Iturri spent the afternoon sharpening.
Hassan had never seen a whole village do one thing at once. Men took turns at the grindstone behind the barn, one on the treadle, the wheel shrieking. Women sat on the doorsteps with files and whetstones, working the edges of splitting axes and mattocks and the long hooked knives they used at lambing. Two teenage boys hauled spades out of the tool shed and laid them on the grass in a row. Twenty-two people, nine of them children, and every adult had something in their hands that could open the ground.
Leah walked among them with a list in her head and no paper. She stopped at each one and said a few words in Basque. Hassan didn't need them translated.
Once. Only once.
Wes sat on a stone by the creek with Kurt's rifle across his knees. He had cleaned it at noon. He was cleaning it again. Dana sat beside him and didn't help.
"You think he's alive," she said. "Kurt."
"They hung his gun up," Wes said. "You don't hang up the gun of a man you've eaten. You hang it up because he's still in the barn." He worked the bolt. "Was in the barn."
Adam spent the afternoon on the rock above the pens with his father, learning the words of the call to prayer one line at a time. He got the first line wrong four times. He got the line that bears witness to Allah right on the first try, and looked surprised, and said it again to be sure. A boy of nine in a red cap sat two rocks down and listened with his chin on his knees. Josu's grandson, Peio. He had watched Hassan walk to the pass through the binoculars that afternoon, and now he followed him everywhere at the distance of a thrown stone.
At sunset Josu climbed the tower and rang the Angelus, three and three and three and then the nine, and the whole village stopped work and stood where it was and prayed.
Hassan stood at the creek and gave the call to prayer.
He hadn't planned to. He had washed for the sunset prayer and stood facing the notch with the bell still ringing, and the bell was a call, and he found his own call in his mouth. His voice cracked on the first word. Behind him the Basque women crossed themselves and murmured their Hail Marys, and he called the faithful to prayer over them, two old calls going up the same valley at the same dusk. Then he prayed the sunset prayer with Adam standing beside him, a little behind, on his right.
When they came into Leah's kitchen, Josu's wife was kneeling by the stove with a length of soft hemp rope.
Peio stood in front of her with his arms up, the way a child stands to be measured. She passed the rope around his waist twice and tied it in a knot Hassan had never seen, flat and ugly and complicated, and ran the other end to the timber post that held up the kitchen beam. She tied that end too. Then she tugged both knots hard and kissed the top of his red cap.
Hassan looked at the post. The wood at waist height was worn pale and smooth all the way round, rubbed into a groove. He had seen grooves like it on every post in the village the night they came in. He had thought of goats.
"Every child," Leah said. She had seen him looking. "From the dusk bell to the dawn bell. Knots a child can't open. Only a grown hand." She lifted a second coil from a hook by the stove and held it out to him. "For your boy. The shedim call the young ones first. They walk in their sleep."
Adam had gone red to the ears.
"No," Hassan said.
"It's not a shame. My son wore one. I wore one."
"He's fifteen," said Hassan. "He's not an animal. I'll hold him myself."
Leah looked at him for a long moment. Then she hung the coil back on its hook, where he could see it, and went to the window.
They came at full dark, down the ridge in the moonlight, and stopped at the stones.
They stopped a few paces short, in a ring all the way around the village, standing in the sage the way they had stood in the street. The painter. The two women. The young mother with the sling. The boy from the bicycle. Faces from the board by the register. They didn't touch the whitewash. They looked at the lit windows and smiled.
Then they started calling.
"Wes," Kurt's voice said from the willows. "Wes, it's cold out here, buddy. My legs. They broke my legs, Wes."
Wes sat on the kitchen floor with his back to the wall and the rifle across his knees, and shut his eyes.
"Dana." Close, at the stones below the window. "Boss. I'm sorry I went down to the creek. Come out and I'll show you where I put the recorder."
Dana went to the window. She knew she shouldn't and she went. He stood just outside the line in his gray hoodie, with Theo's soft face and Theo's weight on one hip, and lifted a hand. She pulled the curtain shut and held it closed with both fists.
Then a young man's voice, from beyond the sheep pens.
"Aita! Aita, I'm cold. Open the door."
Josu was on his feet. His wife caught one arm and Leah caught the other, and the old woman said one word to her son, very quietly, and he stopped pulling.
By the stove Peio was asleep sitting up against the post. When the voice came again he stood without opening his eyes and walked toward the door. The rope came taut at his waist. He leaned into it, calm, his socks slipping on the boards, and his grandmother got up and sat him down again as if she had done it a hundred times.
Hassan sat with his back against Adam's bed and said the Throne Verse in Arabic, low, from memory. "Allah, there is no god but He, the Living, the Sustainer of all; neither drowsiness takes Him nor sleep." He said it again and again, under the old woman's Hail Marys. It was the only thing in the night that was his.
He didn't mean to close his eyes. Two nights without sleep closed them for him.
Cold air woke him. The bed was empty and the window stood open on its hook.
He was out of the house before he knew he'd moved. The moon was low and the yard was blue, and Adam was walking across it in his socks toward the line of stones on the south side. His eyes were half open. His face was calm.
And from beyond the stones a woman's voice was calling him, soft and hoarse, with a Homs accent, by the baby name his mother had used before he could talk.
Hassan caught him one step from the line. One step. Adam's toe was on the whitewash.
Adam fought. He wasn't awake. He fought his father with his eyes half open and his face still peaceful, and he was strong, stronger than he had any right to be. Hassan got both arms around him from behind and dug his heels into the frozen dirt, and they went down together on the frost, and the boy kept crawling.
"In the name of Allah," Hassan said into his son's hair, in Arabic. "In the name of Allah. Adam. Wake up."
Adam went slack all at once. He woke shivering on the ground with his father's arms locked around him, and looked at the shape standing in the sage, and began to cry.
"It pulled me," he said. "Dad, it pulled. Here." His hand was on his stomach. "Like a hook."
"You ate at their table," Hassan said. "Now they think you're theirs."
He walked his son back into the kitchen. Leah was standing by the stove in her shawl. She didn't say anything.
Hassan took the coil of rope down from its hook. He passed it twice around Adam's waist and tied the knot the way Josu's wife had tied Peio's, flat and ugly, and pulled it hard. He ran the other end to the bedpost and tied that too. Adam looked down at the rope and then at his father, and neither of them said a word.
An hour before dawn the calling stopped.
All at once, as it had on the first night in the pines. The silence was worse. Hassan went to the kitchen window. The ring of shapes stood exactly where it had stood all night, but every head had turned the same way, toward the ridge.
Somebody was coming down it alone. A woman in a blue dress and a white apron, her hair pinned up, walking carefully on the loose stones.
She came all the way to the line below Leah's window and stopped, with the lamplight on her round, kind, tired face.
"Hassan," Mae called softly. "Hon. Can we talk? Just you and me?"