by R. W. Peake
Porcinus couldn’t hear it, but he clearly saw Vulso mouth his name, “Gaius.” Then, somehow, he managed to lift his arm to make a weak gesture to the young Legionary. “Help me.”
The blood pouring from Vulso’s mouth made his remaining teeth gleam obscenely, looking as if he had just torn a hunk of living flesh from a freshly killed animal, and to Porcinus, it seemed as if Vulso was giving him a gruesome smile. Then, before the animal took its next step, Vulso’s head suddenly dropped back at an impossible angle, his arm suddenly going limp in a manner that told Porcinus that at last Vulso was dead, and he felt slightly ashamed at the sense of relief he felt. Finally, with what seemed to be a contemptuous shake of its head, the elephant sent the corpse of Vulso flying, where it became its own weapon of sorts, slamming into a pair of Legionaries, although they both managed to get their shields up in time, enabling them to keep their feet but sending them reeling as Vulso’s body dropped to the ground, leaving both men with shields smeared with his blood. From Porcinus’ perspective, and for every man around him, all that existed in his world at that moment was what he could see taking place, and to a lesser extent, what he could hear, so he was completely unaware that, on the opposite side of the animal that was threatening his Century, his comrades were doing their part to try and subdue the elephant. Consequently, it was almost inevitable that accidents occurred, and in an attempt to slay the animal’s handler, one of the men out of Porcinus’ sight hurled a javelin at the Bargosan. From just before the moment the elephant struck the Roman lines, the handler had lain himself flat on top of the animal’s head; what the Romans had no way of knowing was this was not only a way to reduce his own profile and make him harder to hit, but in the cacophony produced by a battle, it was crucial that the elephant hear his handler. Regardless of the reason for it, the Romans who tried to get close enough to thrust at the Bargosan with their siege spears were driven off by the elephant, who had begun swinging its massive head back and forth, which was part of its training to forestall that very thing, while pivoting about on its hind legs with astonishing agility. This was what prompted the javelin throw, and it did almost strike the handler, but it also appeared out of nowhere to the men on Porcinus’ side of the animal, so unexpectedly to one of the other men of the Century that the missile plunged down just over the top of his shield to penetrate his shoulder before he could react. It wasn’t a killing blow, but it put another man out of action, at a time when the First needed every one of them to combat the gray behemoth that was in their midst.
Although Porcinus saw it happen, he couldn’t spare more than a passing glance because he was forced to scramble backward when the elephant swung back around in his direction. It had become clear that this was a tactic; the elephant was back to a slow walk, interrupted only when it suddenly pivoted while swinging its head side to side, and as Porcinus’ comrades quickly learned, it wasn’t just the tusks that were dangerous. Calatinus was a few paces away, separated from Porcinus by two of their comrades, when, as the elephant swung its head, it extended its trunk in a manner that was akin to a man swinging a punch, striking Calatinus in the helmet and knocking him sideways, dazed and reeling but still on his feet. Before he could react, the trunk, as if it was operating independently of its owner, curled around his waist, snatched the Roman off his feet and sent him flying through the air at least three feet above the heads of his comrades, where he landed somewhere off to the animal’s left, behind the line of Romans on the other side of the elephant. Men were trying to dart in, thrusting their own spears, while a half-dozen men hurled javelins, quickly giving up the attempt when they either bounced harmlessly off the armored blanket or barely penetrated the thick hide of the elephant then just dangled there until they were dislodged when it moved. The only real damage done so far was Porcinus’ thrust, but as far as he could see, while blood was running down the animal’s side and back of its right front leg, it hadn’t done anything more than enrage it. Gaius Porcinus and the rest of the men down on the ground in front of the dirt wall were experiencing the challenge and the horror of fighting armored elephants; all Porcinus hoped was that things weren’t going as badly for the rest of his comrades in the other Centuries and Cohorts. That thought had barely entered his mind when there was another shrill scream, but it originated on the other side of the elephant; it wasn’t until it swung its head back in Porcinus’ direction that he saw its left tusk no longer had the shredded tent on it, but it was also covered in blood. Porcinus was a veteran, having been blooded in the first year of campaign, but nothing could have prepared him for what he and his comrades were facing at this moment, and in this way, even the most veteran men, like his Centurion Scribonius, were just as much neophytes at battling armored elephants as he was; when this thought flitted through his mind as he was once more forced to scramble out of