by Cindy Dees
A blow landed in her gut, momentarily doubling her over as the air whooshed out of her. She took a deep breath and came up swinging, continuing to throw kicks and punches and elbows. She didn’t actually have to aim. Everywhere she struck, there was flesh and bone to meet her blows. At one point, someone got a hand over her mouth. She bit the palm until she tasted blood, and somebody yelped.
And then inspiration struck her. She yelled, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Never mind that she was in an almost entirely stone structure with nary a stick of wood to fuel a fire. If she could cause a stampede out of the feasting hall, or at least get a bunch of people to come investigate—
“Shut her up!” someone hissed. The youths surged forward in a rugby-style scrum. They outweighed her by hundreds of pounds, and new urgency fueled their attack.
From her years of tactical training, she knew that in hand-to-hand combat, superior numbers will overwhelm superior skill every time. When all eight youths rushed her in a concerted attack, she was done. Time to leave.
Except as she reached for her pouch, she went down beneath them. Hands grabbed roughly at her then, shredding her dress and grasping her arms and legs with intent to pin them.
Desperation coursed through her as the reality of this attack began to sink in. It was one thing to understand intellectually what might happen. It was another entirely to experience it.
Must reach the cuff. Vague awareness of her stupidity in waiting this long to bail out crossed her mind. But she didn’t have time to berate herself for her mistake just now.
She fought with all her remaining strength to reach her pouch, to press the quartz crystal that would signal Athena to get her out of here—now!
But in short order, the gang sat on her arms and legs. Still, she struggled to free her hand. Escape was so close, and yet so far away. She continued to squirm and heave, throwing off the guy who appeared to be their leader as he tried to mount her.
“Hold her still or knock her out,” the enraged young man growled.
Something hard slammed into her left temple. Bright light exploded in her head, and she saw thousands of little pinpricks of light behind her eyelids, but fought grimly to hang on. Think. There had to be something she could do. But what?
As rough hands yanked her knees up and shoved them apart, she had just enough consciousness left to form a single thought.
Rustam! Help!
Fingers pushed and groped painfully between her legs, and she vaguely heard someone comment, “Hey, she’s blond down there, too!”
She felt as if she were separating from her body, drifting up and away from the person on whom this outrage was being perpetrated. She was starting to retreat to some other place, a calm space of white light and quiet, where no weights held her down and no hands grabbed or poked at her, where she was blessedly alone.
The nightmare swirled around that other person, too awful to be real. Leering faces grinned down at that woman like lustful demons in flickering torchlight, the sweet smoke of the braziers making somebody—her, but not her—violently nauseous.
So. This is what hell looks like.
Something blunt and smooth pushed at her inner thigh, and she gave one last, futile heave. Spittle sprayed on her face as a spate of swearing erupted over her. “Hold her still, dammit!”
A powerful hand closed around her throat and squeezed, cutting off all her air. In a matter of seconds, the scene began to go gray, tunneling down to a narrow field of vision. Damn. She’d been hoping none of them knew a move like that.
She closed her eyes, happy to sink into that other, peaceful oblivion and miss entirely what came next.
And then the weight between her knees abruptly disappeared and something heavy thudded nearby. The hand around her throat loosened. Despite her resolve to pass out, instinct took over and she gulped in air frantically, choking and coughing.
Suddenly, all the weights lifted off of her. Her vision began to return, and she gaped at the sight that greeted her blurry eyes.
Rustam, magnificent in his fury, stood before a half-dozen of the young men, his teeth bared in a snarl of towering rage. He sneered, “Why don’t you try picking on someone your own size, boys?”
The word boys was pitched just right to irritate the living crap out of her assailants. Sluggishly, the realization that he was drawing their attack intentionally broke across her brain. The youths yelled and rushed him.
As Tessa struggled to sit up, Rustam went into action. She was happy to see that he fared much better eight-on-one than she had. But then, he outweighed her by a good hundred pounds of solid muscle.
Someone landed a punch on Rustam’s jaw as she dragged herself up the column to her feet. He spat out blood and kept on fighting. A few more deep breaths and she was definitely starting to feel like herself again. And then she saw something that made her blood run cold. Knives had appeared in several of the young men’s hands.
She didn’t stop to think; just registered that the youths’ backs were all turned to her and that Rustam was in trouble. She charged. Targeting a different attacker with each hand, she slammed her fists into the bases of their skulls. They both went down, probably with no idea what had hit them. She carried her momentum into a spinning roundhouse kick that caught another target squarely in the kidney. He dropped, screaming in pain.
As the youths turned in surprise to face this new threat, she shouted to Rustam, “Knife!”
He nodded grimly, wrapped the ends of his shoulder drape around both forearms and plowed into the mass of now-confused young men. Truth be told, Rustam did most of the rest of the dropping of drunk princes, but Tessa provided just enough mayhem factor to make his job easier.
A few minutes later, Rustam stood panting, a trickle of blood running down the side of his face from a cut over his left eyebrow. Arrayed around him on the floor were the unconscious heaps of all eight of her attackers.
“You all right?” he asked, looking at her across the sprawled bodies.
