“Well, it’s worth looking at,” Aladdin said. He was pressing a hand to the door handle when three guards turned the corner and approached them.
“Any luck?” Aladdin asked, turning to them.
“Unfortunately, no.” The tallest guard shook his head. “I wish we had some information—any information—to share. But so far no one has seen a hint of this man at all. We were just coming to our final place to check, this rug shop, before we came back to the palace to update you.”
“Thank you for trying,” Aladdin said.
“Everyone in the kingdom is searching. Zaid, the lantern shop owner—he lent out all his lanterns to everyone. People are scouring every bit of forest, the lagoons, the dock, and the pier as well. We’ll keep looking until we find it. After we check the rug shop, we will double back to make certain we didn’t miss anything.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and double back now? Jasmine and I can check out the rug shop. Thank you again for your help with all of this.”
“Yes, sir.” The guard saluted Aladdin, and the trio turned and hurried back toward the town square.
Aladdin watched them leave and then looked doubtfully at the shop in front of them.
“It’s possible,” Jasmine said. “Perhaps the magic carpet wanted to meet some of its compatriots, or maybe the man has the carpet stowed away here to throw us off his trail. What better way to hide than in plain sight?”
Stepping inside the shop, Jasmine and Aladdin were confronted by a dizzying array of rugs of all shapes, colors, and sizes. Some hung from hooks in the ceiling, others lay ten to a pile across the shop floor, and more were rolled up in cubbies on the far wall. Aladdin walked over to one hanging carpet. It had the same colors and pattern as his friend, but Aladdin didn’t need to touch it to know it was not his magic carpet. You couldn’t taste or touch or smell the magic that the carpet exuded, but you knew when you were around it that you were in the presence of something beyond what anyone had ever seen. The carpets in this shop were lovely, but they were not magical. None of them was his friend.
“What is that man doing with the carpet?” Aladdin shook his head. “What if he’s hurting it? What if the carpet won’t even be able to fly at all once we get to it?”
“Well, as long as we can find it, we can always leave some other way.”
“How?”
“By boat.”
“Oh,” Aladdin mumbled. “Well…”
“I know. A boat is not the way I would want to go back to Agrabah, either. It will certainly take longer, and there’s no way around the fact that it will come out that I went missing. But let’s not worry about worst-case scenarios just yet. Let’s focus on finding the carpet. We have other ways if we need them.”
Aladdin said nothing. He couldn’t tell her the truth. What would he say? That the boats she found comfort in couldn’t take them anywhere beyond the horizon of Ababwa? What would become of them upon a boat like that?
“I still can’t figure out where that man disappeared to,” Jasmine said. “He must live outside the kingdom. It’s the only reasonable explanation.”
“There is some undeveloped land,” Aladdin said slowly. He remembered seeing it when they had first flown into the kingdom. “It’s past the docks toward the rockier cliffs that border the kingdom. He could be there.”
“He did smell as though he lived directly by the ocean,” Jasmine said. “He must have grabbed the magic carpet and headed out to the less populated parts of Ababwa, where he knew people wouldn’t think to check.”
Aladdin remembered the coastline he’d seen when they had flown over. “But it’s miles long,” he said. “Where would we even begin?” He had to find the thief on his own without Genie’s help—he had to. And yet, he thought of the jagged cliff-laden shoreline and wondered how he could possibly do it alone; they had deployed the entire town to help them find the magic carpet and were no closer than when they began their search.
“The cartography shop!” Jasmine exclaimed. “It’s right there.” She pointed across the street. The light was still on inside. “That’s where we should have started from the very beginning. Let’s check the local maps. That way we can at least get the lay of the land out there, what sort of places someone might hide away. It could help us narrow down the places that this man might be.”
Aladdin hoped Jasmine was right and that Ahmed had some sort of map in his shop that could help them. It was worth a try. Anything was worth it if it could lead them to the carpet. If this didn’t work, Aladdin knew he would be out of options. He’d have to call for Genie and use the lamp.
