The true dawn came the way his father had taught him to see it, on the roof in Homs when he was a boy learning the times.
"Not the false one that rises like a wolf's tail," his father had said. "The one that spreads along the edge of the sky. That's when the dawn prayer comes in."
A thin white line along the eastern hills. Hassan looked at his watch: 6:14. Up in the tower Josu took hold of the rope.
The first stroke of the Angelus went out over the creek, and Hassan raised his hands to his ears and gave the call to prayer in Arabic.
"Allah is greatest. Allah is greatest."
The bell rang three, and paused, and rang three. Behind him the Basque women began the Angelus prayer, and beside him his son's voice came a beat late. "Allah is greatest."
Out on the slope above the village something cried out.
He kept his eyes on the notch and saw it anyway. All along the ridge, faces came loose at the hairline and sagged like wet paper off a wall. Under them were long gray heads. The shapes dropped onto all fours and ran south over the crest, toward the town, their hooves hammering on the stones. The voices stopped, all of them at once.
It was exactly what Yusuf had written. They ran for the ground.
"Come to prayer." And the line that belongs only to the dawn. "Prayer is better than sleep."
He prayed the two cycles facing the notch with Adam on his right, a little behind, where a follower stands. When he put his forehead on the frozen ground, he heard his son go down beside him.
They walked into Sweetwater at nine in the morning, nineteen of them, down through the sage with their tools on their shoulders and the lanterns swinging unlit from their belts.
Hassan thought about the old man on the rock. Let him count. Josu had said it in the empty street: in daylight they were slow and stupid, and knowing the axes were coming wouldn't wake them.
The town was empty in the sun. The porch rocker stood in the shade with nobody in it. In the cemetery every grave was raked smooth.
Leah stood at the gate with Yusuf's map open in her hands, the graves drawn as numbered squares in a dead man's pencil, and pointed with her chin.
The first grave held an old man in a red flannel shirt, curled on his side on the straw a few feet down, like a child asleep. He wore a face from the board by the register, white stubble and a hearing aid. His boots were off and his feet were small black hooves. He opened his eyes against the light, slow as a drunk.
Josu's wife hit him once with the mattock.
The old man lay down again. Then he began to talk. "Again, honey," he whispered. "Please. Again. I can't stand it." When nobody moved he spat at them and called Josu's wife a coward in a clear, ugly voice. Wes stood at the head of the row with Kurt's rifle and said, "No," every time a tool came up, and nobody struck twice.
It took four minutes. Then the old man went dark from the inside, the way a log goes in a stove, and smoked without a flame, and there was a black husk in a red shirt. Hassan crouched at the edge of the grave. The straw under the husk was dry as tinder and still yellow. Not one stalk had caught. The fire had stayed inside him.
Seven graves, seven sleepers, all of them old or thin or lame, seven single blows and seven husks. By half past ten the Iturri men were joking in Basque, and someone had a thermos, and Dana took a picture of Wes leaning on the rifle with his eyes shut and his face turned up to the sun.
Near the back fence a gray hoodie lay folded on a raked mound, neat as a pillow. Dana didn't touch it. Leah marked the square on the map with her thumbnail.
Hassan stood among the open graves and something itched at him. No Theo. No Mae. No face with a silver lauburu at its throat. The seven had the faces of people who had been old when they were eaten.
"Leah," he said. "Where are the young ones?"
She was already looking at the map. "Further in."
The next graves were in a cluster near the church wall, nine of them close together. A dozen men and women stepped onto the mounds with their spades. Josu stood on the eighth grave with his axe. Hassan stood on the ninth with Adam beside him, because he had promised to hold him himself, and Wes stood on the tenth. Dana stayed at the gate beside Leah.
Hassan's spade went in once.
The ground under his boots dropped an inch. Then every grave in the cluster gave way at the same moment, with a sound like a breath let out, and the earth went from under all of them, and they fell.
