After being led through the labyrinthine passages at the top of the stairway, O'Neill stepped past the outstretched hand of the serving girl and through the entrance to his room. He looked around at the fixtures and tried to work out whether he should be impressed with the luxury, or appalled at the antiquity of the furniture. It was all a weird mixture of both. The bed was a huge canopied monstrosity that filled half of the room. Behind a heavily draped curtain he found a bath. The tub was crudely fashioned from copper, but the taps were fashioned by a master craftsman. They were statues of…We won't look to closely at what they were statues of, that is a bit 'adult' for this report.
The servant girl had followed him into the room and stood inside the door, hovering as though there was something that she still had to do.
After a thorough inspection in which he had concluded unequivocally that the thing hidden by the curtain was a bath, O'Neill turned to look at the hovering servant girl for a moment and tried to work out why she had come into the room. Like he didn't know.
O'Neill had been acutely aware of her during the walk to the room, aware of her slender elegant appearance and the manner of her walk. She was a strange mixture of hormone inducing sensuality and demure elegance. Her construction and manner was not the sort of thing that might have been designed so that she would be ignored by Jack O'Neill, he was a marine after all, quite a senior one in fact. They have a reputation for being able to spot a woman at several kilometres, through dense bush and heavy undergrowth. He had none of those obstructions to worry about here, and plenty to feast his eyes on. He tried really hard to ignore her presence. It was not working.
He shrugged at her, turned partly away and then watched her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye. She seemed momentarily confused by his indifference. His sardonic expression managed to convey nothing to her. He could tell that by the hesitation in her body language. She was poised, alert, but still, as though unsure just which way she should go.
Well it was worth a try…She bowed her head momentarily and then made a motion to come forward.
O'Neill stepped aside, curious to see what she intended to do.
She brushed past him, barely avoiding contact with his arm on the way past and made her way directly to the bath where she began playing with the fixtures. Water spouted.
"Ah now that is an idea," said O'Neill gratefully.
"I shall wash you sir," the girl said, and made to remove O'Neill's webbing.
"OK," O'Neill said. "I think I know what that meant. Under the circumstances, I don't think I need Daniel to translate for you at all." He held a hand up and shook his head. "If it's all the same to you, I think we can dispense with that option right now."
She looked up at him with a hurt expression. "You are displeased with me," she said. Her manner changed and she became more assertive. She reached up and touched O'Neill's lips. He stared into eyes that were dark and deep and for a moment he thought he might fall into them.
Her breath in his face was fragrant. Staring into those eyes was like…
What the hell am I thinking, he asked himself.
With a shake of his head, he broke the spell and grabbed her wrist. He pushed her hand away from his face gently.
Her expression was coquettish. She stepped back slowly, leaving the temptation of her body within O'Neill's reach for a long moment, allowing time for the impulse to form in his mind.
He shook his head and then waved the pointed index finger of his left hand at her. She lowered her face from his and moved away from him. With one final glance at him, she bowed and then shuffled backward from the room.
O'Neill collapsed to the bed and stared into space for a moment while his heart slowed down. Motley Crue certainly got that part down. His heart had been kick started all right. Now if he could just calm down.
There was a woman who could tempt O'Neill with an offer like that, but she was in another room. Out of reach both metaphorically and literally.
*
Samantha Carter checked the temperature of the water by passing her hand through the stream that came pouring from the faucet. It was warm enough without being uncomfortable. She shrugged, no matter how bad she felt about their host and no matter how suspicious she was of their circumstances, a warm bath after a field march was always going to be welcome.
The water continued to splash gaily into the huge stone tub, sounding like a miniature waterfall. A mist wafted from where the water landed, and carried with it a whiff of something floral and soothing.
The serving girl had stepped out of the room as soon as she had released the water. It was probably just as well, thought Carter, there was the language problem to deal with, and she could do without a protracted bout of misinformation. Even the few hand signals and misunderstood gestures they had exchanged had been enough. At one stage the girl had thought that Carter wanted her to undress her. The entire incident had been rather embarrassing.
