by Liz Braswell
The genie widened his eyes, all the good-natured humor extinguished from them, as if he understood what a terrible, terrible mistake this was. He looked away, embarrassed by what he was about to do, and pointed a finger at Jafar.
A billow of blue smoke and tiny lightning bolts erupted from its tip. Hellish red fire climbed over his limbs and entered Jafar’s eyes. Now the man was no longer in the white robes of state, but in robes so black it was more like looking into the void than seeing an actual color. His turban was strange and angular. His cobra staff slithered as if alive and then froze into a sharp ebon-tipped thing.
“And now, abject humiliation,” the sorcerer said, pointing his staff at Jasmine and her father.
She found herself thrown down to the floor, onto her knees, prostrate before him. Her father protested the humiliation and his nakedness in incoherent, blubbering gasps.
“And finally,” Jafar said casually, stroking his staff, “my last wish.”
Jasmine found herself magically lifted up. It was not a nice feeling at all. She was set on her feet, and her hands were arranged in a pious manner.
“For the princess Jasmine to fall desperately in love with me.”
Everyone in the room was shocked into silence. Even the genie.
Jasmine heard strange noises coming from the back of her throat, like she was about to throw up.
“No!” her father shouted angrily.
Jafar sneered and waited.
Jasmine waited.
She mentally assessed herself. Did she feel different? How did she feel about Jafar?
The urge to vomit returned.
Jafar’s look of smugness began to slowly fade into confusion.
The genie coughed quietly.
“As I was saying before Mr. High and Mighty Sorcerer of the Entire World interrupted me—you know, limitless powers don’t excuse you from manners, Your Worshipfulness—there are a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos. To your three wishes.”
He hung in the air, his blue smoke calmly waving back and forth.
Jafar didn’t say anything, but Jasmine saw the edge of his mouth begin to twitch in anger.
“Here are the basic laws of magic, students. Listen up. Rule number one: I can’t kill anyone. Rule number two: I can’t make anyone fall in love with anybody else.” He looked pointedly at Jafar, then gave Jasmine a kind wink. “And rule number three—which I suspect is not going to apply to you; you don’t seem like the ‘I made a terrible mistake, let’s bring him back from the dead’ type—I can’t bring people back from the dead.”
The sultan looked relieved. He stood next to his daughter and squeezed her arm.
It was a big relief. There was no worse fate—she could currently think of—than being a love-slave zombie to that hideous shell of a man.
But they weren’t safe yet. Jafar was not someone who reacted well to disappointments.
Jafar worked his jaw, trying to control himself.
“What is the use of a genie who has limitations?” he growled.
“Hey now…” the genie said, getting offended.
“I’ll show you what real power looks like! Hold them, Genie!”
Jafar threw his cape aside and strode forward. Jasmine found she suddenly had golden shackles around her wrists, drawing her hands together. So did her father. The genie swooped in behind them, and she found herself compelled to march, trailing behind Jafar.
The genie leaned forward to whisper to them.
“Sorry. You guys seem like a nice couple.”
“The sultan is my father,” Jasmine snapped.
“Oh. Whoops. My bad. It’s not so unusual, you know—old kings, young girls. That whole May-December thing. Not totally my fault.”
“At least I won’t be married to anyone against my will now. Not even Jafar,” Jasmine said grimly.
“Yeah, how about we not give Mr. Revengey-pants here ideas?” the genie suggested archly. “There’s a substantial legal and magical difference between forcing to love and forcing to marry.”
He had a point. Jasmine kept her mouth shut.
Jafar continued to the royal balcony. As the strange procession passed through the halls, things changed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to the sorcerer’s tastes. Flowers disappeared or wilted; decorative paintings turned black and jagged. Even the stones they walked on became dark and shiny, like polished onyx.
Jafar threw open the curtain to the Public Balcony and glided onto it. He beckoned and the genie shooed Jasmine and her father out there as well. They made a strange quartet, the mostly naked sultan, the blue genie, Jasmine in her shackles, and the crackling-with-power Jafar.
People were running to the square below them from all quarters of the city like ants to a dropped piece of melon. How had Jafar summoned them? The sky swirled madly with the promise of a coming storm, and lightning arced overhead. Not the sort of weather anyone would willingly venture out into…
Jafar smiled, his one gold tooth glimmering in the strange light. He raised his staff, waiting patiently for what looked like everyone in Agrabah to assemble and quiet down.
“People of Agrabah,” he said. Although he wasn’t shouting, his words echoed off every building. “At long last, the suffering you have endured at the hands of the old sultan is over.”
Jasmine couldn’t help sneaking a look at her father to see how he reacted to this accusation. He seemed mildly surprised. And just two days earlier, she might have reacted the same way. But since then she had seen starving children dressed in rags. She had seen organizations of thieves that only existed because there was no other way to make a living. She had spent the day with a boy who had only ever eaten what he had stolen.
“With the support of the palace guards, an incredibly powerful genie, and Princess Jasmine…I, Jafar, am the new sultan of Agrabah!”
If he was expecting a cheer, with his arms uplifted, he was disappointed. His eyes flicked left and right. But rather than panicking, he continued speaking.