range of both the tusks and the trunk of the elephant, it didn’t bring him any comfort. Gaius Porcinus’ world had compacted down to a rough circle less than a hundred paces across, where he and his comrades were surrounding the animal, who was lunging in one direction or another at the men futilely jabbing their heavy spears at its massive bulk, trying to land a damaging blow. From his perspective, they were only succeeding in keeping the animal and its handler alert, although he decided that there was a small blessing in the absence of the three men who had been riding in the box atop the animal. Porcinus and his comrades were just beginning to get the sense that they could anticipate the animal’s moves, when, instead of swinging its head back in the other direction, it lunged forward with a suddenness that Porcinus understood was by design. That cunnus tricked us! This was the thought inside Porcinus’ head, but his body was already moving, seeing, and understanding the intent of the animal as it ran directly at his Centurion. And, judging by the manner in which Scribonius was turning at the waist back to face the animal, Porcinus guessed that he had been issuing an order to their Signifer, who was behind him and standing on the side towards which Scribonius had turned. While the flurry of motion in front of him didn’t seem to completely stop, it did slow down significantly in Porcinus’ view, enough that he could see the look of surprise that dawned on Scribonius’ face in the eyeblink of time it took for him to see the huge beast bearing down on him. Porcinus wasn’t alone in responding to the sudden attack by the animal, and there were men closer to Scribonius than he was, so he saw two of them, both of them armed with the heavy spears rush to defend their Centurion. Who, in Porcinus’ view, was the best Centurion not just in the 10th, but in the entirety of Caesar’s army, save for only one man, his uncle, which was why, even when he saw the first Legionary make a desperate lunge at the charging elephant and miss an instant before the elephant knocked him flat with its head, Porcinus still didn’t hesitate. He had never been more certain in his life that he was going to die, but if that was the gods’ will, he would do it saving his uncle’s best friend.
Pullus was in agony, the nature of which he had never experienced before, because it wasn’t physical. Positioned as he was on the rampart, he had a mostly unobstructed view, and what he saw was the repetition of the same thing Porcinus was experiencing at that moment, with minor variations, except for the entire length of the dirt wall, in both directions, at least as far as he could see. From what he could tell, every armored elephant had now moved on Pullus’ side of the line of naphtha jars, and all but two of the animals had gone smashing into what, considering the circumstances and what they were facing, was a pitifully thin line of his men. As he watched, he briefly considered ordering the other Cohorts down off the rampart to join the fight but almost immediately dismissed it, determining that the problem wasn’t the lack of men; it was that the weapons with which they were fighting these animals were insufficient. Like Caesar, Batius, and several of the officers, Pullus had been at Thapsus, and while his Legion hadn’t faced the elephants directly, they had been near enough to see the kind of damage they could wreak; that most of it that day was turned on the forces of Scipio and Cato was a ha
ppy accident. Regardless of this exposure, Pullus also realized that, while the African animals were larger, they hadn’t been armored, at least to the degree these beasts were, nor were they trained to do anything but smash into a line of men and scatter them about like when a cat pounces on a flock of birds. These animals were clearly well trained, and because of his vantage point, he was watching essentially a repetition of the same tactics being carried out by the elephant in the middle of the First of the Second Cohort. Within the span of thirty or forty normal heartbeats after the leading animal smashed into Scribonius’ Century, something that Pullus had forced from his mind, albeit with some difficulty, the other elephants had done the same, the sounds created by this collision unlike anything Pullus, or any Roman present, for that matter, had ever heard before. The shrill screams of pain were unfortunately familiar; and yet, while the various bellows, grunts, and trumpeting sounds these animals were making were relatively unfamiliar, there was something more that Pullus was hearing. It took him several more heartbeats to determine what it was, and he quickly understood that, as anxious as he had been a moment before, it was nothing compared to what he was feeling now that he realized that his men were truly frightened. All of them were veterans, some more so than others, and no man who went into battle wasn’t scared in the moments before the first blow was struck, but this was decidedly different. His men, his boys were terrified by these strange and dangerous beasts who were, in that moment, crushing the life out of some of them, or spearing them with their capped tusks, eliciting in Pullus the kind of desperate, agonizing love a man might have when he is forced to watch his sons suffer some torment.