That at least was one job she could do without help. The webbing came free of her hips, released with a deft flick of the wrist. Guns, knives and single bunch of grenades - that were like a small punnet of destructive strawberries - found their way onto the bed. They sank almost half of their depth into the soft covers.
She sat on the bed beside them and looked around her room. It was decorated in the theme of medieval castle, all stone walls and extensive tapestries. The windows were shuttered and glassless. The flickering candles cast eldritch shadows. She could see things moving in those shadows if she invested a bit of imagination.
She climbed to her feet and walked over to the shutters. They came free from their attachments with a bit of effort and swung freely to reveal a hole in the wall, without glass.
Through the open window Carter was able to see into the courtyard below. People milled there with torches. There was a lot of them, so many that she though that something must have been going on down there, but they were silent and they moved rarely. It was vaguely creepy, the way that they were behaving. She watched them for a few seconds, tried to work out what they were doing, and failed. It seemed to be some sort of vigil.
In the flickering light of the burning torches she caught to looks on a few of the faces, they were expectant. Carter wondered what the significance might be. No answers were forthcoming.
She closed the shutter and returned her attention to the decor of her room. The only sound was the discharge of water. The bath was something to look forward to, and she intended enjoying it. No amount of peasant massing was going to distract her from it any longer than strictly necessary. She began preparations. The boots were going to be a protracted exercise in lace loosening. Carter flopped bonelessly onto the bed for a moment before starting on those. Motivation was lacking.
She took a few moments to savour being horizontal, after spending such a long part of the day, vertical and perambulatory, before she began to worry about the water level.
Her boots were no closer to coming off her feet either.
Ah, the trials that we content with, she sighed and pushed her self back upright. If she strained her neck a bit, she could peek over the lip of the bath and then be able to check on the water level. It still had a way to go before it overtopped the rim. That was good, she wanted as much water in there as she could get. She intended submerging her self in it and luxuriating in sensuality that only a warm bath-full of scented oils offered.
The mist was still wafting out from the rim to suggest that the water was still coming out warm.
Yes!
With the bath preparation still under control, she bent to the task of untangling her laces. They had accumulated a nest of thorns and tangled twigs. She brushed them aside. The boots loosened from feet that had grown about ten sizes during the days so that their swelling was limited by the seams of the boots.
She was not looking forward to the state of her feet when she uncovered them.
The boots came off reluctantly and its removal revealed an aromatic pair of socks. Her nose wrinkled in distaste before she pulled them off quickly. They followed the boosts on a ballistic path to the other side of the room. Her nose judged the trajectory to be still way too short.
She spent a moment to examine her feet; they were a glowing shade of pink, with little red patches where she could feel them trying to attract her attention via the expedient of clamouring nerves. The cheek of them, she chided.
She climbed to her feet and padded barefoot to the rim of the tub. The water level was almost high enough to satisfy her urge to submerge.
The mechanism of the water faucet had looked simple enough when the serving girl had operated it. Carter experimented with it and confirmed her judgement. She let a little more water in to the bath, and then smiled, nodded and shut it off.
The floral smell was richer now that the tub was full. It was a siren song.
The fatigues came off easily, for which she was grateful. She threw them onto the bed, where they were the only things not to sink half way into the covers.
Her underwear followed and she stepped up to the bath wearing, we presume, just a pair of diamond ear studs and a smear of road grime. We should take the time at this stage to preserve our PG rating and look somewhere else. We probably should have cut away to another room at this stage but there is a pivotal plot scene coming and we should make the effort to be here when it happens. So we will focus on something other than the curves and flesh that houses the delightful Samantha Carter.
We could launch into a description of the giant tapestry that covered the far wall while we wait for Carter to pad lightly across the stone floor and lower herself into the bath while we are looking away.
