Double Cross (5 page)

“Very interesting,” he intoned. “The patient has a severe imbalance of his humors, which has caused the infection. It's irreversible, I'm afraid. The leg will have to come off.”

Athos's eyes snapped open in fear, though he was too weak to protest. Emil, Catherine, and the other Musketeers gasped, but Greg couldn't sit by silently.

“Hold on,” he challenged. “Imbalance of humors? That doesn't even mean anything!”

Fallon wheeled on him, annoyed. “You dare challenge me? I have a degree in medicine from the University of Paris. What do
you
have?”

“More knowledge than you, apparently,” Greg snapped. “You haven't even
asked
what happened to him! He was shot with an arrow. Chances are a piece of it broke off in his leg. That's what's causing the infection. If you cut it out, he'll get better and he can keep the leg.”

Greg's friends reacted to this prognosis with excitement, but Fallon was unswayed. “The leg comes off,” he said. “Where's the surgeon?”

“Right here,” a voice replied. The crowd parted to reveal an unimpressive young man in a bloodied smock. “If you bring him to my tent, I can get started right away.”

Before Greg could protest, the soldiers hoisted Athos up and carried him across the field. Greg and the others raced after them. The surgeon's tent was close by. It was merely a canopy set over the grass. There was nothing close to an operating table. The soldiers simply laid Athos on a tarp on the ground. Greg looked around for any sort of surgical tools, but all he saw was a tin cup holding several scissors and razors. The ground was covered with what appeared to be dead grass at first, but as Greg got closer, he realized what it was.

Hair.

“Wait,” he said to Aramis. “The surgeon is also the
barber
?”

“Of course,” Aramis replied. “All surgeons are. That's why they're called barber-surgeons.”

To Greg's horror, the barber-surgeon reached into a small bag and pulled out a rusty old saw. “Oh no,” he said. “He can't possibly be thinking about doing the amputation with
that
.”

“What else could get through the bone of the leg?” Aramis asked. “It's very thick.”

“No,” Greg said. “He can't do this. He'll
kill
Athos.”

Aramis nodded gravely. “The survival rate from amputation isn't good.” He looked to Greg with great concern. “Do you really think your solution—removing this bit of the arrow—would work?”

“Far better than amputating the leg,” Greg said.

“Could you do it?” Aramis asked.

Greg's eyes went wide. “Me? I'm not the surgeon here!”

“No,
he
is.” Aramis nodded to the barber-surgeon, who was spitting on his bone saw to clean it. “Would you prefer
he
operated on Athos?”

Greg gulped.
This is crazy,
he thought. He couldn't possibly operate on his friend. And yet there didn't seem to be any other way to save him. If the surgeon was allowed to amputate, Athos would most likely die—and if by some miracle he lived, he wouldn't be much of a warrior with only one leg. Not in a time where a peg leg was considered the height of prosthetics.

And without Athos, what would the chances be of succeeding against Condé, Milady, and Dinicoeur? Virtually nonexistent. The Musketeers would never have gotten this far without their swordsman.

Before Greg even realized he was doing it, he'd stepped to Athos's side. “Tell that butcher to keep his hands off Athos,” he said to the others.

Porthos and Aramis dutifully blocked the surgeon as Greg knelt over Athos, who appeared almost delirious from his fever. “I know you haven't trusted me lately,” Greg told his friend. “And I understand why. But you need to trust me now. Because I'm from the future, I know things these men don't. This surgery they're going to perform on you is barbaric, and it will probably kill you. If you'll give me the chance, I can save your life—and maybe even your leg.”

Athos's eyes flicked open. He looked to Greg, then to the surgeon, then back to Greg again. For a brief moment, the delirium seemed to fade, as Athos willed himself back to consciousness.

The surgeon was shoving his way past Porthos and Aramis.

“Stop!” Athos yelled, strong enough that everyone froze in their tracks. Athos found Emil and locked eyes with him, then clutched Greg's arm tightly. “My friend here will do whatever it takes to save my leg,” he said. “No one else touches me.”

And then his eyes rolled back in his head as he lost consciousness.

FIVE

T
HERE WAS NO ANESTHETIC IN 1615.

A thousand things concerned Greg about performing surgery on Athos, but that was probably the worst. All in all, the operation was going to be rather simple. Greg only needed to locate the bit of arrowhead, tweeze it out, and clean the wound. A doctor in a hospital in the twenty-first century probably could have done it in a minute or two. But without anesthetic, it was going to hurt. A lot.

“There's nothing we can give him?” Greg asked Aramis desperately.

Aramis held up a thin strip of leather, rolled tightly so that it was the width of a finger. “Only this.”

“What can that possibly do for him?” Greg asked.

“You put it between his teeth,” Aramis explained, “so that when he gnashes them together in pain, he doesn't bite through his own tongue.”

Barbaric,
Greg thought, shaking his head.
Absolutely barbaric.

