The pickup bucked over the kerb at the city's south gate, and Ibrahim wrote the time on the back of his left hand.
7:12. The ink went on blue and smeared, because the truck would not stay still. He had started doing it on the first day of Captain Qureshi's file, years ago, because the captain had underlined a line in a margin: write down when. The hand was the one place a man could not lose his notes.
There were nine men in the bed of the truck with him. A farmer from the Hauran drove, with his son beside him in the cab, and the rest sat on sacks of feed with their rifles between their knees. Nobody had told them to come. The army had gone out of the east gate after the dawn prayer, and before it had crossed the plain word had come back along the wall that the master of the camp had run, that the one who came down at the white minaret had gone after him, and that the leader of the Muslims was following with whoever could keep up. The farmer had backed his truck out of a courtyard and shouted for anyone who wanted the road.
Ibrahim had wanted it. He did not examine why.
The column ran ahead of them for a kilometre or more: trucks, two buses with the windows out, a water tanker, a line of men on motorbikes. Somewhere at its head rode the leader, who had led them all in the dawn prayer under the minaret that morning.
"Write me down too," said the man next to him, an old man with a white beard stained yellow at the mouth. "For your report."
"What's your name?"
"Write: an old man from Daraya who should have stayed home."
Ibrahim wrote it in the exercise book on his knee, under the time. The ministry that would have read his reports had stopped existing somewhere in the long day, but the leader had asked him, the night he came in from the camp, to set down what he saw in plain words.
The first of them lay at a bend in the road above a dry valley, two hours south.
The column slowed to go round. Ibrahim saw a car on its side in the ditch, a white saloon with its doors open, and a man sitting against the back wheel with his legs out straight. Then a woman a little way up the slope, lying on her face with one arm under her. Then, further along, a boy of about fourteen in a football shirt, on his back on the tarmac, with a sack of something spilled beside him.
None of them moved. The farmer drove round the boy with great care, as if he might be asleep.
After that the dead came in ones and twos for kilometres, then in groups. They lay along the verges and across the road and in the fields on either side. Some had been walking south. Some had been running. A few had turned round and were lying with their faces toward Damascus, as though they had heard something behind them and stopped to look. The truck went quiet. One of the young men began to recite under his breath and did not stop.
The old man from Daraya leaned to Ibrahim's ear.
"You don't know the hadith."
"Some of it."
The old man said it first in Arabic, the way a man says a thing he learned before he learned to read. Then he said it again in plain words, so Ibrahim could write. The Prophet had said that every unbeliever who smelled the breath of the son of Maryam would die, and that his breath would reach as far as his sight reached.
"As far as he looks," the old man said. "That's all. As far as he looks."
At the next halt Ibrahim climbed down.
The column had stopped where a culvert had fallen in, and men were laying planks across it. He walked back along the verge to the nearest body, a man of forty or so in a padded jacket, lying on his side with his knees drawn up. Ibrahim crouched and did what he had been trained to do. Two fingers to the throat. Nothing. The skin was cool and still soft. He turned the man's head with one hand. There was no blood at the nose or the ears. The eyes were half open and the pupils were wide and even. He checked the chest and the back of the skull and the hands. There was no wound anywhere on him.
In the man's fist was a plastic bag of apricots. They were the fat orange ones from the camp's gardens, the ones grown in the rain that fell only on the people who said yes. One had rolled out and lay in the dust by his mouth.
Ibrahim wrote it the way he had written a hundred road deaths in the old life. Male, approximately forty. Found on the east verge, two hundred metres north of the collapsed culvert. No visible injury. No sign of struggle. Personal effects: one bag of fruit. He wrote the time on his hand. 9:40.
He stood and looked along the verge. There were women among them. He made himself look at each face he could see from where he stood, the way he had looked at every woman's face in the crowds since the marsh. His sister was not among these. He did not let himself walk further to check the others.
He climbed back into the truck. The planks held. The column went on.
It was a while before he let himself think the thing he had been carrying since the first bend.
A year ago, in the long day, he had been given a house. It had running water in a district where the taps were dry, and he had turned the tap in that kitchen and stood with his hand under it like a boy. He had eaten the camp's fruit. He had slept a whole season under its roof, and he had not read the word between the master's eyes until the morning he found his mother's prayer mat folded among the camp's gifts. He had run from that house. He had prayed at an estimated hour beside a stranger who turned him gently by the shoulders to face the right way. In the camp outside Damascus he had stood at the leader's shoulder in the prayer and felt his knees shake on the mat.
None of that was in the hadith. The hadith said unbeliever, and it said as far as he looks.
He sat on the feed sack with the exercise book on his knee and paid attention to his breathing. In. Out. It went on doing what it had done all his life. He held his hand flat on his chest to be sure, the way he had checked the man on the verge, and felt it rise.
The old man from Daraya was watching him.
"You're still here," the old man said.
"So far."
The old man nodded, felt in his coat pocket and held out a date. Ibrahim took it and ate it, and put the stone in his pocket because there was nowhere on the truck to throw it.
The column halted for the night where the road crossed a ridge, and he slept sitting up against the feed sacks. In the early afternoon of the second day the column stopped on a rise above a long brown slope, and Ibrahim stood up in the truck bed to stretch his legs. That was when he saw the front of it.
Past the lead trucks, past the motorbikes and the walkers, far out on the road where it bent toward the south-west, there was a place the column did not go nearer. Men were standing back from it, a long way back, in a loose crowd. Beyond them was a figure on the road, too far away for a face. He could see colour: the yellow of saffron dye, two garments catching the light. That was all the distance allowed him.
He did not try to see more. He looked down at his hand.
"Don't stare," said the farmer from the cab window. "My father said you don't stare."
Ibrahim sat down.
The road came down out of the hills at the end of the afternoon. The land went flat and pale, with orchards and irrigation pipes on wheels and a petrol station whose canopy had blown half off. The air smelled of dust and, faintly, of the sea.
There were fewer dead here. The ones who had come this far had been running hard. He saw a bus pulled across the road with its doors open and its seats full and nobody moving in it, and the farmer drove round that too, with the same care, while the young man in the corner of the truck bed recited and wept.
Then the column slowed, and slowed again, and stopped.
Ibrahim stood. Past a road sign shot through twice and still legible, the road ran straight between low walls toward a town, with the light going orange behind it. Men on the roofs of the buses were pointing. The farmer killed the engine, and in the silence Ibrahim heard the old man from Daraya say the name of the town, once, very quietly.
Ibrahim uncapped his pen and wrote the time on the back of his hand. 6:41. The skin there was nearly full.
At the end of the road, standing across it by itself in a wall that was mostly gone, was an arch of pale old stone with the evening coming through it. It was the gate of Lud.