Carter is wearing only a couple of grams of road dust and a similar quantity of gold and molecular carbon, and that is not exactly the outfit she would have chosen to wear if she were greeting the lady of the house. So she was rather put out that it should be so. Her first clue to her un-scheduled audience was the sudden draught that tickled her bare back. Carter froze in position, one foot in the tub and the other on the floor. Her hands went everywhere, and failed dismally to hide anything, from the interloper's gaze. We missed it all, obviously because we were watching the newcomer throughout her entrance, so that we could savour the intense concentration she was expending on her examination of Carter.
"I have caught you at a bad time," the lady of the house said. Her voice came from behind Carter. There was only a mock apology in the sound of her voice. It was one of those voices - throaty and full of mocking. It would laugh and purr and do bad things to the male psyche. It did nothing for Carter's equilibrium either.
"I'm sorry I don't speak your language," Carter said slowly. She half turned to face the other woman; half hid her self at the same time.
The woman who hovered in the doorframe was dark of hair and pale of face. Her hair hung in a raven cascade of silk down her back. She wore a tight dress of blood red, which seemed to have arranged itself several centimetres too close to the floor for it to be worn the way that the designer intended it to be worn. It was strapless, and seemed to defy gravity, barely. The hemline trailed onto the floor. The scarlet of the dress was all the more vibrant beside the alabaster of her skin. The woman was pale almost to the point of albino.
Carter had only one theory about why the dress didn't fall down. It related to a pair of portions of the woman's anatomy that had developed beyond the needs of their function. And even those were holding the dress up in a precarious fashion.
"One so fair should dress to advantage," the interloper said. In her hand she held something made from cloth. She held it up for Carter's inspection. It might have been a dress, if you could call it a dress when it happened to be only a little bit more modest than a film of dirty water. Carter had another look at it. On second thoughts it was no more modest than a film of dirty water, it had about the opacity and fabric density of a net lace curtain.
"I thought you might like to dress for dinner," the lady of the house said.
Carter nodded, understanding the woman's offer without understanding a word that the woman said. Now that the awkward first moment had passed with the embarrassment being entirely one sided, Carter resigned herself to the attention. Carter realised that the woman was not going to become apologetic about interrupting her bath, so Carter decided that the best thing to do was to brazen her way through the indelicate situation. She dropped her hands from their feeble attempts to cover herself (we will look away at this point) and then she slipped into the tub as unobtrusively as she was able.
She felt much better once she was able to hide herself beneath a coating of bubbles. Given that she had spent a lot of time in barracks as an Airforce pilot, her modesty regarding her person was a testimony to the state of her mind. The attention that the woman paid her was disconcerting. And Carter had dealt with that kind of attention a few times in the past, but never from such a blatant come-on.
The Countess blinked momentarily and then said, "Why would you do that to yourself? It must have been quite painful." Her head cocked to one side and a smile grew on her face at glacial pace. "It is an interesting accessory though," She added in a wistful tone.
What?!!
Let's have an action replay.
Squiggle, squiggle, squiggle.
The Countess blinked momentarily and then said, "Why would you do that to yourself? It must have been quite painful." Her head cocked to one side and a smile grew on her face at glacial pace. "It is an interesting accessory though," She added in a wistful tone.
Yep, it was the same the second time.
That sort of comment leads to all sorts of speculation…
No, no, no! We should not waste a moment wondering what the Countess meant by that comment.
It's had not to do so, though…
OK, OK. We have to try; we can't help it. Consider the evidence. OK, we can't see anything beneath Carter's neck, but we can speculate. In developing that line of speculation, we would no doubt remember that Carter was an officer in the USAF and when she was young and drunk… well, it's amazing what new things they have on their person when they come back from their recreational leave. The first idea that comes into the head has to be a suspicion that Carter had one of those pieces of jewellery fitted to her anatomy in such a place that showing it to you would involve losing our PG-13 rating and being saddled with at least an R-certificate.
Surely not…
We're never going to find out while we retain a PG rating though.
AaAARGHH!
Things are happening; we should get back to the action.
