This was bad. This was very, very bad.
My next thought was even worse. We’d got the date wrong. We thought we were in 680BC and we weren’t. If the records were right – and they were – we were in 681BC, instead. Which meant …
No time to think about that now. Both men straightened up from examining the body. One of them casually wiping his sword on his father’s robe, glanced across the water and saw us watching.
I saw it all in slow motion. He stared for a second, then turned his head and shouted.
They weren’t alone at all. Some dozen or so heavily armed men emerged from the trees and bushes.
He pointed directly at us. I don’t speak Akkadian. I didn’t need to. Standing on a small, grassy knoll at the site of an assassination is never good in any language.
‘Shit!’ said Tim, encapsulating the situation nicely.
They began to run towards one of the delicate bridges spanning the moat.
‘Run,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
We fled.
‘We have to get out,’ said Tim.
We certainly did. Once they closed the gates to the gardens, we would be trapped. They’d beat the grounds and it would be only a matter of time. But not if we could get to the gates first.
So we ran.
I shed my shawl – an action I would later regret, and pulled down my hair. From a distance, I was now a red-haired girl in a tunic rather than a mature woman in a traditional shawl.
We flew down the path, emerging near the gate with the stone stele. We’re old hands at avoiding pursuit. We slowed down and walked behind and then alongside a family group on their way out.
The little boy dropped a small, carved toy and Peterson picked it up and began to play with him. At the same time, I relieved one of the women of her heavy basket. I’m not sure how happy she was to relinquish it, but I didn’t give her a lot of choice and we all walked out together. From the corner of my eye, I could see movement. Voices were raised behind us.
Once outside, I handed her back her basket. She snatched it from me, but we were out and I was past caring. We hurried away, back towards the Mashki Gate.
‘What just happened?’ said Peterson.
‘Assassination of Sennacherib in 681BC, by two of his sons in revenge for his desecration of Babylon. Another son, Esarhaddon succeeds, but not yet because he’s not here. Probably there will now follow a period of turmoil and lawlessness while everyone sorts themselves out and new players emerge. A bit like after a general election.’
‘You mean there isn’t turmoil and lawlessness before general elections?’
Joking apart, we were not in a good position. There would be soldiers on the streets soon and almost certainly a curfew. And until Number Three turned up, we had nowhere to go.
And we’d witnessed the murder. And they’d seen us witnessing the murder.
Number Three didn’t come.
We were right about the soldiers. And the curfew. And having nowhere to go.
‘Look,’ said Tim. ‘We can’t hang around here waiting for St Mary’s. God knows when they’ll get here. It’ll be dark soon and we have to find somewhere to hole up for the night. Just in case.’
He was right. St Mary’s would come, but they might not come in time. We needed to find somewhere safe and we needed to find it soon. Before it got dark.
We stepped off the main thoroughfare and lost ourselves in the maze between the Mashki and Nergal Gates, choosing narrower and narrower streets until we finished in a tiny alley behind blind walls. It was a dead end, which wasn’t ideal, but the wall was low enough for us to scramble over should we need to. And from there we could nip through someone’s back yard, over another wall into a similar alley and away.
It wasn’t a comfortable night. We were tired and thirsty and became more so as the night progressed. The sky was clear and full of stars. We sat with our backs to the cooling wall and quietly discussed our predicament.
The first thing, obviously, was that something had gone wrong when the co-ordinates were laid in. The date of Sennacherib’s death was widely and extensively documented. The date was right. We were wrong. And if this mistake wasn’t somehow picked up, they’d look for us in the wrong time. We were in 681BC. They’d be looking for us next year.
Peterson was confident. ‘Chief Farrell, Dieter, Polly Perkins,’ – Polly was head of IT – ‘one of them is bound to pick it up. And if not immediately, they’ll recheck when they can’t find us. They’ll jump about and eventually they’ll get to us.’
Beside him, I nodded in the dark.
‘In the meantime, we need to stay safe. The soldiers are probably looking for us, but the population is around a hundred thousand and so long as we keep our heads down, we’ll be OK.’