Sharon chuckled and put a hand on his shoulder. Like she herself, Stoner was wearing a scrub gown. She'd brought several with her from Grantville, on the off chance that she might be called upon to do . . . well, exactly what she was going to do. She could tell from the warmth and feel of the fabric that Stoner's gown, like her own, had just recently been sterilized in the steam cleaner that had been one of the first innovations the embassy had made in their little palace.

"Relax, Tom. I'm a lot more likely to kill him than you are, much less a casual smoker. Remind me to compliment Billy, by the way. He's done a fantastic job here."

They were only halfway to the operating table, since Sharon was moving slowly to help compose herself. Billy Trumble was lying on a cot not far away with an IV in his arm. One of the older Marines was lying on a cot next to him. Only two donors, which Sharon wasn't happy about at all. Unfortunately, they knew the blood types of only two of the Scot soldiers who made up most of the embassy guard. Lennox was the other one, and he had A-positive which was no use at all since they didn't know Ruy Sanchez's blood type either.

"It's that silly guilt-trip business," Tom murmured. "Billy's feeling bad because he thinks he screwed up yesterday. Dropping the gun the way he did."

Sharon's lips quirked. "I thought he did great, myself. Hey, look, two of us in that madhouse were amateurs. The pro's the only one who got hurt."

"Well, yeah. But Billy probably figures if he hadn't screwed up the pro wouldn't have been scratched." He gave his head a little shake. "As it is, I had to stop him from donating too many units. Especially with him also running around organizing so much stuff. I wish we'd had somebody besides him and Dalziel still here with type O-negative."

Stoner's lips tightened on that last sentence. Sharon knew that Tom had his own worries. His son Gerry had the universal donor's blood type also. But Gerry had vanished, along with Frank and Ron, nobody knew where. The documents they'd found at the Marcoli house after the deadly brawl had referred to crazy schemes to liberate Galileo and murder the pope. True, those documents had obviously been planted by Ducos' agents. But there had also been notes from Joe Buckley-no doubt about it; Joe's handwriting had been distinctive-which seemed to at least confirm the part about liberating Galileo. Lennox and most of his men were out scouring the city, trying to find out what the truth was.

Sharon shook her head. They'd reached the table now, and there was no time to think about anything other than the work ahead of her. The OR table itself was something Sharon had had designed weeks earlier, blessedly, in case of an emergency. It was a well-made local product, heavily shellacked and polished, and now covered with sterilized absorbent fabric. It wasn't quite as good as an up-time OR gurney-and certainly a lot harder to move around, between the weight of the wood and the lack of wheels-but it would do fine.

She looked down at the patient lying on the OR table. She'd wondered if it would bother her, having to operate on someone she knew. To her relief, she discovered that it didn't. The man on the table bore a vague resemblance to a man named Ruy Sanchez, what she could see of the face above the gauze over the nose and mouth that Stoner would use to keep administering the anesthetic. But that was all it was. Just a resemblance. The animation was gone. The skin was pale, the cheeks were flushed. That was fever and blood loss.

The key, though, was the eyes. The patient's eyes were closed now, but Sharon had seen the dullness come into them in the hours after the fight. Not even Don Quixote on steroids could shrug off these kinds of injuries. The cut to the leg, maybe; that had been a simple flesh wound which Sharon had treated and sewn up quickly hours earlier. But certainly not the other trauma.

That one was a killer. The type of abdominal wound which, at any time prior to the late nineteenth century, would have been accepted as well-nigh certain death. A slow and tortured death, to boot. Sharon knew full well that the reason Stoner had been able to pack the huge salon with observers was because they all wanted to see if the exotic American Dottoressa could do what had always been considered impossible.

She took a slow, deep breath. A man named Ruy Sanchez with dull eyes simply did not exist in the world, she told herself firmly.

Could not exist. A contradiction in terms. All that lay here was a patient. A body. If she did her job, a human being might return into that body. But, for now, it was just a body. One of many. She'd studied and handled bodies for years now. The father who had sired her and raised her and given her his own talent and love for medicine had done the same for decades before that.

