Supper came at the hour the camp had agreed to call evening. The sun sat over the western roofs where it had sat for two days, a hand's width above the minaret of the girls' school, and nobody looked up at it any more.
Officer Ibrahim ate standing at the school gate with a bowl of lentils in one hand. He had been in the camp a day and a half and he was still counting things. Forty-one tents in the yard. Nineteen men in the queue at the water tanker. Rifles leaning on the wall in a strip of shade that was not much of a shade. Nobody had asked him to count. It was a habit from the job, and the job was gone.
Beside him Hamza held his bowl and ate nothing. The young man had come down from the terraces that morning with the water run and been kept on for the guard. Ibrahim knew his face from the salt marsh outside Medina, where he had stood in a crowd and watched a sword go through him. Neither of them had mentioned it. It sat between them at the gate like a third man.
The runner came up the ring road a little after the bowls went round.
Ibrahim knew the face before he could make out the words. Everybody did. It was Adnan, who drove the water tanker up to the terraces above the city twice a day, where the sick and the old and most of the soldiers' families still slept under the olives because the city had no more rooms to give. Adnan with the bad knee and the faded red football shirt. He had dust to the thighs and his mouth open, and he did not slow down at the gate.
He shouted it in Arabic, three times, high and cracked.
"The Dajjal has taken your place among your families!"
A bowl hit the ground. Then everything moved at once. Men came off the wall for the rifles. Somebody was already in the cab of a pickup, grinding the starter. A man by the tanker began to call his wife's name, as if she could hear him from five miles away, and the men around him took it up with other names.
Ibrahim did not move. He was looking at Adnan's legs.
Adnan had run up the ring road, flat out, on the bad knee. Ibrahim had watched him climb down from the tanker that morning one step at a time, holding the door. And there was no tanker. Five miles down from the terraces, and the man had come on foot, in less time than the tanker took.
"Where's his lorry?" he said, to nobody.
The Mahdi came out onto the school steps. He did not shout. He raised one hand, and the men nearest saw it and stopped, and the stopping spread out from him through the yard the way a ripple goes out from a stone.
"The Messenger of Allah told us about a cry," he said. "The devil will shout among them that the Dajjal has taken their place among their families. They will go out, and it is false."
The engine of the pickup died. The man who had been calling his wife stood with his mouth still open.
"Nobody leaves this camp," the Mahdi said. "Ten will ride and see."
Ibrahim turned back to the gate.
Adnan was gone. Where he had stood there were footprints in the dust, the scuffed marks of a man who had run a long way. They came up the road to the gate and stopped. None went away from it.
There was no fuel to spare for a look. The farmers from the orchards had brought their horses in with them, and the commander had them led out of a schoolyard that smelt of dung and chalk. The Mahdi chose the riders himself. He did not take long. He touched Hamza's shoulder, and a student called Ziad who taught the children their letters under the awning, and seven men Ibrahim did not know.
Then he looked at Ibrahim.
"You know their ways," he said. "Go with them."
"I haven't been on a horse since I was twelve."
"Then hold on." He put a hand on the neck of the nearest horse. "Go up to the terraces. Then come back by the south road, and tell me what is on it."
Ibrahim got the black one, which would not stand still, and the commander hung a pair of field glasses round his neck without a word. He noticed the others because he could not help it: a grey, two bays, a chestnut with one white sock, a brown mare with a torn ear. He wrote nothing down. His hands were busy with the reins.
They went up through the eastern suburbs at a trot and out onto the hill road. Halfway up, Ziad began to recite in Arabic, the way students recite a lesson to keep the road short. Then he said it again plainly, for Ibrahim, who rode at the back.
"They will send ten horsemen ahead," Ziad said. "And the Messenger of Allah said, I know their names and the names of their fathers and the colours of their horses. They are the best horsemen on the face of the earth that day."
Ibrahim looked down at the black horse's neck. Then at the grey ahead of him, and the chestnut with its white sock.
"You don't think," he began.
"No," Hamza said, without turning round. "Ride."
It was the first word he had said to Ibrahim. Ibrahim understood it the way he had once understood a witness who would not let the court make him into a story twice.
The terraces were as they had left them. Women were taking washing off a line strung between two olive trunks. A boy was chasing a goat. An old man asleep on a mat lifted his head as the horses came up, decided they were not worth waking for, and put it down again.
They found Adnan under his tanker in the shade of the big terebinth, asleep, with his bad leg propped up on a jerrycan. Ziad woke him. He had not been down to the city since the noon prayer by estimate, he said. The tanker was empty and he was waiting for it to be his turn at the well.
When they told him, he put his hand up to his own face and held it there.
They came down off the far side of the hill and swung south, the way the Mahdi had said, and struck the old highway below the ridge at Kisweh as the light went orange without going down. The road ran south straight to the edge of sight.
Far down it, where the road met the sky, a grey cloud hung low over the plain. Under it the ground was green.
Ibrahim had seen that cloud from the inside for a year. He reined in, and the others stopped round him.
There was a column on the road under the cloud's near edge. It was too quick and too light to be the camp, which was eighty thousand people and moved like a town. This was pickup trucks with men in the back, a few buses, a water truck, motorbikes running up and down its flanks like dogs round a flock. He began counting before he had decided to.
He had a biro from the girls' school in his shirt pocket. He wrote on the back of his left hand with the horse shifting under him. Trucks, a hundred and ten, perhaps a hundred and twenty. Buses, nine. Its tail was still under the cloud, twelve miles off. Its head was already past the last village on the plain, three miles below the ridge.
"They're coming to the south gate," Ziad said quietly. "Not the hills."
Nobody answered him. Ibrahim looked back the way they had come, at the ring road and the camp in the eastern suburbs, and at the empty road south of it where the men would not have been, if they had gone up the hill to their wives.
He was writing the last figure when Hamza said his name.
At the head of the column, a man had climbed onto the roof of the leading truck. Ibrahim lifted the field glasses. The man stood with his feet apart on the roof, easy, a bad knee nowhere in the way he held himself. He wore Adnan's face and the faded red shirt.
The man on the truck lifted his arm and waved to them, slowly, the way you wave to a neighbour across a street.