A HIGH WHITE MOON cast its light on the city below as brightly as the sun was said to shine in northern countries. White mud-brick buildings gleamed like pebbles from a faraway beach. The golden onion domes of the capital glittered like a dream against the pale dunes and the dark, starry void.
The heat of the day had long since retreated into the desert, and the city, which had drowsed through the hot afternoon, was finally coming alive. The streets filled with people drinking tea and gossiping, laughing, and visiting friends. Old men played chatrang on boards set up outside cafés; children stayed up long past their bedtimes playing their own games on the sidewalks. Men and women bought rose-flavored ices and trinkets from nighttime vendors. Life was noisy and exuberant in moonlit Agrabah.
Well, not everywhere in Agrabah.
In another part of town, the streets were silent as shadow and black as death. It was not safe for any of the gaily dressed people to be there. Even the locals tended to stay indoors or stick to the unseen alleyways and secret passages that riddled the area out of view from the streets. Here the white walls of the buildings were faded and pitted, mud peeling away from their brick underlayers in great swaths. Half-built timber structures were the only evidence of an ancient sultan’s dream to improve the district, to widen the roads, to bring in water. After he was poisoned, the whole project was dropped. Now the skeletal remains of his grand plan whistled in the desert wind like corpses hanging from gibbets.
This was the Quarter of the Street Rats.
This was where thieves, beggars, murderers, and the poorest of the poor lived. The children no one wanted, the adults no one would hire for any kind of honest work, all of them made their homes there. The orphaned, the unlucky, the sick, and the discarded. It was a whole other Agrabah.
Among the huts and hovels, the falling-down public buildings, and the decaying houses of worship was one tiny home that was slightly better kept up than the others. Its mud walls looked like they had been whitewashed at least once in the past decade. A broken urn outside the door contained a clutch of desert blooms, kept alive by someone’s regular application of precious water. A proper rug, albeit in tatters, lay in front for visitors to leave their sandals on—in the unlikely event they owned a pair.
Through a keyhole-shaped window, passersby could hear the soft sounds of a woman humming. If they peeked through the wooden screen, they would see her: a kind-eyed woman who wore her rags with the grace of a queen. Her clothes were clean, as was the pair of pants she was carefully mending in the spotted shaft of moonlight that came through the window.
A loud knocking sounded on her door. Three strikes, and very powerful. No one in the Street Rat district knocked like that. Always it was furtive, and often in code.
The lady looked surprised but carefully set down her work and adjusted her headscarf before approaching the door.
“Who is it?” she called, fingers on the handle.
“It’s me, Mom,” said a voice.
The woman smiled with pleasure and unhooked the latch.
“But, Aladdin,” she admonished laughingly, opening the door, “you know better than to—”
She stopped when she realized four people were standing in the doorway.
One was her son, Aladdin. He was scrawny, like all the children of Street Rats. Barefoot, with dark skin and thick raven-black hair like his father’s, which was covered in the dust of the street. He held himself as his mother had taught him: head high, chest up. Street Rat in name only.
His friends—if she could use that word—stood a little to the side, giggling and looking ready to bolt. If there was trouble, of course Morgiana and Duban would be involved. Aladdin’s mother clenched her teeth at their sly eyes and obvious zeal to get away.
Behind Aladdin stood a tall, skinny man in a long blue robe and matching turban. Akram, the dried-fruit and nut seller. He had her son’s shoulder in a bony grip that threatened to tighten if the boy so much as thought about escaping.
“Your son,” Akram said politely but angrily, “and his…compatriots. Once again they were at the market, stealing. Empty your pockets, Street Rat.”
Aladdin shrugged endearingly. As he did, he pulled the insides of his pockets out, revealing dried figs and dates. He was not so careless as to let them fall to the floor, however.
“Aladdin!” his mother said sharply. “You wicked boy! I’m so sorry, good sir. Tomorrow Aladdin will run errands for you all day. Whatever you want. He will fetch you water.”
Aladdin started to protest, but a look from his mother silenced him. Duban and Morgiana laughed at him.
“And you two should, as well,” she added.
“You’re not my mother,” Morgiana said insolently. “You can’t tell me what to do. No one can.”
“It’s unfortunate you don’t have a mother like this poor woman,” Akram said sternly. “You will wind up with your head on a spike before you’re sixteen, girl.”
Morgiana stuck out her tongue at him.
“Come on,” Duban said, a little nervous. “Let’s get out of here.”
The two scampered off into the night. Aladdin looked after them dolefully, abandoned by his friends to punishments they all deserved.
“You would do well to avoid their company, I think,” Akram said thoughtfully. “But all three of you are lucky it was I who caught you, and not another. There are some vendors who would demand your hand in payment for the fruit you stole.”
“Here, let me wrap up your goods to take back with you,” Aladdin’s mother said, taking the fruit from her son and looking around for a suitable cloth to hold it.
“That’s all right,” Akram said uncomfortably. His eyes darted around the tiny, dark hovel. “I have already packed up for the day. And a hardworking woman who is so…alone shouldn’t be punished for the sins of another. Consider it a gift.”
Aladdin’s mother’s eyes flashed.
“I do not need your charity. My husband will return any day now,” she said. “Cassim will have made his fortune and will take us to a place more fitting for his family. I’m just ashamed of what he has to come back to in the meantime.”
“Of course, of course,” Akram said soothingly. “I…eagerly await seeing him again. He loved my cashews.”
Aladdin’s mother basked in the glow of someone else’s memory of her husband, as secondhand as it was.
Aladdin slumped. Akram’s hand returned to his shoulder, but instead of the hard pinch of an angry captor, it gave the nervous pat of someone who felt sorry for the boy.
This only made Aladdin feel worse.
“Here now, is everything all right?”
A market guard, one of the younger ones, strode out of the night. He held a cudgel in his hand and had a serious look in his eye. “I heard there was a disturbance at your tent, Akram.”
“It is nothing, Rasoul,” the merchant said, just as soothingly as he had talked to Aladdin’s mother. “A misunderstanding. It is all sorted now. Thank you for your concern.”
The guard, whose only sin seemed to be indulging in a little too much pastry, did not press the matter as other guards might have. He saw the quietly determined woman, the dejected-looking Aladdin, the poverty of the house.
“All right, then. Akram, I will walk you back to your tent. This is not a safe place for respectable people like yourself to be at night.”