She felt calm, now. She'd gained that emotional detachment which, however inhuman it might be from one angle, was utterly necessary for what lay ahead of her.

Stoner had already moved to his part of the OR table and was checking the patient's vital signs.

"The last urine sample we got wasn't too bad," he said. "That was a little over an hour ago. Low volume, but I don't think there's any danger of immediate kidney failure. His pulse right now is . . . pretty good, I'd say. Weak and rapid, of course, but I don't think he's missing any beats."

"What's the systolic pressure?"

"That's the good news. A hundred and ten."

Sharon hummed a little note of satisfaction. She needed a minimum of ninety to risk an operation like this, and had wanted a hundred. A hundred and ten was higher than she'd dreamed of.

For an instant, a treacherous little thought tried to worm its way forward. How could I do otherwise? A wish from my intended is like a command from-

She squashed that, right quick. "Please introduce me to my colleagues," she said, more loudly than she'd meant to. "And I think we should begin speaking in Italian"-that last sentence said in the language-"except in such instances where I might encounter an emergency."

In which case, all bets are off and I'll probably start hollering at them incoherently. But she saw no reason to add that. The two Venetian doctors standing at the table in their own scrub gowns looked to be even more nervous than she'd been.

Tom nodded. "To your left, Dottoressa Nichols, is Dottor Fermelli. He has agreed to serve as your first assist and scrub."

He used the English word scrub, not the Italian translation of it. The full term in English would have been "scrub nurse," but that last word needed to be avoided. In the parlance of the seventeenth century, "nurses" were purely scut-work menials with about as much skill and training-and social status-as a janitor. That was the reason, of course, that the embassy had from the beginning introduced Sharon as a Dottoressa. And since the Italian word for scrub was every bit as prosaic as the English term, Tom had apparently decided to fall back on the ancient trick-perfected by French chefs-of making something sound glamorous by using a foreign term for it.

Fermelli nodded politely. Sharon returned the nod and took the opportunity to gauge the man as best she could. He'd be the key assistant. The second Venetian doctor would be the circulating nurse. Which meant, under the circumstances, nothing much more than a gofer. That doctor was standing next to the small table that held the instruments and absorbents. She'd be curious to see what title Stoner had decided to bestow upon him in order to avoid the dreaded "nurse" label. Circulator, probably.

But it was Fermelli she'd be counting on, in case of trouble. And, perhaps more to the point, it would be Fermelli who'd have to be able to help her with the really grisly parts of the operation. Sharon could well remember her very first experience in an operating room. The operation she was about to do wasn't that much different. It had been an abdominal hysterectomy. She'd almost lost it when they pulled the woman's guts out and plopped them on her chest. To this day, she couldn't eat sausage links.

And she'd just been an observer. Fermelli was the guy who would have to hold the patient's guts once Sharon hauled them out so that she could examine them.

Because of the surgical mask Fermelli was wearing, Sharon couldn't see most of his face. But the calm and steady look in his eyes reassured her. She'd told Stoner to make sure he found someone who had real hands-on surgical experience. Most seventeenth-century doctors-in Germany at least; she wasn't sure about Italian practice-were really more in the way of medical theorists. Advisers and consultants, potion-prescribers and the like, not what Sharon thought of as a "surgeon." The word itself was ancient, her father had once told her, deriving from the Greek kheirourgia and passing through the Old French serurgien before entering the English language. But, despite its majestic lineage, it had entered English through the cellar, not the front door. Until fairly recently in the universe she'd come from-not much more than a century, she thought-the distinction between doctor and surgeon had been entirely in favor of the doctor. The "surgeon" was the lowlife who sawed off legs, using booze for an anesthetic-and, like as not, did so while half-drunk himself.

Satisfied, Sharon looked at the other Venetian doctor. "And this is Dottor d'Amati," Stoner completed the introductions. "He has agreed to serve as the gofer."