Even beneath the cover of the bubbles, Samantha Carter found that she was able to relax. She wore a puzzled expression because the Countess was still in the room, and showed little inclination to leave. Nothing about this castle retreat left Carter with any confidence. She was still convinced that there were Goa'uld around here somewhere, the only question was where. She had a vague feeling that she was sharing her room with one at that moment.
And, of course, that was what the SG-1 team had been sent through the gate to determine. How had this world accumulated terrestrial ecology? As a general rule there was only one answer to that question, but so far there had really been none of the usual trappings to be seen anywhere.
Perhaps she was misjudging the situation?
Carter watched the Countess wander across her room. She lowered the dress to the bed and then stepped back toward the door. Before leaving, The Countess cast one glance at Carter. It seemed to be more calculating than questioning, as though she were trying to decide how best to prepare Carter for dinner or something...
The Countess left Carter to her ablutions, shaking her head as she closed the door behind her.
"Thank you for that," Carter said, keeping her voice as neutral as she thought she could while talking to the closed door. After a while she gave up wondering about their hosts. It was only then that she relaxed and set about cleaning her legs, and letting the water lap against her chin. It felt wonderful.
*
Daniel Jackson marched along the corridor, led by the Count who made little economical gestures at the fittings and furnishings as they passed. For Jackson the impromptu tour was an occasion of professional interest. Archaeologically speaking the furnishings and facilities were much too modern for his taste, or even his area of major interest, but they were interesting in their own right when it came to establishing the vintage of this Goa'uld settlement (if indeed that was what it was).
This had to be a Goa'uld settlement, Jackson believed, and also one of the last Goa'uld excursions onto earth, post-dating the Egyptian and the Minoan seeded sites that they had already seen in their travels through the stargate network, by several centuries.
"I was so looking forward to your arrival," the count said suddenly, bringing Jackson back from his favourite wool-gathering activity. "We have so much to discuss."
"I think there must have been some sort of misunderstanding," Jackson said. "We, um, we only just arrived here and knew not who we should contact. We are travellers, explorers of life, if you like."
"But aren't we all," The count said, and then stopped in the middle of a hallway. He looked searchingly at Jackson, perhaps noting that the other man wore an earnest expression behind his glasses. "You jest with me sir," said the count finally, and threw back his head in laughter. "For a moment there I thought you were being honest, and now when I look more closely I can see that you play with me." He laughed once more and then continued in a much more subdued tone. "Your arrival has been expected. We have been waiting for the four of you for some time."
Jackson decided to keep his council for the moment. "You were expecting us, and we have come." He nodded, and tried to look honest and upstanding.
"We have much to discuss, and plenty of time ahead of us to do so over dinner. You should take the opportunity to freshen up."
The count gestured toward the open door of a room. "Until then I await."
*
Teal'c thought that a bath was a great idea. After a bit of experimentation he managed to work out how the faucet mechanism worked.
He was not particularly worried about how long it would take his clothes to dry. He knew that eventually they would, because he accepted the nature of experimentation. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but there are times when you need to employ cliche to fill up the gap between sentences, and this seemed like a good time to use one.
While the water gushed into the bath he took the time to examine his surroundings. There wasn't much to see.
He was alone in his room, having been shown the door and then rudely abandoned by the serving girl. When she had escorted him to the room she had been unable to get far enough away from him during their shared walk through the hallways. She had tried so desperately hard to do so that she had scraped her shoulder against the rock wall with every step. And then as soon as she had seen him into his room she had disappeared so fast she might as well have been a dot.com companies share value.
Teal'c wasn't about to take her lack of interest in him to heart. He was short of social graces. It wasn't that he lacked the intelligence to be able to work out what people expected and wanted, it was more a matter that he really didn't get out much and didn't really care.
He looked around the room one more time, very slowly.
Some one was watching him. He was sure of it.
Under circumstances like this a good sneer never went astray. He made one, as only he can, and then began a systematic search of the room. He pulled the tapestries aside and found a passageway that was obviously not intended as the main access to the room, but possibly it might have been intended for quick egress under duress. He leaned into the entry and looked both ways along the corridor. He saw no one.
He still felt like he was being watched. He fingered the mark of Apophis on his forehead and frowned.
*
The air had developed a slight chill in the short time since the sun had set.
Samantha Carter was feeling the effects of the various draughts that seemed to come from odd angles when they wafted against the damp patches of her back that she hadn't been able to dry with the thoroughly inadequate towels that had been provided. She made a note to herself to pack a towel in her pack next time they planned an extended investigation.
After a great deal of debate with herself she had finally decided to wear the dress that had been provided by their hosts. The overriding consideration in her decision making had been the absence of anything else to wear in its stead. Somehow, while she had been reclining in the tub, with her eyes shut and her ears submerged beneath the surface, some one had come into the room and taken off with her clothes. She wasn't sure which was more off putting, her hostess's interest or the surreptitious servants.
With any luck they were only going to wash her fatigues, and especially the socks. They might need throwing away.
She hoped they were only going to wash her clothes. The idea of wearing that dress for anything other than a formal orgy was not an option she really wanted to entertain.
Clothed in the inadequate towel, she picked the dress from the bed and tried to work out how it was assembled. It appeared to be a pair of straps and a series of cascading petals. She turned it a few times, tried alternate arrangements, but nothing changed it. No matter which way she held it up, it still looked like some one had taken to a curtain with a pair of pruning shears.
She had once worn a strapless evening dress, but this was more like a gown-less evening strap.
She looked at it one more time and then layed it on the bed. She thought she had it worked out now. She took the towel off and dropped it on the bed. She lifted the dress from the bed and stepped into it.
It was after she shrugged her shoulders into the straps that she thought she might appear more naked wearing it than she had been before she put it on.
*
Jack O'Neill slipped into the bath and thought that it was a pleasant way to soak away the aches and pains of that aging body. He was getting too old for this crap. A twenty kilometre route march with full pack was the sort of thing that they gave recruits to do to break them, not aging Colonels.
There was no soap, but the water was well softened. It might be OK.
He heard a soft sound from the direction of the doorway turned slowly to see what had caused it.
The servant girl had returned. He very nearly groaned. She seriously struggled to take 'no' for an answer. He was about to tell her so, when he realised that it was not the same girl who had escorted him to the room. They were alike enough to be interchangeable, although this one was clothed in a different coloured piece of curtain lace.
She just stood in the doorway and watched him. Her expression was intense, as though memorising him for a later time.
Then she disappeared behind the closed door.
O'Neill stared after the retreating girl and wondered what that had been about.
He blinked and gave it no further thought.
*
Daniel Jackson was cursing the nature of medieval towel technology, struggling to remove the water, and only succeeding in smearing it about.
A serving girl stepped through the door way and after a confused moment, Jackson found another use for the towel, one that it served much more purposefully than it had the task he attempted earlier.
The serving girl lowered her eyes subserviently, if a little slower than she had been trained to do.
"Is there any thing that the master requires?" she asked.
"Ah, no," stammered Jackson. He was more than a little flustered by her attention and by her entrance. He barely saw her, dedicating more of his precious processing time to the question of how the hell to get her out of the room without offending anyone or breaking any local taboo.
She looked up at him and smiled shyly through a curtain of waist length dark hair. "It would be my task to assist drying the master," she said.
It was a more than tempting offer. "Ah, I think I can handle that myself," he said regretfully.
"If that situation changes master, simply ask for Heidi."
She backed out of the room with her head bowed.
Jackson shook his head and stared at the closed door. It had dawned on him rather too late that she had a job to do and might be punished for not doing it. And he was left with a fleeting memory of her face, only acknowledged at the last as being considerably more elegant than normally associated with medieval societies. She had been rather taller than he would have expected also. The Goa'uld certainly looked after the physical aspects of their slaves and potential vassals.
*
The dinning room was a huge, vaulted room with arching ceilings and drapery lining each wall. Tapestries depicted bloody battles and heroic deeds in meticulous detail. Hanging from the ceiling was a giant chandelier composed of perhaps a hundred candles. The light that it cast flickered faintly. Directly beneath it and slicing the room in half was a giant oak table set for eight. A candelabra of Victorian ugliness formed the centrepiece. It carried twenty flickering candles.
O'Neill stepped into the room and looked around at the assembled guests. There was the count and a woman who hung off his arm as though she had been designed as a fashion accessory to match his cape.
The Count was still cloaked in his riot of colour, as though deliberately distancing himself from the dark and brooding structure of his face.
The woman hanging from his arm was unfamiliar to O'Neill. She was dressed in red so vivid that it might have been fashioned deliberately to resemble spilled blood. As a means of preserving cultural taboos and covering her skin from the elements, her dress was a total failure. Any sudden move on her part and they whole thing would be on the floor as fast as gravity could take it.
Secretly O'Neill hoped that would happen. Then he could check his imaginary construct against the reality, because that was the only thing that filled his mind when he looked at her, speculation about what she would look like if she were naked.
"Countess," O'Neill hazarded, attempting to mouth the Germanic pronunciation. He made a reasonable fist of it.
Her gaze was direct to the point of rude. She took a long time to answer. O'Neill was aware of the glisten of her lips. He tongue teased her upper teeth. "Welcome to our home," she purred finally. Her arms remained entwined with that of the count, but her eyes were holding O'Neill's and issuing a visible challenge.
Surely the man must have known about the flirtatious nature of his wife? O'Neill wondered. But the Count's gaze was focussed elsewhere.
Daniel Jackson had arrived, and the Count seemed more than pleased that he had done so.
"I not speak your language," O'Neill managed badly.
"That rather depends on what I want to communicate," the Countess said and batted dark eyes at O'Neill, making any translation rather superfluous.
"Oh…Kay…" said O'Neill and began looking for ways to get away without seeming too rude.
*
Teal'c pushed the tapestry hanging by the window aside and set out to confirm for himself that the draught coming from behind there came from outside the building.
He found an opening that led into a passageway. He followed that for a way and found it was descending. After several minutes feeling his way along in the dark, he had a pretty good idea that he was now under the ground and outside of the castle walls.
He nodded to himself and stopped. There didn't seem any point continuing further. Those explorations could wait until later in the night. He couldn't see the end of the hallway yet, but he was satisfied by that much exploration. He turned around and retraced his steps and re-emerged inside his own room.
It was time to go down stairs. He marched across the room to the door and then went down to meet everyone for dinner.
*
The Count poured a glass of wine for Daniel Jackson, one for himself and one for his wife. The rest of the SG-1 team might as well have been somewhere else for all the interest the Count showed in them.
His wife on the other hand seemed to be looking Jack O'Neill's way every time he chanced a glance toward her. The attention was long past disconcerting.
"My wife admires the decoration that you wear before your eyes," the Count said to Jackson against all evidence. She had not so much as glanced his way once since they had been introduced.
"It is a means to correct my eyesight," Jackson said and then took a sip from the goblet. The wine was coarse and crude, but he swallowed manfully.
"Then you have difficulty with your vision?" The count persisted.
"Yes. The lenses correct the blurring so that I can see properly."
"What a marvellous idea." The Count said heartily. "We are blessed, those of us in our clan, with a persistence of vision," the count smiled at his own pun. Jackson smiled in appreciation. "But there are others in our domain who might benefit from such a boon. You must speak with one of our artificers and educate him in the ways of preparing such a thing."
*
"I have this idea that they were expecting some one else and they have mistaken us for them," Daniel Jackson confided to O'Neill over an aperitif. The count and his wife were discussing something in quiet tones by the table.
Teal'c stood by himself and tried to look like he wasn't bored stupid. Everyone ignored him as though he were the gatecrashing leper in a medical convention.
"Do you have any idea what they were expecting?" O'Neill hissed to Jackson.
"I didn't want to ask. It might sound a touch suspicious if I were to say something like 'oh and what was it exactly that you expected us to do for you once we arrived?' It just doesn't have the right ring of confidence about it. You know what I mean. I'm still hoping that if I talk only a little and listen a lot, then I might get a clue… and you aren't listening to me at all."
Jackson looked up at O'Neill's eyes and found them staring into space. Well not space exactly, just to the opposite side of the room, and part way up the stairs.
Samantha Carter had made her appearance.
No, that's not quite correct. Samantha Carter was making an Entrance.
She had spent many minutes working up the nerve to put that dress on, and then a few more minutes working up the nerve to wear it the down stairs, and now she had taken a deep breath (straining the limits of the garment in terms of skin coverage in doing so) and done so.
The dress had the impact she had dreaded. O'Neill managed not to see the countess from that moment onward.
Jackson calmly closed Jack's gaping mouth for him, but it flopped back open again as soon as Daniel released O'Neill's chin.
Carter's bubble of confidence was burst by the reaction of Jack O'Neill. If he had been cool about it, she just might have been able to carry it off, but that open-mouthed reminder of the tension that existed between them was unfortunate.
OK, so now she knew, the dress was worse than being naked, at least then she would have understood the attention, but this was worse. She just knew that the men would be looking at the edges of each piece of the dress to see if it released her skin and showed off something that she would have preferred to keep hidden.
She stepped down the stairs, refusing to meet Jacks' eyes.
Then she saw the look on the Countess's face and decided that Jack's attention and her own desire to succumb to it, was not the worst thing she could deal with that evening.
Dinner was announced and they all took their seats.
Somehow, Carter managed to be seated beside the Countess. And she had tried so hard to avoid that too.
*
Dinner began tediously for the members of SG-1 who were unable to speak German. Jack O'Neill had noticed the attention that the Countess gave to Sam and entertained a vague jealousy, and that was more than confusing. He knew it was out of line and that one part of him was secretly pleased to be free of the woman's interest, but this was bizarre.
The Count, now that sort of attention O'Neill could have understood, but the Countess…
He shook his head.
Teal'c looked across at him and raised an eyebrow.
O'Neill waved the question away with a flick of his fingers.
And then he saw the way that the Count was acting toward Daniel Jackson and it was all O'Neill could do to avoid laughing at that moment. Something must have shown on his face, because Teal'c had once again released one of his patented puzzled expressions. He raised one eyebrow.
"I'll tell you later," O'Neill told him.
"I look forward to the enlightenment," Teal'c said.
Then there were the two women that sat opposite from the Count. O'Neill had caught a reference to sisters from the conversation between Jackson and the Count when introductions were exchanged. He had missed whose sisters they were, but he suspected they were the Countess's sisters. They had the same raven hair and the same pale complexion. Their eyes were almost impossible to explain. They appeared to be violet coloured, but every time O'Neill tried to decide, he found himself staring at them intently and being unaware of why he had taken the trouble to stare at them in first place. He found himself thinking totally unacceptable thoughts at that point and forced himself to look away.
There had been lots of private predatory smiles.
A giant of a man emerged from behind a tapestry and pushed a trolley toward the table. The aroma of grilled meat wafted from the general direction. Jack O'Neill found himself salivating in disproportion to the food on offer. He couldn't even see it yet. The cart rolled to a halt beside the table and the giant waiter, lifted the silver lid from the tray. O'Neill watched the flourishing lid from over the shoulder of Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter.
"Ah, Daniel," said O'Neill. "Could you ask out hosts a question for me?"
"Sure, what?"
"What's for dinner?"
"Hang on. My companions want to know what is for dinner?"
"It is a favourite of the house, beef in our own special sauces."
Jackson relayed the information to O'Neill. "Beef," he said.
"Daniel, I recognised the shape, it is the colour that I don't recognise."
"What do you…?" Jackson turned around and looked at the food for him self. "Ah, it's blue."
"Yep."
"Blue?"
"That what it looks like to me as well."
"Special sauces," Jackson said sickly.
"I hope so."
"It does smell pretty good…"
It tasted better than either O'Neill of Jackson would have thought.