First Night Out

The first night out, the caravan trusted him completely, and Idris discovered that being trusted by a hundred people is a far heavier load than any camel was carrying. They made camp as the sky went purple. The families gathered close around the fires, and the elders told the children that the navigator knew the stars, that the navigator would not let them be lost, and Idris sat a little apart and listened to himself be described as a thing he was not. He did know stars. That part was not entirely a lie. He had spent a hard youth on shorter desert routes and he could read a sky better than most. But the Astrabad stars were a different language, and the books he had stolen to study were old, and the road moved, and somewhere out there in the dark a hundred people's only hope of reaching their families was a man running a confidence trick he no longer knew how to stop. A child brought him tea. "Thank you for taking us," she said. Idris drank the tea and said nothing, because for once in his life he could not think of a single lie kind enough.