by Judith Tarr
Fabia Ursa greeted Nicole with the quick flash of a smile, and said to the midwife, “Aemilia! I’m so glad you’ve come.”
Nicole sighed faintly. Ah, good. This wasn’t as hard as usual.
Four or five other women were crowded into the shop, doing their best not to get in Fabia Ursa’s way. Nicole recognized all but one as neighbors from houses along the street. Some were regulars in the tavern, one or two she’d seen coming and going about their daily business. The last, whom Nicole didn’t know but Umma probably did, had Fabia Ursa’s narrow, pointy face and her quick, birdlike mannerisms. That, then, would be the sister whom Longinius lulus had said he was sent to fetch.
On the work counter, leaning against a dented copper kettle, stood a small painting of a smiling mother suckling a baby. At first glance, Nicole took it for an image of the Madonna and Child. But when she looked again, she saw that the artist had thoughtfully labeled his work: ISIS ET OSIRIS.
Fury roared up in Nicole, startling her with its intensity. How dared these pagans steal this of all images that they might have stolen? There was nothing more sacred; and nothing, except the crucifix, more distinctively Christian.
As quickly as it had risen, the fury died. Hadn’t Fabia Ursa’s husband said something about how ancient the Egyptians were? They had to go back even further from this time than this time did from her own. And if that was so, who had borrowed the symbol from whom?
Well, she thought with a flicker of amusement, and a slightly stronger flicker of annoyance. There she went, thinking pagans stole, but Christians borrowed. The part of her mind that found and marked fine details in legal documents wouldn’t let go of the slip, or let her forget it, either.
Perspective was everything. I am persistent. You are stubborn. He is a pigheaded fool.
She blinked out of her musings to find Fabia Ursa talking to her. “We’ve got plenty of wine here, Umma,” the tinker’s wife said. “We — “ She paused; her face tightened. Nicole watched a contraction ripple across her belly beneath the tight-stretched tunic. When it was gone, she went on calmly enough, “We shouldn’t need to go back to the tavern for more.”
“That depends on how bad the pains get,” one of the neighbors said. “When I delivered Cornelius — my firstborn, if you’ll remember; he died when he was six, a fever took him off suddenly, but before that he was a fine strong boy — I was in labor two whole days and two nights, and come the third day — “
Nicole tuned her out, and hoped Fabia Ursa did, too. The horror stories were as familiar as the sight of the hugely pregnant woman pacing the floor. Eighteen hundred years and halfway around the world, and misery loved company just as much as it ever would.
But Aemilia wasn’t having any of it. Her voice was sharp, cutting across the woman’s babble. “Stop that, Antonina. This is not Fabia’s first delivery. She’s done it twice before; she knows what to expect. Don’t go upsetting her with your foolish chatter when she needs to keep her spirits up.”
Antonina glowered at the midwife, but she shut up. Nicole felt like applauding. The last thing Fabia Ursa needed to do at the moment was panic over her safety or the safety of her baby. Antonina didn’t appear to care a bit about that, but she wasn’t going to argue with Aemilia, either. The midwife looked as if she’d be bad news in a fight.
After an uncomfortable pause, Fabia Ursa’s sister said, “May the gods grant good health to my new nephew or niece. It’s hard, you know. Loving the little ones, knowing they’ll be lucky to live past weaning. It’s so easy to lose them — and so hard to help loving them regardless. “
The rest of the women in the room nodded, and echoed her sigh. From the looks of it, they’d all lost babies or young children. Some more than one — Fabia Ursa herself had lost two, hadn’t she?
Nicole felt that sinking sensation again, the hollow in the pit of her stomach that went with culture shock. Back in Indiana, she’d known a woman whose son had had some sort of congenital heart trouble. He’d died before he was big enough, or strong enough, for the surgery that might have cured him. More than grief, she remembered anger, and a sense of betrayal. Babies weren’t supposed to die. Doctors were supposed to be able to fix them. Death was for the old — and even they were kept from it as long as humanly or medically possible.
Nicole shivered in the odorous warmth of the shop. No wonder they made a spectacle of death here. Death was a commonplace thing, and death of children most common of all.
