Salt in his mouth.
That was the first thing. A grain of it on his tongue, sharp, and the wet crust under his cheek, and his own breath going in and out against the ground. Hamza lay with his eyes open and watched a blade of the impossible grass bend in it.
He remembered the sword going up. He remembered that clearly, the firelight running along it, and the master's arm, and his own lips still moving on the tenth verse because he had not been able to think of anything else to say. Then the salt, with not even a dark between them. It was like a cut in a film, where a man is in a doorway and then he is in a car.
He put his hand to his neck.
It was his neck. Skin, and the tendon that stood out when he turned his head, and the knob of bone at the back. His collar was dry. He looked at his hand in the firelight and it was clean except for the salt.
Nobody was talking. That was the second thing he understood. Five hundred people round a fire and not one of them talking. He could hear the fire. He could hear the water running in the channel somewhere behind him and, far off, the bees.
He turned his head.
The master was standing over him with the sword hanging from his right hand, its point resting on the crust. Hamza looked at the blade before he could stop himself. There was nothing on it. He did not know whether it had been wiped.
The good eye was looking down at him. The other one, the swollen one, looked at nothing.
Behind the master, the inner ring had not moved. The woman who had been smiling at the fire had both hands over her mouth. The boy with the orange was holding the long spiral of peel in his fist, and the peel was shaking. Further back, at the edge of the light, a man in a grey jacket was flat on the lid of a water tank with his head up, staring, like someone who had climbed up there to see a football match over a wall.
"Get up," the master said.
He got up. His legs held, which surprised him. He stood in front of the man on the same patch of grass where he had stood before, and he found that his knees were not shaking any more. He did not know when that had stopped.
The master was waiting. Hamza could see what he was waiting for. He had brought him back in front of five hundred witnesses. Now the young man was supposed to look at him, and fall down, and say it.
Hamza looked at him.
He looked at the eye like a grape floating in water. He looked at the forehead, and the word was there, the same, plain as before, and he read it again. Unbeliever. He thought: the Messenger of Allah said you would do this. He said you would kill a man and bring him back. He told us, so we would know you when you did.
It went through him then, bigger than the fear had been. It filled his chest the way the cold had filled it on the marsh. Everything the man had just done had already been told. It was written in a book Hamza had held in his own hands in the courtyard, under a teacher who slapped the floor. The killing was in it. The coming back was in it. Even this, the five hundred faces and the silence and the sword resting on the salt, was in it.
He said it in Arabic, the way he had said the first thing.
"By Allah, now I know your reality better than before."
The master's face did not change. Hamza saw the hand on the sword hilt change. The knuckles came up white.
"Hold him," the master said.
Two of the guards took his arms. He did not fight them. They pushed him down onto his knees on the grass and one of them put a hand on the back of his head and bent it forward, gently, like a barber, so that his neck was bare to the fire.
Hamza looked at the grass. He had a moment to think that this was the part he had not known about. The hadith said the man would come back. It said what he would say. After that it said only one thing more: the Dajjal would try to kill him again, and would not be given the power to do it. Hamza had heard that read and had not thought about what it would be like from the inside. He thought about it now, with the guard's palm on his head, and found he could not imagine it, and stopped trying.
He shut his eyes and began the first verse again.
He heard the crowd breathe in, all of it, five hundred at once. He heard the sword go up. He felt the air move over the back of his neck, a small cold stir, the way a door opening in another room moves the air.
Nothing else happened.
He opened his eyes. He was still on his knees, looking at the same blade of grass. The guard's hand had come off his head. Behind him somebody let out a breath that turned into a sound, half a word, and stopped.
He heard the sword go up again. He felt the air move again, on the same place, and that was all. Nothing touched him. He did not know where the blade had gone. He went on with the verse because he had not finished it.
A third time. He felt it go up and come down and stop somewhere above him, and he heard, close above him, a man's breath let out through the teeth.
When he lifted his head, the master was standing with the sword held out to one side, away from his body, the way Hamza had held his wet hand away when he first touched the water. He was not looking at Hamza. He was looking at the blade as if someone had handed him the wrong tool.
"Take him out," he said.
They did not walk him this time. Four of them took him by the arms and the belt and carried him, half running, through the rings and out between the tents. People moved out of the way. He saw them go by at the height of a man's waist, upside down and sideways, faces lit and then dark. Then the fig rows, and the edge of the green where the grass ran out into crust.
They swung him once and let go. He hit the marsh road on his shoulder, rolled, and lay on his back on the hard salt with the stars over him.
The guards were already walking back. He heard one of them say, to the others or to himself, "Did you see the blade?" and nobody answered him.
Hamza lay still. His shoulder hurt. That pleased him from a long way off: it meant his shoulder was there. Overhead the sky had begun to grey at its eastern edge. He reached into his pocket and found the phone still there, and held the button down, and watched the screen come up white with his mother's name the first thing on it. He typed two words with his thumb and sent them before he could think of better ones.
When he sat up, people were standing along the edge of the green.
They had followed the guards out. Twenty of them, thirty, more coming between the fig trees, in their sleeping clothes with their fruit still in their hands, and they stood where the grass stopped as if the salt were water they did not want to wet their feet in. They were looking at him. A woman with a baby on her hip. The man in the good suit, holding his closed laptop to his chest like a tray. The boy with the orange peel.
They looked at Hamza's neck. He watched them do it, one after another, their eyes going to the place where the sword had gone and finding his collar whole.
Then they turned, one after another, and looked back over their shoulders toward the fire.
The boy turned last. He stood a long time with his face toward the big fire and the man beside it, and Hamza saw his face in the grey light change the way a face changes over a letter it has read twice: the frown first, then the mouth going slack, then the eyes going back to the beginning to read it again.