Block forty-one had a hundred and six people in it, and Julian could not make it come out at a hundred.
He stood on the bonnet of the white car with the clipboard against his chest and counted them again. They sat on the gravel in their rows with their bundles and their children and their fat sheep on string, and they looked up at him with the patient, well-fed faces the camp gave everyone in the end. Somebody in the third row was eating a peach. It was the size of a fist and dripping. There had been no rain in this desert for four years before the cloud came, and now there were peaches.
"Six of you," he called. "To forty-two. The family with the blue cart. Thank you."
They went. People did what he said. That had surprised him at first and did not any more. His uncle had told him once, at a dinner when Julian was nineteen and drunk on the man's wine, that people would follow anyone who stood a little higher than them and held something with writing on it. Marcus had been talking about something else. Julian had worked out years later what, reading the papers in the dead man's house.
The marshalling ground ran to the horizon. Eighty thousand by his lists, in blocks of a hundred, numbered in chalk on boards. Lorries, tractors, buses with their seats torn out to take more. Over all of it, low, the grey cloud, and out of the cloud the fine rain that fell on the camp and nowhere else, so that the camp stood in a dark wet oval on the white desert like a stain on a tablecloth. Beyond its edge the dust began, a yard from the last tent, clean as a line on a map.
The sun had not moved much since he got out of bed. He had stopped looking at it. The devils told time for the camp now.
He had lost the jinn. Everyone knew it. The crew of faces he had been given to run, the clever disciplined ones who wore the dead, had turned on the night of the second sword and gone, and their architect had left his last face folded in Julian's tent like a laundered shirt. The devils had talked of nothing else for days. They still called him the clerk. They called him it now, two of them, lounging on the roof of a bus in the loose shapes they wore by day, smoke with somebody's grandmother's hands.
"Clerk. He's coming."
Julian got down off the bonnet.
The man came through the blocks on foot. He always came on foot. He was a short man on bowed legs, and he walked like a man walking his own land in the evening, without hurry, looking at everything, and the people in the rows stood up as he passed and some of them wept and some of them held up their children. Behind him, at a little distance, came the things from the ruin. Julian had seen them rise out of the ground in the dead village, gold and bronze, a silver lamp, coins in clumps of earth, and he had seen them follow him like a swarm of bees. They followed now. They hung in the air behind the man's shoulders, low, turning a little, and the people in the rows did not look at them, the way you do not look at a rich man's wallet. After the gold, at a distance of their own, came the men of the Concord in their good suits, dusty to the knee.
He stopped in front of Julian. Julian made himself look up.
The left eye was an ordinary eye, brown and tired and amused. The right eye stood out of the face like a grape floating in water, pale, blind. Between the eyes, on the broad forehead, there was skin. Only skin. In the camp's first week Julian had heard a girl read a word off that skin out loud, in a shaking voice, before her mother pulled her away. He had heard people in the camp whisper it at night in their tents. He had stood this close a dozen times and looked, and there was nothing written there at all.
"They're slow," the man said. His voice was pleasant and a little hoarse, like a man who has been talking all day. "Make them faster."
"Yes," Julian said.
That was all. The man went on through the blocks. The gold went with him.
The devil came for the list at what the camp called evening.
Julian was in the car with the doors open, reconciling. Block seventeen had come in at ninety-four. He had the earlier sheet beside the new one, and he knew which six were missing before he checked: a family out of a farm town on the coast road, mother and father, two daughters, two grandparents, who had come in whole and had been given a house and a well. He had written them up himself. He remembered the grandmother, because she had looked at the man when he passed and then looked at the ground and kept looking at it.
The devil leaned in at the passenger door. It was wearing a soldier's face today, a young one, with the cheeks still round.
"The ones from seventeen," it said. "They went north. On foot. Toward the city with the gate open." It held out a hand. "Names."
"They're on foot. They won't get far."
"Names, clerk."
He looked at the sheet. Six names in his own neat hand. His uncle had kept papers like this. Julian had found them in the house, boxes of them: names, dates, what each one wanted, what each one feared, whose child dreamed of what. Every one of them had become something his uncle used. He had read them in that cold dining room and felt, under the disgust, the small, clean pleasure of a well-kept file.
He tore the sheet off the clipboard and gave it to the soldier's hand.
"It's only a list," he said.
The devil showed the boy's teeth and was gone.
He wrote at the top of a clean sheet: block seventeen, ninety-four. Then he crossed it out and wrote a hundred, and moved six names across from the overflow sheet to fill it, because the man wanted them faster and a block that came out even raised no questions.
He sat a while. Then he opened the glovebox for the torch, and the face was in there.
He had put it in the tent bin the morning he found it. Someone had taken it out since and worn it. It was still warm. It lay folded on top of the car's papers, a man's face without a man behind it, soft as chamois, with the eyes closed. They were keeping it in his car between uses, he understood, the way a man leaves his coat in another man's hall. A middle-aged man with grey stubble and a mole by the mouth. Julian did not know whose face it had been. He knew only that the jinn who first wore it had taken it off in front of the devils, and that he had been paying for it since.
He shut the glovebox.
They reached the border post on the Amman road at the next noon, if it was noon. The post had been empty for a month. Someone had left the barrier down across both lanes, a red and white pole with a counterweight of concrete, and the column stopped in front of it, and eighty thousand people waited.
Julian walked up the line to the front with his clipboard. Two men from the nearest village on the Syrian side had come out to meet them. They had brought bread on a tray. They were smiling the smile Julian had seen at every town on the road, the one people wore when they had already decided. A mile behind them the next village's roofs stood pale in the dust. Nobody had come out from that one. Its people had gone up into the mountains with their goats when they heard he was coming, the bread men said.
One of them lifted the barrier. It went up slowly, the counterweight grinding.
The man walked under it first. The gold followed him. Then the cloud came, low, sliding over the painted line on the tarmac like a tarpaulin pulled over a load, and the first drops fell on the Syrian side, on the bread, on the two smiling men, on the dust of a country that had been dry for years.
Julian signalled to block one. Block one stood up. The camp crossed into Syria.