The bell rang true, and Elias still waited for it not to.
He stood under the tower with the rope in both hands and let the last stroke go out over Bab Touma, round and whole, the note it had lost two Augusts ago and found again on the evening the sun went down. He had rung it every clock's morning since. Every time, his shoulders came up before the stroke, ready for the flat sound, the hand on the bronze. It did not come. He let the rope go, foolish and glad, the way he had felt as a boy when his father came home late.
The sun had not moved since he came down. It stood over the roofs at the height it reached an hour after dawn, a little east of the dome of the Latin church, and the shadow of the fig tree lay across the courtyard toward the gate, barely a hand shorter than it had been at the same hour yesterday by his watch. One night. The city had had one night, after a year of noon, and had sat up on its roofs through all of it like children afraid to sleep on Christmas Eve. Then the sun had come up and stopped.
Inside, the church was nearly empty. Four old women in black on the left. The Saadeh grandfather by his pillar. The choir stall by the screen had three boys in it out of eleven. He sang Orthros to the people who were there, and the long falling notes went up into a dome built for many more, and came back.
Under his feet, the crypt was empty. On the first night something had knocked at the church door, high on the wood, and then lower down, at the height of a child, and he had stood with his back against the wood and prayed until the stone at the back of the crypt opened and the woman who had brought his guests from Isfahan took them down into the dark under the city. He had not seen them since.
Mira came in through the gate at nine with her bag on her shoulder and her eyes half shut. She had walked from the hospital in the light with a scarf over her head and her face down.
"Forty-one heat cases," she said, before he could ask. "The generator went at four. We fanned them with X-ray envelopes." She sat on the edge of the fountain, which had held no water since the spring before last, and unlaced one shoe. "There's a rumour in the corridors."
"There's always a rumour in the corridors."
"This one's from Medina. A porter's cousin. He says a boy walked out of the city on the night to the man's camp, and the man killed him." She pulled off the shoe and looked into it as if something might be inside. "And then he wasn't dead."
Elias said nothing. He thought of Salwa in her good black coat at his door in the long day, holding both his hands and laughing, telling him the man had called her brother Nabil out of the crowd, alive, her brother whom Elias had buried himself at Easter, whose grave he had gone and found untouched. Salwa had not come to church since. He had prayed for her by name at every liturgy, and for her brother by name among the dead, and had not known which list to put him on.
"He raises the dead," he said. "We knew that already."
"The porter says there's more. He says they tried again." She stood with the shoe in her hand. "I'm going to sleep for a year. Don't let anyone ring that bell."
"I already rang it."
"I heard. It sounded nice."
She went up the outside stair to the flat. He listened to her cross the floor overhead and the bed creak. From the crypt came nothing. He had got used, in a year, to the sounds from down there: Omid's cough, the rabbi's slow reading, three ways of praying under one low vault, each needing to know what hour it was. Now when he went down to fetch the wine he found himself walking softly, as if they were asleep.
Anas came at eleven, which he never did. He came after the noon prayer by his own reckoning, with bread and news, and sat in the vestry under the icon of Saint John drinking Elias's tea and complaining about it. Today he came at a walk that was almost a run, a heavy man in a grey coat with his glasses swinging on their cord, and he did not stop at the gate to say peace on the house. He came straight across the courtyard with his phone held out in front of him.
"Have you heard it?"
"Heard what?"
"Then sit."
They sat on the bench under the fig. Anas turned the volume up as far as it went and held the phone between them, and a man's voice came out of it with wind behind it and a hiss under it, as if it had been recorded off another phone and that off another. He spoke fast, in the Arabic of the Hijaz, out of breath. Elias had to lean in.
The man said he was in Medina. He said that on the first night, when the sun went down at last, a student from the mosque had walked out of the city alone, across the salt ground, to the camp. He had stood in front of the one-eyed man and told him to his face what he was. The one-eyed man had killed him in front of everyone. Then he had given him back his life. The student had stood up and sworn by Allah that now he knew him better than before. And the one-eyed man had tried to kill him a second time, and could not. At dawn they had thrown the student out on the road. He was alive. He was in the city.
The recording ended with the name of Allah, twice, and a click.
The courtyard was very quiet. Nothing came up the crypt stair.
Elias found he had his hand flat on the bench between them.
"Again," he said.
Anas played it again. Elias listened to it the second time with his eyes closed, the way he listened to a confession, for the thing under the words. He heard the wind, and a man who had run a long way to tell it, and nothing false.
He thought of Saint Paul, because he always thought of Paul when he was frightened. "Whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders." On the night the bell went flat he had read the thirteenth chapter of Revelation alone in the nave, the beast with the wound that was healed and the whole world wondering after it, and closed the book. He had believed every word of it and had not known what to do with any of it. A man who could kill and raise had been walking up the roads toward them for a year, and Elias's people had gone out to meet him with their shawls and their choirs, and he had stood at his gate and said Christ comes from heaven and not up a road, and half of them had looked at him with pity.
"He killed him," he said. "And raised him. That is what he does. Salwa's brother."
"Yes."
"And the second time."
"The second time he couldn't."
Elias opened his eyes. The sun stood where it had stood. The fig shadow had not moved a finger's width.
"Then there's a hand on him," he said slowly. "He has a power, and somebody has set it a limit, and he walked up to the limit in front of his own camp and found it." He heard his voice go thin, and did not mind. "Anas. He found it in front of all of them."
Anas did not answer. He had taken his glasses off their cord and was cleaning them on his coat, slowly, both lenses, which he did when he did not trust his face. Elias had seen him do it once before, two years ago, when the boy who would not cross the church threshold sat up and asked for water in his own voice.
"You knew," Elias said. "Your face. You knew this was coming."
"I knew it was told." Anas put the glasses back on. "It's in al-Bukhari. I've read it fifty times. I've taught it to boys who were bored." He looked at the phone on the bench, dark now, and at the crypt stair, and at the gate with the empty street beyond it. "I never thought I'd be sitting on a bench when the voice note came."
"Who was he? The boy."
"A student. Nobody's saying a name."
Elias stood up. His knees hurt from the morning's standing. He looked east down the empty street, toward where the man had been when last anyone said, past the walls and the dead orchards and the road, a long way past, and found that he was afraid in a new way, the fear of a man who has been told a door is real.
"There will be a great many like him," he said. "Liars who raise the dead. Saint John says there are many. How do you tell which one it is?"
Anas stood up beside him. He put the phone in his pocket. For a while he said nothing at all, and Elias thought he was not going to answer.
Then he did, very quietly, as if the man on the salt marsh might hear him.
"That one we were told about."