Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Five

In her dream, she was a caracal in a cage, jumping at pigeons just out of reach. Over and over she launched herself skyward into the fluttering flock, only to fall back bruised to the ground. Their cooing and flapping taunted her; she felt a primeval killing rage come over her, buzzing through her from muzzle to pinned-back ears to powerful hindquarters, down to the very tips of her extended claws.

With the anger came power. She coiled herself against the cage’s floor, following the flicker of their grey wings, and waited for the moment, her muscles taut and almost too tightly wound to contain.

She jumped again. And caught one.

She could feel its terror, the momentary limpness as she stunned it and slapped it down to the ground - and then, as it came to itself, the ineffectual beating of wings against her paw.

But something was wrong.

It wasn’t a bird.

Not a bird at all, but rather one of Professor Flitwick’s winged keys, from her first year at Hogwarts. She prodded it cautiously, all her rage turned to dismay and curling dread, but it wouldn’t move.

It was broken. She’d killed it. The wings were sadly mangled, the key itself bent at an unnatural angle, so that it looked like a broken bone.

It would never fit the lock now.

She was trapped.

And then: “Come this way,” said a voice, and she looked up, startled, to see a woman with a lion’s head, holding out her hand by another door she hadn’t noticed before. “It’s the only way out now,” the woman said, smiling.

The smile looked odd and strained on the lion’s face; like a grimace, like the bloated death-mask of a drowned man. Hermione hung back, unsure.

In the distance, she heard the screaming of women. And woke up, sweating.

**

What was that Trelawney had said, once? Ah, yes: I perceive very little of the Aura about you, my dear.

Ha, Hermione thought wildly, clutching her pillow. Eat dirt, Trelawney, you batty old fraud.

And then, with a sinking cold feeling in her gut: I think I might be the Jade Priestess.

Scary, that, on a variety of levels. And Hermione wasn’t sure what unsettled her the most - the idea of being shanghaied into adopting some sort of vigilante superhero persona because of a centuries-old, Pharoanic curse, or the fact that she was once again holding the jade statue in one sweaty hand … when she distinctly remembered putting it back in its velvet bag and burying it under her flowered cotton nightie, right after Bill had left early on Saturday morning.

She dropped it abruptly, wiped her damp hand on the comforter.

Shit.

She glanced warily at the drawer. It was decorously closed. Further inspection found the velvet bag, its drawstring thrice-knotted just the way she’d left it, still tucked into the undisturbed folds of the nightgown.

Well, that left out sleepwalking. If she’d gotten it out in her sleep, she had certainly done a careful job of it, Hermione thought.

The alternative, on the other hand, didn’t bear thinking about.

**

Somehow, she got through the rest of the week without more dreams - or maybe it was just that she was too tired to remember them. Reading wasn’t the only catch-up work Hermione had to do; Areli had also arranged for her to take beginning Arabic classes at the American University, and pre-med biology and chemistry across the street from the Consortium, at Cairo University itself.

Cleo, was Hermione’s first thought upon learning this - but the caracal didn’t seem to mind being left behind; staying by herself in the sunny, roomy cat paradise of the Consortium was very different, apparently, from being barricaded into Hermione’s efficiency kitchen. It wasn’t uncommon for Hermione to leave her sleeping in the window seat and return from class to find that she hadn’t moved.

The homework wasn’t so bad, but the classes themselves were exhausting - each for different reasons. The students in her Arabic class were mostly expatriates, like the ones Bill had mentioned - rich kids, accustomed to privilege, many of them British or American. This had its advantages - no language barrier, for one thing; they were all beginners like herself. Still, though she firmly suppressed all magical tendencies from the moment she Apparated into the far stall in the women’s lavatory in the Arabic Studies building, though she dutifully dressed up for class in the fashionable, body-conscious Western clothes she’d gotten last summer from Giulia, Hermione didn’t feel she had much in common with them. Nor, for that matter, did she particularly want to rectify that; this was certainly a different world from the rest of Cairo, but it wasn’t necessarily a better one.

Plus, Bill’s horror story about Lila-the-Ex had sunk into her subconscious to stay. She didn’t need green fuzz growing on any parts of her, to top off everything else.

The pre-med classes at Cairo University were as different from the trust-fund playground across the river as chalk and cheese. It was a good thing that the African Ministry of Magic was so lax about Muggle security, Hermione reflected - back in the British Isles, she’d never have been able to use the Comprehension Charm, a nifty little translating spell which was the only thing presently getting her through the sea of Arabic in which the class was conducted.

She did wish she could use a dictoquill, but of course that was out of the question. Apart from the magic factor, however, these classes were everything she could have hoped for in college courses - the students were mostly local, of moderate means (public education in Egypt, even at the university level, was free, after all) and ruthlessly upwardly mobile, meaning that the class was quiet, orderly, and all-business. She wore her black Hogwarts robes, with the crests charmed off, and found that they provoked not the slightest interest - four out of the other six girls in her class were similarly draped from neck to ankle, and two of them also wore a higab, the traditional headscarf.

One of the higab-wearers sought Hermione out in the university cafeteria after class one day, seeking a chance to practice her conversational English - which didn’t, Hermione thought, need much practice at all; it was excellent.

Her name was Itmana, which she said meant hope in Arabic, and she proved, to Hermione’s delight, to be surprisingly outspoken over lunch.

“I’m not religious,” she confided halfway through dessert, pointing to the elaborately knotted scarf. “My father is, though. Very traditional. My mother, too, but for herself, not for me. That’s how I came to live in Cairo, with my aunt and uncle - my parents are still in the country.” She sent Hermione a narrow glance. “Do you know about circumcision?”

“Um.” Hermione frowned, puzzled at the abrupt turn of the conversation. “I think so … ceremonial removal of the foreskin, right?”