She nodded, too winded to answer him. And then Rustam startled her by vaulting over the bodies separating them and sweeping her into his arms all in one explosive movement. He crushed her in his powerful embrace, and she didn’t mind one bit. He smelled of musky fear and the sweat of exertion, and she’d never smelled anything better in her entire life.
To hell with being a macho army officer. She buried her face against his chest and sobbed in relief.
He held her until the worst of it subsided, and then muttered in her hair, “Better?”
She nodded and mumbled against the warm security of his body, “Thank God you came.”
It occurred to her to wonder how he’d known she needed him. Maybe he’d seen the youths follow her from the room. Or maybe Tessa and he truly had some sort of psychic link. Either way, the important thing was that he had come. In time, no less.
He leaned back to look down at her, his eyes black with banked fury. “Did they hurt you?” he asked grimly.
“They roughed me up, but you got here before they managed to rape me.”
She glanced down as someone groaned at her feet. Rustam growled, “In that case, I shall kill them quickly and painlessly.”
She looked up at him, shocked. “You can’t kill them!”
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed? It wasn’t as if she expected the Persian criminal justice system to do anything to them. Not only was she bloody well not sticking around here to press charges, she wasn’t even sure that what the youths had tried to do was illegal. If they outranked her enough, they might have been perfectly within their rights to demand sex from her.
For all she knew, she might be the one who ended up being sentenced to lashes or slavery or whatever they punished women with around here.
The problem was, if Rustam killed them, Xerxes would be forced to act. He would have to appease a whole bunch of angry combat leaders on the eve of battle. For all she knew, Xerxes would delay marching on Thermopylae to deal with eight murdered
princes.
A nightmarish scenario flashed through her head. What if the Greeks had a few more days to bring reinforcements to the pass? What if they stopped the Persians at Thermopylae? Would the Spartans get credit for crushing the Persians and rise to preeminence—shifting the development of Greece into a warlike, autocratic state instead of the scrappy but isolationist Athenian democracy it became?
No matter how justified she might feel if Rustam killed the jerks sprawled at her feet, she dared not tamper with history that way.
She just needed to get out of Xerxes’s court. To slip away with the least possible fuss and go get that hunk of the medallion. The guards, still standing with their backs stubbornly turned to the scene, had seen her and could readily identify her. They no doubt knew Rustam on sight, too.
She reasoned with frantic calm, “You’re a slave, Rustam. These guys are high-ranking nobles. You’ll be killed yourself if you kill them.”
His jaw tight, he mumbled, “Thank you for your concern. But I’d happily die, taking these whoresons down for what they tried to do to you.”
Mutely, she shook her head in denial, terrified of the consequences of such a scenario, but completely unable to explain it to him. At all costs, she must not reveal that she was a time traveler.
He snapped, “Then what do you suggest we do with them? If we leave them like this, they’ll come to in a few minutes. You and I will be arrested and crucified for laying hands on them. And with the cuts and bruises we gave them, there won’t be much question but that we assaulted them, and not the other way around. It’ll be their word against ours. And as you said, they outrank us.”
She blinked up at Rustam. Crucified? For hitting back when someone tried to rape her? Outrage simmered in her blood at the unfairness of that. So much for the romance and adventure of this time period. The stark reality of women’s and slaves’ places in this society, substantially below that of a good milk cow, slammed home.
She sighed. “Let’s just get out of here. If we’re lucky, they’ll be too embarrassed to admit that a slave and a girl beat the snot out of them, and they won’t tell anyone about it.”
To that end, she turned to flee for her room. But a familiar touch on her arm stopped her.
Rustam murmured, “A moment. There is something I can do….”
He knelt beside the nearest figure and touched the youth’s temple with two of his fingers. Rustam’s eyes closed as he concentrated intently on whatever he was about.
In turn, he knelt beside all of them, repeating the performance, putting his fingers on each youth’s temple for about fifteen seconds apiece.
Tessa looked on, perplexed. If she wasn’t mistaken, the air around Rustam and each young man shimmered faintly. If she hung around with him much longer, she was actually going to start believing in magic.
He stood up briskly after his Vulcan mind meld with the last attacker. “Let’s go.” He grabbed her hand and took off, walking even faster than usual.
“My quarters,” she muttered. “I’ve got gear. Provisions. We can leave tonight.”
He veered toward her room. As she trotted along beside him to keep up with his long strides, she huffed, “What did you do to those guys back there?”
“I, uh, planted a suggestion that they got into a brawl with each other over a game of dice.”
She screeched to a halt in the middle of the dim hallway. “You planted a—” She stared in shock. “You can do that? Who in the name of heaven are you? What are you?”
“Long story,” he muttered.
“I’ve got time.”
“Not now, you don’t.” He took off, all but running down the hall.
They reached her room, and she quickly pulled her bags out from under her bed. Rustam swept them up easily. She reached for her belt pouch—
And didn’t feel it. She groped quickly among the tattered folds of her skirt. Where was it? Alarmed, she fished at her waist urgently. Her cuff was in that pouch! Her only ticket home!
