The rope was wet for the last two metres, and Muhammad felt the bucket take its full weight before it broke the surface.
He drew it up hand over hand. The well was old, a stone ring in the square of a village whose name he had learned that morning, with a tin roof on four posts over it to keep off the sun that did not move. Around it on mats sat six men of the village and two from the cell in the next valley. It was the third hour of the night by the notebook. The light was the same white it had been at the third hour of the morning.
The bucket came up full. He tipped it into the trough, and the women waiting with their jerrycans came forward one at a time, and he filled each can and handed it back.
Two valleys over, the villages that had gone out to the road had rain every night by the clock. Here no cloud had passed for a hundred and ten days. The fields were cracked and the goats had been sold. But the well still gave, and the men of the village had decided among themselves, without anyone asking them, that it would not be left alone at any hour.
So they sat with it. They sat in shifts, two hours each, and kept awake by reciting. Mostly it was the opening ten verses of the chapter of the Cave, in Arabic, because Abu al-Darda had reported that the Prophet said whoever memorised ten verses from the beginning of that chapter would be protected from the Dajjal. The old men knew them and the boys were learning them, and the recitation went round the well in a low uneven circle like water going round a stone.
When Muhammad had first come, a farmer had asked him whether the verses were what kept the water sweet.
"Allah keeps the water," he had said. "The verses are for you. You're asking Him, and you're staying awake while you ask."
The farmer had thought about it and nodded, and gone back to his mat, and kept reciting.
At the edge of the square, near the end of the shift, a pickup came in slowly over the ruts with no lights on, because lights meant nothing now. A man got down from the cab and lifted down two children, and then a woman with a baby, and then an old woman who could not lift herself. He came across to the well with a folded paper held out in front of him.
Muhammad read it. It was written in three hands. The first said the family had refused the road's people in a district a hundred kilometres south, that their taps had gone dry the next morning, and that they were to be passed north. It was signed with the name of a cell leader he had trained himself, last summer, in a school gym that smelled of rubber. The second hand gave them fuel and two days' bread. The third was in pencil and said only, "Well at the square. Ask for whoever is on watch."
"You found it," he told the man.
The man began to weep, standing up, with his hands at his sides. Nobody made anything of it. One of the village men took the baby, and another went to fetch the old woman a chair.
The counter had been built to pass a name from cell to cell until it reached someone who could help. Now it passed people. The cells had made themselves into a road without being told, one village to the next, and the road ran north.
Halima was in the old detention room behind the gym, where the blackout cloth had been doubled and pinned to the frame. She lay on a folding bed in the dark with a wet towel over her eyes, and when he sat down on the chair beside her she took the towel off and tried to sit up.
"Stay," he said.
She stayed. In the light that came round the edge of the cloth he could see her face, which had gone grey and thin in the last fortnight, and her lips, which were cracked. She had coordinated nine cities for him through the surge. She had trained more cell leaders than anyone but Sheikh Yusuf. She had not slept, as far as anyone could tell, for eleven days.
"Which one is it?" she said.
"Which what?"
"Prayer. Which prayer is it now." Her hand found his sleeve and held it. "I prayed the noon prayer and then I lay down and when I got up I didn't know if I'd prayed the afternoon one. I prayed it again. Then I didn't know if that was the second time or the third." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I've never lost count. Not since I was seven."
"It's the night prayer next," he said. "In forty minutes. I'll wake you."
"You'll forget."
"I won't forget."
She looked at him for a while in the brown dark. Then she let go of his sleeve and put the towel back over her eyes.
"The doctor says it's the light," she said from under it. "He says the body keeps a clock of its own, and the sun has broken it. He says there are thousands like me." A pause. "I told him I wasn't one of thousands. I told him I was in charge of nine cities. He laughed."
"He was right to laugh."
"I know."
He sat with her until her breathing slowed. It took a long time. On the floor by the bed her cell ledgers stood in a stack as high as his knee, nine cities in nine colours of binding, with a pen clipped to the top one. He moved them to the far side of the room, where she would have to get up and cross the floor in the dark to reach them, and he knew she would, and he moved them anyway. Then he took out his own small notebook and wrote the time, and under it "Halima, night prayer," and set an alarm on his phone as well, because he had promised.
Sheikh Yusuf was on the bench outside the gym door, in the strip of shade under the overhang, with his stick across his knees.
"She's asleep?"
"For now."
Muhammad sat down beside him. The courtyard in front of them was white with the light, and the shadow of the flagpole lay in exactly the place it had lain for three and a half months, short and black as a burn. A boy was asleep under the basketball hoop with his arm over his face.
"Four cells in the east have bought rifles," Yusuf said. "They didn't ask. They told me afterwards, as if I'd be pleased. Boys. Good boys. One of them was in my class on inheritance law." He turned the stick a quarter turn on his knees. "They say the road's people are going to come for the wells next. They say it's better to meet them at the edge of the village than at the well."
Muhammad said nothing for a while. He thought of the companions in the long hadith, when they were told of a day that would last a year. They had not asked how to fight in it. They had asked how to pray in it. He thought of the farmer on his mat. He thought of the paper in three hands, and of the man who had wept standing up.
"They're asking me what you'll do," Yusuf said. "And I'm asking you. As the first man who put his hand in yours. As an old man with bad knees who's going to have to walk wherever you decide to walk." He looked at Muhammad directly. "Will you fight him?"
The boy under the hoop turned in his sleep and settled again. Across the courtyard someone was sweeping the kitchen step with a stiff broom, slowly, as if it were morning.
"Not yet," Muhammad said.