“Patients,” Hans said, appearing from nowhere and startling the hell out of Dr. Robert Henry Lang. “They’re growing restless and debating whether to eat the cat.” The whippet-thin Hans was light on his feet and prone to sneaking up on Rob, who tried to pretend it didn’t bother him.

Rob dipped his fingertips in a washbowl to clean the morning sleepers from his eyes. “Bathroom. Coffee. Glasses. Then patients.”

Hans used a rag to scrub Rob’s face like a parent might with a child, though Hans was several years younger than the doctor he served. “There’s no time for a bath. If you want the privy, the line’s three deep and hasn’t moved since the rooster began crowing. I still don’t know what coffee is, but I’ve put a cup of boiled water on your work bench.”

“Good.”

“Which I’m sure is long drunk by now. I know you’re the doctor, but I don’t see the purpose of these ‘clinic hours.’ Sick people should stay at home where they belong. You’re supposed to visit them, not the other way around.”

“It’s a work in progress,” Rob said. “Glasses?”

“By the wash bowl. And may I raise the issue of our pantry’s honor? I believe I hear it being violated even as we speak.” Hans fingered the bag of bread crumbs he kept tied to his belt. “Robert, I can only be in one place at a time. I suggest we hire a guard—someone fat and well fed—to keep your patients from eating us into the street.”

“No guards, Hans. We have plenty of food.”

Hans shook his head. “Not anymore we don’t.”

“Well, we have money to buy more.” Rob stuck his glasses on his face and squinted into the rectangle of polished metal hanging above the bowl. The reflection showed more crow’s feet around the eyes than a male in his mid-30s ought to have accumulated, and a decent approximation of a beard that, despite a few patchy spots high on his cheeks, Rob had grown rather proud of. Which was a good thing—he refused to shave without a safety razor, grimacing whenever he saw the stubbly, occasionally bloody work of a knife edge on other mens’ faces.

The beard set him apart in this medieval town, but that was okay with Rob. After all, he wasn’t exactly from around here.

Rob was reaching for the beard scissors, made by a blacksmith he’d hired to craft medical equipment, when a wooden crash, a cat’s howl of fury and a string of incomprehensible swear words sloshed in from the next room.

“Patients?” Rob said to Hans.

“Patients. And right away, if you care about having any breakfast left to eat. Or dinner, for that matter.”

Rob pushed open the door to his front room. The iron hinges scraped loudly against each other, freezing the scene into something his free-spirited cousin Zev might have titled Villagers with Chicken Feathers. Through the feathers hanging in the air, Rob spotted his elderly cat squaring off against a chicken he guessed was payment for services yet to be rendered. The chicken perched atop a broken chest while the old cat circled, searching for a way to get at the chicken without being pecked in the head.

Far from being alarmed, his patients were egging the animals on, like spectators at an interspecies fight club. Rob ignored the animals for the moment and scanned the human beings: The man with the broken arm needed attention, but if Rob had to set the break, his screams would scare the others. He’d ask Hans to take him out back for a stiff drink, which should loosen him up for Rob’s probing hands.

The mother with the swollen jaw and blackened eyes seemed content socializing, so she could wait. Rob figured the older man with the spewing cough wasn’t going to get any worse in the next few hours, though he’d be quick. There wasn’t much relief Rob could offer for bronchitis exacerbated by a lifetime of breathing sooty, indoor air.

The young man clutching his chest worried Rob. There weren’t any reliable tests he could run, so he’d be forced to rely on guesswork, the laying on of hands and a superstition-fueled patient history. On the bright side, the young man was shouting for the chicken to get back in the fight, so whatever was wrong with him wasn’t likely to prove imminently fatal.

Still, everyone needed his help. Rob swore at himself for not having gotten out of bed earlier.

Finally, he pointed at a woman with a finger-sized shard of wood jammed into her upper thigh. Her face was drawn and pale, but she looked like she’d had a few children, so Rob guessed that she’d be brave when he removed the shard and sewed her leg shut.

“Ma’am, let’s begin with you, please,” Rob said, shooing the cat into the back room with his foot. “Hans, pull the curtain and boil some water while I help her over to the exam table. And will you see what’s going on with that chicken?”

The doctor was in.

* * *

Many hours and many patients later, Hans shuttered the front window, blocking the late-afternoon light as well as the faces of those who’d lined up to either seek medical treatment or watch those who had. Entertainment was scarce, and although Rob didn’t like it, his clinic days had become the equivalent of a Broadway smash.

“Clinic day is over!” Hans shouted, peeling back fingers from the window frame so he could bolt the shutters. “Come back next time, unless I can convince the doctor to stop this nonsense. House calls tomorrow, for payment. Charity cases can go see the monks!”

