Household Gods

11

Sextus Longinius lulus came into the tavern one day not long after the beast show. He waited politely while Nicole took her latest batch of bread out of the oven. She nodded to him, not particularly surprised. He wasn’t what she would call a regular, but he came in now and then, bought a cup of the middle-grade wine, and drank it slowly as if he actually savored the stuff. Sometimes she thought he came as much for the excuse to get out of the house as for the wine.

Today, however, he seemed oddly tense. He set a shiny brass sestertius in front of her and said, “Let me have a cup of Falernian, Umma. I’m going to be here for a while. Might as well start off with the best. I’ll go back to the cheap stuff later, when I’ve stopped caring what it tastes like.”

Nicole lifted her brows as she drew him a cup of Falernian. She’d never heard him sound so determined about anything.

It dawned on her slowly. Too slowly, if she wanted to be honest about it. She thrust a finger at him. “Don’t tell me. Fabia Ursa’s in labor.”

“She is that,” Longinius lulus said. “Chased me out of the house, too. ‘No place for a man,’ she said — you know how women do. ‘None of your business. Go get the midwife, go get my sister, go get my friends, and go away.’ I knew I’d end up here, and you’re right next door anyway, so I saved you for last.”

Frank had been at the hospital with Nicole when Kimberley and Justin were born. She’d been glad to have him there, holding her hand and coaching her through labor and birth. She hadn’t known he’d fall for a blond bimbo before his son took his first step.

Carnuntum had no hospitals, as far as she could tell. Babies were born at home. And fathers were not welcome in what was obviously women’s work. Female friends and relatives of the mother joined her instead to celebrate the new life. Nicole rather liked that, even if it left the father out of his own child’s first hours. Being there at his children’s births hadn’t kept Frank from running off with the first big-busted babe who came along.

Another sestertius clanked down on the bar, startling Nicole back into the here-and-now. “More of the same,” Longinius lulus said. “Then you’d better go on over. Julia can get me the rest of the way drunk.”

Nicole nodded. “All right. But why —?” she stopped. Why wasn’t that hard, not when she let her brain run for once ahead of her mouth. Fabia Ursa had had two babies already, and lost them both. Her husband wouldn’t have been worth much if he weren’t worried.

Nicole thrust the coin back toward him. “This one’s on me, “ she said firmly. “Everything will be all right. You’ll have yourself a fine daughter or son to be proud of.”

Longinius left the coin where it was, and gulped down the wine without seeming to taste it. He’d been keeping up a good front, but his face was paler than it might have been, and his hand shook as he set down the cup. “Fabia’s been praying to Mother Isis. Pray the rest of the gods it helps.”

“It can’t hurt,” Nicole said, which was true enough, if a little on the lame side.

Sextus Longinius lulus nodded solemnly; the Falernian was hitting him hard. “Egyptians are the oldest people in the world. If their great goddess can’t keep a mother safe, no god can. She’s had practice, she has.”

“I hope it all goes well,” Nicole replied. That was also true. Whether Isis existed at all, let alone had any power to help Fabia Ursa… well, who knew? Liber and Libera had brought Nicole here, hadn’t they? Maybe Isis would answer the woman’s prayer.

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?

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, almost 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.”

Sextus Longmius laughed as if she’d just made the best joke in the world. He got to his feet somehow — she doubted even he knew how — and reeled across the alley to his shop.

Nicole followed more sedately, but quickly enough to evade the customers, and Julia, who wanted to know every detail. “Later,” she flung at them. No one chased her down, at least. As she left the tavern, she heard someone call for a round in the new father’s name. And probably, she thought uncharitably, on his tab, too.

No one in the tinker’s shop seemed to find his condition in any way remarkable. They took little enough notice of him, even Fabia Ursa, though he half fell on her and deposited the sloppy kiss he’d tried to bestow on Nicole. She fended him off with an indulgent smile and sent him veering toward the cradle and the baby.

While he wavered over it, struck mercifully mute, Aemilia and Fabia Ursa went on with their conversation. They were discussing wet nurses. “No, not the one I had last time,” Fabia Ursa said. “I don’t see any way what happened could have been her fault, but — “

“But,” Fabia Honorata said. “There’s always that but, isn’t there? No, you don’t want her. Let me think — I didn’t much like the one I used for my youngest, though Lucina knows she had plenty of milk. How about the one you used, Antonina? Was she reliable?”

The others chimed in on that, batting names back and forth. Women in Rome didn’t nurse their own babies, Nicole realized, even those who were far from rich. Everybody hired wet nurses. There must be a whole industry devoted to it — the Roman equivalent of bottles and baby formula.

At least the baby would have real milk from a woman’s breast, though it wouldn’t be his mother’s. That had to be better than the twentieth-century alternative.

