He drank the water, and Sybil couldn't help but smile in relief. Despite his obvious discomfort, he wasn't refusing her requests, and that made it that bit easier. There had certainly been nothing in her training about how to treat a man from the distant past whilst in the distant future. It would have seemed surreal to her if not for the concrete specifics before her eyes: he was there, and she was, and his sickness was no illusion.
She pulled over a chair to sit beside his bed for a moment, so that he wouldn't have to strain his eyes in looking up at her, and then her eyebrow lifted in faint amusement. 'I'm not a saint, nor a witch,' she responded. Like most people, she fell somewhere between. Except that for all she knew, Cesare Borgia's question might have been quite literal. She had to be as strange to his eyes as these people of the twenty-first century were to hers. 'I'm not quite a physician, although I was taught by them.' An intensive, compressed course of study that had been, what with the steep demand for qualified nurses. 'I'm a nurse. I tend the sick; it's my vocation.' She paused, just a fraction, and then added, 'My name's Nurse Crawley. Sybil.'
She answered his questions carefully, simply, not wanting to overwhelm him with more information than he could process. 'This place is as unfamiliar to me as it is to you, but it seems you have influenza. That's a virus - it causes an infection in your throat, and your lungs, and that's what's causing you the pain. Your fever's a sign that your body's trying to fight off the sickness...' Sybil trailed off momentarily, and then shook her head. 'I don't want it to kill you,' she said, a flat note in her voice. 'You have to fight it, and I'll be here as long and as often as I can, to help you. After I fetch you some stronger medicine, the pain will ease a little.'