Nile Builder: The Architect from the East

The first batch of refugees arrived at the second watch of the night.

A-Tu’s boat ferried them across from the west bank, trip after trip — seven crossings before all the people were over, the boat riding low in the water each time, the oars muffled, the discipline of the grain runs kept for a cargo of people instead of sacks. When the boat touched the beach, Lu Zhu was already there with his people, waiting. No torches could be lit; only two cloth-wrapped lanterns burned, their light hooded. In that dim light, he saw the people coming down off the boat, one after another, close-packed — like a string of shadows soaked through with water.

The old, the women, the children — the ones who could not run fast, the ones who had been left at the end of the village when the fire started. Some able-bodied men, not many — and the faces of the able-bodied were the faces of men who had left something behind, or someone; the faces of men who had carried what they could carry and walked away from the rest. The children were mostly asleep, carried on shoulders or in arms, their heads lolling. At the front was an old man, holding a child of three or four in his arms; the child was burning with fever, its face red, its mind wandering. When the old man saw Lu Zhu, his legs went weak and he started to kneel. Lu Zhu caught him by the arm.

"Master Builder," the old man’s voice was hoarse as a broken gong — the voice of a man who has been shouting, or praying, or both, for three days — "the grain in our village was seized by the rebels. The houses were burned too. My son... my son went to stop them, and they took him. All that’s left is us — the old and the small..."

"Say no more." Lu Zhu said, and his hand was still on the old man’s arm — the grip of a man who has decided, and is holding the decision steady. "Into the city first. Once you’re inside, you’re people of the city. The city keeps its people; that is the whole of the contract."

The city gate opened a crack — the same crack that had let in the grain and the medicine and the torch signals, now letting in a tide of people. The people went in, one after another, the guards counting them quietly, the refugees passing through the narrow opening the way water passes through a gap in a dike. No one wept; no one spoke — on this road, they had spent their strength and their tears long ago. Only the sound of feet on the stone slabs, a soft scuffing — like autumn leaves falling, one by one.

When everyone was in, Lu Zhu drew the old man aside and asked: "When did it happen to your village?"

"Three days ago." The old man said, and the three days were written on his face — the sleeplessness, the walking, the carrying of the burning child. "The rebels came with two companies of a hundred. They entered the village and seized the grain first — more than a dozen carts of it, and they took the oxen too. They entered the village and seized the grain first — more than a dozen carts of it, and they took the oxen too. Our village head went to plead with them and was knocked over with a spear-shaft. In the small hours, the houses caught fire." His voice trembled again as he spoke. "The fire started at the east end of the village. We crawled out through the ditch at the west end. When we looked back, half the village was red."

"Are the villages on the east bank all like this?" Lu Zhu asked, and the question was not an idle one — he was counting, as he asked, the mouths that would follow, the villages that would empty.

"Three villages in a row." The old man said. "The rebels call it ’grain levying.’ But they took even the seed grain. What will the fields be sown with next year?" He wiped his face with his hand. "Master Builder, we have not come to beg. We have nowhere left to go."

"I know." Lu Zhu said, and he said it the way a man says a thing he has already settled in his own mind. "People with nowhere to go — coming here is right. A city that turns away the homeless has stopped being a city; it has become a storehouse with walls, and a storehouse is something to be raided, not something to be defended. The people are the city; the walls only mark where the people are."

The old man moved to kneel again, and Lu Zhu caught him again — the grip firm, the voice already saying the words. But this time the old man’s knee went down anyway, and Lu Zhu felt the weight of it come down through his own arm. Lu Zhu did not stop him. He knew that this kneel was not only thanks — it was a man at the end of his road, entrusting the last of his hope to this city.

The adjutant stood behind the gate, his face tight. When the people were in, he drew Lu Zhu aside and said, low: "Master Builder, let them in once, and they will come every day. Can the city’s grain and water carry it?"

"Carry it or not, we receive them." Lu Zhu said, and the decision came out flat and final, the way his decisions about the city had come out all through the siege — not because the answer was easy, but because it was the only answer that left the city itself intact. "They have not come to share out the grain. They have come to stake their lives. When a life reaches the door and the door is shut — what difference is there between this city and the men beyond the wall?"

"But—"

"I know what you fear." Lu Zhu said, and his voice was the voice of a man who has been through the same fear himself — in the first days of the siege, when every unfamiliar face was a question, and the question had to be answered carefully, because the answer was the city’s life. "You fear spies, and you fear the city being eaten hollow. Both have remedies. Against spies — register them, and screen them. Against being eaten hollow — put them to work; let everyone who can work, work. The people we take in are not burdens. They are hands."

The adjutant said nothing — the silence of a soldier who has been given an order he would not have given himself, and has decided to obey it wholeheartedly. He looked at the string of figures walking into the dark, and said slowly: "Then... we receive them."

That night, the first batch of refugees was housed in the front hall of the old temple — the hall where the god’s image had stood, the hall whose black walls had echoed with a thousand years of prayers. The chief officiant swept it himself, and spread the dry straw with his own hands. The old and the children slept in the hall; the able-bodied and the women crowded under the colonnade. That night, inside the old temple’s black walls — the walls that had held only incense smoke and priests’ shadows for hundreds of years — so many living people lay down for the first time, their breathing filling the hall where the prayers had once echoed. The chief officiant stood at the hall door, looking at the figures, and said to Lu Zhu:

"This temple has housed the gods for hundreds of years." The chief officiant said, and his voice was not sad — it was the voice of a man who has understood something about the old building that the gods never taught him. "Now it houses people."

