards Captain Liversage.

  ‘Death or glory!’ he cried as he reached the edge of the brawl.

  Captain Liversage, cut up and bleeding all over from a plethora of sabre and lance wounds, was engaged in a fierce two-on-one duel, after having dispatched the other two Russians who had been attacking him. Almost any other man would have been dead by now, but the captain was no ordinary man. With his sabre dancing and whirling with a beautiful madness, he was able not only to fend off his enemies’ attacks, he was actually beating them back and forcing the pair of them to go on the defensive. However, another Russian trooper was manoeuvring his horse around Captain Liversage’s rear to deliver a killing blow from behind, and as William arrived, this man was about to plunge his sabre into the captain’s back.

  William, charging at this particular trooper from a perpendicular direction, did the only thing that he could do in the split-second before the Russian could thrust his sabre forward in a fatal lunge: he directed River King into a jump, aiming straight at the man.

  River King sprang up from the muddy ground and hurdled clean over the Russian’s horse as if it were but an obstacle in a training yard, and in the process crashed straight into the trooper, bowling him off of his horse and trampling him beneath his hooves as he landed.

  Just after landing, William reined in River King and wheeled him about to face the enemy troops head on. He spurred him onward, then briefly took his left hand off of the reins to grab a stray lance, embedded vertically in the mud, as he charged. He once more released the reins from his grasp and quickly switched objects between his hands, gripping his sabre in his left and holding the lance in an overhead, javelin-style grip in his right.

  With a shout of rage William flung the lance as hard as he could. It whizzed through the air and slammed home, burying its wicked steel point in the chest of one of the Russian troopers who was attacking Captain Liversage. The Russian toppled backwards off his horse, and now, with the removal of one of his attackers, Captain Liversage was able to dispatch the other with a rapid-fire flurry of cuts, stabs and slashes.

  Three more Russian cavalrymen charged in to attack William and Captain Liversage, but at that moment a handful of British lancers came galloping out of the smoke and confusion, and with cries of vengeance and blades bright against the tide of grey, and together
they all hacked a path through the massed Russians to the open field.

  Through the tumult of clanging swords, firing muskets and stabbing lances, William perceived a lone British trooper galloping across the murk, and perceived immediately that it was Michael. He was only semi-conscious and was hanging with tired and desperate arms onto his horse’s neck, only barely managing to cling on as it ran wild-eyed from the battle in panic. Michael’s face was ashen white, and two broken lances protruded cruelly from his back, giving horse and man the look of an uprooted tree borne helplessly along by a flooding river. With a lurching feeling of dread in the pit of his belly, William noticed that Michael was alone, and that there was no sign of Paul.

  In an instant Michael disappeared back into the choking fog and swirling madness whence he had emerged, and William’s attention was yanked from the distance to the immediate present as a howling Russian trooper attacked him. Up ahead, a pathway to escape and life had been smashed through the enemy ranks, and Captain Liversage reared up his horse on its hind legs and whirled his sword above his head, calling out in a loud and clear shout above the noise of the fight, ‘17th Lancers, retreat from the field! Retreat!’

  After a brief horseback duel William managed to unseat his adversary from his saddle with a well-timed thrust of his sabre, and he turned River King around to follow the path of retreat opened up by the last of the lancers. It was as he spurred his mount on that a crackle of shots rang out from a group of Russians to the side, and with a sickening feeling that hit him like an unexpected ocean wave he saw Captain Liversage and his horse topple over, after they were struck full on by the horizontal hail of lead.

  William galloped over to the Captain, with his heart pounding in his mouth and the bitter taste of vomit tickling the back of his throat. He reached him right as a pack of Russian cavalrymen started charging over to finish him off, their swords and lances bristling from their galloping mass with eager brightness.