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,