"Housing people," Lu Zhu said, "is more solid than housing gods — a god can be moved, or forgotten; a person under a roof is a person who will stand with the city when the wall is threatened."

The registration began the next morning — the first of what would become, in the weeks to come, a familiar ritual at the temple gate: the table, the ink, the line of people holding out their hands.

The chief officiant and the wardens set up a long table before the old temple’s gate — a plain trestle table, the kind that had held grain and cloth in better days, now holding registers and ink. Every household that came was recorded: which village it came from, how many people, how many able-bodied men, what skills they had, whether anyone was sick. Those who could not write pressed their thumbprints — the thumbprints of hands that had carried children and hauled water and dug the earth, each print a life committed to paper. On the first day, forty-seven households were registered — a hundred and sixty-three people, each with a name and a village and a story that the chief officiant listened to, because a man who does not listen to the story does not know the man.

"When you’re recorded," the chief officiant said, and he held up a wooden token so that the queue could see it — a small, plain thing, the number burned into the wood, "you receive a wooden token. The number on the token is your number. From now on, drawing grain, drawing water, and housing are all by the number."

A refugee asked: "Can we... go back?"

"You can." The chief officiant said, and he said it with the same certainty he had used when he told the city, months ago, that someone would come to open the gates. "When the rebels withdraw, you go back to your village, and we’ll help raise the houses again. But for now — first settle your lives in this city. The city has room for its people, and you are its people now."

The two characters "settle your lives" made the queue go still for a moment — the words landing among people who had not heard the word "settle" for days, and had stopped hoping for it, the way dry earth stops hoping for rain. A woman suddenly burst into tears, her whole body shaking with the sobs. The man beside her put his arm around her, his own eyes red. The people around did not try to comfort her; one by one, they turned their faces away and wiped their own eyes.

Hidden inside the registration was the screening — the quiet work that no one mentioned and everyone understood, the work that kept the city’s door from becoming the enemy’s door. The chief officiant did it the way he did everything: without hurry, and without missing. He did not ask for road passes — refugees have no road passes; the passes were burned with the houses. He asked about the small things, the things that only a man who had lived in a place would know: where is the well in your village? Whose house is at the east end? Who was married in your village last month? Those who answered were villagers; those who stumbled, the chief officiant questioned a little more. On the first day, two were screened out as "unable to account for themselves." The chief officiant did not make a scene; he led the two aside and said: "The city’s settlement works on clarity. You can’t account for yourselves — so stay two days in the old temple’s side room. In those two days, think your story through clearly, and then come to me."

The two men’s faces changed a little — the change of men who have been seen through and know it — but in the end they said nothing, and followed. The city’s screening had not raised its voice, and they had no wish to raise theirs. The next day, one of them quietly found the warden and said he was a deserter from the north, and had slipped into the refugee crowd for fear of being dealt with. When the chief officiant heard it, he said: "A deserter is a life too." The chief officiant said, and he said it without judgment, the way a man states a thing he has settled with himself. "Take off your armor, and be put into the work crews. This city will not pursue your past. Only one thing — from now on, your life is this city’s."

"Yes." The man knelt and knocked his head on the ground — once, twice, the forehead striking the stone with a sound that carried through the courtyard, the sound of a life being laid down and picked up again in a different shape.

"Rise." The chief officiant said, and his voice was not cold — it was the voice of a man who has seen enough kneeling in his life, in the dark of the temple, in front of the images, and does not want to see more of it in front of a man. "This city does not practice that." "This city does not practice that. The kneeling was for the old gods; the new work is done standing."

Nefer arrived on the third day — the third day of the registration, the third day of the shelters’ first rising, the day the shelter ground began to look like a place where people could live.

She had come from the western line. When the western line’s troops were drawn away, she could not stay idle; she came south with the supply boats to the West Bank, and then took A-Tu’s boat into the city. When she came down the gangplank, she carried a great bundle on her shoulder — the tools of her years on the western line: a few clay pots, two pairs of scissors, a coil of hemp rope. She set the bundle down on the beach, looked around at the city, and began, without being asked, to take charge of the things that needed taking charge of.

On the road, she had gone over the western line’s settlement methods, again and again. The seven villages of the western line had been burned two years ago, and raided last year. She had led the women’s squad from house to house, raising shelters, ladling out porridge. She knew which old man coughed at night and which child needed to be soothed before sleep — she kept it all in her head.

"In my months on the western line," she said later to Lu Zhu, sitting on the edge of the temple hall’s step, the bundle still at her feet, "I learned one thing. The first three days of settling refugees are the most important. If the first three days are disorderly, everything after is; if the first three days go smoothly, nothing after can go wrong."

"So you’ve brought the first-three-days rules with you." Lu Zhu said.

"Brought." Nefer tapped her forehead. "They’re all in here."

"Lu Zhu!" She called out the moment she saw him. "The refugees of this city — give them to me! I ran settlement for three years on the western line — the women’s, the children’s, the old and the sick’s; I have methods for all of them!"

"Waiting for you." Lu Zhu said. "The open ground north of the city has been marked out. How the shelters are raised, how the people are housed — your rules."

"Rules?" Nefer set her bundle down on the ground. "First look at the ground, then set the rules. Let’s go!"

The open ground north of the city was an abandoned kiln field. The ground was high, free of standing water, close to the wall, and close to the wells. Nefer walked a circle around it, squatted down, picked up a piece of broken tile, and began to draw.

