The Marid would not carry water.
It stood at the head of the third water line with its arms folded, twice the height of the lorry behind it, and the women in the queue stood with their jerrycans and looked at the empty air where Julian was looking and saw nothing at all. The tank on the lorry was full. Nobody could open it. The Marid had sat on the valve.
Julian unscrewed the cap of his uncle's fountain pen and opened the ledger on his forearm.
"You're down for the north pens," he said. "Cattle. Not this. This is the Hinn pair from yesterday." He turned the page round so the creature could see the columns, which was absurd, and he did it anyway, because his uncle's papers said that a written order shown to a jinn bound it better than a spoken one. "North pens. Please."
The Marid looked at the ledger. Then it looked at Julian the way a man looks at a fly that has learned to read.
"The sorcerer's boy," it said, and the words came out of the air beside his ear with a smell of wet stone. "With his little book."
But it went. The valve sprang open behind it, and the women surged forward with their cans, and none of them thanked him, because none of them had seen anything happen.
Julian ticked the line.
The camp had no order when he came to it. It had abundance. It had more grain than it could store and more water than it could pipe and a hundred thousand people singing in the dust, and over them, in the layer he had learned to see from the papers in his uncle's drawer, a swarm of devils that did whatever they liked. They spoiled the bread for fun. They pulled the guy ropes out of tents at the estimated night and laughed at the sleepers underneath. When the court wanted a thing done, it was done eventually, by someone, badly.
Julian had sat in his tent the first week with the box of papers on his knees. Most of it was the family's long line, traced back on brittle pages through name after name, through men who had stood near thrones and opposed prophets, to the oldest page, which named Pharaoh and stopped. He had read that page many times. The rest was method. His uncle had kept jinn the way a good hotel keeps staff: each named, typed, graded, given a place and a time and a task, and never trusted with two tasks at once. There were tables. There were notes in the margins in a small upright hand. "Marid: will not take orders from below. Present from above." "Hinn: give them distance, they prefer it." "Never let a Sila see you eat." On the last page, underlined: "When guests are present, arrange them by height. It reassures."
He had copied the tables into a fresh ledger and begun.
Within a month the water lines ran. The bread came out of the ovens clean. The tents stayed up. He did it with rosters and his uncle's pen, with a patience he had not known he owned, and with "please", which he said to every jinn he gave an order to, in a tone his uncle's papers described exactly.
The devils did what he wrote. They also called him the sorcerer's boy, and the clerk, and the uncle's coat, and one of them had taken to walking behind him in the shape of a small boy in a school uniform, carrying a satchel, which made the others laugh till they rolled.
The human court was worse. The Concord had come over with the master and kept the great tent's ear. The ministers and the generals and the businessmen who had come out to him since in their own cars ate with them in the long tent at the estimated evening, and there was never a place for Julian. Edwin Sallow was quartermaster now. He signed every requisition Julian brought him, read each line twice, and blotted it, and had never once asked him to sit. A former deputy governor with a dyed moustache had told him, pleasantly, with a hand on his shoulder, that the table was for people who served the master. Not for people who served the staff.
He served their table anyway. Behind the ministers' chairs, where none of them could see, he stood the jinn of the long tent in a row by height, tallest at the head, as the last page said. The ministers never knew why the long tent was the one place in the camp where they could finish a meal without looking over their shoulders. Julian knew. He wrote it in the margin, under his uncle's line, in a smaller hand.
At the estimated evening the master walked the line of the court.
He did it most evenings. Nobody called it a ceremony. The court simply stood along the open ground in front of the great tent, in the white light that never changed, and the master came out and walked the length of them, and they lowered their eyes or raised them according to what they hoped for.
Julian stood at the far end, where the clerks stood. He raised his.
On the other side Julian had knelt to him for a year, when he stood taller than this tent. Since then he had seen him close only once, at the roadblock, through a windscreen. He was the same now. A short man, broad, unhurried, a little bowed in the legs, with one eye that saw and a right eye that did not, standing out of its socket like a floating grape. The forehead above the eyes was broad and smooth. Julian looked at the place between the eyes, because everyone looked there, because the women in the water queues looked there and some of them went white and walked away, and he saw skin. Skin, and a faint line from the sun.
Down the line the deputy governor with the dyed moustache had lowered his eyes so far that his chin touched his collar. Julian watched him and saw that the man was afraid of being picked out for something. He kept his eyes on the master's shoes until they had gone by. The devil in the school uniform squatted in the dust behind Julian with its own chin on its chest, copying him, and the others hooted.
The master came level with him. The good eye moved across the clerks' end of the line. It moved across Julian. It did not slow.
Julian had once watched his uncle walk through a hotel lobby in Cairo. Marcus had not looked at the porters either. Julian had been twelve and had thought it the most elegant thing he had ever seen.
The master walked on. Behind him the court let out its breath.
The old Ifrit was waiting in Julian's tent when he got back. It lay across the folding desk on its side, heavy, with the mark on it so thick that Julian could not have said what type it had been born, and it was eating one of his biscuits from the tin.
"Your uncle," it said, without getting up, "is on the rack in my pavilion. Did you know? Somebody's grieving son will want that face one day. It's a good face. Kind."
Julian put the ledger down on the chair. He did not let his hand shake. He had read, in the margins, what jinn did with a hand that shook.
He had seen his uncle's face last at the funeral home, waxy, the mouth arranged by a stranger. He found he could picture it on a peg, folded, with a seam behind the ear. He did not mind it as much as he ought to.
"Is there something you need?"
"Need." The Ifrit laughed and crumbs fell on the map. "There's a Hinn came to us on the road with a tenth of what he used to have. Cells. Discipline. He calls what they do correction." It turned the word over in its mouth like a stone. "The road doesn't like discipline it didn't make, and I don't like Hinn. But you like ledgers, sorcerer's boy."
It slid off the desk and was gone, and its voice came back from the tent's doorway.
"His name's Nessar. His tenth is yours. Keep them busy."