The Chronicle of Young Dastan Read online

  © 2010 Disney enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney Press, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-4231-2709-3

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  G475-5664-5-10046

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter One

  “Stop, thief!”

  The boy ran faster, tightening his grip on the legs of the chicken clutched in his hands. The bird let out a squawk of protest. It was dangling upside down, a startled look in its beady black eyes.

  “Sorry, chick,” the boy told it. He skidded to a stop on the dusty hard-packed street and glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t want to drop you. Not after I went to such pains to snatch you out from under your well-fed master’s long nose.”

  The boy’s stomach rumbled as he imagined the fine meal the hen would make. Fine meals were few and far between for Dastan. Some Persian boys his age spent their time learning to ride and shoot.

  They labored long hours studying arithmetic, music, and astronomy. But Dastan knew little of such things. He had lived on his own for so long he couldn’t remember anything different. Instead of leisurely hours and learning, he spent his days just trying to survive on the gritty, crowded, dusty streets of the walled city of Nasaf, the seat of the Persian empire.

  “Someone stop that boy!” the merchant howled as he pushed his way through the crowded market. Morning shoppers jostled each other as Dastan cut a path through them, rasising dust and the scent of saffron, baking bread, and animal dung.

  A grubby, one-legged beggar was leaning against the stucco façade of a tile-maker’s shop. “Too bad,” he called out to the merchant in a hoarse, wheezy voice that sounded as dusty and dry as the desert outside the city walls. “Your thief happens to be the fastest young fellow in Nasaf, so I hear.” He winked at Dastan.

  “You flatter me, Utana,” Dastan called back to the beggar. Then he turned and dashed down a narrow, crooked street, dodging around a group of chattering women and past a farmer’s oxcart piled high with onions.

  Dastan scooped up a couple of onions that had fallen into the street, tucking them into his clothes. Then he paused, his heart pumping furiously, and glanced back again.

  The merchant let out a string of curses. Shaking his fist at Dastan, he turned and disappeared into an alley, the full legs of his brightly colored silk pants flapping behind him.

  “He can’t be giving up on you so easily, can he?” Dastan said to the chicken, which was clucking softly as it swung like a pendulum in his hand.

  Then he heard a great clattering of hooves against the hard-packed gravel. A second later, a downtrodden mule emerged onto the street, carrying the merchant on its back. A dog and several small children scattered before the creature’s hooves.

  “Now I’ve got you!” the merchant roared triumphantly, shaking his fist at Dastan as he pounded the mule’s sides with his heels.

  “A real chase. This is more like it,” Dastan murmured.

  Dastan turned and ran directly toward the nearest building, a squat textile shop with a tiled roof. The bird let out a cluck of alarm as Dastan swung both arms to gain speed.

  Dastan sprang upward, grabbing the edge of the roof with his free hand, the chicken struggling furiously in the other. He swung his legs up to one side, his bare toes digging into the tiles.

  A second later he was upright, bounding easily up the steep roof. The tiles were already hot beneath the morning sun, but Dastan’s feet were so calloused that he barely felt them burn. when he reached the roof’s peak, he balanced there a moment and peered down behind him.

  On the street below, the merchant had yanked his mule to a halt. The man’s eyes flashed with anger.

  “Get back down here and face me like a man!” the man shouted.

  “I’m not a man,” Dastan taunted, swinging the chicken at his side. “I’m nothing but a piece of street trash. At least that’s what you said when I asked for a bit of that pomegranate you were tossing to your goats yesterday.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Dastan turned and skittered down the far side of the roof. The sun-scorched rooftops of Nasaf lay before him, a vast patchwork that looked like the multicolored patterns in the elaborate silk and woolen rugs sold in many of the shops. Skipping easily across the narrow alley separating the tile roof he was on from the next one, Dastan squinted up at the sky with his sparkling eyes.

  “In proper society, it would be considered a bit late for breakfast,” he told the chicken. “But we street trash take what we can, when we can get it. Sorry, friend.”

  The chicken looked up at Dastan, cocked it’s head, and raised its wings in a gesture that looked almost like a shrug.

  Some might claim that the king’s palace was the heart of Nasaf. But to Dastan and the outcasts he surrounded himself with, a very different place was the center of their world. That place was the vast, stinking, fly-ridden garbage heap that lay just beyond the sprawling market area. Dastan and his fellow urchins spent much of their time sifting through this putrid wasteland, the easiest place to find something to eat without relying on charity or theft.

  Dastan paused at the edge of a flat rooftop overlooking the trash heap and watched several children squabble over a couple of unripe figs. The eldest couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, and Dastan idly wondered how many years had passed since he had been that age. It did not matter. on the street, age was not remembered, or minded. Turning, he scanned the other street dwellers crawling over the refuse. They looked like a swarm of roaches feasting on days-old syrupy waste.