“We’ve got to do something.” He muttered this to himself, but Paterculus overheard, and he took a tentative step towards his Primus Pilus, uncertain whether he was expected to offer something.
“What about the scorpions?” He offered this, but while Pullus didn’t chastise him directly, he snapped, “None of the crews can guarantee they won’t hit our men, not with the way those animals move about. Which,” he added in a gloomy afterthought, “I wouldn’t have believed possible that they could move so fucking fast if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes.”
Pullus had already rescinded the order about trying to fire the rest of the jars of naphtha, so instead of the continuous wall of flame that he had been hoping for, there were intermittent fires spread across his front, although he could see that in a couple of spots, the flames had managed to spread by igniting an adjacent tent. All he had done, he thought miserably, was slow them down, and now his Legion was being torn apart. Worst of all, they hadn’t even thrown a ladder against the northern rampart, although the thought of losing a thousand sesterces to Spurius, or one of the other two Primi Pili, didn’t cross Pullus’ mind. His attention was drawn by another bellow of an elephant, but it was because it was unlike the dozens of similar sounds Pullus had heard over the previous moments, and he turned to see that, somewhere down in the area of his Third Cohort, men had managed to somehow drive the animal back; this in itself was good news, of course, but it was where they seemed intent on making it go that gave Pullus the idea.
“We’ve got to figure out a way to get them towards fire,” he mused, watching the scene.
The men of the Third were indeed using their siege spears to force the animal they were confronting in the direction where a row of tents was fully ablaze, which was clearly driving the animal to the edge of panic, and he could make out that there was only one Bargosan left in the box atop the animal’s back, while its handler was doing what Pullus had recognized was deliberate, laying himself flat on the animal’s head. The remaining Bargosan wasn’t an archer; he was wielding a spear, but as he watched, he saw how clumsily the man was handling the weapon, which he took to mean that it was an archer who had either run out of arrows or had taken up the spear in desperation. In Pullus’ view, this was an incredibly risky tactic for his men to employ; it was just as likely that if the beast went mad, it would do even more damage than it had already done, and he wondered if Metellus, or one of the Third’s Centurions was behind it, or if it was just one of those things that sometimes spontaneously happened in battle. Then, in seeming confirmation of his fears, the elephant made an even more urgent, bleating cry, then with a frankly astonishing burst of speed, it charged, away from the fire but headed in the opposite direction from safety and directly for the dirt rampart instead. Most of the tents in the vicinity where his men were engaged with each elephant were now down, most of them lying in a heap, although those nearest the northern road were a pile of embers, along with everything that had been inside. This afforded the opportunity for the scorpions to have a clear field, and none of the crews who were positioned on the rampart with the proper angle to loose hesitated. Pullus had ordered them to remain ready, something that wasn’t normally done because it would stretch the torsion ropes if it was kept pulled back long enough, but the resounding series of cracking noises that ensued when the animal came running, headlong and clearly no longer under the control of its handler, told Pullus this hadn’t happened. A half-dozen bolts slashed through the air, and while they all converged in the general vicinity of the elephant, hitting a moving target, particularly at a high speed, wasn’t something that Caesar’s scorpions were suited for, so three of them missed by varying degrees. Of those that hit, one of them struck the animal in the side, roughly in the middle of the armored blanket, but while the bolt penetrated the bronze scales, the padding, and the tough hide underneath, Pullus could see that it didn’t do much damage, if any at all. The second bolt struck the animal just above the right shoulder, lodging so that the bolt protruded just behind the handler’s waist, and the third struck it in its massive left hindquarter. Whether it was the second or third bolt that caused it to falter, or a combination of the two Pullus couldn’t tell, but while it slowed the animal, and elicited from it another, almost human shriek of pain, the elephant veered slightly but continued heading for the dirt rampart, just at a new spot.