"Don’t build the shelters big." She said as she drew. "A big one houses a few dozen people — one sickness, and it spreads to all. Small ones — one household to a room, two rows front and back, a lane between. The lane must be wide — for carrying the sick, for passing stretchers; it cannot be squeezed."

"The materials?" Lu Zhu asked.

"Mud-brick, made fresh in the city. Timber — from the old kilns and the abandoned houses of the kiln field. Roofs — reed matting over felt. The felt is thick; it holds out the night wind." Nefer said. "And this field’s old kilns — the walls are thick and the floors solid. Don’t tear them down. Turn them into the great kitchen, and set up eight cauldrons. The refugees eat from that kitchen."

Lu Zhu listened, and nodded. This woman who had led the women’s squad in raising shelters at the oasis village spoke of settlement the way Kamon spoke of walls — every sentence a method.

"Good." He said. "By your rules, work begins tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" Nefer threw the piece of tile down. "This afternoon! Every day the refugees wait is a day more of cold they suffer!"

That afternoon, the sound of ramming rose over the open ground north of the city — the sound that the city had come to know as the sound of walls being born, the sound of earth being made to stand. The refugees heard it and came out of the temple hall to watch, and the watching did them as much good as the porridge.

Half of the workers were the city’s craftsmen — the men who had built the wall and dug the wells, their hands knowing the feel of earth and lime. Half were the able-bodied among the refugees — the men who had carried their families across the river, and were now finding that the carrying could go on, in a different way. The rammers rammed, the carriers carried, the mat-weavers wove. Nefer’s voice carried over the whole field: "Stack those bricks straight! Shelter spacing — one arm’s span, leave the wind lanes!"

But Nefer and Kamon quarreled on the very first day — the quarrel of two people who both knew their trade, and both knew the other was wrong, and both were right.

The quarrel was about the mud-bricks. Nefer complained that the bricks being made west of the city dried too slowly; she wanted more chopped straw mixed in — it would dry faster and be lighter. Kamon squatted before the stack of bricks, knocked one with his knuckle, and said: "More straw? You think you’re molding mud dolls? A shelter’s walls have to take wind and rain. Too much straw, and the brick is lighter — but it won’t survive one rainy season."

"The shelters I raised on the western line were all made this way!" Nefer said, and her hands went to her hips, the old stance of the women’s squad leader who has argued with a hundred foremen and won most of the arguments.

"The western line is the western line!" Kamon said, and he said it without apology, the way a craftsman states a fact of materials. "How many rains does the western line get in a year? Thebes’s rainy season — one storm lasts three days and three nights! Your light bricks will lie down flat in one storm!" Thebes’s rainy season — one storm lasts three days and three nights! Your light bricks will lie down flat in one storm!"

The two of them — one with her hands on her hips, one squatting — neither would give way. Lu Zhu heard them, came over, and handed each of them a brick.

"Stop arguing." He said, and he said it the way he settled every dispute on a work site — not by taking a side, but by finding the ground where both sides stood. "Nefer, what you worry about is the schedule. Kamon, what you worry about is the wall. Both worries are right. So — a middle way: half a tenth more straw in the bricks, and turn them over when they dry. The schedule: two shifts. That way the bricks keep up, and the walls stand up."

Nefer and Kamon looked at each other. Nefer snorted first: "Then we do as the master builder says." Kamon said nothing; he weighed the two bricks in his hands, and that was his acceptance.

The first shelter was standing before dark — standing, and looked at, and touched, the refugees running their hands over the mud-brick walls the way men run their hands over the hull of a boat that has carried them safely. A shelter is a small thing; to people who have slept in the open for three nights, under the sky with nothing between them and the cold, it is a world — a world with walls and a roof and a door that shuts.

A "shelter," it was called — but it was sturdier than a shed: three mud-brick walls, shoulder-high, the south side left for the door. Two timber beams across the top, reed matting laid over, and a layer of felt pressed down, the felt’s corners lashed into the wall joints with hemp rope. The floor was spread with dry earth first, then dry straw. One household to a room, six paces square, room to turn around in.

The bricks were made fresh, the mud mixed and trodden and thrown into the molds with the old rhythm. On the open ground west of the city, three brick molds had been set up — the molds Kamon’s men had built, planed smooth, the corners square. The brick-makers were the city’s craftsmen and the half-grown lads among the refugees. Mixing the mud, filling the mold, turning out the brick, laying it to dry — hand after hand, brick after brick. Nefer called the refugee women over and put them in charge of the drying: when a brick was half dry, turn it over; when it was dry through, stack it. Among the women were some who had made bricks before, and their hands were quicker than the craftsmen’s.

"Our village’s houses," one woman said, and she said it with a kind of pride that had survived the burning, "were all built with bricks we made ourselves. I’ve known this craft since I was a child — my father’s hands taught me, and his father’s hands taught him. The bricks outlive the houses, and the houses outlive the men."

"Good." Nefer said, and the single word was a contract, the way every word of hers was a contract. "From now on, half the shelter bricks come out of your hands — and the hands that made the bricks will be the hands that sleep behind them. That is how it should be."

The felt was gathered from everywhere — the guild’s stores, the city’s old felt, the pieces each household had given up from its own chests, the way a city gives up pieces of itself for a roof: more than a hundred sheets in all, in every shade of gray and brown, every thickness, every age. A-Tu tore two old sails off his boats and gave them to the shelter ground for door-curtains — the sails that had carried grain across the river in the nights of the siege, the canvas stiff with river weather. When the curtains were hung, the shelter doors had the look of small boats themselves, moored in rows. When the sail curtains were hung, the wind moved them with a soft rush — like a row of small flags over the shelter ground.