  Most of the faces were familiar. There were few on the streets, young or old, who were unknown to the sharp-eyed Dastan. But his gaze passed over all of them, finally settling on a slim, wiry boy a few years older than he was. The boy’s dark hair stuck up at all angles from his head; he was dressed in rags with a tattered bit of hemp rope serving as a belt. At the moment, he was helping a wide-eyed little boy dig into a mound of rotting fruit.

  The chicken, who had largely given up its fight, suddenly clucked and twitched.

  “Keep quiet,” Dastan said, tucking the bird behind his back. “I want to surprise Javed.”

  Dastan whistled and the wiry boy looked up immediately, his curious brown eyes searching the rooftops. when he spotted Dastan, he grinned and waved. He said something to the little boy he had been helping and then quickly hurried over to Dastan. As always, Javed’s left arm was tucked inside his clothes. It had been badly burned in a fire that had killed his family a number of years earlier and was of little use to him now.

  “I see you’ve taken to the rooftops, little brother,” Javed called wit
h a grin as he came closer. “Does that mean you’ve managed to enrage another of our esteemed local shopkeepers with your pillaging?”

  “Something like that.” Dastan held the chicken behind him. He shifted and squirmed in an attempt to hide it as it twitched and flapped around. “Get up here and you’ll find out.”

  Despite having only one arm, Javed didn’t need any assistance in reaching Dastan up on the rooftop. Backing up a few steps, he ran straight at the building upon which Dastan was perched, and kept running—right up the wall and onto the roof! It was an impressive and handy trick but also a difficult one. Dastan had never quite been able to master it, as many times as he had tried.

  “Well?” Javed said eagerly. “what did you find?”

  “This!” with a flourish, Dastan pulled some onions out of his clothes.

  “Ah, not bad.” Javed’s expression lost none of its cheer as he took one of the onions, examined it, and then took a bite right through the skin.

  “And they’re neither rotten nor dried out. That’s a fine thing. The pickings are slim in the dump this morning.”

  “And as usual, I see you’ve given away what little you found to someone else,” Dastan said, glancing down toward the young boy, who was gnawing on a mutton bone.

  Javed shrugged. “He’s new on the streets, having lost his mother just a week ago to a brain fever,” he said quietly. “He needed it more than I.”

  To Dastan, caring too much about anyone or anything was a weakness when one lived on the streets. Javed thought differently. For this reason, it had been difficult for Dastan to trust Javed when he’d first turned up among the homeless urchins. Dastan thought he must have wanted something for his benevolence. Until then Dastan hadn’t needed friends, and even now he didn’t really want to let anyone else in. Many times he’d thought, if only Javed felt the same way, surely we would eat well.

  Still, he knew better than to chide Javed for his soft heartedness. It never did any good.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot,” Dastan said with a deliberate air of great carelessness. “I also found this.”

  He pulled the chicken from behind his back, shaking it a bit to make it squawk. Javed’s eyes widened when he saw it.

  “Can it be?” he exclaimed. “A whole chicken! why, king Sharaman himself couldn’t ask for more!”

  “Indeed.” Dastan grinned widely. “And I might even split it with you for a suitable price—say, that worthless old coin hanging around your neck?”

  Javed’s hand flew to the coin he wore on a thread. “My lucky coin? I wouldn’t trade it for all the chickens in the empire!”

  Dastan laughed. He knew very well that the battered old coin was priceless to Javed. It was the only thing he had left of his family.

  “All right, then.” Dastan turned the chicken right-side up and thrust it toward his friend. “I suppose we can share—if you are the one to dispatch this creature so that we might eat it.”

  Javed flinched.

  “Not a chance, little brother!” Javed exclaimed. “You are much more ruthless than I, even at your tender age.”

  Dastan waved the hen in his friend’s face. “Go on,” he urged with a grin. “You can do it. otherwise, I might as well let it go.”

  “Okay, I’ll pluck and prepare it,” Javed said, bursting into motion. “But you’ll need to catch me first!”

  There was a taller building adjacent to the one where they were sitting. without hesitating, Javed raced over, leaped across, and ran up the wall onto the higher rooftop.

  Dastan couldn’t resist a challenge. “You’d better find a sharp stone, because here we come!” he shouted back.

  Tightening his hold on the chicken’s scaly legs, Dastan raced toward the wall that Javed had just conquered. This time he was sure he could do it. He leaped directly at the wall without slowing. His bare feet slapped against the rough stucco. one step up, two . . .

  For a second, Dastan thought he was doing it. But then he felt his momentum slow. one foot slipped and then the other. Dastan cried out as he tumbled to the ground, falling onto the chicken.

  The alarmed bird let out a squawk and flapped its wings violently. Dastan’s grip had been loosened by the fall, and before he knew it he’d lost his hold on the hen’s legs.

  “Hey!” he said as the bird made a break for it, flapping across a narrow alley to another nearby rooftop. “Get back here, you!”

  Dastan stood and brushed himself off, glad at least that nobody had witnessed his fall. Glancing across the alley, he saw that the chicken had stopped to peck at something. It would be an easy matter to collect her, then catch up to Javed, who was surely several rooftops away by now. He stepped closer, preparing to make the easy leap across the alley.