“Fabia Honorata,” Aemilia said, more gently than she’d spoken to Antonina, “we shouldn’t talk about anything unfortunate here today. A birth is no place for words of ill omen.”
Fabia Ursa’s sister blushed faintly. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. What was I thinking?” She tugged at the neck of her tunic as Nicole had seen Julia do now and then, bent her head and spat onto her breast. She was turning away the omen. No one grimaced or upbraided her for silly superstition. All the women looked on with deadly seriousness. Antonina and Fabia Ursa even imitated her.
Bad omens were as real and appalling here as hard-drive crashes or power failures were to Nicole. But she’d never have been so foolish as to think that snapping her fingers or spitting down her shirt would keep the gremlins away.
Somehow, she didn’t think it would be too wise to say as much.
Nicole sighed. So many things she couldn’t say. People here had very different notions from hers about what was self-evidently true. She didn’t know exactly what they did to people whose ideas were too far from the norm, and she wasn’t eager to find out. There hadn’t been any place to run or hide, down on the floor of the amphitheater.
Fabia Ursa had paused in her pacing only long enough to avert the omen. She went back to it grimly, but not for long. Suddenly she staggered. Nicole, who happened to be closest to her, caught her arm. She was surprisingly heavy for a woman so slight.
She smiled at Nicole, a thin, tight smile. “Thank you, Umma,” she said a little faintly. And then, more clearly, she said, “I’ve done all the walking I’m going to do this time. So if you don’t mind…” Still clinging to Nicole, leaning heavily on her, Fabia Ursa waddled over to the birthing chair and lowered herself into it. She sat for a moment, just breathing; Nicole, relieved of her weight, did much the same.
Fabia Ursa seemed to recover first. “Bring me some wine, somebody,” she said with imperiousness that Nicole had never heard from her before. “I’m not getting up from here until I do it with my baby in my arms.” She swept the room with a glare, as if challenging them all to argue with that.
Nobody even tried. “That’s what we’re here for, after all,” Aemilia said mildly. She shifted her leather sack till it lay in front of the birthing chair, just out of reach of Fabia Ursa’s foot, and scanned the room. Her eye fell on a stool not far from Nicole. She pointed with her chin. “Umma. Bring that over here, would you?”
Nicole nodded, and fetched the stool. Its legs were short. They set Aemilia’s head considerably below Fabia Ursa’s — just about at the level of her waist, in fact. The midwife measured the height and the distance, and nodded, satisfied. She bent slightly and burrowed in the sack, pulling out a jar of oil, strips of cloth rolled into a tidy bundle, several sponges, and a cushion. When she had arranged them around her within easy reach, she said, “Get me a bowl of water, someone, please.”
Fabia Honorata moved quickly to obey her. She knew where the bowls were, and where the water-jar was, too, which was more than Nicole could have managed.
Aemilia received the bowl with a brisk nod. She washed her hands and dried them on a bandage from the roll she had laid on the floor. That was, Nicole supposed, better than not washing at all, and the bandages were at least visibly clean. But it was a long way from keeping things surgically sterile. No rubber gloves here: no rubber at all, that Nicole had seen. No antiseptics, either, and not much by way of genuine cleanliness. She tried not to look at or think about the dirt under the midwife’s fingernails.
Fabia Ursa
hiked her tunic up over her swollen belly, no more shy about public nudity than anybody else Nicole had seen in this world and time. Her navel protruded as Nicole’s own had done in late pregnancy. Nicole had been startled, the first time, and disproportionately upset. She hadn’t been as bothered by the way her breasts and belly swelled out of all recognition as by that one apparently minor thing. Her whole body image seemed tied up in it, twisted and distorted and pushed out of shape.
Fabia Ursa inhaled sharply. Her face set; her eyes fixed inward, intent. Her belly went rock-hard as a contraction took hold.
Aemilia set her hand just below the everted navel. Fabia Ursa seemed oblivious. Nevertheless the midwife spoke to her. “Very good,” she said. “That’s a nice, firm pang. Are they coming closer together than they were before?”
“I… think so,” Fabia Ursa answered as the contraction eased.