Rob leaned against a rough-hewn wall. “Hans. Don’t do that.”

“Robert, we just worked a full day for nothing. Less than nothing, because we lost a nice chest, half the bandages and most of our food.” Hans grabbed a straw broom and angrily swept cinders from the stone hearth and onto the hard-packed dirt floor.

Rob rolled his eyes to the low, blackened ceiling. Although his chimney was better than a hole in the roof, as he’d seen in too many of his patients’ homes, the house never wholly cleared of smoke. To make matters worse, Hans seemed compelled to keep a fire going 24-7. Even now, a log lay smoldering in the hearth. “We got a chicken,” Rob said. “A blanket, which can be washed and turned into slings.”

“That’s not enough. And nobody paid us any money.”

“We’ve got money.”

“For now,” Hans said. “But what happens when we’re cold and hungry and your grateful patients are nowhere to be found?”

“We could survive on what you’ve squirreled away for a month. Maybe longer.” Rob reached into the pocket of his well-worn jeans, fishing out a handful of silver coins. “Here, take these. We’re doing fine.”

Hans scowled, looking embarrassed, but he grabbed the coins. “I wasn’t asking for money.”

“It’s your salary,” Rob said. “You don’t have to ask. That’s the whole point.”

Hans stood the broom by the hearth and fixed Rob with his tiny blue eyes. “I don’t like seeing people take advantage of you.”

“You don’t like seeing other people eat our food.”

“Robert, it’s not theirs to eat! They should get their own.”

Rob laughed, although he couldn’t say whether he was laughing at Hans or just falling into exhaustion. Rob liked Hans, even if Hans tended to keep their relationship on a business level. He walked the small man to the door where Hans bobbed, half-in and half-out, like a pet wanting to go outside but unsure about the weather.

“Paying customers tomorrow, all right Robert?” Hans said, tugging his cap down on his head.

“All right.”

“I fed the donkey for you.”

“Thank you, Hans.”

“And if you decide to eat the chicken tonight, don’t do it in front of the rooster. He’ll crow his head off and won’t stop until he passes out.”

“I remember,” Rob said. “Good night.”

Rob closed the door, sucking in a breath of quiet air before returning to work. Trudging upstairs, he grabbed Galen’s On Anatomical Procedures and a volume of Oribasius’s Medical Collections, a pair of ancient—at least from his perspective—medical volumes he’d borrowed from the abbey library. The books were ridiculously heavy; the librarian had bound the hand-written texts in oak and fitted them with iron rings for shackling to his reading tables. In a world without printing presses, books were precious objects indeed.

Although Rob hated lugging around the clunky tomes, he hadn’t brought his paperback Grey’s Anatomy with him, so these books—as primitive and contradictory and just plain wrong as they could be—were all he had. Rob dropped the books on his goose-feather mattress, watching the fleas spring up in the air like trampoline artists. No matter how many times he shook out his blankets, the fleas always came back, and Rob had learned to live with them. His body hardly reacted to the flea bites now, with just the tiniest of red bumps that drew an occasional scratch.

A rust-colored mutt peeked out from behind the bed.

“Just me,” Rob said. “Go back to sleep.”

Rob had inherited the dog—along with a cat, rooster and donkey—when he took possession of this townhouse. While they were too old to do much other than sleep, he’d grown used to their company and their occasional bays, brays, and animal songs.

Rob wrestled open Collections, carefully turning the thick, fibrous pages until he found an anatomical cutaway of the torso. A patient he’d been treating had a mass growing in his abdomen. Rob couldn’t tell whether it was a cyst or cancer, but if it didn’t come out, it’d be the size of a basketball by Christmas. If the patient survived that long.

Using his finger, Rob traced the hand-colored drawings, silently navigating the layers of muscle and tissue. Real body parts looked so much different than they did in books, especially the slick, shiny tubes that made up the gut. To complicate matters, he’d trained as an otolaryngologist—an ear, nose and throat specialist—and although he was an experienced surgeon, he hadn’t cut into anybody below the nipples since his internship.

Which was the least of his worries, given that he lacked anesthetics, proper instruments or a sterile operating theater. First, do no harm, Rob reminded himself, just as the front door banged open and quickly slammed shut.

“Zev?” he said. “Zev, is that you?”

Powerful footsteps attacked the stairs, hitting each step hard and square. Rob dragged the book off his lap. Not Zev, he thought; his sneakers didn’t make that kind of noise. Certainly not Hans. That only left . . .

Magda the Red slammed through his bedroom door, nearly knocking it off the frame. She was tall—not as tall as Rob, of course, but tall for this world—and strong. He could almost hear her shoulder muscles twitching.

