Jewel of the Nile

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The plane ride was ominously uneventful – Khaled had boarded the plane, directed one fulminating look in their direction, and promptly disappeared into the cockpit, where Hermione could hear him haranguing the pilot in tense, clipped Arabic.

"My, he’s cranky," she remarked, sotto voce. Itmana laughed, then winced.

"I’d give anything to know who was on the phone just now," she said, her gaze flickering to the guards sitting in front of them. "My best guess is that it’s my father. From the sound of things, the family knows he’s found us – otherwise, he’d have come alone, and left us back in the desert with his goons." She frowned. "But how would they have found out? That’s so odd."

"Lucky break for us," Hermione averred, though secretly she was thinking – hallelujah-Satchmo, Bill came through. "What would have happened, if he hadn’t been called back?"

Itmana grimaced. "Nothing good, that’s for sure. My parents are going to go into fits when they see us like this – Khaled would never have hit me in the face, if he’d been planning to take me straight back home."

"No?"

"No." Itmana’s fingers drifted up to the crusted-over gash at her temple. "I mean, I’m going to be in unbelievable trouble for running away, don’t get me wrong. But when they see this …" She trailed off. "My mother gives lip service to Islam, but I think she’s a secret agnostic – she already thinks the religion thing is turning Khaled into a savage and a fanatic. This’ll just confirm it for her. Mixed blessing, really – means I’ll get more sympathy than I deserve." She raised one eyebrow at Hermione. "From what he’s done to you, I can only imagine. Does it look really bad?"

"Like you’ve been backed over with a donkey cart," Hermione assured her. "But, Itmana—"

"Yes?"

"If he wasn’t going to take us back to the palace," Hermione began, "then what …?"

At Itmana’s dark look, she paused.

"He likes to torture things," Itmana said. "I’ve seen him kick dogs. Step on goldfish." She shuddered.

"Believe me," she said after a long pause. She was looking out the window, wouldn’t meet Hermione’s eyes. "There were times last night when I thought we should have taken our chances in the desert, after all. You have no idea how lucky we are."

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

**

The plane had barely been in the air an hour, however, when it began to circle and dip. Hermione, who had been dozing, thought nothing of it, but Itmana looked perplexed.

"This can’t be Amman," she said, peering out the window. "We haven’t been in the air nearly long enough."

"Where, then?" Hermione rubbed sleep from her eyes and leaned over to have a go at the window herself. They were still too high up to be able to see much. "Doesn’t look much like Cairo, does it?"

"It’s not Cairo," Itmana said, frowning intently as the clouds shifted and the plane dipped lower toward the city. "It’s … it’s Alexandria. And that means …" She turned to face Hermione, dark eyes glowing out of her battered face. "Oh, Hermione. It wasn’t my father on the phone, after all."

"No?" Hermione lifted one eyebrow. "Who, then?"

"Uncle Farouk," Itmana whispered, as if the name itself were some cherished relic … and sank back into her seat in what looked like low-level shock. "I can’t believe it," she said. "We’re really, truly safe."

**

In the twenty-five minutes it took the pilot to land the plane, Hermione heard a great deal more about Itmana’s great-uncle Farouk than she’d realised there was to know. On one level, he was apparently rather retiring – he lived in the palace, but stayed to himself, seemingly content to read his philosophy books and tinker in his private laboratory. On the other hand, Itmana confided, he loved children, and always had pocketsful of sweets and small clever toys on hand, should a young visitor choose to seek him out.

"He’s a genuine mystic," she told Hermione. "A Sufi. I mean, I don’t really buy all the religious propaganda, but my uncle’s the Real Thing, there’s no mistaking it. He can levitate. Stop bleeding. I once brought him a stuffed animal with one arm ripped clear off, and he mended it with his bare hands, made it look like new just by touching it."

She frowned. "He’s powerful, too. Politically speaking, I mean. The King never does anything important without consulting him first; he’s our family’s holy man, but not like Khaled and his friends. My uncle’s good."

