The Road That Closes

The desert road to Astrabad does not close the way other roads close. There is no gate. There is no decree. At the solstice the road simply stops being a place that goes anywhere — the dunes shift, the stars rearrange themselves over the sand, and Astrabad becomes, for everyone left on the wrong side, a city that can be remembered but never reached. This happens once a generation. Nobody knows why. The desert keeps its own counsel. Idris stood in the staging yard at Kharif and watched the last caravan assemble. A hundred passengers, give or take. Families mostly, trying to reach relatives before the road sealed. Forty camels. Six wagons. And one navigator, hired at considerable expense, whose job was to read the shifting stars and walk a hundred frightened strangers across a desert that was actively trying to forget the way. The navigator was Idris. This was a problem, and the size of the problem was this: Idris had never walked the Astrabad road in his life. He had simply needed the fee very badly, and he had always been an excellent liar, and those two facts had carried him to exactly here.