She must’ve lost it in the fight. “We have to go back there. I lost something.”
Rustam lurched. “Are you crazy? We can’t. Those idiots will have regained consciousness by now. They’ve probably staggered back into the feast and are already hitting on some other poor girl. But if they see us…let’s just say all my suggestions will have been for naught. Seeing us will make them remember everything.”
“You don’t understand,” she cried raggedly. “I have to go back! I dropped something that I absolutely, positively can’t lose!”
“What?”
“Long story.” She repeated his words wryly. “But we have to go get it.”
“We’ll die if we go searching for this thing.”
“I’ll die without it.”
His eyebrows shot up. “What is this item that holds your life in the balance?”
Damn. In her panic, she’d revealed far too much. She backpedaled hard. “It means the world to me. It’s the last thing I have of my home…after the shipwreck and all. Its sentimental value is beyond price.”
“Ahh.”
Dammit, he didn’t sound convinced. “C’mon. Let’s go. You’ll just have to do some more of that black magic of yours and make us invisible or something.”
“I don’t do black magic, and this is madness.”
“Then call me insane. But let’s go.”
Seven
Rustam frowned. He heard true panic in Tessa’s voice. Whatever she’d lost was of utmost importance to her—enough to risk her life to recover it. It would be tremendously dangerous for them to approach the feasting hall again, but apparently, that was exactly what they were going to do.
He sighed. “What did you lose?”
“My belt pouch.”
“Oh. That. I picked it up when I was adjusting one of those randy pups’ memories.” He pushed aside the fold of his short skirt and pulled her leather pouch off of his belt. A wave of enormous power passed through him, literally staggering him. What the—?
He hadn’t felt anything like that since the last time he was on his ship!
Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right…An image of extraordinary clarity washed over him, as if he was seeing it in person. Marching soldiers. Coming this way. With purpose. Focused on Tessa…and him. He swore under his breath.
“Ohmigod. Thank you!” Tessa cried, startling him badly, jerking him back into the present. She lunged at the pouch, clutching it close to her chest like a long lost treasure.
What manner of talisman did she carry in there that so magnified his abilities? Rustam had never felt the like from any Persian artifact.
“We’ve got to go,” he bit out, grabbing Tessa’s saddlebags and tossing them over his shoulder. “Soldiers are coming for us.”
She didn’t question his assertion nor did she need any further encouragement to grab her last bag and bolt for the door.
“Which way?” she asked as they stepped out into the dark hallway.
He’d sensed the soldiers coming from his left. The fading residue of that single moment of sharp vision didn’t tell him more. “Right,” he stated.
She fell in beside him as he took off at a ground-eating run. Please the gods, may she be as good a runner as she was a fighter.
He’d been stunned when she’d waded into the melee with his attackers and proceeded to take out several of them with well-placed blows. He’d heard of warrior cultures far to the north where the women fought as ferociously as men. After seeing Tessa in action, he fervently hoped never to find himself at war with such a people.
A voice shouted from well behind them. He couldn’t make out what the man said, but it might have been something to the effect that he and Tessa should halt. Rustam put on an extra burst of speed as she raced beside him.
“This way,” he hissed.
His unusual status as both slave and playmate of the Persian elite gave him access to every corner of the palace. He used that knowledge now to duck into a narrow servants’ hall, wi
nding his way through a rabbit warren of passages that led to the palace laundry and sewage disposal area. He suspected the guards behind them wouldn’t be nearly so familiar as he with this portion of the complex.
“Good grief, what’s that smell?” Tessa panted.
The stench was overwhelming. Apparently, the winds tonight were blowing back up the offal shafts.
He grunted, “Chamber pots are emptied here. Breathe through your mouth.”
“Egads,” she muttered in a muffled voice.
He ducked back out into a main hallway as soon as possible, traveling at a right angle to their earlier flight. Several expensively clothed figures rounded a corner ahead of them, and he yanked Tessa into a dark shadow. Not enough space here to hide entirely, though.
He swept her into his arms, burying his face against her neck and pulling her head down to his shoulder. As the laughing nobles drew near, he ran his hands through her hair to obscure her face—and swore. Her fair hair would mark her identity more surely than the sight of her face would.
Wrapping his arms tightly around her, he did a quick one-eighty, placing his back to the colonnade and shielding her with his body. To be safe, he pulled the corner of his shoulder drape across her head.
The laughter retreated behind them.
“Hello. I’m suffocating in here.”
“Sorry.” He unwrapped her quickly. “I was afraid they would see your hair.”
“Ahh. Sorry I’m so exotic. I assumed there would be at least a few blondes in this place.”
That was an odd thing to say. He looked at her quizzically, but she added hastily, “Shouldn’t we be going?”
He shook himself. “Right.” After checking the hall, he took off running again.
He spotted a small, unmarked door a minute later. Perfect. It led to a series of chambers Artemesia used for…discreet assignations. Which was to say, when she wanted to seduce a man whose wife might object, she arranged for trysts in these little-used guest quarters. Best yet, the suites opened onto avenues passing the far side of the palace.