"These curtains," Nefer said, running her hand over the sailcloth — the canvas stiff with river weather, the seams of A-Tu’s mending still visible — "keep out the wind. In summer, they’ll keep out the sun too. A boat’s sail coming ashore — for the first time, as a door for the displaced."

Tearing down the old kilns brought a surprise.

At the west end of the kiln field stood a collapsed kiln that had not fallen all the way through, its walls thick, its floor solid. Nefer had meant to turn it into the great kitchen; when they were halfway through the demolition, they found the kiln’s floor was brick-paved, with a shallow flue running through it — in the old days, when the kiln was not firing bricks, the kiln workers had set up their cooking stoves inside it.

"This place," she said, squatting on the kiln floor, running her hand over the old brick, "was a kitchen for people in the old days — before the kiln fired its first brick, the kiln workers cooked here, and the smoke of their meals went up the same flue. Today it goes back to its old trade."

The great kitchen was converted in two days — the old flue swept clean, the brick floor patched, the eight cauldrons set in a row over the channel where the heat would run. The kiln that had once fired the city’s bricks was now firing its porridge, and the change of trade suited it. Eight cauldrons stood in a row over the flue. When the fire was lit, the whole shelter ground was warm. On the first day of cooking, they boiled thick porridge — the grain from the official granary, the dates contributed by the people of the city. Nefer stood by the cauldrons, ladling, one spoonful after another. The queue of bowls ran from the kitchen door all the way to the shelter lane — the longest queue the shelter ground had seen, and the quietest, the people standing in it with the patience of people who have learned that food comes to those who wait.

"Line up, everyone." She called, her voice carrying over the steam of the cauldrons. "The old and the small first! The able-bodied to the back! And no pushing — the porridge is not going anywhere that we are not."

The porridge ran from noon until dark — bowl after bowl, ladle after ladle, the queue moving forward in a slow, patient river. When the last bowl was ladled, Nefer’s arm would not lift. She leaned against the kitchen wall and watched the people squatting at the shelter doors, drinking their porridge, the steam rising from the bowls in the cold air — and then she laughed. She leaned against the kitchen wall and watched the people squatting at the shelter doors, drinking their porridge — and then she laughed.

"Worth it." She said. "This arm is sore, and it’s worth it."

"This shelter," Nefer said, patting the new wall, "doesn’t let the wind through in winter and doesn’t stifle in summer. Ten times better than the ones I raised at the oasis!"

"That’s the materials." Lu Zhu said.

"Not the materials." Nefer said, and for a moment the briskness dropped out of her voice, leaving something quieter underneath — the voice of the woman who had led the women’s squad through the burned villages, and knew exactly what it cost a city to take in another city’s people. "It’s the people. When we fled — the oasis years, the burned villages — no one helped us. We helped ourselves, and each other, and that was all. Now they flee, and the whole city helps. That is the difference, and it is not in the felt or the timber. It is in the hands that brought them."

The first people to move into the shelters were the old and the children.

The old man who had carried the child off the boat was given a room facing the sun. When he walked in, he was still for a moment — there was a straw bed in the room, and on the bed, a folded old quilt. He turned and asked Nefer: "This quilt..."

"Given from the city’s households." Nefer said. "Every family turned out their chests. Enough for twenty beds."

The old man said nothing. He walked slowly to the straw bed, laid the child down, and then slowly knelt — and buried his face in the quilt. After a long moment, he raised his head, and his face was wet.

"I have lived sixty years," he said, "and fled for half my life. This is the first time I have slept under a roof, and under a quilt that someone else has slept under."

Nefer turned her face away and let the door-curtain fall: "Sleep. In the morning, the great kitchen has porridge. Thick."

The shelters went up one after another — the rows growing the way a village grows, first the frames, then the walls, then the roofs, then the smoke of the first fires. By the fifth day, forty-seven stood on the open ground north of the city. Seen from the wall-head, the rows of small shelters looked like a patch of mushrooms just breaking the earth — neat and even, growing on the city’s north side.

On the third night, it rained. A newly raised wall at the west end of the shelter ground took the rain all night. Nefer went to look at it first thing in the morning — the wall was fine, not a crack. Kamon went too; he squatted before the wall, felt it for a long time, and said: "The half-tenth of straw will do."

"Of course." Nefer said. "Could the western line’s method be wrong?"

"What I mean is," Kamon said, "you spread the drying mats over the bricks later, so they didn’t get rained on. This wall standing — half of it is you."

Nefer was still for a moment. She rarely heard Kamon say a soft word — the old foreman’s compliments came out like chisel strokes, few and hard. After a long moment, she said: "All right, all right — go look after your city wall. This place has me." The softness of her own voice surprised her.

Kamon stood up, brushed the earth from his hands, and left. After a few steps he turned back and threw one line over his shoulder: "Short of materials — say so."

"Got it!" Nefer called after him. When she had called it, she laughed to herself — and in the laugh there was a little of the old fire of the oasis years.

"This place needs a name." Lu Zhu said.

"What shall it be?" Nefer asked.

Lu Zhu thought for a while, and said: "The Haven of Settled Lives. So that everyone who comes to live here settles."

"The Haven of Settled Lives." Nefer repeated it. "A good name. Better than ’refugee camp’ — the last thing a displaced person wants to hear is the word ’displaced.’"

