Gods and Legions Read Free Page A

us froze in awe and horror at the sight – a brigade of the King's armored war elephants, bearing down on us at a speed unmatched by any beast or machine on earth.
    At the dreadful sound of the trumpeting elephants, the Roman horses reared, rolling their eyes in terror, and even Julian's well-trained mount almost threw him in the dust. The elephants' awful appearance, their gaping jaws and horrendous smell, struck fear in man and animal, and as the line of beasts approached, the earth physically trembled under the terrible weight of their stumplike feet. They thundered straight toward the center of our panicking column as the drivers perched precariously on the base of the beasts' necks, peering down at us with evil grins, their white teeth gleaming through the blackness of their faces.
    The beasts plowed into our line, enraged at the screams of our terrified troops. The men scattered, fleeing for their lives, while the elephants reared in their midst, bellowing and trumpeting, stomping again and again on the bodies of those they had trampled until they were nothing more than dark smears in the sooty earth. Roman limbs and torsos hung limp and dripping from the tusks, emboldening the animals further in their blood rage. The archers in the towers above rained arrows down upon our men, felling them where they stood to create lines of writhing wounded whom the elephants hastened to stamp upon and crush, or to scoop up in their tusks and tear apart with their jaws. When our Gauls finally managed to scramble out of range of the flashing ivory, the elephant drivers deftly maneuvered their beasts away from the scene of slaughter and formed up in a rank to prepare for another charge at our massed and terrified troops. Behind them, marching implacably down the ridge in tight formation, came an enormous body of Persian infantry, raising their ululating battle cry, preparing to rush in and finish off the destruction begun by the elephants as soon as the terrible beasts had completed their work.
    As the elephants withdrew and began re-forming, Julian plunged into the thick of his troops, his energy restored, eyes glinting with an almost terrifying intensity behind the visor of his battle helmet. The man was everywhere, wheeling and careening his horse like one possessed, shouting encouragement, arranging his troops into a tight battle formation, bellowing instructions for defeating the monsters when they next attacked. The Gauls stared, but swallowed their fear and their impulse to flee into the desert, obeying him with the military precision he had instilled in them over years of campaigning. Shields were raised, bronze-tipped pikes lowered into position, and as the thick black dust settled on our heads we turned to face the elephants' renewed onslaught.
    It came immediately. Led by the huge bull, its red mouth gaping and lips flapping, the beasts charged again into our column, twenty or more of them, shoulder to shoulder in ranks of four. One carried a Roman soldier, impaled through the belly on the beast's chest spike during the previous charge, the man's legs and head flailing helplessly with the animal's swaying strides, his lifeless eyes staring forward at his comrades like a bloodied figurehead on the prow of a ship. Onward they charged, trumpeting, the ground trembling, and as they approached the men fell silent and tensed.
    'Stay your weapons!' shouted Julian, his lips twisted into a kind of mad grin or a grimace, eyeing the onrushing brutes, blinders forcing their stare straight into the thick of the Roman legion. 'Stay!' he repeated, his voice rising, and the terrible, rancid stench of the animals filled our nostrils, mixing with the reek of the blood and excrement covering our feet and the ground around us, 'Stay!... Until I say...
    'NOW!'
    As the elephants thundered furiously into our midst, the ranks of men suddenly parted in the middle like a split sheet of parchment, the two halves of the cohorts leaping frantically to