Page 29 of Hot Zone

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….”

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