The grid said Elias, and so at a quarter past four Elias climbed back up the steps to the top of the gate from his round of the lanes, with his coat buttoned to the throat and a flask of tea in his pocket that he would forget to drink.
It was cold. He had not been cold in two years. The ordinary days had brought the nights back, and the nights had brought the cold, and the stones of the wall above Bab Touma held it now the way they had held the heat all summer, so that he felt it through his shoes. Overhead the stars stood thick in a black sky. The city below him was dark, roof on roof, except where a lamp burned in the window of a house that could not sleep, and there were a great many of those tonight.
The funeral notice was in his pocket with the tea, gone soft as cloth. He had not needed to look at it. Everyone in the quarter knew the grid by now. Midnight to the dawn prayer, Elias. The dawn prayer to the full light, Anas. Every night for five weeks the sheikh had come up these steps at the call and said peace be on you and taken the gate from him, and Elias had gone down and said the morning office alone in the church with the crypt families asleep under his feet.
Tonight Anas would not come.
He had come up at midnight instead, to say so. He had stood on the wall in his grey coat with his hands in his pockets and told Elias that every man of the quarter who could stand would stand in the ranks at the dawn prayer by the white minaret, on the east side of the city, with the army, and then the army would go out. The captains had asked it. Anas had said it plainly, and looked at the dark plain beyond the wall where the camp's fires were, and then he had said nothing for a while.
"Keep the gate," he had said at last. "For all of it. Not only my prayer."
"I'll keep it."
"I know you will. I'm saying it so I can say I said it."
Then he had gone down, and Elias had watched him cross the square under the one lamp and turn into the street that ran south, toward the minaret, and had found he wanted to call after him and had nothing to call.
The two boys with the binoculars had gone with the men. In their place on the wall sat two of the Khoury cousins, and the old Armenian deacon with a shotgun across his knees that nobody believed was loaded, and Reza Karimi, who should have gone to the ranks and had not, because somebody had to stay with the crypt, he said, and Zahra had told him to. Elias did not ask. Up on the roof of the parish hall, across the square, he could see three small shapes against the stars, where Mira had taken the women's watch with Esther and one other: three heads turned the same way, east.
At half past four the sky over the far roofs began to change.
It went from black to a deep blue at the very bottom, and the stars there thinned out. Elias knew that blue. He had stood in it ten thousand times on his way to the church to light the lamps, and had never once looked at it, because it was only the hour before work. He looked at it now. The white minaret was out there, a long way off over the roofs to the south-east, one pale stroke against the blue, so pale it might have been a crack in the sky.
He said the morning prayers under his breath, standing, the old ones, the ones he said every morning. "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us." He said them three times, as he always did, and the Lord's Prayer after them, and his breath went up white in front of his face. Reza beside him had turned toward the south-east too and was standing with his hands open, saying his own words, very low, in Persian. The Khoury cousins crossed themselves. The deacon held his shotgun and moved his lips.
At five the call to prayer went up from the white minaret.
It came a very long way across the roofs, thin and clear in the cold, and the city was so still that Elias heard every phrase of it. He heard it end. Then, after a little, the second call began, the one that stands the rows up, and somewhere out there by the minaret thousands of men were standing, Anas among them, the shoemakers and the baker and the schoolmaster with his cane, shoulder to shoulder in the dark.
The deacon saw it first. He made a sound like a man who has been struck lightly on the chest, and stood up, and the shotgun slid off his knees onto the stones with a clatter that nobody turned round for.
Elias looked where he was looking.
At the white minaret, on the eastern side of the city, a man was descending.
Elias saw two garments dyed with saffron. Even from here, even across all those roofs, the colour stood out against the white of the stone and the blue of the sky, the colour of the threads his mother had kept in a twist of paper for the feast rice. He saw the man's hands. They rested on the wings of two angels. He could not have said what the angels were. He did not try to say it. He saw where the hands rested, and that was enough to make his knees go.
The head was lowered. Drops fell from it.
The head was raised. The first light caught the drops as they scattered, and they were like pearls.
That was all he saw. He would be asked afterwards, many times, by people who had not been on the wall, and he would tell them this and no more, and some of them would be disappointed in him. There was no face that he could give them. He did not look for one. His eyes wanted to, the way a hand wants to reach out for a cup that is falling, and he held them still, because he was an old man and a priest and had spent his whole life telling people not to paint more on an icon than they had been given.
Then the roofs between came up and hid him, and Elias was on his knees on the stone.
He did not remember kneeling. The cold of the stones came through his trousers. The flask in his pocket was pressing into his hip. Beside him Reza Karimi had gone down too, forehead to the parapet, and was weeping, and the deacon stood holding on to the wall with both hands like a man on a ship, and the Khoury cousins were crossing themselves over and over, fast, as if they had forgotten how to stop.
Across the square, on the hall roof, only one small shape was left now, and she had put her hands over her face.
He knelt there a long time. The sky went from blue to grey. Far away, in the place behind the roofs, the army was praying. He could not hear it. He could hear the deacon breathing, and a dog somewhere in the quarter, and a shutter, and his own heart.
He thought of the men on the Mount of Olives with their faces turned up, and the two in white beside them who said, "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." He had read it every Ascension of his life. He had read it at the gate of this church in the long day to half his choir with their bags packed for the east, and they had looked at him with pity and gone. He comes from heaven, he had told them. Not up a road. He had believed it, and been afraid it was only a thing a priest says.
The man on the plain had come walking up the roads, and fed whoever bowed. This one had come down.
Elias put his palm flat on the cold stone of the gate to steady himself. He did not know yet what he would say to anyone. He did not know what Anas would come back and tell him, or what the army would find on the plain, or what any of it would ask of him, an old priest with a cold flask of tea and a funeral notice in his pocket.
But he had seen him. He had seen him from the wall of his own quarter, at the hour of his own prayer, with the light on the drops.
He knew him.