The party broke up not long after. Sextus Longinius snored on the floor beside the baby’s cradle. Fabia Ursa had fallen asleep rather abruptly, and almost in midsentence. Her sister went to see if the wet nurse they’d decided on was available. The other women had children to tend and work to do. Only Aemilia showed signs of staying, which assuaged Nicole’s conscience. She didn’t particularly want to babysit for exhausted mother and blotto father, though if she’d had to she would have done it. Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius had looked after Lucius and Aurelia often enough.

Nicole was free to go home, and glad to do it, too. It was still daylight, rather to her surprise. The tavern was in between the noon crowd and the sundown rush, an interlude of quiet, with one or two dedicated drinkers in the corners, but no demands on Julia’s time.

Julia wanted to know all about the birthing. “Not that I know anything about birthing babies,” she said. “But maybe someday.”

Nicole widened her eyes. “What do you mean, you don’t know anything about birthing babies?” Then, because she’d had a great deal of wine next door, she came out and said it. “Gods know you’ve had plenty of opportunity to make one.”

Julia wasn’t visibly offended. “Not if I can help it,” she said. “I don’t need a fatherless brat dragging at my hem. I smear a twist of wool with pine resin and stuff it up there before I start.” The angle of her eyebrows said that Nicole should know about this rough-and-ready form of birth control, but if Nicole wanted to play at ignorance again, Julia wasn’t of a mind to stop her.

Nicole wondered what the FDA would say about pine resin as a spermicide. Better than nothing, was her guess. She didn’t think a twist of wool would be as effective as a proper diaphragm, either, but it was also likely to be better than nothing. Put them together and they probably made a halfway decent — or perhaps a halfway indecent — contraceptive.

Several times that night, the baby’s crying across the alley woke her from a sound sleep. The first time or two, she lay with all her nerves jangling, ready to leap up and look after her baby. But slowly it sank in even on her sleep-drugged senses that this wasn’t her baby. She didn’t have to do anything about it except listen to it. Fabia Ursa, on the other hand…

Aemilia had left her to it just before dark. Nicole had served the midwife a cup of the two-as wine for the road, as it were, and seen her on her way to a well-deserved rest. “And that’s if nobody takes it into her head to pop tonight, “ Aemilia had said as she headed for the door.

Nicole recalled only too vividly how frazzled she’d been after Kimberley and Justin were born. She hoped Longinius lulus and Fabia Honorata and the wet nurse were giving the poor woman some help. Nicole would look in on her, she thought fuzzily. In the morning.

She woke with the memory clear in her head, and no sound coming from next door. As soon as she’d got the tavern going and set Julia in charge of it again, she went next door to see how Fabia Ursa was doing. She found Fabia Honorata there already, and Longinius lulus fixing the dented pot against which the image of Isis had leaned. With each stroke of the hammer, he winced. He must have the headache from hell, and well earned, too.

The baby lay asleep in his cradle, swaddled like a mummy. Fabia Ursa sat on a stool nearby. Nicole was shocked at the sight of her. She knew what a woman was supposed to look like just after she’d given birth: as if a truck had run over her. Fabia Ursa looked worse than that. Her eyes had a hectic glow that raised Nicole’s hackles. “Are you all right?” she asked sharply.

Fabia Ursa didn’t respond. It was her sister who said, “You see it, too, don’t you, Umma? I’m afraid she’s got the fever.”

Nicole couldn’t see that either Fabia Ursa or her husband had heard a word that either of them said. She crossed the room and laid her hand on Fabia Ursa’s forehead. If the woman wasn’t running a temp close to 102, Nicole would have been astonished. Aloud and in some frustration she said, “She’s awfully warm.”

“She’s burning up,” Fabia Honorata said. Worry made her tactless, or else she didn’t think her sister could hear.

Nicole recalled how often Aemilia had slid her hands inside Fabia Ursa, how much pushing and prodding the midwife had done, and how few pains she’d taken to keep her hands clean. If Fabia Ursa had an infection, what could anybody in Carnuntum do about it? There were no antibiotics here. Aspirin? The willow-bark decoction was the closest thing to it, but it wouldn’t do anything about the actual cause of the fever. Bed rest and hope for the best, Nicole thought. The thought made her uneasy. She hadn’t ever known anybody who’d died in childbirth, but she’d heard enough about the mortality rate before the advent of antisepsis. Puerperal fever was nothing to take lightly.

“Is there something we can — “ Nicole began, without much hope, but she had to ask.

Fabia Ursa interrupted her. “I’ll be all right,” she said.

She didn’t sound all right. She didn’t merely sound exhausted, either. She sounded sick, with the same whining, dragging quality to her voice that Nicole’s kids had when they were coming down with something. It reminded her so vividly of Kimberley that last day in West Hills, her heart contracted. If she could be back there, right now — if she could be right there, with all the troubles she’d had, and the stink of vomit, and every other delight of that awful day — oh, God, what she wouldn’t give to have it all back again.