She was also angry, with the braids in her dark red hair snapping, whip-like, against her back. No hood, as was her custom, and she wore a tunic that barely fell below her hose-covered knees, a veritable mini-skirt in this conservatively-attired town. An axe hung from the belt cinched about her waist, and tall leather boots covered her legs to the top of her calves.

“You,” she said, her lips trembling. “You son-of-a-bitch!”

“Maggie?” Rob said. “What’s going on?”

“Stand up,” she growled.

“What? Why?”

“Because I’m not going to punch you while you’re sitting on the fucking bed!”

“Punch me?” Rob stood up; Maggie slammed a fist into his stomach, dropping him to the floor. “No hitting,” he wheezed.

When his eyes cleared, Rob saw tears running down Maggie’s splotchy face. “I’m pregnant, damn you! Pregnant!” she shouted, and then stormed out as quickly as she’d come. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam down the stairs, boom-BOOM went the front door, and she was gone.

The dog lifted its head, glanced at Rob, then returned to sleep.

Clutching his stomach, Rob dragged himself up onto his bed. He lay there for some time, recovering from Maggie’s unexpected blow—or blows, if one counted the punch and pregnancy both.

And he did. He surely, certainly did.

* * *

Rob walked past the Elven Shoemaker’s shop, past the fountain with the brave little Tailor’s headless statue, past the smiths and tanneries and other medieval industry that hunkered outside the city walls. He hadn’t meant to walk this far, but his racing mind wouldn’t let his feet stop.

“Dude,” the figure trotting beside him said. “I know you’re bummed and all, but you’ve got to try this goat on a stick. It’s mad good.”

After Maggie left, Rob had staggered outside in search of food. Hans wasn’t kidding; his clinic patients really had cleaned him out, and Rob hadn’t eaten anything beyond a handful of bread crumbs Hans slipped him between patients.

Most of the shops had closed their shutters for the day, but a few stalls remained open. Rob stopped by three food stalls run by three brothers, picking up a meat pie from the first brother, a loaf of bread from the second, and quite by accident, his cousin Zev from the third.

“Dude, last bite,” Zev said, thrusting the dripping hunk of goat meat beneath Rob’s nose. Rob shoved it away, so Zev sucked down the last of his dinner. “That littlest brother may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he sure knows how to cook a goat. Hey, Rob-O, spare a little bread?”

Rob tore into his loaf and handed Zev a piece. Squatting by a small stream, he cupped his hands in the cool water, hoping that they were far enough away from latrines and animal pastures for the water to be safe to drink.

Zev plopped down beside Rob, kicked off his bright red soccer flats and dunked his feet in the water. “Silent treatment, dude?”

“I told you I didn’t want to talk,” Rob said, chewing his pie.

“You should have told me not to tag along.”

“I did.”

“Whatever,” Zev said. “You’re talking now, and that’s gotta be a good thing, right?”

Rob bit his tongue to keep himself from arguing with his cousin. He needed space to ponder Maggie’s newsflash, some quiet time to begin the process of emotional digestion. Instead, he had Zev.

Rob finished his meat pie and began to wipe his hands on his tunic before realizing his garment was spotted with blood and dried pus—he’d forgotten to change after clinic. Instead, he swished his hands in the stream, enjoying the numbing cool until he saw, caught in a web of branches on the opposite bank, a blue and silver can of Red Bull.

“What the hell is that?” he said, jerking to his feet.

“What?” Zev asked. “Where?”

“That. There!”

Zev squinted. “I dunno. Looks kind of like a can of Red Bull.”

Without thinking, Rob plunged into into the stream, soaking his shoes and socks, and splashed over to the empty can. He touched it gingerly, as if it wasn’t real—it couldn’t be real, could it?—and turned back to show Zev, who opened his mouth without having anything to say.

“Did you—?” Rob asked, but Zev shook his head. “Then who—?”

Dr. Robert Henry Lang waded slowly back across the stream, the can dangling at the end of his arm, and the cold he felt growing in his chest had nothing to do with the temperature of the water. Once upon a time, he’d inhabited a world with Red Bull and convenience stores, electricity and Amazon.com, but that had been a lifetime ago. Once upon a time, he’d been a University of Washington surgical fellow married to the fill-in co-host for Good Morning Seattle. Once upon a time, he drove a Honda Accord and shopped at Safeway and watched cable TV for an hour or two before going to bed.

Once upon a time, but not now.

And although he hadn’t meant to come to this strange land about a year ago, Rob had grown to like the new home he’d made for himself, and that feeling carried him through a lot of dirt and fleas and goat-on-a-stick dinners. But if someone else had found their way here—someone besides him and Zev—Rob knew without evidence and with all of his heart that this world he’d stumbled upon was about to change, and that change wasn’t going to lead to everyone living happily ever after.