Episode 22: Stingray (Soren)

Soren was the happiest kidnapee ever. If he had to get kidnapped in his life, he tho ught it said a lot about his luck and people skills that he’d ended up here.

Things his kidnappers had done:

1. Saved his son’s life.
2. Given them a house
3. Gotten him nice and drunk after the birth so he would forget certain images

It wasn’t really a house. It sort of was, if a one-room box on wheels, with no plumbing or electricity, could be counted as a house.

It was better than the tent, and slightly less inflammable.

It was safer for Nim and the babies.

It came with a price Soren wasn’t willing to pay.

He got it. Rhoganoi probably didn’t have twins often. There were a lot of things he considered normal that Rhoganoi didn’t do often – having twins, bathing, brushing teeth…

Bathing was critical.

Soren liked a few of the creature comforts. He liked being clean. He liked avoiding corn. He liked sleep, because he was an insane person.

What the Rhoganoi didn’t seem to realize was that twins, in all their ten-toed wide-eyed glory, and sleep, in all its warm and cozy glory, were mutually exclusive concepts.

The fact that Fifika – the price for the vardo house thingy they lived in – had interrupted Soren’s couple hours of beauty sleep seemed like a crime that should be punishable by punishment. Something extreme.

Maybe having to have an open box of chocolate mints on the counter and never being able to eat any. That seemed like a good punishment.

Fifika subscribed to a handful of important Rhoganoi philosophies:

1. Bathing made people sick
2. A dozen kids was a small family
3. Any child old enough to get itself around was the property and responsibility of the entire kumpania

She wasn’t completely wrong. But watching a skinny seven-month-old baby drag herself around in the dirt and mud made Rhoganoi philosophy number one especially difficult to stomach.

Soren was tempted to bathe the baby himself, except he had enough work keeping his two clean in this place.

“Pani,” Fifika demanded when he reached her vardo. It was the same size as theirs and somehow managed to house Fifika and her horde of fifteen. Granted, she kept some of the older ones in a blanket tent that hung off the side of the house but…

…let’s be honest here.

What was it like in that house when someone had gas?

Not that Soren wanted to find out. He just had a mind that couldn’t not think of these things.

“Pani,” Fifika said again. She pointed to two buckets, and then the lake.

Soren groaned.

As the son of a corn farmer, who was the son of a corn farmer, Soren had realized his fate when he was only six years old: He was going to spend his life talking about weather and moisture and setting the market. He was going to spend his life lugging water to crops.

He’d refused to spend his life in the dirt and the mud, lugging water, growing grains, listening to his dad’s favorite topic of conversation – corn.

So he’d studied and applied himself and managed to land a spot at the best school in the country.

And here he was, in the dirt and the mud, lugging water.

Getting the buckets to the lake wasn’t the problem. It was a steep climb down, and there were places he could have fallen if he’d wanted to, but it was doable. Nobody died.

It was the trip back up to camp that killed Soren.

He couldn’t decide whether it was his biceps or his knuckles that suffered more. They were both martyrs under the oppression of Fifika, but he decided his knuckles had the worse fate: he could twist his arms and relieve some of the pressure on his biceps, but the knuckles still had to grip the bucket handles.

It was bad. It wasn’t just bad, it was the worst.

It was the worst of the worst.

Manual labor was evil.

He plopped the buckets – carefully so they didn’t spill – in front of Fifika’s front steps.

“You’re welcome,” he told her, because she didn’t speak his language. “Even though my knuckles will never forgive you, you’re welcome.”

She smacked the side of his head and went off on some kind of loud head-smackey rant.

“I love you too,” he told her. “I hope at least one of these buckets is for the baby’s bath.”

She spit on the ground.

Maybe if he thought of her as a llama, the spitting would make sense. He could even learn to expect it.

“Bye, llama lady,” he said.

Back at his vardo, he picked up the two buckets that hung from the wall. If Fifika needed water, Nim probably would too.

He lugged them down the cliff and back up the cliff.

Somehow, they weren’t as heavy when he carried them for Nim. He even bet Nim wouldn’t spit at him if he suggested one of the babies needed a bath.

He climbed their vardo steps, triumphant. Nim was awake, and baby-free.

She still had henna paint on her face from last night, when the Rhoganoi had done some kind of blessing about the birth and her recovery. It accented shadows he’d never paid attention to before and made him want to kiss her.