"Think that’s why Khaled looked so panicked?" Hermione murmured, and Itmana rolled her eyes.

"You don’t know the half of it. He’s probably up there in the cockpit, soiling himself."

Hermione laughed, but her brain was peeling out into Instant Overdrive.

Levitation? Healing powers?

Could be a coincidence, she supposed; on the other hand – if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck …

Hold on a minute. Don’t get excited, Granger.

"How are you so sure it’s him?" she asked Itmana. "If he lives in the palace in Amman, that is. What does he have to do with Alexandria?"

"The family owns a vacation house here," Itmana explained. "It’s really old. From the 1800s sometime, I think. Alexandria used to be a popular resort town for expatriates, up until Sadat came to power in the ‘50s." Her fingers had crept back up to her discoloured cheek, gently pressing around the edges of the bruise; Hermione doubted that she knew she was doing it. "Now, lots of people come here from Cairo on holiday, but hardly anyone else. Uncle Farouk is the only one who uses the house at all. Told Father that he likes the quiet."

Made sense. "Oh."

They landed ten minutes later on another private airstrip, after a swoop out over glittering deep-blue water that Hermione assumed was the Mediterrenean coast – apparently, Alexandria was too close to Cairo to rate its own airport – and were met by a long grey sedan with tinted windows, slightly old-fashioned in design but impeccably polished; Hermione had no doubt that her father, a longtime aficionado of vintage cars, would have fallen to his knees in front of it. A uniformed driver stood by the rear passenger’s door, his handsome face impassive as he opened the door for her, then shut it gently again once Itmana had slid in beside her. Hermione watched, darkly amused, as Khaled reached for the door handle a moment later, only to be politely-but-firmly thwarted in his purpose by the stone-faced chauffeur.

"Looks like he’s going to have to find his own ride to town," she murmured to Itmana. "Pity I left my guidebook at home. I could have given him the number for a cab company."

Itmana snickered.

**

They drove through rural countryside, past half a mile of ramshackle housing that denoted Alexandria’s itinerant working class, and into a downtown that, while considerably smaller, looked a lot like Cairo’s – dusty, crowded, thick with the moldering architectural remains of more prosperous times. The traffic wasn’t quite as horrific, however – or maybe it was just that she was so groggy, Hermione thought; behind the ghost-grey windows, shielded from sun and noise and carried smoothly along on what was clearly a superior suspension system, she was perilously close to nodding off. By the time they finally turned into a neighborhood of slightly-faded, once-grand European-styled villas, she was yawning openly.

The house which was their destination was better-kept than its neighbours, with a wide circular drive, riotous flowerbeds framed by gently waving pampas grass, and a shady, tree-lined veranda. Hermione could see a lone figure on the back terrace as they pulled in, a slight plainly-dressed man with a long grey beard. At the sound of the car, he slipped into the house – this, surely, was Itmana’s reclusive uncle, thought Hermione, and wondered if she would see him at all, during their visit.

They were met at the front doors by kind-faced women in robes and headscarves – maids? housekeepers? Hermione didn’t know, and didn’t care – who clucked over their injuries and swept them gently along through spare, elegant rooms and into the bath, a miniaturised version of the hammam that adjoined the house. Hermione, too tired to do much more than just stand still, didn’t protest when they stripped off her filthy robes and the grimy blue jeans and Oxford button-down she’d worn underneath, and began to soap down her naked body. Just one more thing to make Harry’s and Ron’s tongues hit the floor, if they ever found out about it – but to her eternal relief, it was quick and impersonal and utterly, utterly relaxing, so that when she’d been wrapped in thick white towels and shepherded through more bare quiet rooms into a warm sunlit place where there was a bed, she was barely horizontal before she felt herself falling.

Just once, she clutched at her chest, and felt the warm damp weight of jade. The Priestess was still there.

Everything else could bloody well wait.