"Then the Haven of Settled Lives it is." Lu Zhu said. "From today, the refugees of this city are all people of the Haven."

The Haven’s three rules were set the next day.

Three lines were written on a whitewashed board, planted in the middle of the shelter ground. First: the able-bodied go out to work, and the old, the weak, and the children keep the shelters. Second: water is drawn in queue, and grain by the head. Third: the sick report to the healers — no hiding, no delaying.

"The able-bodied go out to work," Nefer said, "and it is not free work. Guarding the city, carrying materials, repairing the wall — full meals, and the work recorded. The recorded work is converted into money and grain after the war. This city does not use people for nothing."

"And the sick?" A refugee asked.

"The sick report to the hospital." Nefer said. "Priest Imset’s people — I have arranged it with them. Refugees see the healer first, pay later; the account is settled after the healing."

Someone in the crowd said, low: "This isn’t fleeing. This is coming home."

"Coming home," Nefer said, "means behaving like home. Shelters swept clean; pots and bowls washed up. Whoever leaves a dirty doorstep — don’t blame me for raising my voice!"

The whole field laughed — the laugh of people who have been given something to laugh at, which is itself a kind of food. The laughter settled over the shelter ground, soft — like the first snow of winter, the snow that covers the burned ground and makes it look like a beginning.

Water was the Haven’s first difficulty.

With the refugees added, the city’s wells tightened again. On Mery’s ledgers, the number of heads rose day by day. Nefer’s method: three great water jars in the middle of the shelter ground — the water carried from the nearest well, poured into the jars, the jars covered with wooden lids, the lids weighted with the water-tokens.

"One token per shelter." Nefer said. "Water by the head. Children and the old go to the front of the queue. Spilled water — not on the ground; into the seep trench beside the jars."

"This is the same rule as the city’s wells." A refugee said.

"Right." Nefer said. "The city’s rules are the Haven’s rules. From now on, you are people of this city."

The water-carrying was done by the able-bodied among the refugees in turn — four lads on the roster, their names written on the whitewashed board, their loads measured in the old jars. The work was not easy work, but it was work, and work was what the shelter ground ran on. Before dawn, four lads carried water from the well west of the city to the shelter ground, trip after trip. After a few days, Nefer saw the blood-rubbed marks on their shoulders, and asked A-Tu for two old boat planks, and made two carrying frames — the buckets hung from the frames, two men carrying one load, which did the work of three men with poles.

"This frame," a lad carrying water said, "is easier than a shoulder pole."

"Easier," Nefer said, "means more trips. In this city, strength is not to be wasted."

The latrines were also built under Nefer’s eye.

Outside the shelter ground, downwind, she had three deep pits dug; boards laid across the pits, openings cut in the boards, reed matting around the sides, thatch over the top. The men’s pit on the west, the women’s on the east, a mud wall between. A wooden sign stood by the pits, the characters written large and plain: cover the earth after use. The rule was not a formality — in a city where water was counted by the bucket, the waste of the body was a matter of the city’s health, and the health of the body was a matter of the city’s water.

"In this city," Nefer said to the refugees, "water is tight. Everything about your eating and drinking and the rest must be done with care. The earth in the pits is covered every three days. Covered, the sickness is pressed down. Whoever does his business behind a shelter — don’t blame me for shouting it across the whole ground!"

A child asked: "Auntie Nefer, why can’t we do it behind the shelter?"

"Because of sickness." Nefer said. "Dirty things, dried by the sun, raise the sickness. And when the sickness rises, it knocks down the children first. Think about it — is walking two steps to the latrine worth it, or lying flat drinking bitter medicine worth it?"

The children pinched their noses and laughed: "Latrine! Latrine!"

The women’s teams were formed on Nefer’s third day in the city.

She divided the refugee women and the city’s volunteer women into three groups: one for the kitchen, one for the shelters, one for the needlework. The kitchen group rose before dawn to boil water and porridge; the shelter group checked the shelters every day, patching the wind and the rain; the needlework group pieced old cloth and old felt together, sewing padded coats for the children who had none.

"We women," Nefer said at the women’s first gathering, "can’t match the men in fighting. But this settling work — that is our war. Children not cold, the old not hungry, the sick cared for — win that, and we’ve won our war."

The women answered in one voice. A young wife asked: "Sister Nefer, did you lead people like this on the western line too?"

"The western line?" Nefer laughed. "On the western line, our women’s squad moved the horse-stop stakes themselves. This is nothing. This Haven — it’s going to be neater still!"

That night, after the women had dispersed, Nefer kept Sister Wei behind, and the two squatted by the kitchen, reckoning accounts for half the night — how many quilts the shelters lacked, how many pots, which child had no padded coat. Reckoning, Sister Wei yawned: "Sister Nefer, you run this finer than the western line’s women’s squad."

"Fine is good." Nefer said, and she said it the way a woman speaks who has seen what panic does to a village. "Fine, and people don’t panic. When people panic, no shelter, however solid, can house them peacefully — the panic gets in through the cracks, the way the wind gets in through the cracks."

"And you?" Sister Wei asked. "Do you panic?"

Nefer thought a moment, and said: "I do. But I panic on my own, and they settle on their own. This city needs someone to carry the panic."

The days of the shelter ground settled into a rhythm — the rhythm of a village, the rhythm of people who have been given a place and are learning to live in it, the way a field learns to hold a crop.

