The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [540]
The charge had carried the Guides to within a hundred and fifty yards of the enemy when he heard the vicious crackle of muskets and felt the wind of bullets that sang past him like a swarm of angry bees: and saw his Commanding Officer's charger, stretched at full gallop, come crashing down, shot through the heart.
Wigram pitched over its head, rolled clear and was on his feet in an instant. Only to stumble and fall again as a second musket ball smashed into his thigh.
Instinctively, seeing their leader fall, the Sikhs gave the wailing cry of their race and pulled up, and Wally too reined in savagely, his face suddenly white.
‘What the hell are you stopping for?’ blazed Wigram furiously, struggling to rise. ‘I'm all right. I'll come on directly. Take ‘em on, Walter! – don't mind me. Take ‘em on, boy!’
Wally did not pause to argue. He turned in the saddle, and shouting to the squadrons to follow him, flourished his sabre about his head, and with a wild Irish yell spurred forward up the slope towards the waiting enemy, the Guides thundering at his heels and shouting as they rode. The next minute, with the shock of wave meeting wave in a tide-race, the two forces crashed together in a pandemonium of dust and din, and Wally found himself in the thick of the smother, hacking left and right with his sabre as wild-eyed men rushed at him howling war-cries and curses and swinging great curved swords.
He sent one down with half his face cut away, and as the mare stumbled over the fallen body, heard the man's skull crack like an egg-shell; and wrenching Mushki to her feet, urged her forward, singing at the top of his voice and laying about him the while in the manner of a huntsman whipping off hounds. All around him men were shouting and cursing in a fog of dust and smoke that stank of sulphur and sweat and black powder and the cloying scent of fresh blood. Knives and sabres flashed and fell and men fell with them, while wounded horses reared up with flailing hooves, neighing with rage and terror, or bolted riderless through the mêlée, trampling down all who stood in their way.
The solid mass of the enemy had been shattered into fragments by the impact of the cavalry charging headlong into it, and now the Khugianis were fighting in small groups, clinging tenaciously to the grassy, stone-strewn slope and standing their ground with fanatical courage. Wally caught a brief glimpse of Zarin, teeth clenched in a ferocious grin as he drove the point of his sabre into the throat of a shrieking ghazi, and of Risaldar Mahmud Khan – his right arm hanging useless and his sabre gone, holding his carbine left-handed and wielding it like a club.
Here and there in the press small whirlpools formed about an unhorsed sowar, defending himself with all the ferocity of a wounded boar against the tribesmen who circled about him, waiting for an opportunity to slash at him with knife or tulwar. One such, Sowar Dowlat Ram, had become entangled with his fallen charger, and the three Khugianis who had brought the horse down rushed in to kill its rider as he struggled to free himself from the dying animal. But Wally had seen him fall and now he charged to the rescue, whirling his blood-stained sabre and shouting ‘Daro mut, Dowlat Ram! Tagra ho jao, jawan! Shabash!’*
The three Khugianis turned as one to meet the yelling thunderbolt that fell upon them. But Wally had the advantage of being mounted, and he was the better swordsman. His sabre took one man across the eyes and swept on and down to shear through the sword arm of the second; and as the first fell backward, blind and screaming,