Fan Fiction ❯ Al Dabaran ❯ under the desert stars ( Prologue )

Between one chapter and the other of CHIDO, I have found the time to write this. The story will revolve around Rowena Ravenclaw, how Hogwarts' founders have met and founded their school.

If I have chosen to give to Rowena a Middle Oriental origin, the reason is very simple and obvious: in the X century, Arabic culture was more advanced than European -it's thanks them if we now know Aristotle and has the algorithms- and being Ravenclaw the House devoted to the study...

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In the year of the Lord 937, Edgar the Ravenclaw and his wife Rowena, from Mercia had come to Otranto to embark for the Holy Land: but the night before their ship arrived at destination, they were overpowered by a terrible storm. When Edgar waked up, he was laying on a carpet and around him there were about a dozen of pilgrims: he was terribly thirsty, felt swollen and his skin burnt. A man, a Muslim, approached him and handed him a water bottle speaking an unknown language; then came an other, and this man talked to him in his language. He told him how the caravan has found the shipwreckeds and what was left of the ship, many had died: the head caravan had decided to do a standstill, stay there and take care of the survivors. The man was named Omar Khayyam and was a physician of Damascus. Taken by desperation, Edgar asked about his wife: Omar told him that she could be in the other tent, with the children and the other women, and he took him there. In the tent there was ten women and about a dozen of crying children, but none of them was Rowena; then the physician took the pilgrim in an other tent, far from the camp: it was the dead ones' tent. After have looked many corpses, hoping to not find his spouse, with his great sorrow and desperation Edgar recognized Rowena: the skin of her face, once white like snow, had a bluish hue; and her face and body, once envied by women younger than she, was swollen. The pilgrim fell on his knees and embracing the corps, mourned. Few days after a priest came from Damascus to celebrate a quick funeral; then, when the survivors had recovered strengths, the caravan left again toward the big city. Omar asked Edgar if he liked to be his guest, since after such misfortune he needed a calm and pacific place where take care of his heart's wounds: it was so that Edgar met the Khayyam.

The Khayyam was a very ancient family; some said that they had even come about thousand and five hundred years before from the Kingdom of Saba and for many generations had had the assignment to guard Alexandria's Library: they were valued very wise people and everybody, men and women, devoted to culture. Omar wasn't the only physician; his father and two of his brothers practice this profession; moreover one his sister was a midwife. An other brother was concerned with technique and an other was architect in Aleppo; an other brother and a sister were taken up with astronomy and math. All of them liked literature and philosophy: a strange background for an illiterate man and that in Latin hardly knew the prayers. One thing that nobody knew about them was that it was a wizards' family. The whole family lived in a glen out Damascus: the amenity of the place, the heartiness and the cares of the hosts, and the worriless existence were a miraculous ointment for the poor man's soul.

Among the members of the family, there was one that seemed to give a better benefit to the Christian: Mirimah the midwife. She was a remote and sweet woman, but firm and proud at same time and embodied the Middle East women's beauty: her olive skin was smooth like a peach and scented with jasmine; her brown hair -almost black- fell on her shoulders in braids entwined with gold; and her eyes, dark like onyx and always made up, saw in the depth of men's heart. Mirimah always dressed of blue. Skilled in her job, there were no mother or newborn that dies in her hands, was it even the most difficult birth that the midwife has seen in her life. Mirimah took the assignment to teach her language to Edgar, achievement not easy since often she was called: Edgar was anxious to learn; and when he had learned enough, two years after Rowena's funerals, he asked for her hand. They got married after his return from Jerusalem and at proper time, a baby girl born: in memory of his late wife, Edgar named his daughter Rowena; and since the newborn had smiled few hours after the birth for the first time, Mirimah named her Khurrem, the Laughing.

Rowena grew with her cousins, between the games under the palms and the grandfather's lessons under the stars. When she turned six, three of her mother's brothers brought her to Alexandria, teaching her few months after the Apparation and Disapparation spells: since then, for seven long years, Rowena traveled with her uncles. She saw Byzantium's domes inhabited by angels and the Atlas's peaks; mysterious India's temples on whose walls dancers and warriors of stone chased each other and Catai's refined gardens and pagoda roofs: and of every place, she learns the language and the culture, growing in knowledge more than anyone else. For her thirteenth birthday, Rowena had two gifts: a horse, chosen by herself at the market, and a hawk. Since then, even if she was a girl of marriageable age, Rowena spent whole days riding in the desert and camping out, alone, under the stars: it was in one of these nights that she had her first vision, the first hint of what the Fate had in store for her.

A trip by sea and earth.

When she went back home, the following morning, her father announced her that soon they would have left for Mercia: after fifteen years, it was time for Edgar the Ravenclaw to go back home. Their luggage was ready in few days, and before they leave, the grandfather gave Rowena a trunk with seven locks.

" This is your dowry, Khurrem, in this trunk I have put everything a man could require from his bride: precious cloths, jewels, rare spices and perfumed ointments. But there is also everything to increase your knowledge: the instruments to observe moon and stars, parchments and papyruses, but above all a copy for every book of my library. You will need them when the stars will show your path."