She’d never wanted it so much. At first she’d been too elated. Later she’d been too busy surviving. Now…

Now she couldn’t indulge herself. “I have some willow bark,” she said with a tinge of desperation. “Wait here; I’ll go get it.” As if they could do anything but wait. They didn’t say so. Both Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Honorata nodded gratefully. Fabia Ursa sat mute, sunk again in that frightening lethargy.

Julia frowned when Nicole asked for the decoction. “Fabia Ursa?” she asked. Nicole nodded. “That’s not good,” Julia said. “Fever after you have a baby — that can kill you.”

“I know,” Nicole said irritably. She didn’t, not down in her bones where real belief was, but she’d seen Fabia Ursa. That was a very sick woman. Sick, she thought, as a dog.

Julia fetched the willow-bark decoction from its storage place, moving quickly, but not nearly quickly enough for Nicole’s peace of mind. She snatched the jar with scant thanks and hurried back to the tinker’s shop.

Fabia Ursa had gone upstairs — a good sign, maybe, if she could travel that far: now wasn’t it? Sextus Longinius lulus took the painfully inadequate jar with gratitude that made Nicole want to burst into tears. “Thank you, Umma,” he said. “You’re a good neighbor.”

Nicole started to brush him off, but caught herself. He needed to be grateful more than she needed to be comfortable about it. “I’ll bring you a loaf of bread every day,” she said, “and food your wife might like. All you’ll have to worry about is getting her well.”

She’d done it now: he looked ready to fall at her feet. “You are the best of neighbors,” he said. “The gods blessed me and my family when they set us next to you.”

Nicole mumbled something and fled. It was cowardly, and she really should have gone upstairs with him to make sure Fabia Ursa took the medicine, but she’d had all she could stand.

It wasn’t cowardice, she told herself, not really, that kept her away all the rest of that day and all the next. There was the marketing, there was the laundry, there was a flood of customers that ran her flat out from dawn to dusk. It was two days before she could scrape out enough time to get away. She had managed to send food over, once by Lucius and a time or two by Julia. She’d kept her promise in that much.

She found the tinker’s shop deserted. The same pot he’d been mending before, or another just like it, lay forgotten on the workbench. As she stood hesitating in the doorway, a man’s voice floated down the stairs: “ — warm fomentations on the belly, an enema of warm olive oil, and gruel for nourishment. If she should show improvement, thin, sour wine would be best. “

A doctor, Nicole realized. A few moments later he trod briskly down the stairs. He looked like his voice: thin, intense, and profoundly preoccupied. He was younger than she would have guessed. His brows were drawn together. He did not look either pleased or hopeful. With a curt nod in her general direction, he left in a quite unmistakable hurry. To his next patient? Nicole wondered.

None of what he’d told Longinius lulus sounded unreasonable, though Nicole wouldn’t have wanted an enema if she felt like hell. But they were all things she would have done for the flu in L.A. They weren’t much good for anything more serious.

He was trying to make Fabia Ursa as comfortable as he could, because he couldn’t make her well. Nobody could do that, except Fabia Ursa herself. And that included Nicole.

She wavered, debating the good sense of going up to see if there was anything after all that she could do. But in the end she didn’t go. She left the loaf of Julia’s fresh-made bread and a bowl of stewed pears on the counter, and retreated to the tavern.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. The night again was broken by the baby’s crying, quickly suppressed: the wet nurse was doing her job, Nicole had to suppose.

Fabia Honorata was downstairs in the shop when Nicole went over the next morning, sitting on the tinker’s bench, looking as if she hadn’t sat down or rested in days. She looked up as Nicole came in, and managed a greeting, but not a smile.

Nicole asked the question she had to ask. “Fabia Ursa?”

“Not good,” Fabia Honorata said, too exhausted for anything resembling dramatics. “She doesn’t recognize any of us. She thrashes in the bed. The fever burns her like fire. Pray to whoever you think will hear you. I’d even pray to the Christians’ blustering fool of a god if I thought it would do any good.”

Nicole felt as if she’d been hit in the stomach. It didn’t matter that she’d been expecting such news. She’d hoped — against hope, she’d known from the start — that she’d find Fabia Ursa sleeping, the fever broken, and everything as well as it could be.

She should have known that this world didn’t have much to do with hope. Again she left the food she’d brought, again she fled to the sanctuary of the tavern. There in the comforting smells of bread and wine and humanity, she prayed as Fabia Honorata had asked her to. She did it halfheartedly, self-consciously. Somewhere on the road out of childhood, she’d lost the knack. But she tried. She hoped that would count for something.

That evening, as she was closing the tavern, she discovered what it had counted for. A storm of weeping and wailing broke from the shop next door. Fabia Honorata ran out in its wake, hair awry, tunic torn. “She’s dead!” she cried. “My sister’s dead!”