The guide let go of Julian's wrist, and the sea came up to his knees.
For the length of the crossing he had seen only what he was allowed to see: a grey floor with no edge to it, and the hand on his wrist, dry and too hot. The air had pressed on his face like an oven door left open. Now there was water, real water, cold enough to make him gasp, and a sandbank shifting under his shoes, and the hull of a fishing boat a few yards off with a man at the rail.
He waded to it. The skipper hauled him over the side without a word, and did not once look at his face. The passage had been paid on the other side, in whatever coin the keepers of the gate took. Julian had not been shown what it was. He had been told not to ask.
He sat in the wheelhouse with a blanket round him and his trousers steaming. The sun stood at the top of the sky. It did not move while he dried, and it did not move while the coast came up grey and low ahead of them.
"Twenty-five days," the skipper said, the only thing he said all the way in. He nodded up at it. "Like that. Everywhere."
In the inside pocket of Julian's jacket, folded in oilcloth, was a sheet torn from the keeper's ledger. Edwin Sallow had written it out in his square hand on the last night before the others left. "J. Gardner. Back by the sea gate. The house, the papers. Then the road east, as the master's envoy." Under it the keeper had written the date by the old count, because he trusted no other.
The others had gone with the master to the gate in the east. Julian had been sent the long way round, by sea, for a book.
The dog next door was barking at the house when he got out of the taxi. It had barked at the house the same way when he was eleven.
It was a different dog, of course. Twenty years had gone. Its water bowl by the fence was dry and white at the rim. The neighbour came out with an empty watering can and said sorry, he's like that with this house, and are you the nephew. Julian said he was. The neighbour said nobody had been in for over a year, except a woman from the solicitors, a few weeks back, doing an inventory. Julian said that was odd, because the solicitors had told him nobody had been in.
In the front room the tray still sat on the rug with two tea glasses on it, each with a brown ring dried into the bottom. His uncle Marcus had always poured two. Julian had asked him once, at eleven, who the second one was for, and Marcus had smiled and said, "Whoever's coming."
The workroom was smaller than he remembered. The circle was still let into the floorboards with the three brass fittings at its points. He had sat in it once, at fifteen. His uncle had asked him to hold still and say nothing, and something had answered from the other side of the boards, close as breath, and Julian had taken the train home a week early.
Low on the back wall the plaster had a hollow in it the length of a man. He put his hand in it. It was cold, colder than the room. A year ago he would have called it damp. He had spent that year on the far side, and he took his hand out without a word for it.
The ledger was in the cabinet, bound in brown calf with a strap round it. He sat on the floor and undid the strap. He knew the first forty pages, copied in his uncle's hand from older copies: names down the pages in columns, a man who had stood at a king's right hand, a man who had stood against a prophet in a desert town. The first entry was a title, with "at whose court the sorcerers worked" written beside it. The last was "M. G." , with a pencil line under it and a space.
At the back were his uncle's notes from the months before the purge. "The one who waits," Marcus had written, and underlined it. "When he walks, the line will stand at his right hand."
Julian had knelt to the one who waits for a year. He had watched him come down from the height of a house to the height of a man, a hand's width a month, while the keeper measured. Nobody had offered him a place at any hand.
His phone lit up on the floorboards beside him. The news was all one story. The sun had stood still for twenty-six days now. A man was walking on a road between Syria and Iraq, and the rain came where he was welcomed, and nowhere else. Below that, smaller, the reservoirs were mud again and the hosepipe ban had not been lifted in years.
He strapped the ledger shut.
He drove east.
He took the ferry and then the long roads. He crossed rivers that were beds of stones and countries whose borders had stopped checking anyone, under a sun that never moved off the top of the windscreen. He slept in the car with a towel over his face. By the third day most of the cars around him were going the same way. They were packed to the roofs, with families in the back seats and mattresses strapped on top. Nobody overtook anybody. They went east together, at the speed of the slowest.
At the bridge over the strait at Istanbul the traffic stopped for six hours, and nobody honked.
The roadblock was a day from the Syrian border, where the road came down through low hills. There were no soldiers. Three tractors stood nose to tail across the tarmac. Round them was a crowd of men in ordinary clothes, wet through, as if they had all just come in out of a storm, though the ground round them was dust. Their clothes dripped, and they laughed and handed bread and water in through the car windows.
A man was walking down the line of cars.
Julian knew the walk before he knew the face. He had last seen it on the black rock, the night the devils came up out of the water, a short man on bowed legs in a crowd of shifting faces. On the tarmac he was a broad man in plain clothes, unhurried, and the road had no idea what he had been. He bent to each window and looked in. Some cars he patted on the roof, and for those the tractors rolled back. One or two he passed without a touch.
Julian took the keeper's sheet out of its oilcloth and held it ready in his lap.
The car in front held an old man and a boy. The master bent to the old man's window. Julian saw the old man look up at his face and go grey. The old man put his hand over his own eyes. Then he began to weep, loudly, with his mouth open, saying one word over and over in a language Julian did not have, while the boy pulled at his sleeve. Then he turned the car round in the road, scraping the verge, and drove back the way they had come.
The master watched him go. Then he came to Julian's window and bent.
His right eye was blind. It stood out from the face, like a grape floating on water. The other eye passed over Julian, and over the sheet in his lap, and did not stop on either.
Julian looked at the forehead, where the old man had looked.
He had looked there every day for a month on the other side, and he looked now, hard. Skin, a few lines, a little dust. He wanted, suddenly and badly, to see whatever the old man had seen.
The master straightened and patted the roof twice, lightly, the way you pat a horse you already own.
The wet men cheered. One of them leaned in at the window and pushed a loaf into Julian's lap, on top of the keeper's sheet, still warm, and laughed.
"Welcome, brother," he said in English. "You're one of ours. Go on through."