Everything made him want to kiss her. He was sixteen, he loved her, she was incredibly attractive…

They didn’t need back-to-back twins.

He grinned at her. “Not only did I get water for Fifika, but I brought some for us too.”

Nim grinned and put a finger on the side of her face. “My hero. You lugged water all the way here. It’s too bad I don’t have water magic,” she teased.

Oh. Yeah. Water magic. He could have just asked Nim to deal with the water, while he watched the babies.

She kissed him. “You need sleep.”

“My knuckles may never forgive me,” he groaned.

She laughed. “You have water magic too,” she reminded him. She kissed his knuckles.

They didn’t need back-to-back twins.

He laughed, harder than he could remember ever laughing. “I think I’m tired.”

“I think so too,” she said, with a smile. She handed him a bowl of brothy soup. Rhoganoi didn’t eat meat on Friday, so this was all vegetables and legumes, but it was still delicious. “Have this, then sleep.”

He didn’t want to sleep. He wanted this time alone, just them, with her. “How are Screamy and Squawky?” he asked. He didn’t care which one got which name, since either fit any newborn in his opinion.

“Sleeping like the dead, may they rest in peace. I won the war against refusing naps.”

“For now,” he teased in a deep and ominous voice. He leaned against some kind of wooden decorative dresser carving display table surface whatever – he didn’t have a clue what half the things in the vardo were for – and sipped the soup straight out of its wooden bowl.

“I’m sorry you experienced true labor this morning,” she said, eating some soup of her own. He was glad she was eating. Maybe the twins would sleep long enough that they could both get some rest.

Or, you know, not make back-to-back twins in the most creative possible way to not make them.

“How’s the whole healing thing going?” he asked.

“Well enough to lie because you need sleep more.”

“Says you,” he muttered. He kissed her. They should sleep, he knew that. They didn’t need back-to-back twins.
But… “You know what helps me sleep?” he asked her, as he ran his hands over every curve of her body. It had been days. Almost a week.

“Red drink?” she said with a small laugh. She ran her hands inside his shirt, grazing his abs and the places where his love handles would have been if he weren’t a stick.

“You’re just trying to knock me out.”

She was right, though; both of them needed sleep. This kind of thing would have to wait until they were more functional, like…someyear, after twins. After a decade of rest.

He started to pull her towards the bed, to sleep, when someone clapped their hands outside the vardo.

“Hello?” Rhoda’s voice called.

Because Rhoda was impossibly short and shrunken like a prune, and because the vardo stood several feet off the ground, he could only see her eyes. They took in the embrace with a scowl.

“Hello?” she called.

Nim backed away from him and turned to look at Rhoda. “Evening,” she said, pleasant. Much more pleasant than Soren would have managed.

“Your turn,” Rhoda said. She bent over. They heard a grunt, and Rhoda lifted a filthy boy with wild hair onto the floor of the vardo.

Nim’s jaw physically dropped.

Soren was impressed.

“My turn for what?” Nim asked.

Rhoda climbed the vardo steps. “He have no parents. The daje share him.” Daje was Rhoganoi for mothers. “I pick him away tomorrow morning,” Rhoda promised.

“Hang on,” Soren argued. Back to things Rhoganoi knew and didn’t know about having twins. “I bet most of the other mothers only have one baby at a time. How is Nim supposed to ever sleep?”

Rhoda gave him a sharp look. “Don’t seem tired to me,” she said, and Soren just knew she was talking about that kiss. First real kiss in a week, followed by a guilt-trip.

Nim picked the little boy up, probably ruining her outfit in the process. “Tomorrow?” she asked.

Rhoda nodded her head. It made her eyes disappear and reappear below the threshold of the vardo. “Tomorrow,” she promised. She turned away, but Soren was pretty sure she had an eye in the back of her head that watched them while she walked off.

“What’s his name?” he called after her.

She turned back, a shake of her head. “He don’t have name.”

“Are you actually coming back here, to take him, tomorrow?”

Rhoda laughed.

All her billions of shredded blackened teeth showed. Whenever she smiled Soren wanted to mention a nice dentist he knew in Elbhean who could sedate the entire mouth while he solved all her problems.

“I see you tomorrow,” Rhoda said, and this time she left for real.

