Chapter 15: Superglue Is Miraculous

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 6^th 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.