Itmana laughed.

“For boys, yes,” she said, with a flick of her eyebrows toward the table of male students nearest them. “Relatively minor, no? For girls?” She brought the side of her hand down hard on the table as if it was a guillotine blade. “They take a razor,” she said, leaning toward Hermione and lowering her voice, “and they cut out your clitoris. The whole thing.”

Hermione gasped.

“Surely, though … that’s not … um.” She foundered to a halt, feeling her cheeks burning. “It’s not … I don’t want to be rude, forgive me … but it’s not a religious thing, is it?”

“No,” Itmana said. “Not religious. Muslims do it, and the Coptic Christians do it too. It’s tradition.” She shrugged. “When you’re six or eight or ten - it varies. All the country girls have it done. You can’t get a good husband if you don’t, or so they tell you. But my mother and my aunt, they had theirs done on the same day - and” - here she leaned forward again - “the midwife had a dull blade. She had to cut three times on my mother. Took four women to hold her down.”

Hermione shuddered and pushed away her plate. Itmana tossed her head, looking secretly pleased at Hermione’s queasiness.

“Well, anyway,” she said, warming to her subject, “she put it off for me as long as she could, and then when I turned ten and my father said it had to be done, she sent me to my aunt in Cairo, who remembered, and was sympathetic.” She peeled her orange and popped the first slice into her mouth with relish. “And I still might not have escaped - I know one girl who had it done the week before her wedding, if you can believe it, because her fiancé’s parents found out she wasn’t cut and objected - if my grades hadn’t been so high. Once I passed the entrance exams and was accepted into the pre-med program, they stopped worrying so much about finding me a husband.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Hermione asked, intrigued.

“Well,” said Itmana, “marriage is all about your class, and in Egypt, class is all about money. If I get through medical school and become a doctor, I’ll no longer be a suitable wife for anyone that my family knows. Because of the money I make and my level of education, I’ll have to marry into the professional class - in which case it won’t really matter so much that I haven’t gone under the knife. That’s a very old custom, a country custom; it predates Christianity, Islam - anything, really. Old as dirt.”

“Huh,” Hermione said. “But then - if you’re not religious - why do you cover up your hair?”

Itmana looked momentarily startled. “Oh - that,” she said, returning to her original topic. “Well, that’s just for practical reasons. A woman wearing the higab is left alone in public; covering my head gives me freedom in this city that I wouldn’t otherwise have. Girls in Western dress, and girls who aren’t Egyptian, get hassled all the time - surely you’ve noticed?”

Hermione nodded feelingly. It was true; she’d ventured into the Khan al-Khalili bazaar last weekend to pick up some postcards, and despite her conservative dress - a long linen skirt and matching duster - had been compelled to cut her visit short due to a barrage of unwanted male attention. “I got three marriage proposals on Saturday,” she said ruefully, and wasn’t surprised when Itmana laughed.

“You have to know how to be invisible,” she said, her fingers straying to the knot of her headscarf. “You keep your head down, you don’t smile, you don’t look straight in their eyes. You keep your hand at your side - out stiff, like this -“ she demonstrated - “and wave them off if they so much as look cross-eyed at you. And then if they approach you, you call them every insulting name you can think of, as loudly as you possibly can.”

Hermione snorted. “Sounds like fun.”

“Of course, in your case,” Itmana said thoughtfully, scanning Hermione from curly head to loafered toes, “it might not hurt to go … undercover. Even more than you already are, that is.” She cocked her head to one side. “Want to give it a try, Saturday morning?”

Hermione looked up, startled, into a pair of dark kohl-lined eyes that were, for all their gorgeous odalisque intensity, surprisingly mischievous. She thought fleetingly of Ginny, of the occasional night spent down in Parvati and Lavender’s room, succumbing with reluctant curiosity to boy-magazines and gossip, and felt an unexpected pang of homesickness.

In all her wild imaginings about Egypt, she’d never thought to give herself a girlfriend.

It could be nice.

“Okay,” she said. “Sure - I’m game.”

**

“Going undercover” turned out to mean just that; Itmana showed up on Saturday morning at their rendezvous point next to the university medical centre, bearing two bundles of black cloth - one for Hermione, one for herself. It was a burqa, Hermione realised as she shook out her bundle in the women’s lavatory and pulled it over her head; the all-encompassing robe worn only by ultra-conservative Muslims, which covered even her head and left only her eyes visible, behind a screen of fine grey mesh.

Inside the thing, she felt sort of like Darth Vader. It was hot, too.

But once they were out on the streets, she realised Itmana was right - she might as well have been invisible. The two of them wandered all over the bazaar arm-in-arm, Egyptian-style, carrying on a low-voiced conversation practically into each others’ ears, through the cotton cloth, and inspecting the merchandise without so much as a forward finger lifted by the same men who’d practically stalked Hermione just days before. By the time she’d haggled over and purchased her postcards and souvenirs - the Comprehension Charm firmly in place, the mesh veil surreptitiously treated with a Transparency Spell - she felt almost euphoric.

Or maybe that was heatstroke.

She said good-bye to Itmana shortly before lunchtime - if she didn’t get back, Cleo would have the place torn apart - ducked into a public toilet, and Apparated back to her apartment. As she dropped her bags on the sofa, she noticed that the answering-machine was blinking.

She had a message! Cool.

It was from Bill:

Hope you’re not working too hard. Have procured a nice Pouilly-Fuissé which is feeling stoppered up and is yearning to breathe free. Dinner tonight?

A pause. Unless you call to beg off, I’m coming over. I’ll eat anything.

Apparently, she hadn’t scared him off permanently.

Cool, Hermione thought, and went off to the dining-room table to write her postcards.

She had a lot to report.

**