The grandmother's elbow was in Layla's ribs, and Layla did not move away from it, because there was nowhere to move.
The women's rows filled the arcade along the west side of the square, under a long stone roof held up on pillars. It was dark under there and smelled of damp and of the oil of the night's lamps. The rows ran back past the pillars into a lane, and further. Layla had come late from the house and stood at the end of a line by the last pillar. From there she could see the backs of the women in front, and through the arches a slice of the square, and the backs of the men's rows going away from her into the half dark. The minaret was somewhere off to her left, beyond the roof. She could not see it.
The woman beside her was the grandmother of the boy who had drawn the green field. She had nodded to Layla when she arrived, the nod of one woman who has queued for bread beside another. She smelled of cloves. She had a shawl over her head and another over her shoulders and was still cold.
"The boy is asleep," the grandmother said, though Layla had not asked. "I left him with my daughter. He cried for his uncle last night."
"The one outside?"
"He thinks if he cries loud enough his uncle will hear it over the wall and come back for him." The old woman pulled the shawl tighter. "Maybe he will. My son was always soft about that boy."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Pray." She looked at Layla sideways. "Yours went too. I heard. The husband."
Layla nodded. It was easier in the dark. The old woman said nothing else about it. She reached over and straightened Layla's scarf at the temple, the way you would for a daughter.
The call had finished. Somewhere in front the men were straightening their rows. Layla heard it as a long shuffle of feet on beaten earth, like a congregation of a thousand people all clearing their throats.
Hamza was out there. He had left before her, laced into his boots in the dark, and said nothing at the door but the greeting. She had watched him go down the stairs. Then she had gone back in, and washed, and stood for a moment in the empty room with her hands still wet.
Tariq was out there too, on the other side of the wall. She did not let herself think it in words. She had not let herself think it since the road.
The second call began. The rows in the arcade drew up. Women pushed forward to close the gaps and pulled each other by the sleeve. A girl in the row in front was sent back to stand with the children and went, sulking.
Then the square moved.
Layla saw it through the arches before she understood it. The men's rows were turning their heads. It went through them from the front backward, row after row, the way a ripple goes out across a water tank. As it went the sound changed. The shuffling stopped. A man's voice said something sharp and was hushed. Then there was no sound from the square at all.
The women in the front row of the arcade could see out further than she could. One of them had turned round. Her face was white.
The word came back the way water comes down a line of buckets.
"A man," the woman in front of Layla said, without turning, in a whisper meant for whoever was behind. "At the minaret. Coming down."
"Coming down how?"
"They say from the sky."
The grandmother's hand had closed on Layla's arm above the elbow. Layla did not think the old woman knew she was doing it.
"Saffron," came the next whisper. "His clothes. Yellow with saffron. They say his hands are on the wings of angels."
Somebody at the back began to recite under her breath. Somebody else began to cry and stopped herself. Nobody broke the rows. Layla stood with the old woman's hand on her arm and stared at the slice of square she could see through the arch. All of it was the backs of men, perfectly still.
She waited to be afraid, and found she was not. The thing in her chest was too large for fear. It was like the moment in the school year when a class she had worked with for months understands a thing all at once, every face together. That was the nearest thing she had to it, and it was too small by a long way.
Then the prayer began, and they prayed.
She heard the leader's voice from far in front, carried back through the square and in under the arcade. It was a plain voice. It said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest, and the whole square moved at once into stillness, and the arcade moved with it. Layla raised her hands with the women beside her and folded them.
She could not keep her mind on one word of it. She knew the Opening as well as her own name. She had taught it to a hundred children. This morning the words went past her like birds, and she could not get her hand on any of them. She bowed when the rows bowed, and went down when they went down, her forehead to the cold stone of the arcade floor, and the stone smelled of the feet of everyone who had walked through here for a thousand years. She rose. She did it again. Two units, as every dawn. It seemed to her that it took no time at all, and that it took most of her life.
Then the leader's voice gave the greeting of peace to the right and to the left, and it was over, and nobody moved.
The word came back again a little after.
It came slowly this time, and more carefully, the women in front turning to the women behind and saying it low and clearly, so it would arrive right. Layla saw it coming down the rows toward her the way you see lamps being lit one after another down a street. When it reached the woman in front of her, the woman turned round. She was a girl of perhaps twenty, with a sleeping baby tied to her chest.
She told them what the men at the front had passed back. When the man came to the rows, their leader had asked him to come forward and lead them in the prayer. He had declined. He had said that some of them were leaders over others, an honour from Allah for this nation. And he had prayed behind their leader.
The girl said it the way she must have been told it. Then she turned back round and put her hand on her baby's head.
The grandmother let go of Layla's arm. She said something under her breath in the dialect of her village that Layla did not understand. Then she said, quite clearly, the name of Allah.
Around them the arcade had begun to move again. Women were sitting back on their heels. One was laughing without any sound, her shoulders shaking, her hand over her mouth. A child had woken somewhere at the back and was asking, loudly, whether it was time for bread. Nobody answered her.
Layla stood in the arcade with her hands at her sides.
She thought of Hamza in the rows out there, somewhere in that stillness, in his laced boots, nineteen. She thought of Tariq on the plain behind the wall, eating rain-grown fruit in the camp of a man with one eye, not knowing his son's name. She thought of the children in the tailor's room and the boy's green field. She thought of none of them for long.
Her face was wet. She put her hand up to it and found she was weeping, steadily, the way rain falls when there is no wind, and she did not know why, and she did not try to stop.