By day, the able-bodied went out to work — guarding the city, repairing the wall, carrying materials — the men of the shelter ground joining the men of the city in the same queues, the same lifts, the same chant. The work was the same work; the difference was only in the faces. When they came back at night, the shelter ground was bright with the kitchen fires. On the great stove, the porridge bubbled. The children stood in line with their bowls, craning their necks to see into the pot.

"Dates today!" A child shouted.

"Dates." The kitchen woman said, ladling the porridge with a steady hand. "Sent by the people of the city — the date-sellers and the flatbread-makers and the women at the wells. Half the city is thinking of you little ones."

The child took his porridge, but did not drink it first — he carried the bowl to the shelter door, to his sick father. The father leaned in the doorway, took the bowl, blew on it first, and pushed it back to the child’s mouth: "You drink first. Father’s not hungry."

"Father drinks." The child said, pushing the bowl back with both small hands, his voice firm with the firmness of children who have decided. "I’ve drunk already — I had some at the kitchen."

Father and son, one bowl of porridge, pushed back and forth — the father’s hand on the bowl, the child’s hand on the father’s, the two of them in the doorway with the wind moving past them. In the end, they shared it, half and half, and drank it slowly against the north wind, and the bowl was empty before either of them was.

Such things happened in the shelter ground every day — the small generosities of people who have nothing left to give and give it anyway. Nefer saw them and did not interfere; she only had the kitchen add an extra ladle of thick to the sick households’ porridge, and said nothing about it to anyone.

The shelter ground’s children had their own excitement — the excitement of children everywhere who have been given walls and a patch of ground and other children, and who turn all of it into a world. Between the two rows of shelters, they played at "defending the city": lumps of earth for walls, one side playing the rebels, one side the defenders. The defenders always won — because the child playing defender imitated the adults, using a grass-stalk for a rammer, "ramming" the wall and calling the work chant. The chant carried across the whole shelter ground.

"This chant," Nefer said, listening, "rings brighter than the one on the work site."

"Children’s voices are good." Sister Wei laughed. "It’s just that the tune wanders."

"Let it wander." Nefer said. "As long as it can be shouted, it’s a good day."

Lu Zhu came to inspect the shelter ground on the evening of the fifth day.

He walked slowly, looking at each shelter in turn — whether the walls were straight, whether the roofs were pressed firm, whether the door-curtains hung tight. When he reached the third row, he squatted and scraped the wall-foot with his finger — the night dew was the first thing to rise from the wall-foot.

"The wall-foot needs another layer." He said to the foreman following him — a city foreman who had built walls in the new capital, and who wrote the order down on his board without a word, the way the city had learned to write down everything Lu Zhu said about walls. "Broken brick, or cobbles. Otherwise, when the spring damp returns, the wall-foot rots first."

"Noted." The foreman said, and the board went into his belt, the order already memorized.

"And the roofs." Lu Zhu looked up. "The felt over the matting — the direction is wrong. Felt below, matting above — the rain hits the matting first, seeps through, and reaches the felt. The other way round, the matting soaks and sticks to the felt, and the felt soaks and leaks through the roof."

Nefer was listening beside him, and put in: "You could have said this sooner."

"I’m here now, aren’t I?" Lu Zhu said. He straightened up, looking over the rows of small shelters, and said: "Nefer, these shelters need a drawing kept. How big each room, how high the walls, how the roof is pressed, how the drainage runs — record it all. When this war is over, every village in the country will learn from it."

"Learn from this?" Nefer said. "These are shelters for the displaced."

"Shelters for the displaced show the real craft." Lu Zhu said. "In peaceful days, building a house is about how it looks. Building a shelter in flight is about keeping life. The craft that keeps life is the craft that must be passed on."

Nefer was silent. She looked at the row of shelters, and suddenly felt that what she had been busy with these days was not only a place to live — it was the shape of countless future villages, of countless lives.

"All right." She said. "From tomorrow, I’ll have the literate warden measure everything and write it down."

"No hurry." Lu Zhu said. "First settle the people. The drawing can come slowly — a drawing that waits a season is still a drawing; a shelter that waits a night is a family sleeping in the cold."

With more people, the city’s burden grew heavier.

On Mery’s ledgers, the number of heads had risen nearly two-tenths since the beginning of the siege. The grain consumption rose with it. He went over the accounts again at night, and the next day asked Lu Zhu to come to the granary.

"Teacher," he said, "the city’s grain was enough to last until before the spring. With these people added, it runs to the bottom half a month early."

"Half a month." Lu Zhu repeated.

"That’s still counting tight." Mery said. "The sick among the refugees need supplements; the workers need additions. A supplement here, an addition there — half a month doesn’t cover it."

"So the south line’s boats must be urged." Lu Zhu said. "Meru’s side — add a run."

"Where does the grain for the added run come from?" Mery said. "The West Bank’s village granaries are the north line’s waist now. The south line takes more, the north line gives less. Two ledgers, gripping the same throat."

Lu Zhu said nothing. He stood at the granary door for a long time, watching the clerks go in and out. After a while, he said: "Report the account to the court. Say: the refugees have entered the city; the grain deadline has moved up. Ask the court to order the new capital to release another batch of south-line grain."

"Will the court release it?"

"They will." Lu Zhu said. "Because this city is sheltering Egypt’s people. The court can ignore one city — it cannot ignore the city that shelters its people."

Mery nodded, and wrote the report that day. At the end, he added a line in small characters:

"The refugees of the city are all people of Egypt. When the people have somewhere to lean, the city has something to stand on."

At night, the shelter ground was quiet.