It was ten feet, maybe twelve, onto packed dirt and straw. Hassan landed on his side with Adam on top of him. Dirt poured down after them, and the hole above was a ragged square of blue sky.
They were in a tunnel. It ran both ways into the dark, high enough for a man to stand, its walls scored with marks like fingers. Other holes of sky showed further along, and under each one people were getting up, coughing, calling names.
Hassan looked at the walls and thought of supper, the town coming in at dusk with dirt ground into its knuckles and knees and hair. Working the fields, Mae had said. They had been working this, fifty years of digging under the street and the church and the graves. The graves were doors.
Up above, someone shouted in Basque. A body dropped through the hole beside him, and another. The Iturri people who had stayed up top were jumping in after them. A heavy man in a sheepskin coat landed on his feet with a lantern already lit. Leah's face showed once at the edge of the sky, white, with three of the old men beside her, and then pulled back.
Dana dropped in last. She landed badly and got up swearing.
"I wasn't staying up there by myself," she said.
Down here the dark was the dark of a closed box.
Hassan's headlamp went first. It dimmed to orange and died. Wes's flashlight flickered and went out. Dana held up her phone and the screen glowed, shook, and went black. Hassan opened the compass. The needle spun one way, stopped, and spun the other.
Only the herders' lanterns burned, small yellow rooms in the black.
And in them, they came.
They had dropped their faces at dawn on the ridge and hadn't put them back on. Long gray bodies, too long, moving low and quick on all fours. Smooth narrow heads with holes where the eyes should be. Split hooves that clicked on the packed earth. They were faster than dogs. Hassan saw one cross the whole width of a lantern's light in the time it took him to raise his hatchet.
An Iturri man swung at the first one. It swayed aside and his axe went into the wall.
They didn't stand still. They knew what the axes were for.
One went down under a spade, and it didn't lie there begging. Another came low out of the dark, straight past the man with the spade, and struck its fallen kin once across the back of the head, the way you'd slap a dog awake. It got up.
It got up faster and bigger, filling the light. It took the man who had hit it by the shoulder and pulled him into the dark, and he was gone, and they heard him a long time.
They did it for each other every time. Where none of its own could reach, a struck one flung itself at the closest pair of hands. And the Iturri men, who had pulled each other's lambs and dug each other's graves all their lives, helped each other every time.
"One blow!" Hassan was shouting it before he knew he was. "One hand! Don't help the man beside you! Stand over the ones that fall! Keep the others off them!"
Leah's word, in Basque, went up the tunnel in a dozen mouths. Once. Only once.
Josu had found his son.
It came out of the black at the end of the lantern light, upright, wearing Ander's face, black hair over its eyes, the little silver lauburu at its throat. It stood alone there, the gray shapes hanging back, and it stopped as if it were lost. Josu struck once. It went down at his feet.
"Aita," it said, in Ander's voice. "Aita, again. It hurts."
"Josu!"
Josu struck again.
It rose under the axe the way water comes up a drain. It was taller than Josu now, and the face hung off one side of its head like a mask on a nail. It put one long hand on Josu's chest and the other on his throat, and Hassan heard the sound.
Wes fired once.
The thing fell across Josu's body, and lay there, and turned Ander's half face toward Wes. "Buddy," it said, in Kurt's voice. "Come on. One more."
Wes worked the bolt and didn't fire.
A gray shape came low out of the dark toward it. The heavy man in the sheepskin coat stepped over the body with his lantern and his axe raised, and the shape stopped at the edge of the light, and swayed, and backed away. The thing began to burn from the inside. Josu's wife knelt in the straw beside her husband, and the heavy man lifted his lantern toward the far end of the tunnel.
There was a door there. Old planks, set in stone. Daylight leaked under it, thin and gray.
Hassan pushed it open. Stone steps went up into a long low cellar, and along one wall, in the gray light through the floorboards above, people sat chained to iron rings.
A rasp came from the far end, and a big man with a gray beard pushed himself up the wall onto his feet.
"Wes?"