A Symphony of Echoes (22 page)

Slowly, we left the more popular areas behind us, drawing near to the moat to get a good view of the ziggurat.

I was entranced.

‘Tim, this is wonderful.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I could stay here for ever.’

We never learn.

As he spoke the words, we stepped out from under the trees and found ourselves looking across the moat to the ziggurat and a flight of steps leading to the first terrace. Even though this was the least visited part of the park, Sennacherib had still paid attention to detail, and two winged leopards guarded the stairway.

We ascended a small, grassy hump for a better view.

And then, as we watched, three sumptuously dressed figures emerged and stood directly opposite us on the other side of the moat. One, several steps above the others wore a tall, golden conical hat. The other two were bareheaded. They talked among themselves. They were obviously high-ranking noblemen, their beards curled and oiled in the fashion of the day. The two younger men wore robes of gold with scarlet shawls. The older wore purple. Royal purple.

Tim stiffened. ‘Is that who I think it is?

I nodded. Something was wrong. Really wrong. I had a very nasty feeling we were looking at the mighty Sennacherib himself. And with the lack of guards and personal retinue, the two younger men must be family members. Sons, probably. Two of them.

My happy feelings evaporated.

‘Tim, we may need to move pretty sharpish.’

‘Why?’

Too late.

Even as we watched, one of the younger men laughed and pointed upwards, drawing attention to a bird passing overhead. The older man looked up and as he did so, both younger men fell upon him with swords. Taken completely unawares, he went down at once. It was over in seconds. He lay, head down on the staircase, not moving. Scarlet trickles of blood ran down the steps in a dreadful parody of the cascading water around us.

We stood frozen.

They’d killed the king. Right in front of us, they’d killed the king. The mighty Sennacherib. The Assyrian who came down like the wolf on the fold was dead. Killed in his own back garden. By his own sons. And we’d witnessed it.

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.’

He wasn’t being over-optimistic. It wasn’t the soldiers we needed to worry about too much. If we weren’t rescued within a day or so, then life for us was going to get very tough. Very tough indeed.

Everyone has their own place in time. Almost everyone is part of a family unit, or a tribe, or a guild, and even those who aren’t – those who live outside of normal society – usually have the knowledge to survive. Where to go – where not to go. Where they’re likely to pick up free food. Who to watch out for. We had none of that knowledge. We didn’t speak the language. We weren’t prepped for a long assignment. We had no money – or the equivalent. We had nothing tradable. Nothing to barter. If we wanted to eat then we’d have to steal it – with all the dangers of being caught. Hanged. Hands chopped off. Impaled. Not all at the same time, obviously, but none of it was good.

Water was not so much a problem. There were public wells. But we had nothing in which to carry it. We’d have to persuade someone to draw it for us. Or we could go down to the riverbank. The Khosr flowed through the city and the mighty Tigris itself was only a mile away.

But we couldn’t go too far away from the Mashki Gate because that’s where they’d look for us. Except they’d be here next year. Because we were in the wrong time. We would never survive for a whole year.

Neither of us got any sleep that night. Soldiers were everywhere. Whether they were searching for us, or simply enforcing the curfew during the current power vacuum, we had no way of knowing. Twice loud voices sounded at the end of our little alley, but no one ventured near us.

Night in the desert is very cold. We both shivered in our thin tunics. We huddled closely together, tucking Tim’s shawl around us.

He said, ‘Do you remember our first jump together?’

‘I certainly do. You peed on me.’

‘Do you want me to do it again? For old times’ sake?’

‘Save it. If we have to go into hiding, we may have to drink our own urine.’

‘That’s something I’ve often thought about. Do you drink your own – or the other person’s?’

‘When you say ‘
often
thought about’ …’

‘Well, you know, every now and then. Just out of idle curiosity.’

‘You’re not drinking my urine.’

‘That’s a little selfish. Surely, in our current crisis, we should be working together. I’m rather disappointed in this “me first” attitude.’

‘Fine. Half a pint of Maxwell’s Old Peculiar coming right up. Get it while it’s still warm.’

I felt him chuckle. ‘This time tomorrow we’ll be back at St Mary’s.’