**

When she woke up, the sun had moved, throwing the room into deep shadow. Clean robes had been laid out … luxurious Egyptian cotton, in a restful cool shade of green that made Hermione think of mint leaves, and her own underwear, freshly laundered. Curious, better-rested than she’d thought possible under the circumstances, and suddenly, brutally hungry, she shrugged into the clothes and headed for the door.

When she heard voices, she went toward them … and before she reached the door, saw Itmana, coming from the opposite direction. "Hi," she said, and Itmana grinned at her.

"Hi."

"How long have you been awake?"

"Not long. I was just looking for you." She jerked her head toward the sound of the voices in the next room. "They’re in there together – my uncle and Khaled. Uncle Farouk’s called my parents; they’re already on a plane by now, I’d guess." She shrugged nervously. "Hope it’s okay. Looks like he’s going to be in more trouble than I am."

"I bet they’ll just be really glad to see you," Hermione said, not having any idea whether it was true or not but feeling that comfort was in order. "And glad that you’re all right. Are you going to come back to Cairo, do you think, to finish school?"

Another shrug. "Depends," Itmana said. Another nervous shrug. "On how it goes. I may sort of be under house arrest for awhile."

"Would you mind?"

"In a way. In a way, it’d be nice to be at home." She gestured to the quiet, spare elegance around her. "Not much of this in a rented room in Giza – now, is there?"

She had a point there.

They slipped a little closer to the door. Peering around the doorframe, Hermione could see that the room was a library, softly lit and thickly carpeted and floor-to-ceiling absolutely-jam-packed with heavy, leather-bound volumes.

Be still my beating heart. God, do I ever hope that he really is a wizard.

Farouk was seated in a Moroccan-leather chair on the far side of the room, and though all through Itmana’s rapturous descriptions of him Hermione had been thinking of Albus Dumbledore, there really wasn’t that much of a resemblance. This man was shorter, for one thing, and slighter of build. Sterner, not as merry – though perhaps that was just the circumstances; Khaled – half-chastened, half-defiant – was pacing back and forth in front of him, handsome face turned away but snarling, hand raised in a vehement explanatory gesture. When Farouk checked his outburst with a few murmured words, he subsided, but angrily, like an attack dog yanked back by an unforgiving training collar.

But those were just the superficial differences. This man seemed less … well, less definite than Dumbledore, less solid and immediate. Even in his obvious anger, his eyes seemed faraway – maybe he wasn’t a wizard at all, Hermione thought, but just a religious mystic, gifted with some latent magical talent that had gone untrained by traditional methods.

But then he spoke, a sharp word in Arabic that had Khaled biting his lip in suppressed pique and dropping reluctantly to his knees in front of the chair. Hermione leaned forward in the doorway, eyes fixed on the older man’s face. His hand lay across Khaled’s wavy dark hair in what was almost a caress. "Can you see anything?" Itmana hissed, and Hermione absently shook her head no. Nothing to see, yet.

But then …

"Paeniteo," Farouk said softly – so softly, in fact, that Hermione didn’t hear it so much as catch the shape of the word in the air as it passed. A streak of gold, almost invisible to the naked eye; a crackle of energy in the air … and the tall young man kneeling on the floor began, audibly, to weep.

Paeniteo. Hermione had read that word, somewhere … where had it been?

Ah, yes. History of Magic; they’d been studying not the Great War, but the one before. Grindelwald’s War. The Forces of Light had used Paeniteo in their war-crime tribunals, Hermione remembered, and shuddered … whether at the thought of the spell’s effects, or at the sound of the sobbing man in the next room, she didn’t know.

The Curse of Contrition, Binns had called it – and dull as he’d been, Hermione still remembered what he’d said about it.

It’s a conscience-charm, he’d said, wheezing a bit as he drifted through the clouds of chalk-dust at the front of the classroom. Instant empathy. It visits upon the transgressor the suffering of the victim, without ameliorating any of his guilt.

Definitely, definitely a wizard, Hermione thought – dreamy eyes or no – and frowned as the old man in the chair extended his hand once more to caress the bowed black head in front of him.

Uncle Farouk, she decided, would certainly bear some watching.

**