The Seven Hills (45 page)

And still the men were crossing the stream, churning
the ground on the far side to mud, crowding the ranks
against one another. The army was losing cohesion and turning into a mob. She looked north and saw that Norbanus's small cavalry force was confining its activities to keeping the much larger Carthaginian force from flanking the Greek contingent.

"Hamilcar," she said, her voice sounding hoarse in her
own ears. "Stop your men from crossing the water. They can
do no good and the pressure over there will not let up until the Romans begin to retreat."

The shofet just looked annoyed. "They will break very
soon. Look, I am already victorious on the south."

She looked that way and indeed the Gauls there were be
ing driven back in confusion by the orderly lines of the
Greeks and the Macedonians. Soon they would flank the Romans at that end and roll up the line. This looked encouraging, but a nagging thought assailed her:
He knowingly left his
south end weak and vulnerable. He did not take the city and port to
the south. The road south is wide open. What can this mean?

Then she was appalled to see Hamilcar order his reserve
regiments across the stream, into the center. "Shofet! You tire your men to no cause!"

"That will be enough, woman!" he snapped. "They are
engaged all along the front now. Soon the weight of my army will crush them underfoot!"

Frustrated, she sat and watched. It occurred to her that Hamilcar had not studied his battles as closely as he thought. His ancestor, Hannibal, had once won a battle something like this: beating a larger army with a smaller. That was Cannae, his greatest victory. She was sure that Norbanus was using some form of the Cannae strategy, but the battles were so dissimilar that she could not understand what he intended.

She did see, plainly, that the Romans were not distressed
by the vaunted "weight" of Hamilcar's army. Only the men of the front lines could engage actively. The Romans had a well-drilled maneuver by which, every few minutes, the front-line men stepped back and those behind them stepped forward, keeping fresh, untired men at the fighting line. If
the rear men of Hamilcar's army pushed, they merely drove
the front-line men into the Roman swords. At intervals,
more of the murderous pila would arch out above the heads
of the legionaries and plunge into the struggling' mass of Hamilcar's men.

She saw men detach from the rear of the Roman formation, form a neat, orderly rectangle and march to the southern end of the Roman line, there to form a thickened,
south-facing line just as Hamilcar's Greeks had their flank
ing maneuver almost concluded. The Gauls, caught be
tween the two forces, were slaughtered. But the Roman line
held. They inflicted few casualties on the orderly Greeks, but the phalanx was stymied.

Teuta stood and paced before the glowering shofet. She saw how long her shadow had grown and turned to look at
the sun. She was amazed to see how low it stood in the west.
To the north she saw a new movement. The block of Norbanus's Greek-Macedonian phalanx was moving, pushing against the lightly armored Iberians, shoving them back, spearing them, striding over their bodies. Already, men were breaking away from the battle, frustrated at being un
able to come to grips with the Romans, unable to take heads and win glory. Slowly, a step at a time, the Greeks were cut
ting themselves a strong position at Hamilcar's left flank.

"Look!" she said, grasping the shofet by the shoulder and
shaking him. "You are being flanked!"

He shook off her hand. "They can accomplish nothing! There are not enough of them."

She knew now that Hamilcar was seeing only the ideal battle in his head, the battle that he wanted to see. Immedi
ately, she determined to extricate her men from this disaster. Hamilcar did not even glance in her direction as she walked
to the rear of the platform and leapt upon her horse. Her bodyguard rode behind her as she pelted northward, toward the cavalry action. Beside her rode her standard-bearer. Atop a long pole he bore a golden dragon, its long, waving tail a silken tube that filled with air as he galloped, making the queen conspicuous to her men.

She rode through thousands of wounded men, seeking to
put distance between themselves and the battle. She saw
that not all were wounded. Idly, she axed a few of these de
serters down when they strayed too near. She did not plan to stay on this field, but neither was she deserting. She knew when it was time to withdraw an army to fight another day.

She found her men engaging the Roman cavalry. They
were greatly frustrated that the smaller Roman force refused
to engage them in a mass and obligingly allow themselves to be slaughtered. Teuta shouted and her trumpeter sounded his horn, and swiftly, the Illyrian horsemen rallied to their queen's banner.

"Come with me!" she yelled to them. "You are needed in
the south!" Without question they obeyed, ignoring the
dismayed cries and jeers of the other cavalry. They followed
their queen, not some foreign king. They cared nothing for his hired lackeys and their fate.

While they assembled, she studied the progress of the battle. The Greeks at this end were now at the stream, able to spear with contemptuous ease the men still trying to cross. When their enemy gave up and ceased trying to cross, the Greeks raised their spears upright, then performed an
elegant left-facing maneuver and lowered their spears once
again. This time the formation, and its spears, faced south. Then the Greeks began their slow, inexorable push.

They have us, boxed!
she thought.
There is no way out but
south.
Now she could see what Norbanus intended.
Why
he
was doing it remained a mystery. With her men behind her, she made a wide half circle around the now-disintegrating army. Whole units were pulling away and retreating to the west, unwilling to cross the stream into what was now
nothing more than a slaughter yard.
With just a few more
men, he could have bagged this whole army,
she realized. Yet an
other doubt assailed her on this day full of doubts. She had a suspicion that the utter destruction of the Carthaginian army and its shofet was the last thing Norbanus wanted. But why?

