The crust broke under his shoes like the top of a loaf, and under it the mud was cold.
Hamza stopped to pull his foot free and looked up again, because he could not stop looking up. There were stars. He had forgotten how many. For a year the sky over Medina had been one white lid, and he had slept under a blanket nailed across his window and woken to the same noon he had lain down in. Now the dark went all the way up and was full of small hard lights, and the cold came off the marsh in a breath he could feel through his shirt.
Behind him the city's lamps sat low on the horizon. He did not turn round for them. If he turned round he thought he might go back.
Ahead, a long way off, the fires.
He walked. The salt flat ran out in front of him grey under the starlight, cracked into plates the size of prayer rugs. Every plate gave a little under his weight and then held. Twice his foot went through into black water to the ankle. The smell was eggs and the sea. He had a bottle of water in one pocket and his phone in the other, switched off. If his mother rang he would answer, and if he answered he would tell her where he was.
He recited to keep his legs going. He had learned the opening ten verses of the chapter of the Cave in the mosque in the long months, a verse a day with a teacher who slapped the floor beside his knee whenever he dropped a vowel. He said them now in Arabic, under his breath, and the words came out white in the cold. At the tenth verse he slowed, the way he always slowed there, where the young men go into the cave and ask their Lord for mercy.
The Messenger of Allah had said a man would come out of Medina to the one camped on the salt marsh, the best of people or one of the best. Hamza was nineteen. He had failed his driving test twice. He had once fallen asleep in the courtyard during that very hadith, and woken with the carpet's pattern printed on his cheek.
But the sun had gone down at last, and the city had shaken three times, and the men who were going to leave had left. He had stood at the gate tonight and watched the fires on the marsh and found he could not go back to his room.
The guards came out of the dark on his left, two of them, with torches strapped to their foreheads like miners. The light hit him in the face and he put up his hand.
"Where are you going?" said the first.
"To your camp."
"From the city?"
"Yes."
The second man laughed, not unkindly. He was young, with a beard that had not finished coming in, and he had a bag of dates open in one hand. He held it out.
"You're the first one tonight," he said. "They all came out in the shakings. Since then, nobody. Have one. Have them all, there's more."
Hamza did not take a date. The young man shrugged and ate one himself.
"Who do you want?" said the first.
"Your master."
The two looked at each other in the crossing light of their torches. Then the first one nodded, as if this were a reasonable request at a hospital desk, and turned, and they walked him in between them.
The camp began without a fence. One moment Hamza was on cracked salt and the next there was grass under his shoes, wet and thick and green, growing straight out of the crust. Water ran beside the path in a channel the width of his hand. He could hear it. He crouched before either guard could stop him and put his fingers in it. It was cold and moving and real. He stood up with his wet hand held away from his body.
The tents went on further than he had guessed from the city. Most were dark. People lay asleep outside them on the grass with their faces turned up, as if they had fallen asleep watching the stars and nobody had told them to go in. A child lay across her father's chest with a peach in her fist, one bite out of it. Fig trees stood in rows where there had been nothing in the spring. Their leaves were black in the firelight and their fruit was split with ripeness. Hamza had not eaten fresh fruit in seven months. His mouth filled with water and he swallowed it.
Somewhere off to the right there was a sound like bees. It rose and fell. He looked for it and saw nothing but dark between tents, and the sound moved, keeping pace with something he could not see.
"Don't mind that," said the young guard. "That's the gold. It follows him."
They brought him to a fire larger than the others.
Men and women sat round it in rings, the inner ring on carpets, the outer ones on the grass. Some were talking. Some were eating. A man in a good suit had a laptop open on his knees and was typing, and he looked up when the guards came in and then looked down again. Across the fire, on a plain wooden chair that somebody had carried out onto the salt, sat a man.
He was a man. Hamza had expected him to be larger. He had expected more, the way he had expected the year to end with thunder. It had ended with the sun going down behind the date palms like any evening. The man in the chair had his hands on his knees. He wore a dark coat. He was looking into the fire, and the people nearest him were looking at him.
Then he turned his head.
The fire was between them and Hamza saw it clearly anyway. The right eye was wrong. It stood out from the face, pale and round and swollen, like a grape floating on the top of a glass of water, and there was no sight in it. The left eye was ordinary and dark and had been looking at the fire, and now it was looking at him.
Above them, between the eyes, was the word.
Hamza had read it in the hadith a hundred times, in the courtyard, in the margins of his teacher's books: written between his eyes, and every believer would read it, whether he could read or not. He had wondered how that would work. Would it be ink? Would it be a scar? He found he did not know what it was made of. It sat across the forehead like a word on a shop sign you have passed every day of your life. He read it without trying. Unbeliever.
The man in the good suit was still typing. The woman beside the chair was smiling at the fire. A boy Hamza's age in the second ring was peeling an orange with great care, in one long spiral. None of them looked up at the forehead or flinched.
They can't read it, he thought. They have been sitting in front of it all year.
The one-eyed man watched him. The left eye took him in, his wet shoes and his salt-white trouser legs and the hand he was still holding away from his body, and the face around it did a small, tired, pleasant thing, like a host whose guest has come late.
"You walked a long way in the dark," he said. His voice was ordinary too. "Sit down. Someone get him something to eat."
A woman in the inner ring was already getting up with a plate.
Hamza did not sit. His legs were shaking so badly that he locked his knees, and he felt the cold of the marsh come up through the grass into his feet. The bee sound had come round behind the tents and was settling, close, a deep low hum he felt in his teeth. He thought of his mother's voice on the phone saying the city shook three times. He thought of his teacher slapping the floor beside his knee.
He opened his mouth, and his voice came out higher than he wanted, and then it steadied. He said it in Arabic, loudly enough for the outer rings to hear.
"I testify that you are the Dajjal whom Allah's Messenger told us about."