“Is it going to ram its fucking head into that wall?”
Pullus could only shake his head to Paterculus’ question, but their attention, and that of every man on the rampart, was turned momentarily away from the fighting in front of them to watch as, judging from appearances, this was exactly what the animal intended. Every Roman standing on the dirt wall could see the handler, sitting back up and frantically striking the animal with the metal end of his goad; Pullus noticed that the man was doing so in the same place, just behind the right ear of the beast, but it had absolutely no effect. Then, when it was no more than fifty paces away, and before the crews frantically cranking the torsion arms for another shot could finish readying their piece, the handler yanked at something around his neck, then seemingly in one motion, with his other hand drew something from his belt. Pullus saw the handler’s arm rise, but he was too far away and it wasn’t quite light enough to see what it was, although immediately afterward, he correctly assumed that it was a hammer. In the moment, however, he only saw the arm come down…and the animal instantly collapsed, in much the same way Pullus had seen, and caused with men when his sword thrust had gone through the mouth and come out the other side, severing the spinal column. But, unlike men, the momentum of this huge animal meant that while it plunged headfirst into the ground in a fantastic shower of dirt, it continued sliding forward for at least another ten paces before finally coming to a stop, no more than two paces away from the wall. Unsurprisingly, there was no immediate reaction by the onlooking Romans, all of them stunned, and slightly awed, by what they had just witnessed. Ironically enough, it was the handler who broke the spell, and in so doing, hastened his own demise. Somehow, he had managed to stay on the beast’s back, but when he began moving, apparently to extricate himself, this drew the attention of the nearest Romans, and before he could lift more than one arm, three javelins sailed down from the dirt rampart, all three striking him and killing him instantly.
“So,” Valerius, his Corn
icen, spoke up, his eyes still on the animal, “Primus Pilus, the only way to kill these fucking elephants is to drive them towards the fire until they go mad, then wait for their rider to kill them?”
Pullus wasn’t really certain Valerius was being serious, but even if he wasn’t, he had touched on the factors that formed the idea in Pullus’ head.
“No, what we’re going to do,” Pullus gave Valerius a grim smile that, even to the Cornicen, seemed to offer nothing but a promise of pain, “is bring the fire to them.”
Without explaining, Pullus turned and called to the chief Immune of the nearest crew.
“Murena, are there any more strips of cloth left? If not, make some more.”
Once Pullus was done explaining, the Immune’s face expressed his apprehension, but he knew his Primus Pilus well enough not to attempt to change his mind, and he hurried away after voicing his concern, which Pullus acknowledged but didn’t change his order. He knew he was taking a terrible risk, and the likelihood was high that what he had planned was likely to cause almost as much damage to not just the scorpions but to the men down there desperately fighting these beasts, but he was out of other ideas. Any thought of reaching the city walls, even if it wasn’t first, had been set aside; now, he was just trying to save his beloved Legion. As he scanned the line of the fighting, there was a flurry of movement that drew his eyes to the spot where Scribonius and his Century were still struggling to contain the elephant belonging to the Bargosan he assumed was in nominal command of the raging animals, and it seemed to him as if the blood in his veins actually froze, so overwhelming was the sensation of cold. Although, between the distance and the lighting, it was impossible to make out facial features, Pullus didn’t need to see Scribonius’ face to know that his friend was in mortal danger, the red transverse crest of the Pilus Prior serving as a beacon. The movement that had caught his attention was when the elephant, who Pullus saw still had the one spear embedded in its side, used its tusks to apparently scoop one of his men off the ground, then tossed the ranker several feet into the air. That this was the last Legionary between the animal and Scribonius meant that Pullus’ best and now-longest friend was standing with nothing between himself and the animal, and he saw Scribonius, standing in front of his Signifer, seemingly calmly waiting for what came next, sword in hand. Then, from the ragged line of men surrounding the animal with their spears held out in front of them on Pullus’ side, he saw a Legionary detach himself from the line, running the few paces separating him from Scribonius, sliding to a stop directly in the path of the animal, dropping his shield to hold the spear in both hands.
