Hole

In sixth year, Draco had learned the meaning of fear. He didn't like to think that it had changed him, but perhaps it had. That year he had created the first two of his eventual network of Safe Apparation Points. He had never told a single soul about them, not even his mother.

The first one had been created purely for himself. It was not far out of Hogsmeade, halfway down a stony barren slope where three boulders in a ditch created a tiny shelter. He had practiced apparating into the hollow until it became automatic, and then added wards and precautions with increasing levels of paranoia. The ward of which he was most proud was the one which deflected anyone other than himself who tried to apparate into the point, depositing the intruder half a mile away on the edge of a copse. A novice tracker would think that his quarry had fled through the trees, while even a more experienced hunter could not be sure what had happened.

It wasn't long afterwards that he had wondered what he would do if forced to apparate with his mother - possibly injured and wandless. He created the second apparation point in the disused cellar of a listed - but minor and dull - Heritage ruin. The wards were similar, except that they allowed him to carry with him any person he touched. He had stocked the the cellar with everything he thought he might need - money, spare wand (stolen from a third-year Hufflepuff), medical supplies and food. By the end of the year it also had portkeys to the manor in Epernay and the pied-a-terre in Barcelona.

His time as a Death Eater had not diminished his paranoia, and even after Potter had killed Voldemort - winning the battle but losing the war when the Death Eaters managed to retain control of the Ministry, declaring the fallen Dark Lord a martyr and his killer a terrorist - he had continued to create Safe Apparation Points. The largest, however, was still the second that he had created: the cellar.

It had been almost a year since he last checked the site. It was dusty, but all his supplies were intact. Methodically he sorted through his stores, dividing them into two piles: Go and Stay. The clothes almost all went into the Go pile, most of the food and the Hufflepuff's wand into Stay. The second wand (planned for his mother's use) he frowned over, but eventually placed into Stay - he had found it in the Room of Requirement Storage area, like most of the wands in his later SAPs. He had made most of the medical supplies himself, or filched them from the Manor supplies, so they went into Go.

The money supply hadn't been upgraded since the SAP had been created and was a paltry hundred galleons or so. He left it, but took the purse it had been in, tipping the money into a glass bowl. The shabby furnishings had also come from the Room of Requirement and could be left in situ.

With a wave of his wand he banished the Go pile to a SAP about fifty miles away. Looking around critically he realised that he had forgotten the portkeys, hanging on the wall where a desperate fugitive could seize them without delay. These he decided were better destroyed.

Draco rubbed his forehead. Was he really going to do this?

It was a foolish thought - he had already made the decision. He took out the bundle of supplies he had already bought and placed them on the table - 15th century with one 18th century leg amateurishly grafted on by a sixteen-year-old child - before unshrinking them. There was plenty more to do here, but not today. He was supposed to be on his way to the Ivory Coast, where one of the last Wizarding Kings kept a retinue which reputedly included an amazing troupe of dancers.

* * *

It was good to be away from the manor for an evening, without any hidden agenda. King Adan was most hospitable and had agreed to negotiate for the loan of his public entertainers on the morrow. Meanwhile, Draco was a guest in his home, and being very well entertained by the King's private entertainers.

The drummers were the backbone of the troupe. They started with the primal beat of the heart, then speeded up until that beat was just a little too fast, forcing the listener's heart to speed up to meet it. Soon the smaller drums began to run a parallel, faster rhythm until, without observable signal, they stopped. The dancers came running in - four males and a strongly built female wearing elaborate clay masks which must have been heavy as fuck, and about twenty younger females dressed in nothing but paint and short, short skirts of dyed feathers. The drums started again, and then were joined by an unearthly wailing pipe as the masked figures ascended to a higher plane.

The story being told was an eden myth, Draco realised. The gods were represented by the masked figures, who were lured to earth by the sensual wiles of earthly women. The young women undulated breasts, bellies and hips in a display that Draco, at least found extremely alluring. The first god swooped from his heavenly rectitude and gave the foremost young woman a rousingly dramatic fuck as the other mortals watched in envy.

It was a tragedy in the end, of course, with the female god casting curses to destroy the lascivious male gods and as many of the (extremely) satisfied females as she could find. Half a dozen survivors, large bellies draped in obviously symbolic cloth wraps, crept out from the ruins to wander across a desolate landscape.

If King Adan was watching Draco's face, Draco was sure that the price of his troupe's hire had just gone up. Especially when a pretty young dancer came over to sit upon his lap and feed him delicacies for the rest of the evening, her naked buttocks rubbing gently over his arousal. Draco waited until the King and several courtiers had shown him the correct protocol for dealing with the situation, which fortunately was much the same as it would have been at one of Lucius' men-only soirees, only with added giggling.

Draco considered that it really would be in his best interest to cultivate more friends from abroad.