Nicole glanced at her left wrist, checking a watch that wasn’t there. She started a little as she realized what she’d done. She hadn’t done it in a while.
No watch. No way to tell time but by the beating of her heart and the motion of breath in her lungs. Closer together would have to do. No sure way of telling whether the contractions came seven minutes apart, or five, or three, not here, not now. No monitor around Fabia Ursa’s belly to chart how strong they were, either, nor a monitor to check the fetal heartbeat. All they had was Aemilia, with her none-too-clean hands.
The midwife rubbed sweet-scented olive oil from the jar onto those hands, then, quite without ceremony and without even asking the woman’s leave, slipped her oiled hand up inside Fabia Ursa’s vulva. Fabia Ursa’s breath caught, but she didn’t protest. Nicole didn’t know how competent Aemilia was, but she was certainly confident; Nicole’s own gynecologist back in California hadn’t been any more matter-of-fact about what she was doing.
Fabia Ursa’s voice came quick and a little breathless. “Here comes another one.” Aemilia’s hand slipped quickly out. Nicole nodded rather grudging approval. Good thinking, there, and smart midwifery. She hadn’t wanted anyone messing with her in the middle of a contraction, either.
“Your womb is widening nicely at the mouth,” the midwife said to Fabia Ursa. “Everything is the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t think this labor will last very long. Neither of your first two did, did they?”
“I don’t think so,” Fabia Ursa said. “They didn’t last all day and all night, the way some women’s do, I know that.” She sighed. “Maybe, if this one lasts longer, the baby will, too.”
When, at nine in the morning, a nurse had told Nicole she’d probably have Kimberley by noon, Frank had said blithely, “Oh, that’s not very long.” The nurse had been right, and it really wasn’t long at all as labor went, but it had seemed plenty long to Nicole. Pregnant women didn’t need Einstein to understand how time could bend and crumple in peculiar ways.
She suppressed a snort. Time didn’t just bend, it folded in on itself, and spiraled down and down into another time altogether. Wasn’t that how she’d got here, after all?
Fabia Ursa’s contractions continued. The other women had each got comfortable in her own way: some sitting on stools or on the tinker’s bench, some on the floor, and one leaning on the worktable with her arms folded under her ample breasts. The wine went round. It had stopped including Fabia Ursa. She was too busy, laboring in earnest. The contractions came closer and closer together.
Nicole had never thought of having a baby as a spectator sport. But here they all were, standing or sitting, drinking and chatting, chewing over gossip as Fabia Ursa so loved to do. She joined in when she could, distracted and clearly glad of it; but those intervals grew shorter as her labor pains grew stronger and closer together.
After what seemed like forever but was, from the angle of the light through the opened shutters, maybe three or four hours, Fabia Ursa began to curse her husband with concentrated viciousness. Nicole would have been horrified if she hadn’t done just the same to Frank when she was in labor with Justin. She had a vivid memory, just then, of how much it had bloody-bedamned hurt, and it was his fault. He had put that baby in her. He had stuck her in this place and made her go through this for his petty little ego. “Next time,” she’d snarled at him, “you have the damn baby.”
Frank had been shocked, too shocked to talk back. “It’s normal,” the nurse had told him. “They all do it sooner or later.”
“Ah,” he’d said in the knowing way he had, which she’d found more charming than not while she was dating him, but which made her hate him with rare passion in the middle of delivering his son. “Projection. Perfectly understandable.”
No one here knew anything about twentieth-century psychobabble. But from the looks they exchanged, this was nothing abnormal here and now, either.
Indeed, Aemilia seemed to recognize it as a sign of progress. She oiled her hand again, palpated Fabia Ursa once more, and nodded approval. “The mouth of the womb is open wide enough,” she said. “See if you can’t push the baby out. “
Fabia Ursa grunted and strained — and gave birth to a startling, and redolent, quantity of excrement. Nicole gasped and nearly choked on the stink. She’d had an enema in the hospital, a refinement that obviously had not occurred to the Romans.
Everyone else was taking this latest development perfectly for granted. With reflexes honed by now to a fine edge, Nicole did her best to do the same. Antonina scooped up the evidence with a scrap of board, and flung it out into the street.
