It rained at four, as it had rained at four every day of the siege, and none of it fell on Damascus.
Elias watched it from the bell chamber with his elbows on the sill. The cloud came up from the south-east over the plain at the same hour each afternoon, low and dark underneath, and stopped over the camp as if somebody had parked it there. Then it opened. He could see the rain from here, grey strings of it hanging down out of the cloud onto the tents and the green fields the tents stood in. He could see where it ended. It ended in a line you could have laid a ruler along, a few hundred yards short of the walls, and on the near side of the line the dust lay grey and dry right up to the foot of the stones.
In the first week he had made himself stop watching it. Now he came up every afternoon to see it the way you go back to touch a sore tooth.
The camp's people would be out in it. He could not see them at this distance, but he knew what they were doing because Rami had shown the parish on his phone, the week before he went east: they stood in the rain with their arms out and their mouths open, children and grandmothers, and laughed, and it ran down their faces. Rami had been crying while it played. Elias had thought at the time it was from longing.
Below him, in the courtyard, the fig tree had dropped its last leaves. The fountain had been dry for two years. Beside it stood the three blue jerrycans that held the parish's water, two of them empty.
The tanker had not come for nine days. The spring in the hills to the west that fed the old city had been in the camp's hands since the second day, and the pipes from it ran dry, and the wells inside the walls gave up a bucket of brown water each morning and then mud. The Mahdi's men kept the one cistern by the citadel under guard and gave out a cup a head at the sunset prayer, by ration card. The quarter queued for it with jerrycans in the square inside the gate every evening, by the stone bench where Anas had made the watch.
Tonight there was nothing in the cistern to give.
Elias stood at the end of the queue with two cans. In front of him the rabbi stood with one, very upright, and in front of the rabbi was Abu Samir, and in front of Abu Samir a long line of people he knew by name, all the way to the bench, where a captain of the Mahdi's men stood with his hands empty and told them, again, in a voice gone hoarse from saying it, that there was no more.
Nobody went home. They stood where they were in the dusk, with their cans, as if the water might be persuaded.
Mira came through the gate at the change of shift, with her uniform stained to the elbow, and stood beside him.
"We washed a man's burns today with the water from the radiators," she said. "It was brown. He didn't care."
The cover of the old well in the corner of the square lifted from underneath.
It was a round iron lid, older than the square, with the name of a French foundry on it, and it had been rusted shut since before Elias was ordained. It came up an inch, and then slid aside with a long grinding scrape, and a woman climbed out of the hole in the ground.
She was young, in a grey coat, plain, with her headscarf tied back. She was wet to the knee. She stood on the cobbles beside the open well and reached down into it, and someone handed her up a bucket, a big rubber builder's bucket, full to the brim. Water slopped over the edge onto the stones and lay there in the dust, dark.
Then another came up after her. A man in a grocer's apron with a clay jar on his shoulder. Then a thin old man with a jerrycan in each hand. Then more, one after another, climbing up out of the dark in the corner of the square, ordinary people in ordinary clothes, each of them carrying water, and they set it down in a row on the cobbles and stood behind it and did not come forward.
The queue had gone silent. Somebody near the bench made a sound in her throat. Elias felt the rabbi in front of him go still as a post.
The young woman in the grey coat stepped out in front of the row of buckets.
Elias knew her. He had opened his side gate to her once, in the long day, and found her on his step with five people out of Isfahan behind her, filthy and thirsty. Later, at that same gate, Mira had asked her what she was, and come back up the stairs white, and told him. He had not slept that night.
"Peace on you," Rahma said, to the whole square. Her voice was not loud, and it carried. "We're of the jinn. Of the jinn of Nasibin, and of this city, under it. This shape is so you won't be frightened. This is water from under your streets, from the old cisterns your people built and forgot. It isn't ours. It's yours. We only carried it up." She looked along the queue. "We'll bring more every night we can."
Nobody moved.
"They come with faces," a woman said, high and shaking, from the middle of the line. "That's what they say about him. Everything he gives you is the other thing. His water's fire."
"Yes," Rahma said. "His is."
Anas came out of the queue. He did not hurry. He walked up to the young woman and stopped in front of her and spoke to her quietly, and Elias could not hear what he said. She answered. Elias saw her lips move, and knew from the shape and the length of it what she was saying, because he had heard it from the minarets of this city every day of his life: the testimony of faith, in Arabic, the whole of it, without hurrying.
Anas listened to the end with his head on one side. Then he nodded once and stepped back.
Elias found that he had come forward too. He had not decided to. His feet had brought him out of the line with a jerrycan still in each hand, and now he set them down, and stood in front of the row of buckets, and did what he had done over every font and every well and every jar of water brought to him in thirty-one years of priesthood. He lifted his right hand. He made the sign of the cross over the water, slowly, and said the short prayer of blessing under his breath, in Arabic, the way the old priest who had taught him had said it.
He did not do it to find anything out. He would think about that later and be sure of it. He did it because it was water, and there were people waiting for it, and his hand knew no other way to hand water to his people.
Rahma waited. She stood quite still with her hands at her sides until he had finished, and lowered his hand, and only then did she step back from the row.
The square was still silent. All down the line, people were looking at the buckets and not at one another. Elias saw the Khoury cousins look at him, and the men from the mosque look at Anas, and the rabbi look at nobody, his eyes on the water, and nobody take one step.
Mira went past him.
She did not look at him. She walked straight across the cobbles to the row and bent and took hold of the big rubber bucket the young woman had brought up first, by both handles, and lifted it against her stained uniform with a grunt. Water slopped over the rim and soaked her front. She did not seem to notice.
"Thank you," she said to Rahma, as if they had met before, which they had.
Then she turned with it and started across the square toward the hospital and the man with the burns, walking fast and a little bent under the weight, and behind her on the grey dust of the square she left a line of dark wet drops, one for every step, all the way to the corner.