“I will be a sultan of the people. Attentive to their—to your—every need.”
There were a few murmurs from the crowd below.
“We’ve heard that before,” someone shouted back, hands around his mouth to make his voice carry.
“Yes!” shouted someone else. “Remember the wedding? The new sultana promised us decades of prosperity!”
Jasmine felt her breath catch. Her mother had said that?
“You doubt my word?” Jafar asked thoughtfully.
Jasmine didn’t like the tone of his voice. The sudden receiving of absolute magical power didn’t seem to do anything to stabilize the sorcerer or quell his violent tendencies. He raised his arms again, brandishing his cobra-headed staff.
Jasmine and her father drew back.
“Let me, in my first act as sultan, prove my good faith!”
He cast an eye back at the genie. The genie, still looking a little shocked by the turn of events, distractedly wiggled his fingers.
The clouds cracked apart with lightning. It began to rain.
A…golden rain.
Small golden coins fell out of the sky and tinkled on rooftops and cobblestones.
There was a gasp from the crowd. Then people were diving for the money, holding their hands in the air to catch the coins, grinning. Jasmine turned her face away, repulsed by the show of greed.
When the initial rush was over, they finally began to cheer.
“Long live Jafar!”
Jafar visibly relaxed, finally getting something that he really wanted out of the day.
After a moment, he turned to the three standing behind him. He put a hand on the old sultan’s chest.
“There, you see?” he said with a sneer. “That is real power.”
And then he pushed the sultan over the balcony.
DEEP UNDER THE DESERT, Aladdin was digging.
Digging. Removing rocks. Pushing slippery piles of scree and sand aside. Digging again.
He had been doing it fo
r two days.
A lesser man might have given up.
He was so thirsty his tongue was swollen and he couldn’t swallow. He was so hungry he could barely even sit up; most of his scrabbling was done while lying down. He was so tired that the difference between asleep and awake was becoming hard to distinguish.
The blackness around him was absolute except for the occasional red flicker of lava from far below. Time had ceased to have any meaning. Aladdin slept very little, afraid that if he did, he would never wake up.
But he didn’t give up hope. The same endless expectation of good things that had kept his mother struggling until she died was in his blood, as well.
He wasn’t so deep under the sands, right? And whether it was dormant or alive and moving, the giant stone tiger still kept its basic structure, right? So he was probably still in the “throat,” which was close to the “mouth,” which led to the surface. And the thing was so torn up and destroyed that there were probably holes all over its granite skin.…
Right?
Aladdin also had two more things besides endless optimism that most other people didn’t have.
One was a tiny monkey.
He wasn’t really that much help. But Abu kept Aladdin sane and gave him a reason to push on.
The other thing he had was a magic carpet, who—which?—was useful. It neatly carried piles of stones out of the way and occasionally even lent a tassel to working out a stuck rock. Aladdin curled up on the carpet when he rested, and he could have sworn the thing rocked him a little.
He also had his thoughts to keep his mind busy while he worked. Sometimes they turned to the crazy, evil old man and his attempt at murder. But Aladdin wasn’t one driven by revenge; he had seen that emotion use up and destroy others in the Quarter of the Street Rats. He just couldn’t figure out why, once the old man had the stupid trinket he wanted, he had felt it necessary to kill Aladdin. He had what he wanted and Aladdin couldn’t care less what happened to him and his dumb lamp. It wasn’t like he was going to try to take it from him. There was something else in play there, a mystery he would solve as soon as he was out of the cave.
But mostly Aladdin thought about Princess Jasmine. If he had never met her, he wouldn’t have been thrown into prison by the royal guards, he wouldn’t have fallen in with the crazy, evil old man, and he wouldn’t be there now, trying to dig himself out of a black, suffocating pit in the middle of the desert.
And still he wouldn’t have changed a thing.
He thought about her eyes when she was looking into his. He thought about her eyes when she had seen the beggar children. He had witnessed the single moment she began to comprehend the world he lived in. He replayed the graceful skill with which she handled her tiny silver dagger. He thought about her descending from the sky at the end of her pole vault like a warrior angel.
Thinking about all that made him forget that his fingers were rubbed raw and the inside of his mouth felt like the sand he dug through.
On the end of the second day—or maybe it was the middle of the third; it was hard to tell—Aladdin began to hallucinate.
He imagined there was a tiny monkey with him that wore a tiny vest just like him. He imagined there was a magic carpet helping him and waving its tassels around like a worried mother hen.
Aladdin decided to keep his eyes forward and continue digging. Things that weren’t real would just distract him.
Some undetermined amount of time after that he began to hallucinate that there was light coming in from somewhere. Yellow light. Clean light.
A few minutes of pushing rocks aside and scraping away sand revealed that this, at least, was not a hallucination. A tiny pinhole, no larger than an ant tunnel, was filtering in sunlight that the cave greedily sucked in.
“I see the sun!” Aladdin croaked excitedly to his friends, forgetting for a moment that they weren’t real. “I see it!”
He scrabbled faster, pulling away loose stones and trying not to get so overexcited that he caused an avalanche. If he imagined that the carpet and monkey helped him, so much the better.