  “Help!” a terrified voice cried out from somewhere below. Then he invoked the gods. “By the names of Zurvan and Ahura, someone please help me!”

  Dastan stepped out to the edge of the roof and peered down. A narrow alley lay directly below. It was a dead end, with houses on both sides and a high stone wall at the corner. A man with a patchy gray beard and tattered clothes was pressed up against the wall, looking terrified. Standing in front of him were a couple of nasty-looking youths.

  “Don’t go far, my tasty friend,” Dastan called to the chicken. Then he began to stealthily make his way down into the alley.

  Chapter Two

  “Titus and Darius,” Dastan muttered, as he drew nearer and could make out the thugs.

  The two boys were well known on the streets of Nasaf. They were about Javed’s age, but each of them was easily twice Javed’s size. Beefy and aggressive, Titus and Darius were no-good lazy liars who were just as likely to rob a fellow street dweller as a wealthy merchant. Dastan did his best to stay out of their way.

  Neither of the boys had noticed Dastan approaching. “Go on, old man,” said Titus, the taller, paler, and uglier of the two. “You too good to share with someone needy?”

  “Yeah, needy like us.” Darius gave the old man a shove and burbled with nasty laughter. Darius was nearly as hairy as a camel, and every hair seemed to vibrate with each guffaw. He carried his two pet vipers with him wherever he went. one of them arched its body and hissed at the old man.

  “Please,” the old man whimpered. “I am like you. A street musician, trying to get by.”

  Dastan blinked, finally recognizing the man. His name was Haxam, and he had been on the streets for as long as Dastan could remember. known throughout Nasaf as a crazy old coot, a drunk, and a teller of tall tales, he often stood in the courtyard outside the main palace gate, singing and playing his battered old lute in hopes of earning a few coins from passersby.

  Dastan wondered what the old man had done to attract the bullies’ attention. Glancing around for Javed, he thought about escaping before he was spotted. After all, Haxam wasn’t worth risking Dastan’s own neck over.

  “Please!” Haxam whimpered to the boys, his voice cracking with terror. “I mean you no ill will. . . .”

  Javed was still nowhere in sight. The chicken was wandering around on the next roof. Dastan’s stomach growled. But something within him wouldn’t allow him to ignore the old man’s pitiful cries. He fought the urge and was about to take off when Titus gave the old man a healthy smack across the face.

  “That’s it,” Dastan murmured. “You there!” he barked out. “Leave him alone!”

  The sudden outburst made all three of the figures in the alley jump in surprise. Titus whirled around and used his hand to shield his eyes from the sun while searching for Dastan.

  “Who’s there?” he yelled back threateningly.

  Darius squinted up toward the rooftop. “It’s that miserable little toad, Dastan,” he said. “The one who hangs around with the one-armed dogooder.”

  Titus laughed and gave Haxam a poke in the chest. “Sorry, old man. Ahura might still save you, but you’d better not count on this kid.”

  “So says you!” Dastan challenged. Flinging himself off the roof, he
kicked off the opposite wall of the alley, somersaulting gracefully and raising a cloud of dust as he landed in front of Titus, fists clenched. “Leave him alone, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

  Both of the thugs smirked. “All right, then,” Titus said. “Here’s how I’ll deal with you, my tiny friend.”

  He swung one meaty fist. But Dastan was quick. He ducked the punch easily, then darted forward and kicked Titus in the shin.

  Titus howled.

  Darius grabbed one of his snakes and swung it toward Dastan’s legs. Dastan leaped up quickly, avoiding a snake-whip, and the viper ended up coiled around its master’s leg.

  “Watch out. The old man’s getting away,” Darius screamed as Haxam sidled along the alley wall.

  “Let him go.” Titus rubbed his hands together, his small, dark eyes trained on Dastan. “I see better sport here. we might not eat bread this morning, but there will be plenty of dead street trash to feast upon.” The boys laughed, and Titus licked his lips at Dastan.

  Dastan glanced over and noticed that Haxam was clutching a stale crust in one gnarled hand. So that was what the boys were after. . . .

  He looked around, quickly sizing up his options. There were no windows in the nearby walls. Titus and Darius were blocking the near end of the alley with their huge bodies. That meant the only escape route was back up the way he’d come. Dastan had little doubt he could dodge the two bullies long enough to spring back up onto the roof and get away. But doing so would mean leaving Haxam to a bloody beating.

  True, that wasn’t really Dastan’s problem. And for a moment he was tempted to run. But then he heard a soft cluck from somewhere overhead and had a better idea.

  “Hungry, are you?” he said. “well, settle for an old crust of bread if you like. But there’s a far better meal walking along in front of your ugly noses right now.”

  He pointed up at the chicken, which had just strutted into view. Darius glanced up. His jaw dropped, revealing several missing teeth.

  “By Alamut!” Darius cried. “A chicken!”

  “Give me a hand up,” Titus ordered, instantly forgetting about Dastan and Haxam.