The shade behind the carts was empty, and Julian stood in it for a full minute before he understood what was wrong.
There was no pressure behind his eyes. For a month he had walked past this shade every afternoon and felt them there, the master's devils, packed into it like heat in a closed car. He had felt them last night at sunset, drawn in tight. Now there was only shade, and a cold that came off the ground, and a smell like a fire that had been put out with water. A brass lamp from the treasure heap lay on its side in the grass. One of them must have kicked it going.
He had not slept. He had sat up in his tent with the lamp turned low and brought the ledgers up to date, the fruit and the water and the men, and drawn a ruler line through six more names. At three a captain had come to the tent flap and asked him, in a whisper, whether it was true the old ones were all dead on the road. Julian had said he did not know. The captain had gone away looking as if Julian had told him yes. He went on up the slope with his ledgers under his arm.
The master was where Julian had left him. He stood on the dry side of the line at the camp's edge, on the same spot of white cracked ground, facing east. He had not gone into the tent. Somebody had put a chair behind him in the night and he had not sat in it. His back was very broad in the grey light. His hands hung at his sides.
Julian stopped two paces off. That was the distance he had been told.
"The men are asking about the attack," he said. "The captains want to know which gate."
The master did not answer. Julian had not expected him to. He waited anyway, with the ledgers against his chest, because waiting was what he was for.
The call came from the city, as it came every dawn.
Julian had learned to ignore it. It started at one minaret and went to another and another, and the followers on the green side never looked up from their fires. This morning they looked up. The call ended, and something happened in the city that Julian could not name. It went quiet, deeper than the quiet after any call. It went so quiet that he heard a cart horse stamp at the far end of the camp, and the stamp seemed loud.
Then a sound came over the wall. It was faint and it lasted a long time. It took Julian a while to understand that it was thousands of people drawing breath together.
The followers stood up from their fires. Women came out of the tents holding children. The captain from Deir came up the slope and stood a little way off, not near enough to Julian to seem to be with him.
"What are they doing in there?"
"Praying."
"They pray every morning."
Julian had no answer to that. He looked at the master's back. It had not moved. The line of the shoulders had changed, though. They had come up, a little, the way a man's shoulders come up when someone walks up behind him in the dark.
The quiet over the city went on for the length of a prayer. Then, far off, the great bar of the east gate groaned, and the doors swung back.
They came out on foot.
First a line of young men with nothing in their hands, walking slowly into the open in front of the gate. The boys from the front row. Julian had marked the east gate for them on his map. Behind them came the army, men with rifles and men without, pouring out of the gate and spreading across the dry ground under the wall. They walked out without running and without shouting, as people walk out of a mosque, and they came on across the plain toward the camp.
On the green side the followers began to back away from the fires.
"Master," Julian said. "They're coming out. Shall I tell the captains. . ."
He stopped, because the master had not turned toward the army at all.
He was looking past it. Past the young men and the rifles and the gate, far off over the wall, toward the place where the white minaret stood up pale over the roofs. Julian looked where he looked. He saw the wall, and the tops of trees, and the minaret, small with distance. He saw the first sun on the hills. He could not see anyone. Whatever the master was looking at, it was too far away for Julian to make out, or it was something Julian was not able to see.
The master's good eye was wide open. The floating eye beside it had not moved. It never moved.
Then Julian saw his hand.
The master's right hand hung at his side, as it had all night. As Julian looked at it, the edge of it went soft. The line of the fingers blurred. It was like watching a lump of salt dropped into a glass of water, the way the sharp corners go first, rounding off, and a faint haze rises off them into the water and hangs there. The fingers were still fingers. They were less fingers than they had been. A clear drop ran off the knuckle and fell onto the white ground and darkened it.
Julian took a step back. He did not mean to.
It was not only the hand. The heavy line of the master's shoulder was going the same way. The back of his neck. The thick hair. Everywhere Julian looked, the edges of the man had begun to soften and run, slowly, the way salt goes, from the outside in. Under the plain clothes the whole broad shape of him was settling, losing an inch of itself, as if it had been standing in water a long time without knowing it.
The captain from Deir made a sound in his throat and stepped away down the slope.
"Master," Julian said again. His voice had gone high. He hated it.
The master did not hear him. He stood staring east, and dripped.
He turned.
Julian saw his face full on for the first time that morning. The one good eye was fixed and staring. Between the eyes there was skin, still only skin, wet now, shining. The mouth was open a little. Julian had stood in front of that face for more than a year and seen it bored, and pleased, and patient. He had never seen it afraid. He did not know until that moment that it could be.
The master went past him.
He went fast, faster than a man that size should move. He did not go toward the tent or the treasure or the captains. He went south, away from the gate, straight across the dry cracked side of the line, with his softened hands held a little out from his body as if he did not want them to touch his clothes. Where his feet came down they left dark wet marks on the white ground, and the marks steamed faintly in the cold.
The followers on the green side stood among their fires and watched him go. Nobody called after him. Nobody moved to follow. The washing between the tent poles hung still. Behind the white tent the gold of the dead villages lay in the grass where it had settled. It lay there without a sound, like any heap of metal left out overnight. A boy holding an apple stood in the middle of a lane with the apple halfway to his mouth.
Julian stood on the slope with his ledgers in his arms and watched the man his family had walked toward for four thousand years run from what Julian could not see.
The master did not look back. He ran.