We weren’t.

We had a shit day. Even by St Mary’s standards, it was a shit day.

We snuck out of our alley at first light and walked to the well at the end of the street. Early though we were, a couple of old crones were there before us. Peterson heaved up a couple of buckets of water for them and they gave us a drink in return. We chugged back as much as we could handle, nodded our thanks, and set off for the Gate again.

We hung around all day, moving on when we started getting suspicious looks. We would walk around in the hot sun for a while and then return.

The result was always the same. No St Mary’s.

Soldiers were everywhere. Troops marched purposefully from A to B and then, presumably, back to A again. Groups of them stood on street corners, and large contingents had been drafted to the Gates. We couldn’t have got out even if we’d wanted to.

The sun rose and the heat intensified. I had no shawl to protect my head. Without a comb, I twisted my hair up as best I could. Peterson said I looked like someone’s mad granny.

The city seemed calm but tense. People knew something had happened, but not what. Nineveh under Sennacherib had enjoyed a period of stability. What would happen when the news got out was anyone’s guess. Widespread panic, probably. People don’t like change.

Their plan was obviously to keep a lid on things until a peaceful succession could be achieved. But Esarhaddon was a long way off. He would undertake a series of forced marches. He would get here. But he wasn’t here yet.

I wondered what had happened to the murderers. Did they sit tight and ride out the storm? Or were they out of the gates before the body cooled? And speaking of the body …

‘Let’s go and look,’ said Peterson. So we did.

The site was pristine. Gazing across the moat, we could see no traces of violence at all. That was what all the guards had been for – they were the clean-up squad. Not a trace remained of yesterday’s drama.

We returned slowly back to the Mashki Gate. Still no sign of St Mary’s.

‘Typical,’ said Peterson. ‘Without you or me to show them the way they probably can’t even find Hawking by themselves, let alone Nineveh.’

There was quite a crowd at the public well by now, and we had to wait a long time for our turn. We were hungry, too. The time for the mid-day meal was approaching. Succulent smells drifted around. My stomach rumbled.

We returned to our little alley, stifling between the high walls. The citizens of Nineveh employed the time-honoured method of rubbish disposal. They chucked it over the back wall into the alley. Problem solved.

We poked around, found some odd bits of wood, one sandal (why is there ever only one?) some strange bits of shrivelled vegetables that presumably even the goats wouldn’t touch, a certain amount of night soil, a dead rat, and some broken pots.

We’re St Mary’s. We can make anything out of anything. We could probably build a nuclear reactor out of this little lot. However, we settled for propping the wood against the wall and draping Peterson’s shawl over the top, which gave us shade and cover. Crawling underneath, I picked over the pottery and we found a broken piece that could hold several inches of water.

We slept for a while, roused only by the family on the other side of the wall all of whom seemed to have all traipsed outside for the sole purpose of yelling at each other for half an hour, and then traipsed back inside again.

It was still stifling in our alley, so we set off to the well again. Using our precious piece of pot, we were able to rinse off some of the dust and drink our fill.

The sun was going down. We’d been in Nineveh for twenty-four hours. With that thought, my stomach rumbled again. The street markets were packing up for the day and we wandered slowly along, keeping an eye out for discarded fruit and vegetables. No such luck. The street urchins had long since done all that. We really needed to get our act together. I started to think.

Peterson, turning to speak to me, brushed against a pile of figs and knocked some half-dozen to the ground. He stopped, picked them up and replaced them, contriving to keep two back. And the stallholder kindly gave him another two – one each – by way of thanks.

A feast!

We sat on a low wall and ate them slowly. Two figs seemed very inadequate. Over the way, a man was stirring a huge cauldron of something savoury and dispensing ladlesful to people who turned up with bowls. And money.

We moved on.

The smell of piss told us we were in the dyeing and laundry area.

I had an idea.

The secret is not to run. Running draws attention. Move slowly and with confidence. I walked to the nearest vat full of reddish-coloured water, picked up a nearby bowl, filled it and walked slowly out again. I don’t think anyone even noticed me. Peterson waited outside.