Julian put an apple on each corner of the map to stop it rolling up, and the captains watched the apples instead of the map.
They were good apples. They had grown in the rain on the followers' side of the plain, red and heavy and perfectly round, and there were cartloads of them. Nobody in the camp was hungry. Julian had spent a month making sure of it, because hungry men wander and wandering men go over the wall. He had a ledger for the fruit and a ledger for the water. He had a ledger for the men, by village and by family, with a column for those who had stopped coming to the morning count.
"Seven gates," he said, and tapped them in order with a pencil. "This one is bricked. This one they've filled with rubble from inside. These three are watched day and night. That leaves the east gate and the little one by the river."
"The east gate is where they keep the young ones," said the captain from Deir. "The boys in the front row. Unarmed half of them."
"Then that's the gate."
The captain from Deir looked at him the way all of them looked at him, the way his uncle's clients had looked at his uncle, when they thought he wasn't watching. A foreigner with a pencil. A man who had come to the road with the master's court, the foreigners who called themselves the Concord and had knelt to him a year before any of these captains saw his face, and who had been allowed to keep his car. They took his orders because the master had given them his orders. They did not like him. That was fine. Julian had not come east to be liked.
When they had gone he sat with the ledger of men. Forty-one names had stopped coming to the morning count in nine days. He knew what that meant. They had gone over the wall in the dark, to the hungry side, carrying children fed on rain-grown bread. He did not understand it, and he had stopped trying. He drew a line through each name with a ruler, the way his uncle had kept his books.
His uncle had kept everything. Julian had found the ledgers after the funeral, in the rooms nobody would rent: forty years of names in a small upright hand, the human clients in black ink and the other kind in green. The green column had a heading, underlined twice. Staff. Julian had laughed when he first read it. He had not yet seen what staff could do. Now he kept the same columns in the same two inks, and the green column had been taken away from him. Every afternoon he walked past it, sitting in the shade.
He walked up through the camp at four with the map under his arm.
The camp had grown on the plain like a town grows on a river. There were lanes now, and a market, and women hanging washing between tent poles. Children ran in the wet lanes on the green side and never crossed to the dry. Behind the white tent the treasures of the dead villages lay where they had settled after the last march. Bars of old gold, coins in rotted chests, a church bell, a heap of brass lamps. They had followed the master over the hills in a long low cloud, humming like bees. Now they lay in the grass and nobody guarded them, because nobody would dare.
The devils were in the shade. Julian could feel them as a pressure behind the eyes, the way he had felt his uncle's workers in the old house in the years when he was a boy and didn't know what they were. Since he had lost the tenth they did not bother to hide their contempt. One of them, in the shape of a tall man with a bad sunburn, fell into step with him for a while.
"The old ones are gone," it said. "The ones who opened the door. Six of them came apart on the road in three nights. One is left. Nobody's bothered with her."
"Does he know?"
The devil looked at him as if he had asked whether the sun knew it was hot, and peeled away.
The master was standing outside the white tent with his back to it, looking at the city.
He was a man. Julian had to tell himself that each time, because the camp told him otherwise. He was a short, broad man in plain clothes, red in the face, with thick curled hair and a short neck, and his legs bowed a little when he stood. On the island he had been the biggest man Julian had ever seen. Julian had watched him come down to this a hand's width at a time, through a whole year, and had never once seen it happen. His right eye stood out from the face, blind and rounded, like a grape floating in a glass of water. Between his eyes there was skin, and only skin. Some people read a word there. The men who went over the wall at night had said so, before they went, and some of them could not read at all. Julian saw nothing. He had stopped looking for it a long time ago.
"The gates," Julian said, and held out the map.
The master did not take it. He looked at the city over Julian's head.
"And the old ones on the road. The six. They're finished."
He had wanted to say it. He did not know why. Perhaps because they were the only other things in this camp that had come here by a door, like him. His family had spent four thousand years walking toward this man. The papers in the house in England went back through his uncle and his uncle's grandfather and on back, to a king in Egypt who had told his people he was their lord most high. Julian had read every page of them. He had thought they would count for something here.
The master said nothing about the old ones. He did not seem to hear.
"They will open it themselves," he said. "They are hungry in there. Feed the ones on the wall where they can see."
"From the carts?"
"From the carts."
That was all. The voice was ordinary and a little hoarse. Julian had never once heard it raised.
At sunset he went down to the edge of the camp with the carts.
The followers lined the ditch on the green side and threw apples up toward the wall. Most fell short and rolled back into the ditch. A few went over. Up on the wall the guards stood still and did not pick them up. Some had cloths over their mouths. One boy in the front row had taken an apple off the parapet and was holding it and looking at it, and the man beside him reached over and took it out of his hand and dropped it down the outside of the wall.
The master had come down to watch. He stood a little way off on the dry side with the low sun on his face, and the followers on the green side turned toward him like flowers. Julian stood at his elbow with the map, because that was where he had been told to stand.
"Tomorrow," the master said. "Or the day after. They will come out to me with their hands open. Every one of them who is hungry, and then the rest, and then. . ."
He stopped.
Julian waited for the end of the sentence. It did not come. He looked up.
The master had turned his head away from the city, where the call to the sunset prayer was rising now off the minarets one after another. He was looking east of it, past the end of the wall, where the land climbed into low brown hills under a darkening sky. There was nothing there. Julian looked as hard as he had ever looked at anything, and he saw rock and scrub and the first star, and nothing.
The master's head stayed turned. His good eye was narrowed. The floating eye beside it did not move at all.
Around them the camp went still. The followers on the green side stopped throwing. In the shade behind the carts the pressure behind Julian's eyes drew in tight, all at once, as if every devil in the camp had caught its breath.
The master stood like that for the length of the call. He did not finish the sentence.