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 another 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 responsibility 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 Macedonian 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 another 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 unsure 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?"