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 insidehis head. He threw a surprised glance over his
