The wall had fallen, but the brick oven hadn’t. Mirah had grabbed up little Dinah and huddled against the oven, and then the roof had come down. The falling beams should have crushed them both, but two had fallen at an angle over the stove. A rain of stones had trapped Mirah’s ankle, but the beams and the oven had given her a tiny pocket of protected space. My men were cursing, yelling, straining to shift one of the beams, while I peered down through the gap I’d made in the stones. I could just see a strip of my wife’s hair, a section of bruised forehead.

“You’re hurt.” My heart knocked like a drum in my chest as I saw the blood. She had a broad smear of it across her cheek, dried dark brown.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That’s birth blood.”

“What?”

“I had a good knock from those beams. The baby started coming before the stones even settled.” Her head moved, and I saw my wife’s eye glaring up at me through the gap. “You swore this one would be born in a house. I didn’t think I had to mention that the house should still be standing.”

“Move faster!” I screamed at my men.

“We’re fine, all three of us.” Mirah’s voice was tremulous, but it was also, God help me, cheerful. “I helped the midwife when my cousins had babies, so I knew how to tie off the cord…”

“Move! Move!”

A creaking squeal of timber, and the beam slid to one side. I jumped down where its end had rested, reached into the gap in a tumble of sliding shale, and lifted out my wife: filthy, bloody, tired, and smiling.

“Water,” she rasped, and then I crushed her against me. My heart was still hammering, and I still heard the screams in my head that had begun when I found her foot in the rubble. Then I realized the screams were real, and coming in angry wails from the pair of bundles in Mirah’s arms. One was Dinah, her swatch of black hair just visible over the shawl Mirah had wrapped her in. The other—

“We have another daughter.” Mirah gave me a screaming little bundle of limbs still covered in dried birth blood and inadequately swaddled in her mother’s blue shawl. “Thank God she came easy.”

I could hear my men whispering. “That’s a good omen, that is,” the Spaniard was nodding. “Born in blood and ruins, but still kicking. Just like us.” Boil shouted for someone to bring food, water, and bandages for the ankle Mirah held gingerly off the ground, and Antinous was off running before any of the men could jump to it. All I could do was hold her and tremble.

“I promised you’d have a midwife,” I told Mirah numbly. “I promised you’d have a bed—and proper food—”