The master sat on a crate now.
Julian noticed it every time he came back across, and every time it caught him again, like a stair that is not where your foot expects it. A plain wooden crate from the stores, the kind the tins came in, set on the flat rock in front of the great boulder. In the autumn the master had sat on the rock itself with his back to the boulder and his head among the pale streaks in its face. Now his feet were on the ground and his knees were bent, and the boulder rose behind him a long way over his head, like a wall behind a man at a bus stop.
He was the height of a man. A short man, broad through the chest and shoulders, his legs bowed outward under him so that his knees stood apart. The iron was gone from his wrists. It had slid off on its own one night in the spring, Sallow said, because the wrists had got too small to hold it, and Sallow had picked up the two cuffs off the rock in the morning and weighed them and written the weight down. The collar had gone the same way a month later. He still had the hair, a mass of tight curls, and he still had the red in his face.
And the eye.
Julian had not been able to see it while the master was a giant. The face had been too high, too far, and his guide had let him see it only as a broad red shape. He could see it now, from six feet away, every time he sat on the second crate with his folder on his knee. The right eye was blind. It stood out from the face, pale and swollen, like a grape floating in a glass of water. The left eye was ordinary and brown, and it looked at Julian, and it was in no hurry.
This was the last month. Ormsby had told them so at the start of it, the way he told them everything now, briefly and as if to himself. The master had said nothing to Ormsby about it. Ormsby knew it anyway. He said his father had known it, and his father's father, and the old houses before them.
Julian opened the folder.
"Wheat is up again," he read. "Forty percent since March. There are riots in three capitals. The Euphrates is lower than the records go. In Syria and in Iraq they're digging the wells deeper and finding salt." He turned a page. "Karachi had nine hundred heat deaths in June."
The master listened. He always listened. He never wrote anything down, and Julian had never once seen him forget anything. Once, in the winter, Julian had misread a figure, the depth of a reservoir in Spain, and the master had told him the figure from the briefing of a month before without being asked, and waited while Julian found it. Julian had not misread anything since. He checked every page twice now on the crossing over, holding the folder to his chest in the dark.
"The spring of Zughar," the master said. "Is there water in it?"
Julian found the page. He had found it for the third time that year, because the master had asked for the third time.
"The news says it's dry," Julian said. "Since the winter. They showed the stone where it used to come out."
"Do the people there still water their fields from it?"
"No. There's nothing to water them with."
The master turned his head and looked out at the haze over the water, the way he had looked at it every day for a year. He did not say anything else. After a while Julian understood that the briefing was over, and closed the folder, and went.
The woman from Lyon caught him at the stores.
She was thinner than any of them. Her short grey hair had gone white at the temples over the winter and she had stopped eating most days. She took the tablets Sallow kept for her and sat in the shade of the tarpaulin with her knees drawn up, and lately she had begun to say things.
"Did you look?" she said.
"At what?"
"His forehead." She looked along the rock at the crate and the short broad figure on it. "I had a Muslim girl working for me, before. In the shop. Algerian. She told me once, when I asked her about her religion. She said they say a word is written between his eyes. She said every one of them can read it, even the ones who can't read." The woman laughed under her breath. "She said, even the children."
Julian said nothing.
"What does it say?" she asked him. "You've been closest. You've sat in front of him a hundred times. What does it say?"
He went back.
He told himself he had forgotten a page, and took the folder, and went along the rock to the crate. The master did not look at him. Julian stood a little to one side, where the grey light fell across the face, and looked at the forehead between the eyes, where the shop girl had told her to look.
There was skin. There was a crease above the nose, a deep one, like a man who has frowned at bright water all his life. There was a little dried salt from the haze in the line of it.
That was all.
He looked until his own eyes watered. He wanted, badly and all at once, to see something there, anything, a mark, a letter, a stain. He thought of the shop girl in Lyon he had never met, reading it with no trouble at all, and something cold went down through his stomach, and then something else, quieter, that was almost like being left out of a room.
The master's good eye came round to him.
Julian lowered his face and went back to the stores with the folder under his arm. He did not tell the woman from Lyon anything. When she asked him again, he said there was nothing there, and she nodded and began to cry, and he did not know whether she was crying because she believed him or because she did not.
On the last night, Ormsby called them all to the flat rock by the lamps.
There were nine of them now. The youngest of the three brothers had gone back across in February, carried out by his guide in a fever and not brought back. Sallow had written that down too. They stood in a row in the hiss of the lamps, the way they had knelt on the first day, and Julian looked at them and saw what the year had done. Ormsby could no longer stand without both hands on his stick. Sallow's coat hung on him like a coat on a chair. Julian himself had to hold his trousers up with string.
The master stood. It was the first time in weeks Julian had seen him stand. He was shorter than Julian. He stood with his bowed legs apart on the black rock and looked at the haze, and something in the haze moved.
Julian's guide let him see it.
The haze was full. As far as he could see along the water's edge, and further out over the water than he could see, there were figures standing, like a crowd in fog. Thousands of them. More than all the visitors Sallow had counted at the lamp line since the autumn. Their faces shifted when he looked at them and settled when he looked away. The air smelled of struck matches and of the sea.
They were all looking at the master, and he was not looking at any of them.
Beside Julian, Ormsby made a thin sound in his throat, the sound an old man makes getting out of a chair, and Julian saw that he was weeping.
The front of the crowd came up out of the water onto the rock. There were six of them, then a dozen. They came to the master and went down on their knees on the rock around him, and put their hands on him, under his arms and at his back and at his bowed knees, the way men lift a coffin.
His devils had come to carry him across.