“Bring me the instruments,” Reynevan said loudly and without thinking, “and bring the wounded man here. And light, I need light!”

The wounded man, who a moment later landed with a thud of armour on the table, turned out to be one of the two from the parade ground who had been fighting without helmets. The result of his imprudence was a cheek cloven to the bone and a notched ear hanging off his head. As the wounded man cursed and struggled, blood gushed onto the lindenwood table, spattering the meat and soaking into the bread.

The physician’s satchel was brought, and Reynevan got down to work by the light of several sizzling torches. He found a flacon of Hungary water and poured the contents over the wound, causing the patient to wriggle around like a landed fish and almost fall off the table, after which Reynevan called for help holding him down. Reynevan quickly threaded a curved needle with stout twine and began to suture the wounds, doing his best to keep the stitches even. When the patient began to swear, the grey-haired Markwart of Stolberg stopped up his mouth with a lump of pork. Reynevan nodded his thanks and continued his work under the fascinated gaze of the audience crowding the table. Shooing away with his head the moths that were swarming around the torches, he concentrated on reattaching the severed ear as close as possible to its original location.

“Clean linen,” he asked after some time. Immediately, someone seized a wench and ripped off her blouse, silencing her protests with a few slaps.

Reynevan thoroughly bandaged the wounded man’s head with plenty of linen torn into strips. The patient, astonishingly, didn’t faint, but sat up, mumbled something about Saint Lucia, groaned, moaned and shook Reynevan’s hand. Immediately after, all the others began hugging the physician and congratulating him on his excellent work. Reynevan accepted the congratulations, smiling and proud. Although he was aware that he could have done better with the ear, he saw the marks of much more poorly stitched wounds on plenty of the faces around him. The casualty mumbled under his bandages, but no one was listening.

“Well? Quite something, isn’t he?” Scharley received congratulations beside Reynevan. “A remarkable physician!”

“He is,” agreed the culprit, the Glaubitz with the golden carp in his coat of arms. He showed absolutely no remorse as he handed Reynevan a mug of mead. “And sober, which is a rarity among quacks. Schoenfeld was lucky!”

“He was lucky,” Buko of Krossig commented coldly, “because it was you who smote him. Had it been me, there’d have been nothing to stitch up.”

Interest in the occurrence suddenly dwindled, interrupted by fresh visitors riding into the Kromolin stronghold. The Raubritters murmured and an air of excitement indicated the arrival of an important individual. Reynevan watched, wiping his hands.