Benjamin looked doubtful. Hermione put in quickly, 'Did you mean it when you said we didn?t have much time??
'We don?t.' Benjamins voice was short. 'Rowena..' His voice trailed off. 'You?ll see when we get to her.'
His voice was tight with unhappiness. He swept his red cloak around himself and set off without looking back. Pausing only to glance and shrug at the others, Hermione followed him, Ginny and Ron behind her.
Benjamin wended his way through the rubble as if it were a familiar landscape. Hermione scrambled to catch up and walk beside him.
She was bursting with curiosity. 'What happened here?'
He looked at her incredulously. Hermione couldn?t repress a little shiver. It was bizarre to see such black eyes looking out of Harrys face. 'The war,' he said.
'Between who?' Hermione was fairly sure she knew the answer, but she wanted to hear him say it.
Skidding down a slope of tumbled rock and broken bits of stone, Benjamin shook his head. 'The Snake Lord raised an army,' he said.
'He marched against the House of Wizards and against those who were once his friends…don?t you know all this? Isn?t it like a history lesson for you?'
'Humor me,' said Hermione.
The boy shrugged. 'All right. The Snake Lord created an army of goblins, shapeshifters, and hybrid half-man creatures. The whole wizarding world was drawn into the battle. On our side, we had the giants, unicorns and the dwarves — '
'What about the dragons?' demanded Ginny, catching up to them.
Benjamin snorted. 'Dragons don?t choose sides usually. They watch.
They have funny senses of humor, dragons. But Slytherin had some kind of control over them.' He paused and glanced around him at the wreckage. 'This was Hufflepuff Castle,' he said. 'What wasn?t burned to the ground by dragonfire was destroyed in the aftermath of the curse.'
'What curse?' Hermione demanded. She couldn?t help thinking of the curse that Sirius had been accused of performing, that had had smashed apart a street and killed twelve Muggles. How much stronger this curse must have been.
'Rowena will explain that to you,' said Benjamin as they came around a corner of broken wall and out into the sunlight and open spaces.
Hermione gasped. The landscape was barely recognizable as that which surrounded the Burrow and Ottery St. Catchpole. Open field stretched before them, as far as the eye could see, the blue sky arcing overhead. Dotting the field, in clusters and lines, were hundreds, possibly thousands of wizarding tents, both large and small, and all the colors of the rainbow. It was like the scene at the Quidditch World Cup, only a hundred times more so. Magical pennants snapped overhead in the brisk winter wind: she saw the scarlet of Gryffindor, the blue of Ravenclaw, the gold of Hufflepuff.
The firefly spark of campfires glowed in between the tents, and she could see dozens of figures hurrying about, some clearly human, some clearly not.
'Blimey,' exclaimed Ron from behind her, sounding impressed.
'I?ve seen pictures of camps like these in textbooks, from the goblin rebellions. I never thought I?d see one in real life.'
On the way to the camp, they passed over the remains of what had been a moat and would one day be the Weasleys? quarry. Stone steps led down into it, and a thin layer of dirty water covered the bottom. Hermione couldn?t help staring as they crossed over it on a thin plank of wood. Somewhere down there lay incalculable treasure, not to mention the Time-Turner that would one day be Ginnys.
Close up, the camp made for an even more bizarre sight. Hermione, Ron and Ginny stuck close behind Benjamin as he wended his way through the tents, trying to ignore the odd looks they were getting.
Hermione supposed they did look bizarre — she wished she had worn something other than jeans and a jumper, but then she didn?t have any thousand-year-old wizarding robes lying around. Anyway, the denizens of the camp were none too ordinary-looking themselves.
She began to wish she hadn?t dropped Care of Magical Creatures after fifth year — there were all sorts of beasts and beast-people rushing to and fro, some which she recognized and some which she just wished she did. There were centaurs trotting purposefully and looking stern, pointy-eared, haughty women in long silky dresses who could only be elves, and a number of very short, very hairy, angry-looking creatures who sat around one of the campfires clanging brass tankards together and singing in off-key voices.
Benjamin paused, and with a muttered 'Wait here,' to Hermione and the others, ducked into a small blue tent.
Ron reached over and rubbed Hermiones arms. 'You look cold.'
'I am cold. Its freezing. And those little singing men are making me nervous.'
'Dwarves,' muttered Ron, into Hermiones ear. 'Read about them in history class. Mean little buggers but good fighters. Get them drunk, they?ll run around axing everyones legs off at the knee.'
'They?re awfully hairy,' put in Ginny, looking at the dwarves suspiciously.
'And gender does seem to be optional,' observed Ron. As if they had heard him, the dwarves glanced over and glared at the three of them out of many pairs of little red eyes. A moment later, they had gone back to singing more loudly and raucously than before.
The chimneys were dirty at Mrs. McFry's
And I'll grant they were worse down at Molly O'Clue's But the chimney sweep said, with a gleam in his eye
'I've got a great tool here for cleaning the fluuuuuues!
For I may be a tiny chimney sweep
With a tiny grimy face