After tearing off several more fingernails in desperation, Aladdin finally managed to force open a hole large enough to fit his head and shoulders into. When the stones refused to budge any farther, he croaked in frustration. He would not be stuck in the cave until he died. That wasn’t going to happen.
With a final push that used all of his remaining strength, he shot through and into the daylight.
He lay there for a moment, blinking into the blindingly blue-white sky.
Then Aladdin laughed like a madman under the deadly desert sun. Its heat on his face felt alive. Far more natural than the searing flames of the lava. At least if he were to die, it would be outside, looking up at the heavens.
But he wasn’t going to die.…
Tumbling into the sunshine next to him were Abu and the magic carpet.
How could he ever have doubted their existence?
“Guys!” he cried happily, gathering them both into his arms. “You’re real! We’re all real! And alive! C’mon—let’s go home!”
The carpet spread itself out and Aladdin rolled on, barely able to keep his head from spinning. “Agrabah. Take me to Agrabah.”
The carpet rose into the air and headed east.
Although exhaustion threatened to claim him, Aladdin kept his eyes open and forced himself to acknowledge the appearance of Agrabah on the horizon. The walls were too decrepit, the scene too dusty to be imagined. This wasn’t a dream.
They covered the distance through the desert air far faster than he and the evil old man had on foot and hoof. Soothing wind lapped at Aladdin’s face, and golden sand skimmed just below them like water. He wished he was feeling better and up to enjoying it. He bet that with a little nudging he could get the carpet to take some of the curves faster and the dives harder. It was like riding an eagle.…
The carpet stopped in front of the camel watering station perhaps a little harder than it needed to, causing Aladdin—with a bit of a flourish—to tumble into one of the troughs with a splash.
“What are you trying to tell me, Carpet?” Aladdin said with a grin, glorious water trickling down his neck. Abu was already guzzling it down, but Aladdin waited until he got out and made his way to the well itself. He pulled up the bucket and ignored the ladle, pouring the sweet liquid directly down his throat.
It was only after he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand that he suddenly noticed they were still alone. He looked around suspiciously. There were no caravans arriving and watering their camels after the long, dusty road through the desert. There were no caravans leaving after filling up their water skins and letting their camels prepare for the journey. There were no vendors selling pastries to hungry and weary travelers. There were no hawkers trying to get the newly arrived to stay at their inn, or to pitch their tents at their property. There were no children offering to carry things or guide people through the city for a tip.
“Huh,” Aladdin said slowly. “All right…let’s go grab a bite to eat. But, subtle-like.” He twirled his finger and the magic carpet neatly rolled itself up. It flew over and positioned itself comfortably on Aladdin’s left shoulder. Abu hopped up onto his right. They set off as casually as they could down the empty road.
As the three kept going deeper into the city, the streets remained silent. The desert wind blew mournfully through abandoned stalls, houses, and squares. Far off there was the sound of something that he couldn’t quite make out. Like the distant whisper of a hot breeze before a storm. Other than that, nothing.
Agrabah wasn’t usually a quiet city. There was always someone shouting: a merchant selling his wares, a rag collector begging for people’s refuse, mothers yelling at children, men screaming at each other. Very rarely was it in anger; that was just the way the people in his land communicated.
Aladdin scratched the back of his head. In his experience, creepy things that didn’t make much sense usually added up to something b
ad. Like that day years ago when all of the doves and sparrows in the city flew up into the air at once. It had been an amazing sight—and then there had been an earthquake right after.
He resisted the urge to whistle, to fill the air with some sort of sound.
He jumped when a lone cat meowed from the top of a wall.
It wasn’t until he was practically in the city center that he began to see signs of human life. People—stragglers, it seemed like—were running. Toward the main square. Toward the palace.
“Hey, friend,” Aladdin said, grabbing one man by the shoulder. A little harder than a friend might. “Where’s the fire?”
The man looked at him with confused black eyes. “Have you not heard? There’s going to be a great parade for the new sultan! Let me go, I don’t want to miss it.”
“New sultan?” Aladdin asked, surprised. “What happened?”
“The old one is gone! Long live Jafar!” the man called out, and pumped his hand in the air in a strange, almost military salute. He broke out of Aladdin’s grip and went scampering down the road to the palace.
“Gone?” Aladdin repeated in wonder. Just a week ago he wouldn’t really have cared one way or the other what happened to the sultan—or maybe he would have cheered a little for the regime change. Things couldn’t have gotten much worse under someone new.
But then he had met Princess Jasmine.
The sultan might have been a bad joke at best, but he was still her father. She never had anyone else.
And, not irrelevantly, there was the little question of what happened to Jasmine now that her father was no longer the sultan.
Aladdin began to run in the same direction as the man. There would be answers to at least some of his questions at the parade, or at least more people to ask.
Worry for Jasmine and curiosity did not deter him, of course, from zipping through a couple of hastily abandoned stalls and helping himself to a quick kabob, a square of flatbread, and a half dozen apricots. It had been at least three days since he had eaten and it wasn’t just riding the carpet that was making him lightheaded.