The chief officiant’s night patrol, walking past the shelter ground, always lingered a little longer — the patrolmen had learned to walk softly there, the way men walk past a room where a child is sleeping. The lantern light swept across the rows of shelters. Where a door-curtain hung open, the patrolman tucked it shut; where a child slept outside, he carried it back in, gently.

"This shelter ground," the chief officiant said to the patrolmen, his lantern swinging low over the rows of shelters, "is the softest place in the city. The softest places fear the wind most. Our lamps are the windbreak for this soft place."

One night, outside the shelter ground, the chief officiant saw the old man who had carried the child into the city. The old man squatted by the dying embers of the kitchen fire, weaving a pair of straw sandals by the last of the light. The chief officiant walked over and asked: "So late — not sleeping?"

"Can’t sleep." The old man said, and his hands did not stop moving, the straw twisting between his fingers. "Weaving a pair of sandals for the child. His wore through on the road — and a child with no soles has no road left."

"Weave, then." The chief officiant said. He squatted down and watched the weaving by the firelight. After a while, he said suddenly: "When this war is over, I’ll help you raise your village’s houses again. New timber for the beams."

The old man’s hands stopped. He looked up at the chief officiant; in the firelight, his eyes were wet.

"Chief officiant," he said, and the question came out of him the way the deepest questions come out of the old — slowly, and with all the weight of a life behind them, "do you really think we can go back?"

"We can." The chief officiant said, and his voice was the voice of a man who has watched the city hold through three months of siege, and knows what holding looks like. "As long as the wall stands, and the people stand. The land does not run away; the village does not run away. What runs is the days. When the days have passed, the people go back."

The old man said no more. He lowered his head and went on weaving. The straw sandal took shape between his fingers, little by little. The firelight jumped, throwing the two men’s shadows long across the shelter walls.

The consumption of medicine rose too — among the refugees, the sick were mostly the old and the small. Imset and his medicine boys ran to the shelter ground every day. After several trips, he set up a small medical point there: a long table, a few medicine jars, a register of patients.

On the day the medical point opened, the queue of patients ran from the table to the kitchen. There were coughs, fevers, diarrhea — and one child with a dislocated arm, crying with pain. Imset saw them one by one. When he reached the child, he sat him on the table, and talked to him while gently working the arm — before the sentence was finished, "click," and the arm was back in place. The child blinked, stopped crying, and turned to find his mother.

"Priest!" The child’s mother was in tears. "If only our village had someone like you..."

"There will be, in time." Imset said, and he said it the way a man promises a thing he means to see done. "When this war is over, village medical points will rise one by one — the way the granaries rose, the way the wells rose. What this city has learned, the villages will learn too."

"The refugees’ sicknesses," he said to Nefer, "are half from cold, half from hunger, and half from fear. The first two have medicines; the last one must be cured by this shelter — and the people in it."

"So this shelter," Nefer said, "is also a medicine."

"It is." Imset said. "The largest medicine of all."

On Shafi’s ledgers, the medicine tightened again — the ledgers that had been stretched thin since the fire-arrow nights, and were now being stretched a little further by the coughs and the fevers of the shelter ground. She listed the shelter ground’s use in a separate column: so many packets for the old people’s coughs, so many for the children’s fevers, so many for wounds. Behind every packet, a downward arrow. She looked at the column, and said to Imset:

"Teacher, the refugees’ medicine cannot be cut, however we save. But at this rate, the hospital’s stores will not last past the twelfth month."

"If they don’t last, urge Meru." Imset said. "Medicine is like grain — someone must keep the account, and someone must urge the boats."

"I keep it." Shafi said, and the register was already open on the table, the columns ruled, the figures in her small even hand. "Three times a day — once at dawn, once at noon, once before I sleep. The medicine and I know each other’s numbers now."

The able-bodied gradually merged into the city.

The adjutant picked sixty sturdy men from the refugees and put them into the defense companies. He picked twenty who could swim and gave them to A-Tu. The rest went half to the work sites, half to the granaries.

On the day of the picking, the adjutant stood in the middle of the shelter ground — the sixty men drawn up before him in rows that had never drilled together, but stood the way men stand when they have decided — and said: "Serving as a soldier — full meals. But the ugly truth comes first: the wall-head has arrows, and arrows have no eyes. Whoever is afraid, leave now."

Not one of the sixty moved — not a foot shifted, not an eye dropped. They stood the way men stand when they have already decided, and the decision has cost them something, and they are keeping it anyway.

"Good." The adjutant said. "From today, you are people of this city. The wall is everyone’s wall; the lives are everyone’s lives."

A-Tu picked his men by a different method. He had each man get onto a boat, and watched how he handled the pole, how steady his legs were. Those he chose followed him on the night crossings. On the first night, one lad was so seasick he could not stop vomiting. A-Tu did not scold; he only handed him a gourd of water: "When you’ve finished vomiting, keep learning. I vomited my way through it too, in my day."

"Uncle A-Tu," the lad wiped his mouth, "how many times did you vomit?"

"Forgotten." A-Tu said. "All I remember is, I never vomited after that."

In the first days, people still said "from the city" and "from outside the city." Half a month later, no one said it any more.

"Why divide?" A lad of refugee birth said, and he said it with the simplicity of a man who has just seen something obvious. "We all live behind the same wall. We are all one life — the wall does not ask where a man was born before it lets him stand on it."

"Well said." An old city soldier clapped his shoulder. "From now on, this wall is guarded by all of us together."

