The generator coughed twice and died, and Julian sat in the dark of his tent and listened to the camp have nothing to say.
He had been listening since yesterday. Yesterday morning there had been noise enough: shouting down the lines, engines, someone weeping in the women's quarter, the master's guard running for their vehicles with their rifles held over their heads as if the air might take them. By noon most of the noise had gone south down the Damascus road after its master. Today the men of the Concord had gone before noon, in the cars they had come in. Edwin Sallow had stopped at Julian's tent on the way to his, long enough to ask for the water ledger back, since it was the Concord's property, and had taken it under his arm and gone without another word. By the afternoon what was left had gone everywhere else. Some had walked to the city gate with their hands open. Some had loaded cars with whatever the rain had grown and driven east toward Iraq. He had watched a man he had made a quartermaster put a sewing machine in a wheelbarrow and push it over the dry irrigation ditch toward nowhere.
Julian had stayed. He had told himself he was waiting for orders.
He found the torch by feel and switched it on. The battery was low and the beam came out brown. It lit the folding table, the steel trunk with his uncle's papers in it, and his camp bed, where he had once found Nessar's face laid out empty on the pillow. The devils had worn that face up and down the road since. He had stopped asking where it was.
Something moved in the door of the tent.
He knew it before he saw it. He had learned that much of his uncle's trade, the way a man learns a language by being shouted at in it. It was the small one, the Hinn that had carried his water since Medina. He had never given it a name. His uncle's notebooks said you did not, that a name was a door. It came in low along the ground, in the shape it used for him, something like a thin brown dog with too many joints in its legs.
It did not wait to be addressed.
"He's dead," it said, in the voice of a woman who used to sell cigarettes at the camp gate. "At the gate of Lud. Before the sun went down. The one from the minaret killed him with a spear."
Julian kept the torch on it.
"Who told you?"
"Everyone." It turned its long head toward the door. "They're all going. There's nothing here to stay for."
"I haven't dismissed you."
The Hinn looked at him. In the brown light its eyes were the cigarette woman's eyes, pouched and tired, and there was something in them he had never seen in a servant's face. It took him a moment to place it. It was pity.
Then it went out under the flap of the tent, and he did not hear it go anywhere.
He walked the lines with the torch held low.
The camp had been laid out in streets. He had laid most of them out himself, in the second month, when the master's people had found that the dead sorcerer's nephew with his box of papers could organise a latrine trench and a ration list, and despised him for it, and used him. Every street had a number. Every tent had a list of names, written in his hand, pinned to its pole. He passed them now, Street Four, Street Five, the lists flapping in the night wind with nobody under them.
In the middle of Street Six the torch found gold.
It lay in the dirt the way spilled grain lies, in a long scatter: coins, a bracelet, a little cup, the twisted end of something that might once have been a lamp. Further along there was more. Silver plates. A heap of old jewellery tangled like weed. He had seen these things rise out of a ruined village in the long day and come after the master across the fields in a swarm, the way bees come after their queen, and settle round his feet when he stopped. The men had laughed and filled their pockets. Julian had not touched them. He had not been sure they would let him.
Now they lay where they had fallen when there was no one left in the camp for them to follow. A coin rolled under his shoe. He moved his foot. It stayed where it was.
He went on to the master's pavilion.
It stood at the head of the camp, white canvas on a frame of poles, larger than a house. He had been inside it eleven times in a year. The guard had gone. The flap was tied back. Inside, the carpets were still down and the lamps were still hung, unlit, and at the far end, on a low dais, was the chair.
It was the plain wooden chair they had carried out onto the salt on the first night. He had never been near enough to see how ordinary it was. One arm was scratched. It could have come from any kitchen in the city.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
He went back for the trunk.
It took him two trips, because he was not strong and the trunk was steel. He set it on the carpet in front of the dais, and opened it, and took out the roll.
His uncle had kept it in a cardboard tube in the bottom of a wardrobe, under shoes. Julian had found it the week of the funeral, with the notebooks and the account books and the two glasses of tea nobody had cleared from the low table. It was a family tree drawn on joined sheets of paper, the oldest of them brown and soft as cloth. The names at the top were not in any alphabet he could read. Further down they came into Greek, then Latin, then English. Some had a line beside them in his uncle's small square hand: "against Moses", "against the Messenger", "in the reign of", and dates. The tree went down the paper like water down a wall.
He unrolled it on the dais by the light of the torch until he came to the bottom.
Marcus Gardner. A line from Marcus to the side, to his brother. A line down from him to a single name.
Julian Gardner.
There was nothing under it. There had never been anything under it. He had no wife and had never wanted one, no child, no cousin's child, nobody. He had carried the roll across to the island because the master would want to see it, when the master was still the biggest man Julian had ever seen, and the master had glanced at it once and handed it back. He had carried it through two years as if it were a passport.
He looked at the blank paper under his name. Then he rolled the tree up again, carefully, from the bottom, so that his name went in first, and laid it on the cushion of the empty chair.
He did not know whom he was leaving it for. He left it anyway.
The torch was nearly gone when he got back to his tent.
He set it on the folding table, pointing up, so it made a brown circle on the canvas roof, and took his shaving mirror off its nail. It was a small round mirror with a crack across one edge. He held it close to his face.
For a year he had watched the believers look at the master.
He had seen it at the roadblock the first day, and a hundred times after. A woman would be brought in, a man, a child, and they would look up at the master's face, and their eyes would go to the place between his eyes and stop there, and they would read. Some of them read it aloud. Some only went pale. A few wept. Julian had stood at the master's shoulder and looked at the same place and seen smooth skin, and he had felt the reading going on around him like a conversation in a language he had not been taught. Later he had begun to catch them looking at him that way too, the believers in the pens, their eyes going to his forehead and stopping there, checking. He had never known what they found.
He leaned into the mirror until his breath fogged it, and wiped it, and leaned in again.
His own eyes. A crease between them from a year of squinting at the sun. Skin, pores, a small white scar from a childhood fall that he had forgotten he had.
He looked for a long time, the way he had looked at the master's face for a year, and he could not find the word, on himself or anywhere else. The one forehead it had ever been written on was lying in the dust at Lud, and the word had gone into the ground with it.
The torch went out.
He stayed where he was, in the dark, holding the mirror up to a face he could no longer see.