Culture Shock

A/N:

My profound thanks to RedSkyAtNight for her tireless and excellent help.

They stayed the night at the Bilsa reserve outside Quininde, where Rawa cast a spell around them to ward off mosquitoes, conga ants, jaguars, and other unwelcome guests. If she had come on her own, she would simply have slept in one of the tree platforms high in the canopy, but she had no wish to contend with the puzzle of lifting Hagrid the requisite thirty meters. So they stayed on the forest floor and dealt with the mud and the annoying fauna.

Early in the morning they were awakened by a ferocious growling roar, and Hagrid...whose condition, as expected, had improved dramatically with the drop in altitude...sat up and said, "Bloody hell! Are there dragons in these woods, then?"

"Monkeys," said Rawa.

"That's never a monkey!"

She pointed up into the trees where a band of innocuous-looking howlers was swinging through the branches above them. Hagrid was convinced that nothing so small could possibly make such a horrific sound without the aid of magic, and their departure was delayed for over an hour while Rawa and Sammy tried to convince him that these were ordinary monkeys, and talked him out of capturing one of the young ones to take back with them.

By late morning, however, Sammy was on his way back home in the truck, and she and Hagrid, after a makeshift breakfast, mounted the motorcycle and took to the sky. The journey itself was surprisingly short, and in just a few hours they were landing, with a bone-jarring thump, on the grassy lawn of an enormous castle.

They were greeted by a small army of dwarflike creatures who identified themselves as house-elves and who carried Rawa's belongings into the school. She was relieved to see that the frogs and finches had survived the journey unscathed, and pleasantly surprised when, after navigating a labyrinthine series of stairways and corridors, the elves ushered her into a small apartment. They deposited her things, bowed profusely in response to her thanks, and left.

She looked around. The apartment was a little larger than her rooms at Yachay Wasi, and consisted of a sitting room with a small kitchen off to the right, a bedroom in the back, and a bathroom. There was a pot of tea waiting on a low table in the sitting room, along with a small plate of cakes and crustless sandwiches, and she sank gratefully into an overstuffed armchair and drank the tea, wishing only a little that it was café pasado or a good hot chocolate instead. It was cool in the room...cooler than she was used to in August...and the sunlight coming in through the single window was not intense. It was already mid-afternoon here, she realized: they had been flying against the sun.

She finished the tea, and then set about unpacking her trunks and boxes. About an hour into this process, she heard a knock at the door and opened it to see a tall, elderly man with long white hair and a beard that reached his waist, dressed in a purple robe and wearing gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles.

"Professor Akapana!" he said. "Welcome! Jelly bean?"

This greeting completely mystified her, until she realized that he had thrust forward a small bag of multicolored sweets; she took one and found it unfamiliar but tasty enough.

This, then, was Albus Dumbledore, the author of the letter. She was relieved to find that she could understand him (and he her, apparently) without difficulty. They exchanged pleasantries, and then she said shyly, "I brought some things," and retrieved from a side table the cage of finches.

"They are for carrying small messages," she explained, "but only indoors," and she showed him the minute papers that could be rolled into the tiny compartments fastened about their necks.

"Interoffice memos!" he cried delightedly. "Please tell me they will leave random droppings about the castle. Filch will be beside himself."

She smiled uncertainly. "I have some other things," she said. "Seeds, and plant cuttings, and some herbs and poisons you may not have here."

"Ah, Professor Sprout will be glad of those . . . except perhaps for the poisons. I think we'll leave those to Professor Snape." This made him smile for some reason.

She gathered up the botanicals she had brought, and he led her out to the greenhouse to meet Pomona Sprout, a roly-poly woman who seemed quite pleased to receive them. Some she had heard of ("Cecropia seeds...wonderful for repelling snakes!") and others, like the hallucinogenic chakruna, she had not. But she accepted all of them with an indiscriminate enthusiasm which went a long way towards easing Rawa's awkwardness.

Thus she was feeling just a little less out of her element by the time Dumbledore asked her apologetically if she would mind finding the Potions classroom on her own, as he had some pressing business to take care of before dinner. She returned to her rooms and gathered up an assortment of bottles, along with the glass vivarium, and...armed with a little map that Dumbledore had sketched on a scrap of parchment...went to find the Potions master.

The Potions classroom was the polar opposite of the greenhouse: where one had been light and airy, the other was a dark, gloomy room located in the bowels of the castle. Its sole denizen was a tall, angular man with lank, greasy hair and a dour expression, who brightened not at all when she introduced herself. She had trouble with his name...his surname was impossible for her to pronounce without adding a vowel before it, so it came out of her mouth "Esnep," and she could see that he was neither charmed nor amused.

He was dressed in black trousers and a white shirt. The shirt had a high, stiff collar that was unbuttoned at the moment, and the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing a strange tattoo on his left arm. He had been stacking cauldrons on a long table at the back of the room.

"A gift of poisons," he said. "How very . . . significant." He accepted the arrow-poison frogs, along with an assortment of other substances...including a tiny vial of wayruru venom that had cost her very dearly indeed...with a bemused expression and without further comment.

Rawa regarded him uncertainly. He seemed annoyed at her very presence, although she was at a loss to divine why. As always when she was nervous, her English deteriorated, and her efforts to explain the reasoning behind the gifts, and the uses of the various poisons, were less than a brilliant success. The wayruru in particular defeated her, and she finally resorted to pictures, drawing on the dusty blackboard a picture of the spider with the hourglass on her belly.

"The black widow," he said.

"Yes, the one, she kills the male after they, after they . . ."

He let her flounder, a look of mordant amusement on his face.

Finally he said, "And does it have a practical use, this venom, other than the expedient elimination of undesirables?"

"Yes, you can make with very small quantities of it a, an, antídoto for the love that is ..."she groped in vain for the right word "...enfermizo."

"Well, that certainly clears that up."

Whatever had she done to antagonize this rude man?

"I will go," she said simply, and turned toward the door.

"Wait," he said.

She looked back at him.

"It's time for dinner," he said. "Just let me lock up here and I'll show you the way." He rolled his sleeves down and fastened the cuffs, buttoned his shirt collar, and took down from a hook on the back of the door a long black frock coat, which he put on, buttoning it as he walked toward the door. He locked the cabinets, and then the room itself, with a dismissive wave of a black wand.

In the corridor he looked pointedly at her feet. "Don't you own a pair of shoes?"

"I do not wear shoes."

"Never?"

"Very rarely."

"Why not?"

Maleducado, thought Rawa resentfully. "I just do not," she said. "I never have."

"But surely," he persisted, "you must have some compelling reason for such a peculiar practice."

She was tired, both from the journey and from dealing with the unfamiliar surroundings. "Surely," she mimicked him, "you must have some compelling reason for being so rude."

He seemed taken aback for an instant, then gave a little half smile. "Point taken," he said.

She looked up at him. The eyes that looked back at her were as black as night; his face was narrow, almost gaunt. Its most striking feature was a strong hooked nose, which presented itself at an unfortunate angle to someone of her short stature. He had buttoned the black frock coat almost all the way up, so that only a narrow strip of the white shirt collar was showing. He extended a long, black-sleeved arm, indicating the direction of the stairs.

And suddenly she knew.

Knew that he was the reason the Condor had dispatched her here, knew that in fact he was the reason it was the Condor, and not some other messenger, who had been sent to her. Knew that this strange, unpleasant man was going to matter very much to her.

He was looking at her very oddly. "Shall we go?"

"Yes," she said.