She left Longinius deep in his third cup of wine — the cheaper stuff this time — with Julia to keep an eye on him and the children to help her, and went out across the alley to Fabia Ursa’s house. Just as she reached the door, someone else came up beside her: a lean, determined-looking woman loaded down with a heavy leather sack and what looked more like an adult-sized potty chair without the pot than anything else Nicole could think of. After a moment, Nicole realized it had to be a birthing chair. She’d heard of such a thing somewhere, but she’d never seen one. Compared to the way she’d had to deliver her two, flat on her back with her feet in metal stirrups, the chair looked a hell of a lot more comfortable.
The woman noticed her glance, but misinterpreted it. “Good day to you, Umma,” she said, her voice civil but brisk. “Yes, this is the same chair you had for yours. It was made to last.”
“It certainly looks that way,” Nicole said. The midwife nodded with the barest hint of a smile. She wouldn’t let Nicole take the bag or the chair, but did submit to having the door held open for her. Nicole had resigned herself to picking up the woman’s name from context. She’d done that so often by now, it no longer threatened to pitch her into a panic attack.
In all the time Nicole had been in Carnuntum, she hadn’t ever gone into the living quarters of the tinker’s house. Fabia Ursa had always come to the tavern with her store of gossip, or Nicole had stopped by the shop without going the rest of the way.
Today was no different. Nicole could see why it might make sense for Fabia Ursa to have her baby down below, in the much larger, lighter, and probably cleaner room. The shop had been cleared of much of its debris, the heaped pots pushed against the walls and the tools put away, probably in the box in the corner. In the cleared space, Fabia Ursa was walking with grim determination that Nicole well remembered from her own labor. It was supposed to help move things along. Whether it did or it didn’t, it gave the pregnant woman something to do. When the contractions grew too strong, she’d settle into the birthing chair and get to work in earnest.
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?
Perspective was everything.
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
