The captain put his arm out across the road, and the front guard stopped walking.
Hamza stopped with them. His feet kept wanting to go on. They had been going since the dawn prayer of the day before, out of the east gate of Damascus and down through the hills in the backs of trucks, with one cold night on a ridge between, and for the last miles on foot at the front, because the trucks could not be trusted not to run past the place where the captain wanted men to stand. His shins ached. His mouth was full of dust. Behind him the column was pulling up in a long noise of brakes and engines cutting out, and then there was a silence he had not heard since the marsh.
"Here," the captain said. "No further. Stand where you are."
He did not raise his voice. The grey-bearded man had not raised his voice once in the whole siege. He took his arm down and stood with the rest of them, a pace ahead, with his folder under his arm as if he were still on the east wall reading names.
They were on a straight stretch between low walls. The road ran ahead of them to a town, pale and low against the evening, and at the near edge of the town there was an arch standing by itself across the road. That was all Hamza could see of the place at first. A gate in a wall that was not there any more.
Then he saw the man on the road.
He knew him at once, the way you know the walk of someone from your street at the far end of the street.
He had stood a yard from that man on the salt marsh, in the light of the camp's fires, with the gardens growing out of the salt behind him. He had looked up into that face and said what he had come out of Medina to say. He had seen the right eye that stood out like a grape and the word between the eyes, and he had read it as plainly as a shop sign. He had felt the man's breath on him when the man leaned close to look. Then the sword.
He did not let himself go further than the sword. He had found that he could stop there, if he did it quickly, like stopping at the edge of a step in the dark.
The man on the road was running. He was a long way off, the length of three or four football pitches, and running toward the arch, and he was small.
Hamza had not expected that. On the marsh he had been broad, and heavy in a way that made the ground seem to tip toward him. The guards had shoved Hamza toward him and Hamza had felt it in his knees, the way you feel a lorry go past too close. The man on the road out there was a man. Then he was less than a man, a stooped shape, labouring, with nothing round him.
"Is that him?" said the boy on Hamza's left.
He was fifteen or sixteen, from a village in the Hauran, and he had a rifle he had not fired and a cough he could not stop. He had asked Hamza on the first night of the siege whether it was true that Hamza had been killed. Hamza had said yes and the boy had not spoken to him again until now.
"Yes."
Between the column and the running man, far out on the road, there was colour. Hamza did not look straight at it. He knew what it was. He had stood in the third row at the dawn prayer by the white minaret and seen a man come down with his hands on the wings of two angels, in two garments dyed with saffron, with drops falling when he lowered his head and beads like pearls when he raised it. Hamza had seen that much, and no more, and he had not tried for more. He had been afraid that if he looked harder he would see something he had no right to. Now he kept his eyes on the gate.
The column had stopped a long way back from that colour. So had everyone. Nobody had told them how far. They had all stopped at the same distance, the way men stop at the edge of a cliff in the dark.
The man reached the gate.
Hamza saw him go into the shadow of the arch. He seemed to stop there, or to stumble. From this distance it was hard to tell. The arch was a dark mouth in the pale wall-ends, and the evening was going orange behind the town, and the man was a small thing inside the dark of it.
Then the colour came down the road after him and reached the gate too. Hamza watched it the whole way and could not have said afterwards how long that took.
He did not see what happened in the arch. He was too far. There were men in the column with binoculars and long rifle sights, and afterwards some of them said they had seen it and some said they had not, and the ones who said they had seen it would not say what. Hamza saw a movement in the dark of the arch. That was all.
Then a spear was lifted.
He saw it clearly. It went up out of the shadow of the gate and was held high, toward the road and toward them, the length of it black against the orange sky, and on the blade there was blood. He could see the blood. It was dark on the iron and it caught the last of the sun, and he knew what it was from where he stood, as you know the colour of a thing a long way off because you have seen it close.
The spear was held there for the men on the road to see.
Around Hamza nobody moved. The captain did not move. The boy with the cough had stopped coughing. Behind them, all down the column, the engines were off and the men were standing on the trucks and the buses and on the low walls along the road, and there was not a sound from any of them.
Hamza found that he was holding his own wrist, hard, with his other hand. He had done it on the marsh after he came back, to feel the pulse there, and he had gone on doing it at night in Damascus when he could not sleep. He let go.
"Is it finished?" the boy said. His voice cracked on it.
Hamza looked at the spear held up in the last light, and at the blood on it.
"Yes," he said. "It's finished."
He had not said even that many words to a stranger since the marsh. His mother would have counted them. He thought of her, for a moment, in the tailor's workshop in Damascus with the children's drawings, and the thought came with no fear in it at all, and that was new.
The noise came from beyond the town.
It came up from the orchards on the far side, where the land ran out toward the sea and where the ones who had run ahead with their master had stopped that afternoon. Hamza had seen the smoke of it all afternoon over the town's roofs. Now there was a sound from there like a crowd at a match when the floodlights fail. It was thousands of voices at once, with no words in it.
Then he saw them.
They came out between the trees in every direction. They came out onto the roads and across the fields and along the irrigation ditches, men and women and children, running, carrying what they had picked up and dropping it. A white tent at the edge of the orchard folded in on itself and went down. Cars started and drove off the road into the fields. A line of people went up the slope to the north and another went south, and another went toward the sea, and some of them ran straight toward the column on the road and then stopped and stood still in the open with their hands up.
No one was chasing them. The spear had been lowered. The arch stood dark and empty.
The camp broke the way a dropped plate breaks, everywhere at once, and Hamza stood in the road with the front guard and watched it go.