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.
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,
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.”
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
“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 —