Above and below the wall, the two groups gradually became one appearance — the same coarse clothes, the same black-red faces, the same habit of pricking up their ears at night to listen beyond the city. The city had done what sieges do to cities: it had taken in the displaced and made them its own, the way a wall takes in a new brick.

But though the hearts were settled, the business was not finished.

On the eighth night, A-Tu’s boat brought another load — larger than the first, whole families, crowded over the whole beach. They had come around from the east bank — the rebels were combing the villages to the north, seizing the grain of three or four villages at once, and the people could not live, so they ran toward the place that had walls.

"How many more?" Lu Zhu asked A-Tu.

"A hundred-odd are still hidden in the willow grove on the far bank." A-Tu said. "They say they will cross tomorrow night."

"Let them cross." Lu Zhu said. "However many come, we receive them."

"But, Master Builder—" the adjutant’s voice was heavy, "the shelters are full."

Lu Zhu said nothing. He looked toward the north of the city. In the darkness, the lamps of the shelter ground were points of light — like a field of stars fallen to earth.

"If they’re full," he said, "build more. If the ground north of the city is not enough, tear down the city’s abandoned houses. When the abandoned houses are gone, there is still the old temple’s colonnade. As long as this city stands one more day, it can give up three feet of ground somewhere."

"And one thing more." Mery had come to the gate that night too, the ledger in his breast, his face heavy in the lamplight. "The rebels are combing northward. The emptied villages will send more people here, wave after wave. The city’s grain is tightening."

"How long can it hold?"

"At this rate of entry," Mery said, "the grain account runs to the bottom before the twelfth month. Unless—" he paused, "unless the south is brought to a resolution soon. The more people the city takes in, the less time it has. This siege cannot be dragged out."

In the gate tunnel, the shadows of several men stood still. Beyond the gate, people were still waiting on the beach to cross; inside the city, the lamps of the Haven of Settled Lives burned one by one, as if counting every life the city had taken in.

"It cannot be dragged out," Lu Zhu said, and the words came out the way they always came out when he was stating the ground of a decision — flat, and final, and already acted upon, "but they must all be let in first. When the people are inside, we have the right to speak of ’holding.’ A city holds its walls by holding its people first."

He turned and walked back into the city. Behind him, on the beach, A-Tu’s boat cast off again, creaking.

The expansion began the next day — the day after the second crossing, the day the shelter ground learned that its rows would not be the last rows. The hammers were out before the light, and the sound of work rose with the sun.

Beside the old kiln field stood a row of abandoned houses, empty for a dozen years, their roofs half fallen. Lu Zhu went to look, walked a circle, and said: "The walls are still good. Patch the roofs, and they’re ready-made houses." So they tore down here and patched there — new beams for the fallen roofs, new mud for the leaking walls, the rotten door planks taken off and used as material. In three days, the row of abandoned houses had been turned into twenty rooms, sturdier than the newly built shelters — the old walls were thick, the old beams seasoned, the old doors hung true. The houses had stood empty for a dozen years, waiting for something; what they had been waiting for had arrived.

"Give these rooms to the households with the sick." Nefer said. "Thick walls keep out the wind."

"And keep two rooms for the women in childbirth." Lu Zhu said. "This winter, the shelter ground is likely to hear a new baby’s cry."

"A new baby is a happy thing." Nefer said, and her voice softened on the words, the way a woman’s voice softens at the thought of a birth. "How long has it been since this city heard a child cry? I mean — a child just born, crying for the first time in this city. The shelters and the porridge and the lamps — a new baby is the one thing the siege cannot ration."

Lu Zhu did not answer. The two stood before the row of repaired houses, watching the refugee households move in, one by one. Their belongings were few — some households’ entire luggage was half a broken quilt and a chipped pot. But their steps as they crossed the thresholds were light.

"Master Builder," an old woman moving into a new house called to Lu Zhu, "how long can we live here?"

"Until you can go home." Lu Zhu said. "Or until you don’t want to."

The old woman laughed, showing a mouth of gaps: "That would be best. This city is more of a home than our village."

That night, the sound of ramming rose beside the Haven again.

The shelter ground’s women had not slept either. The kitchen group soaked the next morning’s porridge grain; the needlework group sewed the last small quilt under the lamp. Nefer walked her rounds, checking every shelter door. In one household, a child had rolled off the straw bed; she went in, carried the child back onto the bed, tucked in the quilt, and slipped out again, softly.

"Sister Nefer," a newly arrived young wife followed her, "are you tired?"

"Tired." Nefer said, and she said it without complaint, the way a woman states a weather report. "But when I see the lamps in these shelters — one after another, burning behind the door-curtains — I’m not tired anymore."

"Why?"

"Because under every lamp," Nefer said, "there are people who have come back to life — people who walked into this city with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and a child in their arms, and who are now sleeping under a roof, and will wake to porridge. That is what the lamps are for."

In the deep-night sound of the ramming, an old man sat at a shelter door, holding the sleeping child, looking toward the city’s edge. The child breathed softly in his sleep. The old man’s eyes were open, and the tiredness in them was deep as a well.

"Grandfather," the child murmured in his dream, "where is our home?"

The old man said nothing. He drew the child closer against his chest, so that the child’s breath warmed his collarbone, and looked at the firelight on the wall-head — the fires of the city’s own guards, burning in their brackets along the stone — and did not move. The question the child had asked in its dream was the question of a whole generation, and the old man was carrying it the only way he could: holding the child, and waiting for the morning.

(End of Chapter 12)