SALEEM HAD been keeping a secret for a long time. It was a secret he’d kept so long he sometimes wondered if it was merely a story he’d told himself. And yet, he thought of his mother—her silvery blue eyes and her hands worn from laboring in the fields, tending to their vegetable gardens, and milking the goats—and his father, small in stature and rough in demeanor, who said such qualities were simply how one survived in what they did for a living. And Saleem would remember again how real his past was. It wasn’t his family he wished to hide; he loved his family. What they did for a living was the true source of Saleem’s shame.
His family spoke to bulls. Some would hear this and take it metaphorically, thinking what one meant was simply that they were so well equipped at their work of raising, training, and caring for bulls that it was as though they could speak to them. But in fact, his family had a gift of speaking in the particular animal language of the bull. His family could calm their rage. Convince them to give the neighboring farm’s cow a calf. Because they understood their language, they respected these giant creatures, and though the family could have made far more money if they’d trained and sold bulls for bullfighting, as was the custom of most bull breeders, the family knew a life in a bullring was not what any bull desired. The money would have been nice, his father often said, but he couldn’t live with the knowledge that they’d played a hand in the inevitable fate of a bull’s grisly death. So they lived on their acre of land and helped neighboring farms with breeding, calming, and selling bulls to distant pastures. Though it never amounted to much, a simple existence was all the family had ever known. They got by somehow, and they were content enough with their circumstances.
Except Musa Saleem.
Of course, back then, he had not been Musa Saleem. He was Musa Bullknower, the surname as undignified a name as one could have. He loathed the manure and the stench that never left his skin even after scrubbing under scalding water in the tub. He hated the heat of the oppressive outdoors and the sheer difficulties of their circumstances. His parents were grateful for their plot of land, handed down from generation to generation, but the square patch owned him more than the other way around—a lifetime prison sentence he could not commute. When he read the books the kind local bookshop owner lent him from time to time, Musa dreamed of the characters in those tales and longed for a life beyond the one that was his destiny.
And then one day, he stopped dreaming and began planning.
Step one was to look the part he wanted to play. After years of saving and secreting away money, Musa had enough to pay the local tailor to make him a splendid outfit. “An outfit fit for a king,” the tailor declared after he’d finished. Indeed, the navy outfit that Musa ran his hand over was the finest material he’d ever touched in his life.
The next step was to purchase a book—his first one—from the surprised bookshop owner. The book was entitled Manners and Mannerisms of Proper Society. He read the book cover to cover in secret until he had memorized all its contents, and then he burned it.
The final step was the most difficult: his departure. There was nothing for him in these farmlands. He had to travel to the heart of the kingdom, where the rural landscape melted away into the city proper. What would happen then, Musa didn’t know, but staying where he was wasn’t an option. And so, the next evening, as his parents looked on with tears in their eyes, Musa waved goodbye and stepped onto the dirt road that eventually led to town.
A handful of coins secured him a ride with a passing caravan, and by dawn he arrived. Musa marveled at the city sights. Shops stacked upon shops, and streets full of people and carriages.
Before Musa could wonder what exactly he would do now, a golden pumpkin-shaped carriage passed by, and a pebble from a horse trotting past dislodged from the ground and flew into its spoke. The carriage halted with a sudden jerk.
Musa hurried over and poked the pebble off the spoke. It slid effortlessly to the ground.
“Thank you, good man.” A prince popped his head out of the window.
Musa flinched. He hated how people’s expressions crumpled upon looking at him closer, their noses scrunching up at the smell he could not hide. But this prince smiled at him. Then Musa remembered his fine navy clothes; he looked nothing like the bull keeper he was.
“I’m Prince Kashif. What’s your name?” the prince asked.
“I am…Saleem.” Musa thought quickly. “I am here from Sulamandra,” he improvised, using the name of a nearby kingdom he’d heard much about recently.
“Ah, that fire.” The prince nodded sympathetically. “It was as bad as they say it was?”
