The first thing Edwin smelled on the seen side was diesel.
It came to him in the dark, before anything else came, before the ground or the air: the flat sour smell of a road where lorries had passed. Then dust. Then the cold hand that had held him under the arms across a sea he never saw let go, and he fell forward onto his hands, and his hands were on earth. Dry earth, loose, with small stones in it. It was cool. Nothing on the other side had been cool in a year.
He opened his eyes and there were stars.
He lay looking at them with his cheek on the ground. He had forgotten how many there were. He had forgotten that a sky could have depth, that you could see past one thing to another behind it. His eyes ran with water and he let them.
When he could, he sat up.
He was in a ruin. Mud-brick walls stood round him to the height of his chest, crumbled along their tops like old bread, roofless, with the stars over them. In the middle of the ruin was a well. It was ringed with cut stones, very old, and when Edwin leaned to look over the rim there was no water at the bottom, only a dark that went down further than the starlight reached. The air above it moved a little, the way air moves above a road in the heat. He leaned back from it quickly.
The others were lying and sitting around the ruin where they had been put down. He counted them. Ormsby, on his back, his stick still in his fist. The woman from Lyon, curled on her side. The two older brothers, holding each other by the shoulders. The rest. Eight, with himself. Julian was not among them. Edwin had sent him back the long way, by the sea gate, for the family's papers.
The master was standing in the gap where the ruin's doorway had been, looking out.
Edwin's watch had started.
He did not notice at first. Then he heard it, a small dry ticking by his ear as he wiped his face, and he held his wrist up to the starlight and watched the second hand go round, forward, steady, for the first time since the second week. It said ten past five. He did not know whether that was true. He decided it was. He took the ledger out of the satchel he had carried across against his chest, and opened it on his knee, and wrote under the last entry in the light of the stars.
The twentieth of August. Ten past five. Came out.
The master went out through the gap in the wall, and Edwin got up and followed him, because there was nothing else for any of them to do.
Outside the ruin the land lay grey and flat to every edge, without a tree, without a hill. A road ran past fifty yards off, a strip of cracked tarmac with a white line worn almost away. There was a sign beside it on two metal legs, peppered with old holes. Edwin went close enough to read it in the first grey of the light. It gave two distances in two scripts, one to a town on the Syrian side and one to a town on the Iraqi side. The ruin and its dry well were somewhere in between.
The master stepped onto the road and began to walk along it, east, toward the grey line where the sun would come up.
He did not look back at them. He had not looked back at them in a year, and Edwin had not expected him to start now. He walked the way a short man walks who has a long way to go and no reason to hurry, his bowed legs swinging, his arms loose at his sides. His feet were bare. They made a soft slapping sound on the tarmac.
The Concord fell in behind him.
Nobody told them how. Ormsby went first, a few paces back, both hands on his stick, his face grey and wet and fixed on the master's back. The woman from Lyon went at his elbow, holding a fold of his coat. The brothers came next, then the others. Edwin went last, as he always had, with the ledger, counting.
He thought, walking, that from a distance they would look like a court. An old king's court in a painting, the men in their good coats gone to rags, walking behind the one who mattered, carrying his papers. Useful, the way a court is useful. He had kept the accounts for a year and he had not been spoken to once. The master had spoken to Ormsby perhaps twice and to Julian when he wanted the news. He had not learned their names. Edwin did not believe he had wanted to.
He wrote that down too, in his head, in the remarks column. The master does not ask our names.
A mile along, Ormsby fell.
His stick went out from under him on a loose patch of gravel and he went down on one knee and then on his side on the tarmac, and lay there, breathing in short gasps. The woman from Lyon knelt and got an arm under him. The brothers stood looking at the master's back.
The master did not stop. He did not slow. He went on along the white line at the same pace, his bare feet slapping, and the distance between him and his court grew by a yard with every breath Ormsby took.
"Go on," Ormsby said from the ground. His voice was a thread. "Don't stand there. Go on after him. I'm coming."
They got him up between them and went on.
The sky ahead went from grey to the colour of dirty brass. The sun came up over the flat land, red, swollen in the dust, and in a quarter of an hour the cool of the night was gone as if it had never been there. The heat came back. It was the old heat, the heat of the seen side, of the dry years, and it lay on the back of Edwin's neck like a hand.
The village showed first as a line of palms.
They were dead palms. Edwin saw that when they came closer, perhaps an hour along the road: the fronds hung brown and broken from the tops of the trunks like the ribs of burnt umbrellas, and the trunks were grey. Behind them were mud walls, low houses, a water tower on stilts with its paint peeling. A ditch ran along the road in front of the village, lined with concrete, dry to the bottom. A dog lay in it in the shade of the culvert and did not get up.
The master stopped at the edge of the village where the road crossed the ditch.
He stood there. He did nothing that Edwin could see. He looked at the houses.
A door opened.
An old man came out first, in a long grey robe and a white headcloth, holding a stick. He stood in his doorway looking at the road. Then a woman came out of the next house with a child on her hip and stood beside him. A boy ran out from behind them with an empty plastic can in each hand, and stopped as if somebody had called his name. Then more doors. More people came out of the houses and stood in the dust between the walls, men and women and children, twenty and then fifty, more than Edwin would have thought the village could hold. They held empty cans and buckets and cooking pots. Nobody spoke.
They began to walk out toward the man on the road.
Edwin had the ledger open. He had his pencil. He found he could not write, and he did not know why, and he looked up from the page to see what his hand had stopped for.
Over the village, in a sky that had been white with heat for four summers, a cloud was forming.
It came out of nothing, the way breath comes on a cold window. A grey smear above the water tower, thin at first, then thickening while he watched, spreading out over the dead palms and the low roofs, darker at its heart, until its shadow came down the street ahead of the people and lay across the dry ditch at the master's feet.