Chapter 2 · Chapter 2

The hammer started before the sun had cleared the dyeworks.

Mother sent Maryama up to the roof with the flatbread because a roof is where a child can be out from underfoot and still watched, and she sent me behind her because I sit still. So we sat behind the lattice at the corner of the upper room, the wood cool against my forehead, and the lane lay under us like something spilled.

Nobody had called the street out. The street was full anyway.

Three men stood at the gate where our lane met the square: two soldiers, and between them a clerk with a satchel and a hammer. The soldiers did not move. The clerk kept putting his hand into the satchel and taking it out again, as though the paper in there might have changed since he last looked.

The herald stood on the third step of the fountain and read.

Castilian came out of him fast and flat, water off a height. I did not have the words. I had the shape of them — the long roll at the end of a line, the small stop he made before the word that finished it. Every man in the square had his head turned to that voice. Women had come out onto their own roofs, and the dyer's wife was crying into her sleeve with no noise in it at all.

Maryama pulled at my wrist. What does he say.

Nothing, I said. Terms.

Which terms.

I did not know which terms. Behind me the stairs took my grandfather's weight, one step, then the next, the way they took it now, and then he was standing behind the two of us with his hand on the frame and the whole lane under his eyes.

"They are reading the terms," he said.

Hasan had come up behind him with flour still on his cuffs from the night before. "What terms?"

"All of them," my grandfather said.

Below us the herald came to the end of something and the square made a sound I had never heard a square make. Not a shout. It went out of them at once, the way air goes out of a room when a door is opened somewhere else in the house.

The clerk climbed the step. He held the paper up so the seal showed, and drove the nail in with two blows, one to start it and one to seat it, and the sound came up off the stones and into the lattice and into my teeth.

Then the paper was on the gate at the height of a man's eyes, moving a little.

A boy went up to touch it and a soldier cuffed him back into the crowd without looking at him.

My mother's voice came up the stairwell, thin, the way it goes when she is holding the baby on one hip. Maryama. Come down from there.

Maryama did not move. I put my hand flat on her back and she stayed.

"Hasan," my grandfather said. "Go down. Look at that nail. Wood or plaster."

"And then?"

"Then come and tell me wood or plaster."

Hasan went down. The stairwell swallowed him and then gave him back into the lane, and I watched him cross to the gate with his arms loose at his sides, unhurried, a boy going to look at a nail. Two soldiers watched him do it and did nothing, which was somehow worse than if they had moved.

He stood in front of the paper long enough to read it. That was the part I did not expect. His lips moved once, twice, and then he came back, and he did not look up at the lattice, and he took the stairs slowly.

"Wood," he said. "The nail is in the wood of the gate, not the plaster beside it."

My grandfather stood there a moment with his hand on the frame.

"Then it stays," he said. "A thing nailed to a gate is meant to be read by people coming in. They want it read."

"They wrote the terms of the capitulation," Hasan said. "The whole of it. The surrender of the city, the terms of it, in the square, in front of everyone, before it is done."

"Yes."

"Then it is already done."

"It is written," my grandfather said, "which is not the same, but it is the road to it." He turned his head. "Saleema. What did the herald's voice do at the end of the fourth line?"

I had to think. "It stopped. Before the last word. He stopped and then he put the last word down by itself."

"Yes," my grandfather said. "That is a man reading a thing he did not write and cannot change. Remember the stop. The stop is where the fear is."

I have remembered the stop.

Maryama got tired of the screen and went down for the bread. I stayed and watched the square empty the way it fills, a few at a time, and the dyer's wife go in and shut her own door, and two men stand at the foot of the gate arguing about whether the paper had been nailed through the seal or beside it. Then a third man joined them and they stopped arguing.

My mother called again. This time I went.

In the court my grandfather was at the well with the rope in his hands, drawing up nothing in particular, and there were men at the door already, two of them, wanting to know what he thought, and he told them what he had told Hasan and no more than that. He was not a man who gave more than he had.

I went for my basket. The mint had wilted in the heat and I did not care.

On my way back through the lane I looked at the gate once, straight on, the way you look at a thing you are going to have to look at for years. The paper moved in the wind off the river. Under the paper the old wood. Under the wood, nothing — a floor, a stair, thirty feet of dirt, and forty-one books.

Two, I said, to no one. Two blows. I had counted them from behind the lattice with my forehead on the wood, and that was the only number in that street I could have sworn to.

That night the lamp went down under the floor again, and again I stood at the top of the stair with my hand on the rail, and again he came up empty-handed, and this time my grandfather did not say anything at all about it. There was nothing left to say that the hammer had not already said for him in the square.