The day afterward, Malchus had the march through the mountains resume. As he had since the campaign’s beginning, he led from his turret atop the mighty elephant Mago, who along with his herd-mates tore and tramped through the vegetation, carving out the avenue that the rest of the army would follow. The turret’s constant rocking would make Malchus’s head spin and upset his balance a little, but he considered those discomforts a minor price to pay for the prestige and vantage of riding the largest of the beasts they had brought over from Africa. It was at any rate preferable to hiking on the ground like a common soldier.
So far, despite the march’s arduous conditions, Malchus had not received any reports of desertion during the whole campaign. Men losing their morale and running off without ever returning was always a thorn in a general’s side, especially if the campaign had taken an undesirable turn, yet not a single soldier seemed to have done so on their own volition all summer, at least not to their officers’ knowledge. Perhaps the very unfamiliarity of the terrain discouraged the men from straying, for they would be unable to survive in an alien land where most of the natives would not know a word of Carthaginian.
The one man known to have left the army at all was Isceradin, the Iberian traitor, and that was on Malchus’s own orders.
Would the Iberian survive on his own out in the woods between these mountains and the colony? He undeniably had a better command of the indigenous Atlantean tongues than anyone else Malchus knew, so he would have little difficulty trading for supplies. Nor would it be likely that Isceradin would get lost on his way back, given the wide trail the army had blazed. If Malchus had any concerns for the traitor at all, they were over his reception back home. The Senate could have him exiled from any territory under Carthaginian control, if not put to death. Then his wife would be without a husband to warm her bed, and his little daughter without a father to take care of her.
That was what one would sacrifice whenever they betrayed their countrymen. Isceradin should have considered himself fortunate the Shaawanaki had agreed to call off the ambush they had planned with his aid, inadvertent as it might have been.
Something soared from the undergrowth and plunged into Mago the elephant’s face. He raised his trunk with a shrill trumpet, jolting the turret on his back and throwing Malchus against its rear wall. The general had yet to regain his footing when he heard more missiles whooshing like thrown javelins and then stabbing thick pachyderm skin, further agitating Mago and his mates to their left and right.
Up from the bushes rose red-striped men with buckskin sheets covering their torsos front and back, shrieking with bloodthirsty fervor as they kept hurling spears at the Carthaginian elephants. Glimpses of copper dangling from their necks, blazing in the daylight like infernal fire, gave away who these attackers were. Malchus should have considered that the Shaawanaki would not hold up their end of the deal! How could he have been so stupid?
While his elephant and the others brandished their tusks and trunks at the assailants, he shot into the enemy mass with his bow. Each arrow he loosed took out one barbarian after the other, yet it was the might of the massive monsters that wrought the most carnage, goring men or crushing them into slimy crimson paste beneath hoofed feet. The crunching of bone, the roaring and screaming of men, and the elephants’ enraged trumpeting blocked out all other sound in the world in a deafening clamor.
Despite all the damage the beasts were inflicting on their front ranks, the Shaawanaki ambushers did not relent. Instead, their formation deepened with men coming in from behind as they continued chucking volleys of their obsidian-tipped spears, studding the elephants like quills on a porcupine. The Numidian mahouts stabbed their goads into their mounts’ heads in a frantic effort to keep them in the fight, but Malchus could observe that the animals’ attacks were slowing down and becoming more jerky as their strength bled out.
A Shaawanaki spear that flew higher than normal hit Mago’s mahout in the chest, sending the man rolling off. Having lost the one human in his life who could control him, the bull elephant turned to stomp away from his barbarian tormentors. The remainder of the herd followed suit, despite their mahouts’ desperate protests. Together, the panicked creatures were stampeding into the body of the army that had been behind them, trampling any men or horses that got in their way. The chaotic noises of bones being crunched, armor being crumpled, and human death rattles wrung Malchus’s stomach with nausea even more than the turret’s violent shaking atop his mount.
As if that were not enough trouble, more Shaawanaki were pouring from the surrounding forest to harry the Carthaginian flanks. The savages had Malchus’s army entrapped in a circle of stabbing spears and slashing serrated clubs, a circle that ate away at his men as it squeezed onto them. Still he shot after the ambushers with his bow, but with the elephant’s turret as unsteady under his feet as it was, he was sure he was as likely to hit his own soldiers as he was the Shaawanaki, or miss entirely.
One enemy warrior ran up to the charging Mago and thrust his spear into the animal’s breast. Throwing his head up to let out a moaning final trumpet, the great elephant buckled and collapsed onto the ground, with Malchus hopping off to escape being crushed under his weight. The general whipped out his sword and hacked away at the barbarians around him, his vision red with a desire to avenge his proud steed’s death.
The butt of a Shaawanaki club rammed into Malchus’s brow, and the world went black in an instant.