Page 24 of Hot Zone

Malah made a face. “Aye, that is true enough.” The maid eyed her speculatively. “Something simple, I should think. Delicate. A piece to compliment your beauty and not overpower it.”

Tessa sighed. “Just make me as ugly as you possibly can without making Artemesia angry.”

The maid frowned, obviously judging her temporary mistress more than a little mad but too aware of her place to comment upon it.

Malah showed her to a communal bath a little while later, where Tessa briskly shampooed her hair and scrubbed off the grime of the day’s hike. Thankfully, the place was not crowded. She gathered from the bath mistress that most of the nobles had bathed earlier and were already deep into their preparations for tonight’s celebration.

The attendant, who turned out to be the gossipy sort, also hinted that tonight’s feast was rumored to be special. Apparently, Xerxes had been closeted with his kings and priests all day, and some sort of an announcement was expected.

Tessa winced. She prayed the emperor wasn’t going to launch his army against Thermopylae tonight. She needed to get out of here and well away from the Persian army before the fighting commenced. The last thing she needed was to get trapped in the middle of a war!

She put up with Malah’s fussing and fluffing and pleating and draping as patiently as she could. She’d never been a primp-happy female in the twenty-first century, and she wasn’t one now. Finally, the maid pronounced her ready for the feast. Tessa had no mirror in which to examine herself, so she would have to take Malah’s word for it.

Because the gown was sleeveless, she slipped her all-important bronze-and-quartz arm cuff into her small pouch and tied it to her belt. She reached for her dagger, but Malah gasped in alarm.

“Oh, no, m’lady! ’Tis forbidden to carry arms within the emperor’s presence! If you were discovered with that you would be put to death on the spot!”

Tessa jerked her hand away from the dagger. Yikes. The true extent of the danger a time traveler faced struck her yet again. Athena might be able to implant the language and culture of a time period, but not even the professor could cover every detail. Were it not for Malah, she would have committed a grave crime without even knowing it to be one.

After a murmured word of thanks to the servant for her help, Tessa took a deep breath and stepped out into the hallway. The feast wasn’t hard to find. She just followed the stream of gaudily clad nobles streaming toward the celebration. The bath mistress hadn’t been wrong. Wind was in the air of something big tonight, and it didn’t take psychic powers to sense the assemblage buzzing with anticipation.

Thankfully, Tessa was seated in an obscure corner of the gigantic hall, as befitted her status as a minor noble. Still, she stood out like a sore thumb, a pale blue icicle in the midst of a thousand bright butterflies.

Her table companions turned out to be two married couples and a Persian army officer of some kind. Thankfully, the officer was much more interested in ogling the male servants in the room than in looking down her dress.

She would have loved to talk tactics and strategy with her peer from ancient times but dared not go there. And anyway, he got drunk so quickly she wouldn’t have garnered much useful information from him.

Emperor Xerxes’s grand entrance was a spectacle she would never forget. Slave girls threw flower petals at his feet. Horns blared. A hundred guards lined the emperor’s path, forming an arch of scimitars with a precision that would have made a modern drill team sigh with envy. And then came two dozen kings and queens, promenading down the archway and taking their places just beyond, kneeling on cushions and bowing down until their foreheads touched the floor.

Finally, the great one himself arrived. Tessa got a good look at him before she bowed, along with everyone else in the room. He was a handsome man, actually, with dark curls, a hawk nose and intelligent eyes. He wasn’t Greek-coin beautiful, but he wore imperial power with regal ease.

As she took her seat to await the meal, Tessa pondered the difference between his power and Rustam’s. Xerxes’s was the charisma of a supremely confident political and military leader. Rustam’s energy, on the other hand, swirled around him like a living thing—of him and yet not of him—an essence he controlled but did not entirely own. Even though his power originated within him, it was larger than him, in the same way that a child could spring from its parents’ loins, and yet eventually surpass its parents.

Rustam’s personal charisma was every bit as aggressive and confident as Xerxes’s was; he just contained it more carefully. It was if he didn’t want the world at large to notice it. She’d only gotten a full grasp of it herself when he’d kissed her.

How was it that a sorcerer-slave from what she knew as modern-day Turkey could match the force of personality of one of the most powerful men in history?

As if her thoughts conjured him into existence, she suddenly caught sight of Rustam across the hall. He wore yet another skimpy towel low on his hips, held in place with an elaborately jeweled belt. Tessa knew now that the brief skirt was the garment of a slave, yet somehow he wore his with all the panache of a prince.

A veritable army of servants marched out of a half-dozen tunnels around the room, loaded down with massive platters of food. Although the slave attending her table looked at her as if she was crazy when she asked how recently the ox and lambs had been slaughtered, she wasn’t about to risk a serious case of food poisoning on spoiled meat right before her journey.

She was relieved to find out the animals had been butchered last night and roasted throughout today. Although the spices on the meat were somewhat strong for her taste, all in all, the meal was tasty. A theme of honey and fruit and savory spices like cinnamon and saffron dominated.

She only sipped at her wine, particularly after her army officer escort mentioned casually that “herbs” were mixed into it to increase its intoxicating effects. She did not need to get wasted tonight of all nights! Goblets were hoisted all over the room, emptied, and refilled steadily.

In short order, the party was on.

Music started up, wine flowed and dancing girls and boys performed. Clothes came loose, people started to pair up—or group up, as the case might be—and the tone of the feast went from PG to X-rated in no time flat.

The guests had seriously let their hair down and were well into whatever state of revelry they preferred when Xerxes stood up across the room. Someone bellowed for quiet and then a deafening fanfare of horns—more nasal and reedy than trumpets, but easily as loud—blasted the room into silence.

He announced, loudly enough for his voice to penetrate every corner of the hall, “I have consulted with my generals and my priests. The army is prepared, and the omens are ripe. Tomorrow we march on Athens!”

This announcement was greeted with a loud and protracted outburst of crazed cheering. It felt strange to Tessa to sit there, knowing the disappointments and ultimate failures that lay before this wildly enthusiastic assemblage. She was witnessing the last great moment of the Persian Empire before the beginning of its centuries-long decline. A chill chattered across her skin.

She felt his gaze upon her without even having to look up. But she did, anyway. Rustam nodded soberly at her across the heads of the screaming crowd.

He looked as if he, too, had an inkling of what lay ahead. Not surprising. He was extremely intelligent and probably knew as well as anyone that the Greeks would not go down without a desperate fight. He’d said as much earlier when they’d been up on that mountain.

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