Ibrahim stepped over a sleeping man's legs, said sorry to nobody, and kept walking with a peach in his hand that he had no intention of eating.
The peach was cover. Everyone in the camp carried food. They walked about at all hours with a fig or a slice of melon, eating slowly, the way people eat at a wedding when the meal has gone on too long, and a man with empty hands looked like a man who had come from outside. He had learned that in the months he lived here. He had lived well. The house they gave him had water in every tap, and he had stood under the shower the first night until his skin wrinkled, while the rest of the country dug for it.
Then he had read the word, and run.
He had run north with the faithful, three weeks on foot and in the backs of trucks. He had prayed beside strangers at guessed hours and been turned by a stranger's hand toward the right direction. At the border he had sent Saba his fortieth message and seen it sit there undelivered with its one grey tick, and in the morning he had walked back to the road and got into a car going south.
She had stayed in the house he ran from. She had her two boys with her, and the boys had put on weight for the first time since the wells went dry. When he told her what he had seen between the master's eyes, she had looked at him the way she used to look at their father when he came home from the coffee shop with a story about a ghost on the Lyari bridge.
"You're tired," she had said. "You've been tired since the sun stopped. Lie down."
He had not lain down. He had packed one bag. That was the last thing he had said to her face.
He could not get used to the night. For a year he had worked under a sun that never moved, and he had built his days around the watch on his wrist like a prisoner, and now the dark had come down at last and nobody in the camp seemed to know what to do with it. Some slept where they had sat. Some stood between the tents with their heads back and their mouths open. A woman near the water channel was crying without a sound over a sleeping baby, and when he passed she said, to him or to the stars, "She's never seen it. She's never once seen it."
He went on toward the house. It stood at the camp's south edge, past the fig rows, a real house with a tin roof that had arrived in pieces on a lorry in the spring. The door was open. The beds were empty. Saba's sandals were gone and so were the boys' trainers, and on the kitchen table was a plate of grapes with a fly walking on it.
He was standing in the doorway, working out where a woman goes at two in the morning in a camp with no streets, when he heard the voice.
It came from the north, from the big fire. It was a young man's voice, high and then steady, and it carried over the tents in the cold air the way the call to prayer used to carry over his own street at home. He heard every word. The words were in Arabic and he understood them anyway, because there was only one sentence like that, and every child who had ever sat in a mosque class had heard it read.
"I testify that you are the Dajjal whom Allah's Messenger told us about."
Nobody shouted. The camp was so quiet that he heard the water in the channel at his feet.
Then the tents began to empty.
He had seen crowds form before. He had worked a dozen riots and a hundred funerals, and crowds formed in a few ways he could name. He had no name for this one. People came out of the dark without talking, without hurrying, in their sleeping clothes, carrying their fruit. They walked toward the fire the way water finds the drain in a tilted yard. Ibrahim went with them because there was nowhere else to go. He kept to the outside, along the fig rows, where he could see faces.
The rings round the big fire were already ten deep when he reached them. He climbed onto a water tank at the back and lay flat on its lid like a boy on a garage roof.
He saw the young man first. He was young, nineteen at most, thin, in a white shirt gone grey at the cuffs, his trouser legs crusted to the knee with salt. He was standing. Everyone near him was sitting, so he stood out like a post in a field. His hands were at his sides. Ibrahim had seen men stand like that in interview rooms, men who had decided to tell the truth and had not yet found out what it would cost them.
Then he saw the master, in the chair across the fire, and he made himself look at the forehead.
It was there. The first time, in the free house, it had come to him slowly, like a word surfacing in a puddle as the mud settles. Now it sat there as plain as the number plate on a car. He read it. He felt his stomach turn over and went on reading it, because a policeman reads what's in front of him, and he wanted to know whether it was still there if he kept looking. It was.
He moved his eyes across the inner rings, face by face, the way he had been trained to search a crowd. He found Saba in the third ring, near the fire, sitting on a carpet with her younger boy asleep across her knees and her older one leaning on her shoulder. She had her good scarf on, the green one. Her face in the firelight was calm and interested. She looked like a woman at a play.
He could not reach her. There were two hundred people between the tank and the third ring, and they were packed so close that a dropped peach would not have found the ground. He could shout. He opened his mouth to shout and shut it again. He knew how a crowd turns on a man who shouts.
The master stood up.
He did it without effort, an ordinary man getting out of an ordinary chair, and the whole crowd moved a little toward him as he rose. Ibrahim felt it in the tank under his chest, a pressure going through the people like wind through barley. The master looked round at them with the good eye. He did not look at the young man at all.
"If I kill this man and then give him life," he said, "will you have any doubt about my claim?"
His voice was not loud. Ibrahim heard every word from the back. He found he had stopped breathing.
The crowd answered at once, and together.
"No."
It came low, the way a congregation says the last word of a prayer, even and from every throat. Ibrahim watched Saba's mouth make it. She said it the way she said "yes" when their mother asked if she had eaten. Her older boy said it too. The younger one slept.
The young man had not moved. Ibrahim could see his face now in profile against the fire. It was white and wet. His lips were moving, small movements, and Ibrahim knew without hearing that it was not to anyone in that crowd.
Ibrahim turned his wrist over in the firelight. He had no paper. He took the pen from his breast pocket, the cheap blue one he had carried through a whole year of noon, and wrote the time on the back of his hand the way he had written it once in a foyer with the light going brass outside. 1:52.
He wrote it because Qureshi would have written it. He did not know who he was writing it for.
Down by the fire the master held out his right hand, palm up, not looking to see who would fill it.
A man in the inner ring stood and unwrapped something long from a blanket. The firelight ran along it from end to end, and the crowd breathed in.
It was a sword.