Esther came down the ladder at the first word of the call, because she had promised, and down the hall stair and the church stair into the crypt, where her father was already awake and sitting on the edge of his mattress with his tallit bag in his lap.
"You said you'd wake me," he said.
"I'm waking you."
"I've been awake since two." He untied the bag. "Old men don't sleep the night before anything."
She sat down on her own mattress. Her legs had been shaking since midnight and now that she was off the roof they decided to stop holding her. The crypt was nearly empty. The Karimis' corner was rolled up. Reza had taken Omid to the rows at four, Omid asleep on his feet and furious at being left behind if they tried to leave him, and Zahra had gone up to the women's side with the woman from the cellar family. The two little girls slept in the saint's alcove under one blanket.
Her father put on his tallit and stood to face the wall he faced, south and a little west. He had begun the first blessing when the sound from the city changed.
It did not get louder. It stopped. Up through the stone and the stair, all through the night, there had been the sound of a city awake, feet and buckets and water, and then the call, and then the murmur of people moving into lines. All of that stopped at once, as if someone had put a hand flat on it. Esther heard the two little girls breathing. She heard a drop fall somewhere in the vault.
Her father stood with the tallit on his shoulders and did not go on with the blessing. He was listening too.
After a long time the sound came back, a little at a time, and it was not the same sound.
Reza came down the stair when the sun was up with Omid on his back and the knees of his trousers grey with dust. He put the boy down. He stood at the bottom of the stair with his hands open by his sides, a man who had come in to say something and could not find where it started.
"Sit down, Reza," her father said. "Sit, and then say it."
Reza sat on the bottom step.
"I was far back," he said. "Forty rows, fifty. Behind the men from Homs. I couldn't see anything but backs." He wiped his face. "Then everybody turned their heads to the minaret. All at once. You could hear it, the heads turning. And I turned mine."
"What did you see?"
"Yellow. Two garments, yellow, like saffron. Far off, by the top of the white minaret." He held his hands apart, a small distance, the size of something seen across a valley. "His hands were on the wings of two angels. I didn't see the angels. I saw where his hands were. And when he bent his head, drops fell from it. And when he lifted it, drops. Like pearls." His voice went. "That's what Zahra's mother said. That's word for word what she said, Rabbi, in the kitchen in Isfahan. I thought it was a thing for children."
"His hair was wet," Omid said. "But it wasn't raining. It isn't raining here."
"Then the one at the front, the leader, stepped back for him. To let him lead us. And he wouldn't." Reza looked at his hands. "The men passed it back down the rows. He said some of us are leaders over the others. An honour from Allah for this nation. And he prayed behind our man. Behind him. I prayed the dawn prayer standing in the same field." He laughed, once, without any sound in it. "I don't remember a word I said."
Her father had not moved. He stood with the tallit on his shoulders and his hand resting on the back of the chair, and he looked at Reza as he looked at a page he was reading for the second time, slowly, without skipping.
"Thank you," he said.
Zahra came down at half past six with the news from the lanes, and it was already a different news.
The camp had broken. People on the walls had seen it. The one-eyed man had come out in front of his tents to look east, and then he had gone soft somehow, nobody could say how, the boys on the wall said he had gone like a sugar cube in tea, and then he had run. He had run south and west along the old road with his devils going ahead of him, and men were already going out of the south gate after him, and the one from the minaret with them.
Zahra knelt down by Omid and took his face in her hands and looked at it as if she were checking it for damage.
"My mother told me," she said, to the boy, or to all of them. "Every unbeliever who smells the breath of his body dies. And his breath reaches as far as his sight reaches." She said it the way her mother had said the hadith of the shawls at the stairwell window: low, like something she was afraid of being right about.
Esther stood up.
She did not decide to. She was on her feet and at the bottom of the stair, and she was seeing the wall at Bab Touma and the line where the rain stopped, and the pale block below it, and a girl with a string-tied rucksack lifting her whole arm to wave. As far as his sight reaches. The camp was on the plain all round the city. The plain was open. You could see a long way across it.
"Hadas," she said.
Nobody answered her. Zahra let go of Omid's face.
Her father took his hand off the chair. He went to his mattress and knelt, which he did not do easily, and opened the tallit bag the rest of the way. Under the prayer book, under the tefillin in their velvet, wrapped in a tea towel from the kitchen in Isfahan, there was a small paper book with a cover gone soft as cloth.
Esther stared at it.
"You said not the books."
"I said I'd read the books." He unwrapped it. "I didn't say I'd finished this one."
He sat on the edge of the mattress with it on his knee and turned the pages, carefully, the way he had at the table under the lamp the summer before the buses, his lips moving. The flyleaf with his father's brown ink went past. He found a place near the end and smoothed it with the side of his hand.
"And Menahem son of Ammiel will come," he read, in Hebrew, and then again in Persian so they would all have it, "and he will blow into the face of Armilus, and Armilus will die."
He kept his finger under the line.
"It's Isaiah," he said. "The man who wrote this took it from Isaiah. 'And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.' He was frightened and he wanted to be ready, so he went to Isaiah and took what was there."
"Father, is it him?"
He looked up at her. She could not tell what was in his face. She had known it all her life and she could not read it.
"I've read about Armilus since I was younger than you," he said. "I know what his book says. I don't know what that man is, out there, who came down and wouldn't lead them." He looked at Reza on the step, and at Zahra. "They know what their book says about him. I'll leave that to them."
He closed the book. He closed it with both hands, the way you close a door on a room where somebody is sleeping, and held it shut a moment. Then he wrapped it in the tea towel and laid it on top of the prayer book and pushed the bag across the floor to Esther with his foot.
"Keep that."
"Don't you want it?"
"My father said every generation needs one man who has read it." He stood up and turned back to the wall he faced, and settled the tallit on his shoulders. "This one had me. That's enough."
He began the first blessing again from the beginning. Esther sat on the floor with the bag in her lap and her hand on the shape of the book through the cloth, and above them, through the stone, she heard engines starting in the lanes, one after another, all of them turning south.