They were in a field. Soldiers loyal to Emil were doing their best to keep the rest of the army at a distance. Greg would have much preferred the privacy of a tent, but the tents were far too dark inside and Greg needed the bright sunlight to operate by. Athos lay on a table before Greg. Some soldiers had procured it from a nearby farmhouse, so Greg wouldn't have to do the operation on his knees. Athos was resting peacefully now. Greg thought his fever might have dropped a bit, but there was no way to know, as thermometers didn't exist yet, either.

They had jury-rigged a set of restraints from their horses' reins and used these to lash Athos's arms and legs down.

The barber-surgeon's “tools” were laid out on the table. To Greg, they looked more like implements of torture than surgical supplies. He'd found them sitting in a cup of bloody water; apparently, the barber-surgeon had no idea that merely rinsing them all in the same cup was a fantastic way to spread disease. At Greg's urging, Porthos and Aramis had washed them as thoroughly as possible, sharpened them on a razor strop, and sterilized them (or at least tried to sterilize them) by heating them over a campfire.

Now the moment of truth had come. Greg couldn't delay it any longer. The sun would set soon, and he needed the full light of day to operate by.

Catherine stood by Athos's side, putting damp rags on his forehead to bring his temperature down and cradling his head in her hands to comfort him. Aramis and Porthos were on hand to help. That was it. Greg had asked the rest of the army to give them privacy; although the soldiers were all gathered not far away, eager to know what was happening.

Greg turned to Aramis. “I guess you should put that thing in his mouth. It's time to start.”

Aramis pried Athos's teeth open and set the bit inside. Athos opened his eyes, half-conscious, as though semi-aware that something bad was about to happen.

Greg knelt by Athos to inspect his wound.

It was a quarter-sized hole in Athos's thigh that oozed pus. It went in from the side, into the meatiest part of the muscle, behind the bone. The flesh around it was black and puckered and reeked of infection. “We need to clean this,” Greg said. “I need some sterile water.”

Aramis had already prepared some ahead of time. He'd heated the water in a tin over the fire until it boiled, then left it to cool. Greg tipped the tin over the wound and poured a tiny bit of the water inside, flushing the pus out.

Athos's eyes went wide and he gritted his teeth on the bit, as if even this had caused him great pain. But he didn't make a sound.

Greg had to repeat the process several times to truly flush the wound. But eventually, the job was done and the wound looked far better already. Unfortunately, Greg had no good way to look inside it. Simple flashlights were still centuries away. The best he could think to do was use the face of his watch to reflect sunlight into the wound.

“Porthos and Aramis, hold him tight,” Greg ordered. “Catherine, I need you to hold the wound open.”

“Me?” Catherine asked, turning pale.

“You have the most delicate touch of all of us, I think,” Greg said. He selected two thin metal rods with fine tips from the surgeon's tools. He shuddered to think what they were actually designed to be used for, but they were the best option he had for the task at hand. “Put these in the hole and pry the sides apart.”

Catherine nodded and took the rods. Aramis pinned Athos's arms down while Porthos held his legs. Then Catherine inserted the rods into the wound and gently pried the puckered flesh apart.

Greg was right about her having a delicate touch. Athos bit down again and writhed a bit at the first touch, but the pain seemed to be manageable, and he calmed. “That's great,” Greg told her. “In my time, you'd probably make a great doctor.”

He then reflected sunlight into the wound. It didn't work very well at all—it was sort of like trying to light a cave with a candle—but after doing it for a minute, he noticed something glint in the wound.

“I think I see it!” he said. He took one of the thin rods and carefully poked at the object, which gave a metallic
clink
. Definitely something that didn't belong in Athos's leg. Greg was able to maneuver it into the meager light.

“I think the whole arrowhead's still in there,” he said. “Athos must have just snapped the shaft off instead of trying to pull the whole thing out.”

“Well, there was a lot going on at the time,” Porthos said, which was quite an understatement. In fact, the boys had been under siege from four assassins with no cover. “I guess he didn't feel he could wait to do it right.”

Greg winced, thinking about the pain Athos must have been in all along.
Why hadn't he ever said anything?
he wondered, but he knew the answer. Milady's life and the fate of France had been at stake. Athos would have felt that stopping to care for himself and recuperate would have been self-centered and hardly chivalrous. He probably would have been willing to die for both causes if he had to.

There was only one good thing about the whole arrowhead being in Athos's leg: It'd be that much easier to pull out.

Greg examined the surgical tools, trying to figure out what would work best. He selected a large pair of tweezers—they'd actually come from the army's blacksmith, as they were designed for pulling horseshoe nails out of a horse's hoof—and a pair of thin, sharp scissors that were designed, horrifyingly, for snipping infected tonsils out of the back of a man's throat.

“All right,” he warned everyone. “I think this is going to be the rough part.”

Aramis cinched the restraints down as tight as they would go. Porthos simply laid his entire bulk across Athos's shins to hold his legs still. Catherine took Greg's watch and held it as close to the wound as she dared to reflect light inside.

