The bread queue stopped moving when the sun touched the roofs.
Nobody told it to. Layla was eleventh from the baker's hatch with the ration card in her fist, and the woman in front of her turned to the west, and the man in front of her turned, and then the whole line had turned its back on the bread. The sun sat on the far ridge of the old city, swollen and orange in the dust. It went down. It took perhaps two minutes. A boy on a wall clapped once, and his mother pulled his hand away.
It was the ninth evening of the ordinary days, and still they watched it every time.
Layla had stopped trusting the light in the long day. She had learned to sleep under a blanket nailed across a window and to cook supper by a clock that said nine while the street outside shone like noon. After it came the month-long day, which she remembered as one grey afternoon she could not get out of, and then the week. Now the sun rose and set as it had when she was a girl, and her body would not believe it. Every dusk she waited for the trick.
The call to prayer went up from the mosque by the spice market, on time, by the sun and not by anyone's estimate. The queue loosened. Half of it went to pray and half held its place and argued about whose place it was.
"They have rain out there," the woman in front said, to nobody. "My sister's husband went over the wall. He sent word. Rain every afternoon, and apricots."
"Did he send apricots?"
The woman looked at her properly for the first time.
"No."
The room had been a tailor's workshop before the siege. The tables were still marked with chalk where he had cut cloth, and somebody had stacked his dummies in the corner like a crowd of headless guests. Twenty-two children sat on the floor, on mats, on the tailor's offcuts. Their families had walked behind the Mahdi's army out of three countries, and none of them had the same schoolbook, so Layla taught from nothing.
She had taught small children for nineteen years in a city that was a long way off now. She found that the work had not changed much. Children wanted to know who sat next to whom, and who had got the bigger piece, and whether the thing they were afraid of was coming tonight.
She gave them paper the quartermaster had let her have, the backs of supply lists, and told them to draw the place they had come from.
Most drew houses. One girl drew a goat in great detail and wrote its name under it. A boy of about nine, from a village somewhere in the north of Iraq, drew a wall with people on top of it, and below the wall a wide green field, and on the field rain falling out of one small cloud, straight down, in lines.
"Is that home?"
"That's outside," the boy said. "That's where my uncle is. It rains on them because they said yes."
He coloured the field harder. The crayon was nearly gone.
"On our side it's dust," he said. "My uncle said if we say yes we get the field too."
She did not tell him his uncle was lying. She had been a teacher too long to tell a child that his family lied. She asked him what colour the man's tent was, and he said white, and then he said he had never seen it, he only knew it was white, and then he put the crayon down and lay on his back on the mat and looked at the ceiling.
At the door, a little later, his grandmother took the drawing and folded it small without looking at it.
Hamza came in after the night prayer with his hair wet from washing and dust to the knee.
He was nineteen. He had been nineteen in Medina, and on the marsh, and he was nineteen now, but she could not find the age in his face any more. He had come home to her thinner, with the same hands and the same way of tilting his head to get his ear nearer to a voice. He had not said one sentence about the marsh. She had stopped asking after the first week, when he had answered her with a look so patient that it frightened her more than anything she had seen on the road.
She put the plate in front of him. Lentils, a little oil, the half loaf she had queued for. He ate the way he had eaten as a boy after football, bent over, the spoon going steadily.
"Where were you?"
"The east wall."
"All day?"
"Since the noon prayer."
She waited. He tore the bread and wiped the plate with it, every line of oil, and ate that too.
"They're making lists," he said. "For when it comes. The captains go along the wall and ask who can carry what. Who's fought. Who can shoot." He drank his water. "Who's seen him."
The room went very quiet. Down in the yard somebody's radio said the word Damascus and the name of a road, and then music.
"Seen him how?"
"Close."
She looked at his hands on the table. There was nothing wrong with them. She had checked them, the first night home, while he slept, the way she had checked them when he was born.
"You told them."
"Somebody told them. A man from Medina. He was there on the marsh. He saw." Hamza set the cup down exactly in the ring it had left. "They asked me if it was true. I said yes."
"And?"
"The captain wrote it down."
She wanted to say a dozen things, and every one of them was something she had said when he was fourteen and wanted to take the bus across the city alone. She had not been able to keep him from Medina, or the marsh, or the sword. She had been on a roof two hundred miles away, in the first dark in a year, when the blow came at an hour she could not name. Later her phone had lit with two words.
"Go to bed," she said.
He went. At the door of the back room he stopped with his hand on the frame.
"They didn't sing last night," Hamza said. "Out on the plain. They always sing."
Then he went in and lay down in his clothes, and in a minute he was asleep. He slept like a stone now. That was new too.
In the morning she followed him to the east gate without telling him.
She stayed back in the crowd of mothers and sisters and old men who had come for the same reason and pretended they had come for something else. The air was cold and smelled of wet stone and smoke. Beyond the wall, out on the plain, the followers' fires were going out one by one in the daylight. Somewhere past them was the white tent the boy had never seen.
The young men stood in loose lines in the square inside the gate. Some had rifles. Most did not. A captain with a grey beard and a cloth folder walked along them reading names off a sheet. As each man heard his name he moved. Some went left, to the stores. Some went to the steps of the wall. The captain did not raise his voice and did not need to.
She worked out the order of it before she wanted to. The men sent to the steps would fight from behind stone, with the parapet to their chests. The men left standing in the square were the ones who would go out when the great doors were drawn back, and stand on the open ground in front of them, between the wall and whatever came across the plain. The square was emptying. Layla watched Hamza's back. He stood with his weight on both feet and his hands loose at his sides, as he stood in prayer.
The captain reached him, looked at the sheet, and looked at Hamza's face for a long moment. He did not read the name aloud. He turned the folder so Hamza could see the line himself.
"Front row," the captain said. "By the gate. When they come, you stand where they can see you."