D'Amati's chest swelled and he beamed at her. It was all Sharon could do not to burst into laughter. She should have known! Leave it to Tom Stone to call a gofer a gofer. There were times Sharon really liked that old hippie. She had no doubt at all that by the time Stoner finished with his lectures in Venice and Padua, Italian medical practitioners would have gofer firmly planted in their prestigious lexicon. He'd probably even manage, somehow, to get them clawing for the honor of being called a nurse. Which, as far as Sharon was concerned-she really looked at the world from a nurse's perspective, not a doctor's-would be just dandy.

She felt good. Really good. She'd been almost petrified in the hours leading up to this, knowing that for the first time in her life she'd have to be the one in charge of a critical operation. Now . . .

Flesh and blood. She could almost feel James Nichols' big, capable hands settling over her shoulders, as if from half a continent away his spirit was calming her and guiding her.

The sensation was powerful enough that by the time Sharon finished sterilizing with alcohol the area where she'd be operating-she'd have preferred iodine but they hadn't been able to turn up enough in the short time they'd had-she decided she would explain what she was doing while she worked. She'd seen her father do that, before students. He'd told her afterward that he found it a steadying influence on himself.

"I'm going to begin with what we call an exploratory laparotomy." She gave Dottors Fermelli and d'Amati a smile, hoping they could detect it under her own mask. "That's just a fancy phrase that means I'm going to cut the patient open and go exploring to see what's happening in there."

They seemed to be smiling back. Judging from his eyes, Fermelli's smile was even cheerful.

Splendid. She made sure of her grip on the scalpel. "The initial incision needs to be made in one firm stroke. It must be firm enough to cut through the skin and part of the initial subcutaneous layer. That's just another fancy word for 'fat.' Judging from appearance, I don't think we'll find a very thick layer of that with this patient. For a man of his age, he appears-make that any age, actually-to have a very low percentage of body fat."

She slid the scalpel in. "I'll open him from an inch or so below the breast bone to about four inches above the pubic bone. Like-"

It was a good cut. Really good.

"So."

Cardinal Bedmar was not the only spectator who looked away, at that point. But he suspected he was the only one who did so for spiritual reasons.

Like-

So.

The cardinal from Spain understood many things now which had been murky to him before.

Some, which had been murky for a short time, he understood very well. Ruy Sanchez's obsession with the woman had become a mystery to Bedmar, as the weeks had gone by since the doge's levee. The cardinal had assumed, at first, that the Catalan's fascination was nothing more complicated than a taste for exotic flesh.

And indeed, so it might have been, at the beginning. In the costumes they favored for their wealthy women, as in so many things, the Venetians enjoyed thumbing their noses at the Spain that controlled half of Italy. Where the Spanish style that still dominated much of the continent encased the female form in rigid, stiff-above all, high-necked-apparel, the Venetians preferred to see their women. Decadent and lascivious, in this as in all things.

And, see them they did. The first time Bedmar had ever attended a Venetian levee, as a man in his mid-thirties born and raised in Spain, he had thought himself somewhere at sea-with surging half-bare breasts making up the waves. He'd been quite shocked at the time, though he'd diplomatically kept it from showing.

He had not been shocked, of course, when he saw the Nichols woman so attired at the levee in February. By then, the man of thirty-five was a man of sixty-two, the marquis had become a cardinal, and Bedmar was as well traveled, cosmopolitan and sophisticated as any man in Europe. Yet even he had been arrested, for a moment, by the sight of such a magnificent and well-displayed bosom. All the more so when the flesh was as darkly colored as undiluted coffee.

But he had misgauged the Catalan, he now realized. Seeing the same woman wearing garments that, though they could not hide the female form did nothing to display it either, had laid bare the truth.

All his life-and Bedmar had known him since he was a young man-Ruy Sanchez had never been able to resist a challenge. In that, he was much akin to the hero of the Cervantes story that he so adored. The flesh was not the challenge, of course. For a man like Sanchez, flesh was no longer a challenge at all. The challenge came from meeting the first woman in the Catalan's life who intimidated him.