Nicole’s eye was caught by that motion, and by a moment’s reflexive revulsion at the thought of walking in the street after this was over. Fabia Ursa’s shriek brought her back with a snap to the shop and the birthing chair.
“There,” the midwife was saying with rough gentleness as she drew her hands from Fabia Ursa’s body. “The baby was turned about a little. I straightened it. It should come out more easily now.”
“Straightened it?” Fabia Ursa gasped. “Was that all you did? I thought you were sawing me to pieces.”
Aemilia’s face didn’t change, either with annoyance or amusement. “The head is down, and it’s straight, as it should be. It’s all ready to go. You just have to push it out.”
“Push — “ Fabia Ursa looked suddenly exhausted. “I’ve been pushing.”
“Push harder,” Aemilia said.
Fabia Ursa pushed. She pushed till her face darkened to purple. Gravity helped, Nicole saw, almost in envy. The birthing chair was a better idea by far than delivering horizontally in a bed. The only advantage to the latter that she could see was that doctors and nurses had better access if something went wrong.
If anything went wrong here, Nicole didn’t know what Aemilia could do about it. Probably not much. That being so, the birthing chair had everything going for it.
“Come on,” Aemilia urged. “The baby’s head is right there. I can feel it. One more good push and you’ll be all done.”
She’d just given Fabia Ursa the best incentive in the world. Nicole remembered how it had felt. One last push. One last screaming pain. And then — done. Fabia Ursa put every ounce of effort into it. A groan wrenched itself out of her, as if she’d tried to lift a loaded cart — and had the front wheels off the ground.
And suddenly the baby’s head was out, wet and covered with cheesy-looking membrane and a little blood. The rest was almost too fast to take note of. Aemilia reached inside and guided the shoulders out. The rest of the baby almost squirted into the world. The head was the big part and the hard part, literally and figuratively.
“A boy!” Aemilia, Fabia Honorata, and Antonina said it in chorus, like characters in a play. Fabia Ursa let out a long sigh — more exhaustion, Nicole judged, than joy.
But Aemilia wasn’t about to let her rest. “Don’t quit quite yet,” she said. “See if you can push out the afterbirth. Believe me, it’ll be easier for you if I don’t have to go in and get it.”
Fabia Ursa’s eyes closed. Nicole had cursed the doctor roundly, a
lmost as roundly as she’d cursed her husband before the baby came. Fabia Ursa seemed resigned to this last effort. She had, after all, been through it twice before.
Aemilia left her to it, wiped the vernix from the baby and dug mucus from his mouth and nose with a finger that hadn’t been washed since the labor began. He struggled feebly and started to wail, a thin, furious sound. The cry brought air into his lungs at last. His face and body brightened from dusky bluish-red to healthy pink, then from pink to raging red as Aemilia dug an oiled little finger into his anus — which Nicole had never seen any nurse do to her own babies — and dabbed at his eyes with a scrap of cloth soaked in olive oil. From the volume and longevity of his howls, nothing whatever was wrong with his lungs.
Fabia Ursa gasped, almost inaudible underneath the baby’s cries, and grunted in a mingling of pain and relief. The afterbirth slipped from her to the rammed-earth floor. It looked like nothing so much as a large, bloody chunk of raw liver.
Aemilia nodded at the sight of it. She bound the umbilical cord and cut it, and sprinkled the baby with salt. Nicole wondered a little wildly if she was going to put him in a pan and pop him in the oven like a Christmas goose.
“Good,” Fabia Ursa said. Her words dragged; her eyelids drooped. “Yes, that’s good. Toughen up his skin. Keep the rashes away.” She shook herself out of her exhaustion and the lassitude that went with it. “Umma, will you go? Tell my husband he has a son.”
“I’d be glad to,” Nicole said. She hoped she didn’t sound too glad to be out of that cramped and airless room with its stink of blood and birth.
Sextus Longmius was still in the tavern, and feeling no pain. When she gave him the news, he fell on her in a reek of wine and tried to kiss her. “Now, now,” she said with mock severity. “Save that for your wife.”