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
