The call ended, and the square full of men let out its breath at once and settled.
Hamza stood in the third row with his heels on the line somebody had scratched in the dirt with a stick. The man on his left was a farmer from the orchards south of the city. The man on his right was a carpenter from Homs who had talked all night about his daughters and was silent now. Their shoulders pressed his. It was cold enough that he could see his own breath and the breath of the row in front, all going up together and thinning out.
His body did not feel like it belonged to the morning. It had not, since the marsh. He woke in it every day and found it whole, his hands, his neck, the long muscles of his back, and every day there was a moment before he trusted it. He had stopped telling anyone. His mother had stopped asking. Somewhere behind him, past the men's rows, past the gap, she was standing in the women's rows. He did not turn to look for her. He knew where she would be. Near the back, at the end of a line, where a teacher stands to see the whole class.
Behind the wall, out on the plain, the camp's fires were still burning low. He did not need to see them. He could feel the camp the way you feel a stove in a room with your eyes shut. He had felt it every hour since the marsh, and he knew it better than he had ever wanted to know anything.
Off to the left of the rows, at the edge of the open ground, the white minaret stood up. It was paler than the sky, which was the dark blue that comes just before grey. The lamp at the top had gone out. The muezzin was coming down.
After the prayer the front row would go out through the east gate. The captain with the grey beard had told them so last night, walking along their blankets in the dark: pray, eat what you have, go out. Hamza had his boots on now, laced. He had no rifle. Nobody in the front row had been given one. The captain had said they were not there to shoot. They were there to stand where the camp could see them, men who had seen the one-eyed man close and had not gone over to him. Hamza had understood that. He did not mind it. He had stood in front of that man once already, with less around him than a city.
In Medina, in the long day, his teacher had read the hadith to them in the courtyard of the Prophet's mosque.
He was an old man with a cloudy eye who taught on a rug by a pillar, and he did not let them hurry. Hamza remembered the light that day, the same flat noon light as every day of that year. He remembered the heat of the marble through the rug. He remembered the old man's finger moving along the line of the book. There had been nine of them in the circle that day. The boy beside him had been his friend since the first week, a boy from the coast who laughed at everything. Hamza had stood on a roof months later and watched that boy walk out of the city in the stream of people the second shaking threw out, toward the salt marsh, without turning round.
The Messenger of Allah had spoken of the Dajjal, and of what would come after. Allah would send the Messiah, the son of Maryam. He would descend at the white minaret on the eastern side of Damascus, wearing two garments dyed with saffron, placing his hands on the wings of two angels. When he lowered his head, drops would fall from it, and when he raised it, drops like pearls would scatter from it.
The old man had made each of them say it back. Not the meaning. The words. Hamza had stumbled at the pearls and had to say it again.
"You will want to add to it," the teacher had said, when they had all said it. "Everyone does. You will want to know his face, how tall he is, what he says. Don't. If Allah lets you see it, you will see what the Messenger told you. If you see more, ask yourself who is showing it to you."
Hamza had thought, that day, that it was an old man's caution. He had been sure of most things then.
The second call began, the one that stands the rows up for the prayer.
Hamza straightened. All down the line the men straightened with him. The farmer's shoulder pushed against his. In front, between the heads of the second row, he could see the front rank, and in front of the front rank the place where the leader would stand.
The Mahdi walked out to it. He walked as he always did, plainly, a man in a brown coat going to stand where he had been asked to stand. He reached the place and faced the direction of prayer, with his back to them. The call was still going on. The square was so quiet that Hamza could hear the muezzin take breath between the phrases.
Then the rows moved.
It was not a sound at first. It was a movement that ran through the men in front of him the way a gust runs through barley, a turning of heads, one row and then the next. The carpenter beside him drew in his breath sharply through his nose. The farmer's hand found Hamza's sleeve and gripped it.
"Look," the farmer whispered. "Look. At the minaret."
Hamza turned his head.
He did it slowly. He was afraid. He was more afraid than he had been on the marsh, walking out across the salt toward the fires. There he had known what he would see. Here he did not know, and he did not want to see anything he had not been told.
The white minaret stood against the sky. At it, on the eastern side of the city, a man was descending.
Hamza saw two garments dyed with saffron. They stood out clearly, even at that distance, against the white of the stone and the grey of the coming day. He saw the man's hands, and that they rested on the wings of two angels. He could not have said what the angels were like. He did not try. He saw the hands, and he saw where they rested, and that was what he had been told.
The head lowered. Drops fell from it.
The head was raised. Drops scattered from it like pearls.
Hamza did not look for a face. He felt his eyes want to, the way a hand wants to reach for something falling, and he held them where they were. He saw the saffron and the hands on the wings and the drops. He saw nothing else. There was nothing else he had been given to see.
The man descended until the heads of the rows ahead hid him, and Hamza lost sight of him.
His knees were shaking. He found he was weeping, and that the carpenter beside him was weeping, and that the farmer had let go of his sleeve and was holding his own face in both hands. Nobody in the rows had broken the line. Every man stood where he had stood, heels on the scratch in the dirt, faces turned toward the place where the rows had closed over him.
"Did you see?" the carpenter whispered. "Did you see it?"
Hamza could not answer. His mouth would not make the words. In his head the old man in Medina was saying them for him, one at a time, and making him say them back.
The second call had stopped. In the quiet after it, he heard a stir at the edge of the rows, toward the east, men moving aside to make a way.
At the front of the rows the Mahdi was looking toward the minaret. He had turned his head at the first stir. He stood a moment longer in the leader's place.
Then the leader stepped back.