Ibrahim read the numbers off the back of a cigarette packet, because it was the only paper he had had on the wall.
"Fires on the plain, nine hundred and some. Call it eight to a fire on the green side, fewer on the dry. Twenty thousand under arms, give or take. The rest are families." He turned the packet over. "Carts, four hundred. They moved the gold this afternoon. It's behind the white tent now, not beside it."
The Mahdi wrote the numbers down. He wrote in a school exercise book with a pencil, and he wrote every number Ibrahim gave him, even the ones Ibrahim had guessed. Ibrahim had noticed that the first time, in the camp outside the city. A man who writes your guesses down is a man who means to check them.
The room was a schoolmaster's office off a courtyard near the east wall. There was a map of the world on the wall with the countries in faded pinks and greens, and a framed certificate, and a kettle on a gas ring that nobody had lit. Four men sat on the benches. They were captains. One of them had been a dentist in Homs.
"And him?"
"He came down to the ditch at sunset. Watched them throw apples at the wall." Ibrahim hesitated. "Then he stood and looked east for a long while. The man I had on the ditch says he stopped in the middle of talking. Didn't finish."
"East," the Mahdi said.
"Past the end of the wall. My man looked. There was nothing there."
The Mahdi closed the exercise book on the pencil to keep the place.
"We go out after the dawn prayer," he said. "Tell your men. Tell them to sleep if they can."
That was all. The captains stood. Nobody made a speech. Ibrahim had been to a great many briefings in his life, for raids and riots and one state funeral, and he had never been to one that ended so soon.
Nobody on the east side was sleeping.
He walked the length of it after midnight with his hands in his jacket pockets. That was an old habit from the bureau, walking a scene at night when the crowd had gone to see what was left. Here the crowd had not gone. Men sat along the inside of the wall in their boots with their backs to the stone. Some had rifles across their knees. Most had nothing, or a length of pipe, or a kitchen knife wrapped in a cloth.
A man was writing a letter on his knee by a candle in a jar. He wrote a line, read it, and crossed it out. A man beside him was sharpening a blade that was already sharp. Two boys were sharing an apple that had come over the wall, passing it back and forth and taking small careful bites, and Ibrahim thought about telling them where it came from and did not. Further along, three old men were reciting together in Arabic, low, the chapter of the Cave. They lost their place at the same verse, and laughed, and went back to the beginning.
He knew the chapter only by its first lines. He had learned those on the road, in the column, from a photocopied sheet a man at a petrol station had given him, a verse a day. For most of the long day he had not known them at all. He had lived in a house the camp gave him, with running water in a drought, and he had looked at the word between the one-eyed man's eyes every day and seen skin. Then one morning, among the rain-grown things on his table, he had found his mother's prayer mat. The next time he looked, the word was there, plain as a street sign. He had run that afternoon with nothing in his hands.
By the east gate the front row was asleep, or pretending.
They lay in a line on blankets in the open square, young men, nineteen and twenty. Ibrahim walked along them out of habit, the way he would have walked along a row of detainees, reading faces. He stopped at the fourth.
He had seen that face before. On the marsh road outside Medina, in the cold at the end of the long day, in a ring of followers. He had seen a young man stand there in front of the one-eyed man and say what he said. He had seen what was done to him. He had been sure, standing in that crowd, that he was looking at a corpse.
The young man was lying on his back with one arm over his face. He breathed slowly. His boots were by his head, laces tucked in, the way a soldier is taught.
Ibrahim stood there longer than he meant to. Then the young man lifted his arm off his face and looked up at him, entirely awake.
"Are you lost, uncle?"
"No," Ibrahim said. "Sorry. Go to sleep."
He walked on. Behind him he heard the arm go back down over the face.
At three the wells began.
He had not thought about the water. A city of soldiers and refugees all washing for the same prayer at the same hour needs a great deal of water, and someone had thought of it. There were troughs along the east side filled from the old wells by a chain of men with buckets, and taps at the mosque, and barrels on carts. The queues for them went back into the dark streets. Men stood in them with their sleeves already rolled.
Ibrahim found himself working the lines without being asked. Twenty years of match days at the stadium had taught him how a crowd jams and how it frees, and he moved the queues on with his hands and his voice. This one to the barrels. You, here, this trough is quicker. Mind the old man. Nobody argued with him. Nobody seemed to find it strange that a policeman with a cigarette packet in his pocket should be telling them where to wash.
When his own turn came he washed at the end of a trough in the cold with water that smelled of iron. Hands. Mouth. Nose. Face. Arms to the elbow. A wet palm over his hair. His ears. His feet, one and then the other, standing like a heron. He had forgotten the order for years, and a man in a column on the road had shown him again. He had it now. His hands shook a little with the cold. He let them.
The ranks were forming in the open ground by the white minaret on the eastern side of the city.
It stood up pale over the roofs in the starlight, higher than anything round it. Lines of men were drawing up below it on the stamped earth of the square and in the streets leading off, shoulder to shoulder. Behind them, at a distance, the women's rows were filling. Men in front were pulling men forward by the sleeve to close the gaps. The Mahdi was walking along the front rank, saying nothing, straightening a shoulder here and there with his hand. Ibrahim saw the young man from the marsh go into the third row and stand.
There was a light at the top of the minaret now, a small one, moving. The muezzin had gone up.
Ibrahim found a place near the back, at the end of a row, beside a baker he had seen in the queue. The man stepped half a pace sideways to let him in, and their shoulders touched. The baker smelled of yeast and woodsmoke. He had flour in the creases of his knuckles still, after washing.
"Straighten up," the baker said, not unkindly, and pushed Ibrahim's foot forward with his own until their toes were level. "There. Now we're one line."
Ibrahim looked along the row. It ran straight away from him into the dark, man after man, heels on the same line, as far as he could see.
Above them the voice began. It went out over the square and the wall and the plain beyond, and it said in Arabic, "Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest."