I stabbed the creature known as Graith through the back of the head, killing him. I had used a silvered seax knife to pierce his brainstem. I don’t know why silver works against weres but it does. According to legend it may have something to do with Judas and his 30 pieces of silver, although John’s memories debunked that theory by predating the use of silver in killing weres to well before the birth and/or the death of Christ. Silver is antimicrobial and were-ism is communicated through bodily fluids like a disease… maybe it has something to do with that, maybe. I didn’t know how it worked and at that moment I didn’t care as long as it did work.

My use of a silvered knife was going to be a problem that I couldn’t explain (nor could the problem of me being able to chop off werewolf arms and legs, but I was hoping that would be covered under the general, heat of the moment-adrenaline clause). So I hid my knife back in my void space and used the sword in my left hand to hack his head off. Hack was the appropriate term; I deliberately made a mess of it to cover up my stab.

I felt sick.

I dropped the sword. And put my hands on my knees. I panted, breathing in deep lungfuls of air. The battle haze, that had come over me started to pull back. I had been single minded in my focus when battling Graith, nothing else had mattered. All of the sounds of the surrounding battle had faded away and only the battle against the monster that was in front of me had remained.

The sounds of battle had stopped. So I felt confident in letting my guard down.

Then I heard a loud panicked shout. “EMRIS!” I turned around to look at where the shout had come from, it was Mark. He was holding on to a fallen Josiah and was yelling towards me.

I hurriedly rushed over to see what had happened. Mark had a deep laceration on his arm that was bleeding profusely, but he didn’t seem to care. He was holding on to Josiah. Josiah had broken his arm. Badly. It was a compound fracture which meant he had broken both the radius and ulna; one of his bones was sticking out of his skin. He also had a big cut on his thigh and a huge knot forming on his head. Merlin was on his knees trying to put pressure on the leg wound to stop it from bleeding.

Frank was sitting on the ground holding his right arm up to his chest and was having trouble breathing, he probably had broken ribs.

I quickly ripped apart Josiah’s shirt and bound it around his thigh, well above the wound and used a broken spear shaft to twist the cloth in order to tighten it and form a tourniquet. “Hold this, firmly” I said to Mark, giving him the spear shaft. I then moved over to where Merlin was and asked him to remove his hand to see the wound clearly. It was a deep cut and it had cut open a big vein. He had lost a lot of blood. I cheated and used void particles to form an invisible tube which held the vein together temporarily buying me some time and asked merlin too keep putting pressure.

Isiah came running in; to look at what had happened. The situation was bad, Josiah was deep trouble. I took Isiah by the shoulder and walked 10 yards away. He looked at me. “Can you save him?” he asked, his face was a mask.

“Maybe, but not without revealing our secrets.” I said. “He has lost too much blood. More than likely, the only way to save him will be to give him some of your blood.” the implications of my words were clear. There was only a 5 percent chance he could survive without Isiah’s were blood, but there was only a 10 percent chance of Josiah surviving Isiahs were blood. If he did nothing his brother would have a 5% chance of survival. But if he did give him some of his blood, there was a 90% chance that he was murdering his own brother. There was also the matter of whether his brother could keep this a secret and if turning him into a were-cat would put all of us in danger. Plus there was their past relationship and Isiah’s child hood bullying at Josiah’s hands to consider.

Isiah simply nodded his head in acknowledgement. I rushed back to Josiah.

I asked Merlin to go grab a couple of people from the caravan to help us carry Josiah back. Then I checked Josiah’s pulse below the arm break as I noticed his fingers were turning purple. I couldn’t really feel anything, and I had supernaturally acute senses. The blood flow was being obstructed by the break. I grabbed a nearby spear shaft and broke it in half, and then I pretended to baton each half. I used a void edge to cut the stick lengthwise to form two long sticks. I then tore the remaining bits of Josiah’s shirt into long strips.

I asked Isiah to help. “Hold him down, firmly. This is going to hurt.”

Isiah held him down by the shoulders. I pulled hard on the broken arm straightening it out as much as I dared. Josiah twitched, his body responding to the excruciating pain despite being unconscious. I temporarily splinted up his arm as best as I could, the bone was still sticking out, but I could now feel the pulse at his wrist.

Merlin came running back with two of the more burly merchants. The five of us picked Josiah up and carried him to the wagons, I made sure to task someone with the Job of securely and stably holding Josiah’s head in place. When we reached the wagon train, we gently lowered him to the ground.

I had one of the wagons emptied, the same wagon we the mercenary troops used to stow our stuff whilst travelling, so that we needn’t carry heavy packs all day. After emptying the wagon and ripping out the covers to let the light in. We gently put him in the back of the wagon

I had the wagon moved to the edge of the stream and had any and all men go out to gather as much fire wood as possible.

Whilst they were doing that, I grabbed Mark and made him sit down. “You are injured and losing a lot of blood, if this goes on much longer Josiah is not the only one who might die.” I grabbed the only pack left in the wagon and took out a rolled up leather bundle. I had this bundle specially made for me by a craftsman in Leicester to store some of my emergency medical kit. I grabbed a curved needle out of the pack as well as some silk string and a candle and some scissors. I lit the candle with a fire striker and some char-cloth. I surreptitiously swapped out my waterskin with a waterskin filled with vodka that I had in my void space. I threaded the needle with the silk string and tied a knot around the needle. I heated up the needle in the candle flame to sterilise the needle and I placed it in a bowl filled with vodka. I used a clean rag to clean the wound with vodka. Mark flinched in pain. “Ow that burns! What is that?” He exclaimed in pain. I ignored him and quickly stitched him up. The wound was 3 inches long and an inch deep but luckily it hadn’t cut any major blood vessels, but it required over 20 stitches and would leave a very nasty scar.

The people sent out to bring firewood started to arrive as I was wrapping up Mark’s wound. It had been 15 minutes since the fight had finished and despite the tourniquet and my creative void tube Josiah had lost a lot of blood.

I asked someone to fill up a pot with water and start to boil it.

Isiah returned back with firewood and looked at me “no matter what he has done, he is my little brother”

I looked him in the eyes. He had considered everything and came to this conclusion. I nodded my head. “You will never question me about what happens this day, and you will do what I ask.”

He looked back at me and nodded.

“Good, now go grab a fresh corpse and cut out their kidneys and bladder, and make absolutely sure not to damage the tube connecting the bladder and the kidney.” Isiah looked at me wide-eyed like I was crazy, but he nodded his head and took off running. The desecration of a corpse was a huge taboo. Even medical autopsies were banned by the church.

I needed a strong flexible rubber or plastic tube, I didn’t have any. so I was making do by using a human ureter (the tube connecting the kidney to the bladder). It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I could do without modern plastic tubing. It may have seemed macabre to use a human ureter, but considering where we were the only other choice was to go hunt a deer or boar for its ureter and we simply didn’t have the time.

I may have seemed calm and bossy on the outside, but I was panicking on the inside. I had no practical medical experience, except for my eight months here in the 6th century. I was making all of this up as I went along combining bits of knowledge gleamed together from TV shows like House M.D. and scrubs. Combining that, with my basic knowledge from one semester of anatomy and whatever I could remember from A-level biology. That inadequate amount of knowledge somehow made me the best doctor/surgeon in the world. The normal surgeons of the time were the local barbers and butchers, and the medical knowledge was woefully inaccurate, stunted.

I remembered a tale that I had read for my research paper on the history of medicine, it had stuck with me because it seemed funny at the time:

“They brought to me a knight with a sore on his leg; and a woman who was feeble-minded. To the knight I applied a small poultice; and the woman I put on diet to turn her humour wet.

Then a French doctor came and said, "This man knows nothing about treating them." He then said, "Bring me a sharp axe." Then the doctor laid the leg of the knight on a block of wood and told a man to cut off the leg with the axe, upon which the marrow flowed out and the patient died on the spot.

He then examined the woman and said, "There is a devil in her head." He therefore took a razor, made a deep cross-shaped cut on her head, peeled away the skin until the bone of the skull was exposed, and rubbed it with salt. The woman also died instantly.

I asked them if I was needed any more, and when they said not I came home, having learned of their medicine what I knew not before.”

And that was from the 12th century, a full 6 centuries of “modernisation” later.

I was about to perform surgery, actually two surgeries, on a man in the middle of a field, because I could maybe save him. I was scared.

I called the rest of squad nine over. “What I am about to do is going to be extremely difficult, I am going to need my absolute concentration and I cannot be disturbed. I am going to need you, Merlin, and you, Frank; to make sure no one comes and disturbs me.” I turned to Mark and said. “We should retrieve whatever we can from the bandits, but make sure not to go near the leader’s corpse you have an open cut, his curse is passed on through blood.”

I had the water boiling by the time Isiah came back, I carefully measured out a litre of boiling water, using an empty vodka bottle and filled up a sterilized waterskin. I then added about 9g of salt (a bit less than 2 teaspoons) to the water skin making an improvised isotonic normal saline solution. I carefully took the human innards from Isiah and placed them on a clean sterilised cloth; I carefully found the ureter connecting the kidney to the bladder and managed to cut about a foot long section. I took that section and thoroughly cleaned it in water, then vodka, then sterilized water. I made sure to properly flush the insides of the ureter.

I attached the flared kidney end of the tube to the waterskin spout, binding it with string. I then tied the other end to a large diameter hypodermic needle (I also used some super glue to make sure there were no leaks). I found a vein in his non broken arm. I let the liquid flow through the needle making sure there were no large air bubbles in the tube, and then inserted the needle into the cephalic vein. I asked Isiah to find a spear and then stab the spear into the ground. I then carefully measured a height that allowed me to tie the water skin up above Josiah. I asked Isiah to carve a notch into the spear at the correct height, which he did using his claws. I tied the waterskin to the spear and let it hang, completing the improvised gravity powered intravenous saline drip.

I took a deep breath and blew it out. Now came the hard part. I cut open the wrap around the splint and carefully cut away all of the wrapping. I removed the halved dowels from the splint. I took out a Japanese kiridashi from my void space and dipped the edge into the boiling water, I didn’t have scalpels in my medical kit and this was the only knife that worked in a pen grip, I may have had some in the void but I forgot to look for them in my panic.

I was about to perform surgery on a man who wasn’t even anesthetised, he was simply knocked out, with a severe concussion, and quite probably suffering from a brain bleed. I carefully cut open the fore arm at the break site being very careful to avoid any big blood vessels. I slowly flayed open the entire break site and inspected the breaks, they were clean breaks and luckily there were no bone fragments in the surrounding tissue. I carefully inspected the breaks. they weren’t flat and clean, but they weren’t jagged or crumbly. I reattached the bones together using super glue. Yup, super glue, I knew super glue had been used to repair bones in animals and also to reduce bleeding in wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War, so I was using it to temporarily attach the bones together. In modern times an actual trained surgeon would use titanium pins and plates to hold the bones together, but I wasn’t in modern times. And it was abundantly clear I wasn’t an actual surgeon, I could tell that from my hands, which were shaking more than Gene Wilder’s in that famous scene from the movie blazing saddles. I used the super glue to lightly suture together the flayed open wound site. I then re-sterilised the stitching needle and stitched the wound shut.

I inspected the leg wound, it was deep and a vein had been cut, but there wasn’t anything else wrong. I cleaned the wound with the sterilised water and a diluted vodka solution, and then used the super glue to join the cut vein together. I let the superglue dry and then dissolved my void tube, which was holding the vein together. The vein remained sealed and there were no leaks. I waited another 10 seconds checking to see if the seal would hold and then I sealed the wound and stitched it closed.

Once I got Josiah stabilised I heaved a sigh of relief, and cleaned up. Whilst I was cleaning up in the stream Isiah came up to me. “How is he?” he asked sombrely

“I have done everything I can, his body should heal given enough time but the bump on the head… he is probably bleeding on the inside of his skull, it is unlikely he can survive the night.” I replied soberly. “When I previously straightened out his arm, he felt the pain and moved. I just flayed open his arm and caused ten times the amount of pain, he didn’t even twitch. He is deteriorating fast”.

I paused, took a moment to consider my next question and asked. “What will happen if we give him some of your blood?” I asked Isiah, were-cat things were his domain, not mine.

“His body is in the correct shape, so he will heal correctly now, if we had done it earlier, his arm would have never recovered.” He said. “It should stop the bleeding in his head and heal him up. If he survives”

“I don’t think he can survive the night. So we might as well try, at least this way he will have a chance.” I said whilst drying myself.

We walked up to the cart where Josiah lay recovering.

Mark and Merlin came up to us, they had been guarding the perimeter making sure I wasn’t disturbed during the surgery. Mark had taken over from Frank as Frank had broken ribs and needed to rest.

“How is he?” they asked.

“I have done everything I can, but he has lost a lot of blood and that wound on his head concerns me. He never woke up, even once, during all of my mending that is not a good sign.” I was preparing them and (if I am honest) me for the likely possibility of his death. Even with the were-cat blood there was a 9 in 10 chance he was going to die.

Mark nodded his head. “We will need to talk after you have finished.” He said looking at me.

I nodded my head in acknowledgement.

“We were lucky you are with us, I don’t think we would have survived against that monster.” Merlin said his body shivering at the thought of Graith.

They both started to make their way back to the camp. Isiah and I made our way to Josiah, preparing to turn Josiah into a were-cat.

I looked him in the eye. “Whatever happens, it isn’t your fault. Remember that. Without this he will be dead by tomorrow. If he dies you cannot blame it on yourself.”

Isiah nodded his head readying himself.

Isiah transformed his right hand into claws, and drew out his retractable claws. “Do it.” He said to me. I stabbed Josiah in the chest with the kiridashi, opening a cut all the way into his chest, Isiah quickly slashed his left wrist with the claws and let the blood drip into the wound and directly into the heart; Isiah’s dark ruby blood mixing directly with the scarlet heart blood.

The wound started to heal and close up almost instantaneously, leaving no Marks behind. Josiah started to wriggle around, his body clearly in discomfort. Isiah looked at me and said that he could look after him now. I nodded at him and started making my way to Mark.

I found Mark and Merlin by a pile of bodies. They had stripped the Blood Wolves down and retrieved anything of value. Things like good chainmail and swords cost money and frankly, the dead weren’t using them anymore.

Mark ushered me over to a secluded area and spoke to me. “I have no idea how you killed that monster and I don’t want to know. My mother told me you were special, she grew up in the capital before the Great War and she taught me not to be afraid of magic. But I am a soldier, and if you revealed your magical nature to me, I would be duty bound to report it. Your actions today saved our lives and your knowledge of medicine may save Josiah. So as long as you don’t tell me what you are I won’t mention anything to anyone.” I nodded my head in understanding. I didn’t try and lie to him, I didn’t want to insult the trust he had placed in me. He knew telling me that he knew I was extra-normal was a risk, but he placed his trust in me and I didn’t want to return faith with a lie.

We spent the next few hours cleaning up and stacking our loot into a spare cart. We had managed to create the spare cart by shuffling a few things around and packing things more efficiently. By the time we were finished it was night time, Isiah was staying at Josiah’s side monitoring him in case he woke up during the night.

It had been a taxing day and I decided to turn in early, I would wake up tomorrow morning to see if Josiah had survived the night.

I woke up before dawn to a commotion outside, someone was dead. I assumed Josiah, l felt sorry for Isiah. First the break up with Amelia, now this… he was my friend and this was unfair. I got up, put on my trousers and walked outside. I was expecting the commotion to be outside near the stream where Josiah’s body would be, but the commotion was nearby, only 10 yards away. I rushed over to see what had happened and I was shocked, I felt a sense of helplessness and guilt.

There was someone in the squad who was dead, but it wasn’t Josiah.

It was Frank.