Household Gods (42 page)

Read Household Gods Online

Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
10.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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 Longinius 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 Longinius 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.

Other books

Angels & Sinners: The Motor City Edition by Ashley Suzanne, Bethany Lopez, Bethany Shaw, Breigh Forstner, Cori Williams, D.M. Earl, Jennifer Fisch-Ferguson, Melanie Harlow, Sara Mack, Shayne McClendon
Bubble: A Thriller by Anders de La Motte
Possession of Souls by Weatherford, Lacey
Fatal Headwind by Leena Lehtolainen