Soren crossed his arms and looked at the filth-monkey. The hairball. His hair…was kind of a work of art. It was the rest of him that was a disaster. The way his hair stood on end though…

Soren needed to not have ideas.

“That sounded suspiciously like a no,” he muttered. He carried a bucket to the edge of the vardo and hopped down before lowering the bucket with him. Heating the water to a nice temperature, with fire magic, was easy.

“Soap?” he requested. “Hairball?”

Nim handed him both. He stripped the hairball and Nim joined them with the second bucket and washed the boy’s clothes.

Soren rinsed and scrubbed him.

The entire time, he didn’t make a sound, but he smiled a lot.

Soren smiled a lot back, and sang goofy songs he’d heard around the palace and around the kumpania.

“So we’re keeping him,” Nim mused. She dehydrated the clothes, which came out like a stiff board so she dumped the bucket and refilled it with her own magic before re-washing the clothes.

“What?” Soren asked.

Nim managed to do a perfect mockery of Rhoda’s intonations: “Watch this boy. It has no name. Maybe if you take him now you will only have three kids and not four.”

Soren laughed.

He had intended to sleep. Maybe Nim had other ideas.

“That doesn’t mean we have to keep him,” he argued, even as the hair idea flashed across his mind again. “It can be like babysitting. Insane babysitting where nobody ever sleeps.”

Nim dried the clothes again, while Soren dried the boy’s hair. No matter what he did, how hard he pressed, the hair bounced up to stand on end.

“You’re right,” she said after a minute. “She has no foresight.”

Soren looked down at the hairball. His hair was fluffy and clean, his skin scrubbed clean. “I didn’t think of that.” His stomach should have sunk. Wasn’t newborn twins bad enough? But it didn’t sink. He felt this weird excitement and wanted to pick the boy up and promise him a home forever.

He helped Nim dress the boy, and she picked him up and carried him into the vardo to feed him. Soren wondered if he was old enough that he ate real food, or if the Rhoganoi nursed babies forever.

One glance at Nim, who served the boy a ladleful of the soup, told him everything he needed to know. The boy watched Nim with a steady gaze while he ate, silent and observant.

Soren wanted to get him talking.

“I think I lost my mind carrying that water,” Soren joked. “That is quality lake water,” he reminded her, teasy. “None of that pure stuff you make.”

According to the Rhoganoi, the detlene – ghosts of dead children – lived in the water.

He wanted it science-y, not creepy. “It’s got all kinds of amoeba in it.”

She grinned at him and raised one eyebrow. “My water has plenty a-me but I’ll still drink the lake water.”

He laughed and sat beside her on the bed. One quick, chaste kiss, nothing at all twin-makey about it, except maybe a little.

“Does that mean you want to keep him?” he asked.

“I just met him.” She looked down at his heavy eyelids, which appeared to be closing. “I don’t know. Maybe we only keep him because I assumed we would.”

Soren decided to go for it. “Yeah, but I mean…he has your dad’s hair. And the dead king’s. I think we could probably prove a genetic link.”

She fluffed the little boy’s hair just as his eyes sank into the last stages of open, little stubborn slits, and closed altogether.

“I want to keep him,” she said, “because this is how I imagine our lives.”

He grinned. “You know we’re crazy, right?”

“We can think about it for a day. But he needs parents.”

He could see that her mind was made up. His was too.

His son, the hairball.

He wanted this boy. They could give him a very different life than he had with the Rhoganoi. They could get him talking, give him a real home, love, immortality.

How could they not offer that to him?

“And a name,” he added, “don’t forget about that.” He finished off his bowl of now-cold soup and lay back on the bed.

She settled next to him, the toddler asleep and still nursing beside her.

“Sleep while they sleep?” she suggested.

He closed his eyes. “While I sleep I’ll try to decide whether we should name him after your dad or your dead uncle. Maybe the uncle, with that hair…” The dead uncle had wild hair like that, in the few pictures of him anyone had.

“Or both,” Nim considered. Her eyes had closed too. “Dremel or Dremy?”

He laughed. “Dremy?” he teased. Maybe if it was a girl. “What about Meldrey?”

“Meldrey?” she teased, with the same incredulous tone. “Go to sleep, Soren.”

“There are worse combinations,” he defended, amused. He could call him Meldrey-Stingray.

Nim twisted around and kissed his forehead, which meant the boy must have unlatched and been sound asleep.

He put his arm around her, and they slept.

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