Greg poked the tweezers into the wound and tried to pull out the arrowhead.

Now Athos screamed. He roared, despite the bit, and flailed wildly, far more than anyone had expected. Even with his arms and legs lashed, he bucked and writhed.

To make matters worse, the arrowhead didn't come out easily. The only time Greg had ever done something like this before was pulling out thorns and splinters, which came out easily once you got a good grip on them. But the arrowhead had been designed, rather diabolically, to stay where it was. Greg had seen plenty during his time in France. They had little barbs along the edges, like fishhooks, so they would dig into flesh and remain there. There was no choice but to poke the scissors into the wound and snip away around the barbs. Greg was sweating from stress and the heat of the lantern, but he finally managed to clear enough away that he could feel the arrowhead wiggle beneath the scissors.

He stuck the tweezers back in and gave it another try. The arrowhead caught for a moment, then popped free. It was a nasty-looking thing, still sharp after all this time. Thankfully, it was all in one piece, which meant there wasn't anything else back in the wound.

Athos now lay still again, which freed Aramis to come inspect the arrowhead. “Good work,” he told Greg. “What do we do now?”

“We need some alcohol,” Greg replied.

“For drinking?” Porthos asked.

“It's to sterilize the wound,” Greg told him. “This is actually the most important part. We need to kill the infection—or it will kill Athos.”

“I'll see what I can do,” Porthos said, and then hurried off into camp.

“I think I know something else that may help,” Aramis said, and then he ducked away as well.

Greg returned to Athos's side. His friend was unconscious again. The pain of surgery had most likely drained him. He'd bitten almost entirely through the leather bit. “I think we might need another of these,” Greg said.

While Catherine dutifully made a second bit, Greg heated the water in the fire again, bringing the temperature back up. Aramis was soon back, his hands full of herbs.

“What's that?” Greg asked.

“Chickweed, plus a few other herbs I saw growing around camp,” Aramis replied. “They have healing powers.” When Greg frowned skeptically, Aramis said, “They
do
. The church has long documented the effects of these herbs. We're not entirely barbaric in these times.”

It occurred to Greg that Aramis probably knew what he was doing far more than the physician had. And his mother was always going on about the healing powers of herbs herself—although she generally took them for headaches, rather than flesh wounds. “All right,” Greg said. “Do whatever it takes to make him better.”

Aramis quickly prepared a poultice for the wound. He'd just finished when Porthos arrived, clutching a bottle filled with clear alcohol. “Sorry it took so long,” he said. “This wasn't easy to get. Apparently, alcohol's worth more than gold to a soldier.”

Greg took the bottle. The fumes alone were strong enough to make him dizzy. Whatever this stuff was, it certainly had a lot more alcohol in it than anything his parents drank. Greg figured it would be painful on Athos's raw wound, but unfortunately, he knew of no other way to sterilize it. “Hold him tight,” he told the others.

Aramis and Porthos set their weight on Athos's arms and legs again, and when they were ready, Greg carefully poured the alcohol into the wound.

Athos snapped awake again, wailing like a banshee. Catherine knelt over him, stroking his face and doing all she could to calm him. “Everything's all right,” she cooed. “It'll all be over soon. Just relax.”

Greg dumped the entire bottle into Athos's wound, letting it spill back out again, hopefully flushing out whatever bits of debris and diseased flesh might be left inside. When that was done, he poured in the water he'd heated. While this hurt Athos as well, it was considerably less painful than the alcohol, and he calmed considerably. After Greg had repeated the process several times, the water came out as clear as it had been going in, indicating that the wound was as clean as he was going to get it. He nodded to Aramis, who quickly placed the poultice over the wound and lashed it in place with strips of cloth to protect against any further infection. Aramis's herbal knowledge appeared to be spot-on. No sooner was the poultice on than a look of relief spread across Athos's face and he slipped back into sleep.

Emil rushed over, unable to wait any longer. He had gone white at Athos's final scream and now looked even more disturbed than Athos did. “What's happening?” he demanded. “Is Athos all right?”

“He's fine,” Aramis said. “Thanks to D'Artagnan.”

Emil's color returned. He turned to Greg, impressed. “Then I owe you a great debt of gratitude.”

“We all do,” Catherine said. She was looking at Greg now with something more than respect, as though something had changed in how she thought of him. When Greg met her eyes, she turned away, blushing.

The silence was broken by the sound of hoofbeats coming quickly. Greg turned to see the steed gallop into camp and head for the crowd of soldiers. “Where's the commander?” the rider demanded. “I have an urgent message for him.”

The soldiers pointed toward Emil. The rider dismounted and rushed over. He was a young boy, barely any older than Greg, and he recoiled with fear upon seeing the makeshift operating room.

“I'm the commander here,” Emil said. “What news do you bring?”

“I've just ridden directly from Paris,” the messenger replied. “The city is under siege.”