Chapter 1: Agrabah
The streets of Agrabah are filled with two kinds of people: people for whom stealing is living, and people for whom living is stealing. Somewhere there is, presumably, someone who lives honestly, but these people are regarded with deep suspicion by the other two groups.
Of course, stealing comes in all different kinds of forms. Legally speaking, the man who charges fifty denarii for a bronze ring he’s painted to look gold is not thieving. After all, the customer was willing to buy it at that price, knowing it was probably not a gold ring. But if anyone else were to discover this little quirk of his, it would be deemed stealing. This is why people who have this sort of habit often move away very quickly afterwards, usually to Agrabah.
For some reason, the first kind, the sort that steal because they have to, are the sort that get a crackdown from the law. They have a hard time from the people who steal for fun, and, by many people, they are considered the lowest form of life. But there are lower.
At least the thieves have a Thieves’ Guild; there is a lower class of people. That is the street rats: the men and women who have no guilds, no friends, no homes. Loners in a street full of people. Of course, they steal. they’re too dirty and low bred to be hired even by other thieves. They’ll steal anything from anybody in order to avoid starvation. They don’t even pretend to be respectable, or even to be people. They’re just street rats. The only thing that is lower than the street rats is the dirt they walk on.
Aladdin bin Cassim was the street rat of all street rats. He had no family, no past, not future, and hardly any present. He was lean, brown, strong, young, dirty, and handsome. He could run like an ostrich and climb like a monkey. He was as nimble fingered as he was light footed and could steal the beard out from under the Sultan’s chin. And Aladdin had never been in trouble—well, according to him, since his private definition of trouble was ‘getting caught.’ This was partly because no one knew where he lived, although the city guards would have loved to find out, and partly because he had the natural cleverness that comes from a lifetime of knowing when to run (when a voice shouts ‘that’s him!’) and when to stick around (when there is a good chance of getting free food, often provided by someone who wasn’t aware of the fact, and even then, you usually end up running).
He never begged. He didn’t have enough dignity. Asking implied you thought you deserved something. Taking only implies that you think that they don’t. The beauty of it is, Aladdin reflected one day, scrambling over a wall inches ahead of a rapidly descending sword that had an idea that he would look better without a hand, is that they usually don’t. A body came flying at him with an idea to pin him down, but he ducked and sprinted away as fast as his feet could carry him. Instinct more than thought propelled him over an overturned cart and around a corner before the knife that was waiting nearby could be thrown accurately.
He leaned against a wall for a precise three seconds, then seized a nearby protruding bit of rock and propelled himself onto the roof of the building. The guards charged around the corner, and Aladdin, catching his breath, watched in amusement as they looked around for their quarry without success. His instinct misled him to keep his eyes on them too long—one of the guards spotted him.
“Rats,” he muttered, and took off at high speed across the roof. He grabbed a stick and vaulted across the alley and onto the just slightly higher roof of the next building over...
From below, the angry of voice of Razoul, the head guard, shouted up, “You won’t get away so easy!” in a rather out of breath voice.
He shrugged, grinned, and flung himself flat. The axe spun over his head and landed with a chunk in the wood.
“You’re probably going to have to pay for this roof, Razoul,” he called easily, gripping a rope suspended to hang out laundry and sliding across it to the other side of the street.
“Well, you’re going to have to pay for that loaf of bread, street rat!” Razoul shouted. Aladdin sighed. Razoul wasn’t the best at banter. He liked Samir, of the night watch, better. At least he could keep up a decent rapport. Although, he admitted to himself, jumping off the roof and catching hold of a tree branch, Samir had come nearer to catching him than Razoul could ever have hoped to have done. Aladdin shuddered when he remembered the cold fingers gripping his ankle. He swung idly for a second or two and, letting go his grip, landed lightly on his toes and took off at high speeds.
“There he is!” shouted Razoul at the far end of the street.
“Can’t you think of anything more creative, Razoul?” he yelled, leaping over a stall and purloining a sausage in mid air.
“I’ll have your hands, street rat! You two, go down that way, you three, that way, you two, come with me!”
“Mm, better, but it lacks a certain—yipe!” He dodged the flying sword. It always amazed Aladdin that guards seemed to have an endless supply of swords and things to fling at you when you were retreating. Did they just remove them from handy citizens? Did they keep them in their ridiculous turbans? He rounded a corner and flew straight into the arms of an off duty night guard who was arguing with a fig salesman.
“Hel-lo,” he shouted. He squirmed his way out and fled down the street. A rope presented itself for climbing and was climbed just in time to send two guards approaching from opposite directions careening into each other.
He scrambled to the top, jumped through a window, and found himself in the women’s quarter of a very wealthy priest, or imam. Four wives and twenty-odd daughters looked up in startled incredulity. He touched his forehead.
“Afternoon, ladies. Excuse me.” Aladdin sprinted through the room, then on second thought turned and relieved a nearby dresser of carelessly tossed burqa, which he flung over his head. “Can I borrow this?” he asked politely through the meshes of fabric.
After the skin of the street rat had touched the fabric, the ladies would never have thought of it as worthy of them again. They made no objection, indeed made no motion at all, except to look rather astonished, so he shrugged and went out.
Adjusting it to cover him completely, he proceeded at a sedate and what he hoped was a womanly walk down the hall. He heard footsteps coming up the stairs in front of him, and he had to repress every urge to leap out that near window.
“You there! Did you see a street rat come in here?” Razoul demanded, but his tone was considerably hushed.
Aladdin shook his head gently, keeping his head down in case by some incredible guard magic he could see through the net that covered his face.
He held his breath for half a second, and felt the guard brush past...
Yes! He walked slowly down the rest of the hall, out the door, looked carefully left and right to see if there was anyone who would see him, and climbed a ladder with agility that was barely inhibited by the long folds of fabric.
When he reached the top without hearing so much as a whisper from the guards or anyone else—at least, not a whisper that had anything to do with, say, his climbing over a wall and taking off—he knew he was safe. Still, he ran over the rooftops in a zigzag, took a few alleys and byways, cut across a garden (nothing was quite ripe yet), pole vaulted over a wide street, and slid behind a wall.
“Hah!” he exclaimed. He knew he had lost them. The guards would never look for him in this part of the city.
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