Flandry and Bourtai spectacularly escape from the palace. Initially unarmed in Flandry's room, they kill two guards, take their blasters, kill more guards, take their varyaks (motor bikes), use unmanned varyaks to break through the gates and thus escape from the palace grounds but must head for the steppe because the spaceport is heavily guarded.
They are not in John Carter's league but almost. When a large number of sword-wielding yellow Martians had chased Carter and a few friends down through a long sequence of passages and stairways, Carter, the best swordsman of two worlds, suddenly wanting to retrace his steps, simply shouted, "Way for the Prince of Helium!" and ran back through the passages and up the stairways, killing every single enemy swordsman that had crowded into them. Poul Anderson managed to write slightly less implausibly than that.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I can think of many factors making Flandry and Bourtai's escape from the palace not that impossibly difficult to accept. The lateness of the hour, for instance, meant there would be fewer people, including guardsmen, around. And they might well be tired and not react as quickly as they might have. Also, the boldness, speed, and skill shown by Flandry probably took his opponents by surprise.
Altai also gives us an interesting example of high tech nomadism. Instead of horses, the nomads used those motorized varyaks.
Ad astra! Sean
There are plenty of historical examples of people doing similar things.
Eg., in one cavalry skirmish in the American Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forest personally cut down six men, then rode off the battlefield holding the body of a Union cavalryman at arm's length as a shield against bullets!
And the father of a friend of mine killed about twenty Chinese soldiers on a trench raid in the Korean War -- he went down a trench and hacked them to death with a sharpened entrenching tool, killing a man at every second step. They were all armed and trying to fight back, too.
Or there's the WW1 fight where Alvin York killed thirty Germans and took over a hundred prisoner, virtually single-handed.
Fiction has to be plausible; history just is.
NB: link to a woman who did similar things, albeit in contests with rules, but those were pretty rough-and-tumble back then and wounding and occasionally death were common this sort of affray:
https://www.facebook.com/333661528320/photos/a.423118913320/10158184973053321/
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You are right, real history can be more fantastic than mere fiction writers often dare to be!
I actually thought of your friend's father while reading about Arthur ("Mad Artie") Scelham in DAGGERS IN DARKNESS!
Ad astra! Sean
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