She found Hamilcar pacing on his platform. His face was worried, his glance straying every few seconds to the city on
the southern horizon. She dismounted and climbed to the carpeted deck. "Hamilcar," she said quietly. "It is time to go. You are doing nothing to harm them. You still have the bulk of your army. Break off and retreat. Fight this man
somewhere else, some other time. You won't beat him here, today, no matter how many men you sacrifice."

"It cannot be!" he cried. "He has a paltry little army and I have a great host. He should be at my feet begging for his life!"

"That is not going to happen. If you stay here, he will
grind all your men to blood sausage and then it will be your
turn to beg. Get away from here, now!"

Abruptly, his face went slack. "How did this happen?" he
said with little expression.

"You allowed him first to destroy the army of Mastanabal, that otherwise would have been here this day, making you truly invincible. You allowed Norbanus to choose the time and the ground for this battle, then you gave him all the time he needed to make his preparations." She saw no
reason for merciful words. Now she was sure that she had
chosen the wrong man. Perhaps that could be rectified. In the meantime, it was up to her to salvage what she could from this debacle.

He said nothing for a while, then: "You are wise. I should
have listened to you."

She nodded. Perhaps he was beginning to show some sense.

"But that cannot be all of it," he said further. "I must have offended the gods in some fashion. When I return to Carthage, I shall order a
Tophet.
The children of the highest families of Carthage shall be sacrificed in the fires of Baal-Hammon."

She rolled her eyes. Like every other man who could not face the reality of his own failure, he was passing responsi
bility to the gods. "Then let us go now. Back the way we came. The Romans will pause here to loot your camp. With your men reorganized, we can make a fighting retreat."

"No," Hamilcar said. "Do you not see that the way south
is unimpeded? My fleet is in the harbor of Cartago Nova. We will take ship from there."

"Notice?" she said, frustrated. "I've been noticing it all day! He left Cartago Nova untouched! He put his weakest
forces on his south flank, opposite.your strongest! His Mace
donian phalanx is pressing your men southward! In the name of all the gods, Hamilcar, can't you see when you are
being
herded?"
She all but screamed the last word.

Oddly, he took no offense at her tone. He pointed to the mass of Gauls and Iberians now trudging westward, away from the battlefield. "Those men will regain their spirit and their senses soon. It will occur to them that they can curry favor with Rome by attacking us. It will be that way all the long road to the Strait of Hercules. I can rely only on my Greek professionals, and I do not have enough of them."

She calmed herself. His words were not without sense. At least that was something. "Very well. But we don't wait and
try to defend Cartago Nova. He's already thought of that and has something planned. I don't care about the rest of
your army. I want my men and their horses embarked on the
first transports, along with you and me. We don't wait for
the rest of the army to go. We leave as soon as we're aboard. The rest can follow, if they can contrive to. You can raise an
other army when we get to Carthage."

A dusty, bloody man climbed the steps to the platform. It was Euximenes, the commander of the Greeks. "Shofet,"
he said, "we've won our part of the field, but everywhere else is chaos. My men are in good order and haven't taken many
casualties. Let us get you out of here. There is no time to
waste." He looked back and forth between the two, as if un
sure where his orders were to come from.

"Prepare a retreat to Cartago Nova, Commander," Hamilcar said, sounding firm and decisive again.

"Then if Your Majesties will come with me, you'll be safest among my men."

The two mounted, and surrounded by Hamilcar's honor guard and Teuta's Illyrians, they crossed the stream and joined the solid, orderly mass of the Greek-Macedonian mercenaries. The officers called their orders, and the standards waved and the trumpets sounded. They turned southward and walked away from the field. Behind them, the survivors of the army followed them, some throwing away shields and stripping off armor to move more easily. Far in
their rear, the other phalanx kept up its steady pressure. The
Roman legions had not advanced a step from the battle line they had established at the outset of the fight.

Atop his own high tower, Norbanus watched
them go. His highest officers stood with him. Although they understood everything that had happened, they were still amazed.

"General, we could still bag the lot and finish this," Cato said, his fingers working feverishly on his sword grip.

"Finish what?" said Norbanus. "Finish this battle? It is finished. Killing every man out there, including Hamilcar,
would not finish the war. Another war, perhaps, but not this one, because we have sword to destroy Carthage utterly and
Carthage still stands. That is why we will now invest Cartago Nova, but we will not hinder his escape."

"It seems a pity just to let him go," said the commander
of one of the new legions, one of the younger Caesars.

"Long ago," Norbanus explained, "a defeated shofet could be crucified. But old Hannibal put an end to that. He abolished the republic and made the shofet a true king. If
we kill Hamilcar now, as we easily could, who knows what
might happen? He has no heir. The Council of One Hundred might choose a really capable man to lead them. They could raise up another Hannibal. But as I have arranged
things, when we arrive before the walls of Carthage, who do
you think will be in charge there?" He looked around at them, smiling. "Why, none other than Hamilcar Barca, the
man whose fat backside we've just flogged bloody and sent
running back to Africa!"

The men on the tower laughed uproariously, that swords-
on-shields Roman laugh that struck terror into other nations. "General," Niger said, pointing to the natives who
had abandoned Hamilcar and now fled westward, "shall we send out men to kill those fleeing savages?"

"No," Norbanus said. "I will treat with them later. They'll listen to me, because today they saw us accomplish
the impossible. They will have the choice of being slaves or
being allies of Rome. It will be the same choice the rest of the world will have, and I think they'll choose wisely. We can add their numbers to our army as we continue our march. There's nothing wrong with them as warriors. They were just badly led and they know it."