On Leave

Young Inarra, green and scaly, oversized webbed hands and feet, gangly and awkward and an adolescent as the seafolk counted such things, sat in the chair across from her mother's desk in her mother's study, trying to look anywhere but at her mother, waiting for her to put down the estate account book. Her mother was a respectable member of the Children of the Sea -the nagaa - covered in smooth green scales like her daughter. She wore half-lensed reading glasses, fastened to her noseless flat face by a elastic string looped around her fin-like ears. Her hair was pulled back in a rather severe bun, with only a touch of grey here or there among the jet-black strands. Although she had big, powerful webbed hands, she handled her writing brush with ease, making notes in the account book in the precise, elegant handwriting, that years ago, had won her a first place Prize for Penmanship at the Academy competitions she participated in as a student.

The study was in a corner of the big house, with sliding teak and rice paper walls partly open to catch the cool breezes from the ocean's edge to the south. It was an austere, orderly room, in keeping with her mother's taste. On the walls, on shelves concealed behind more sliding doors, were row upon row of account books, year after year, for the last decades since her mother had taken over running the estate from her late grandmother. Elsewhere, Inarraa knew, there were archives going back some six hundred years, carefully preserved, the history of her family and the land - the rice paddies, the fish ponds, the generations of seafolk and their human tenants who had lived, worked and died here. Sometimes Inarraa , if she thought about it, felt the weight of all that history, but never did it weigh quite as heavily as it did now.

The sun was beginning to set. and the shadows in the room were lengthening. One of the human house servants padded soundlessly into the room and lit several oil lamps from a long glowing taper she carried, and, after bowing to her mother and Inarra, padded silently out of the room once again.

Her mother finished making an entry , closed the account book, carefully washed out her writing brush in a elaborately carved little jade water holder, dried the brush with a small square linen cloth, capped the water holder, and put the bush, the inkstone and the water holder away in a drawer of the desk.

She peered at Inarraa over her reading glasses and sighed. Inarraa's heart sank. If there had been any doubt in her mind concerning the subject of the discussion she was about to have with her mother, that doubt was now replaced by apprehensive certainty. Inarraa studied the pattern of the rice mat under her feet intently, as if hoping to find some mitigating explanation there.

"Inarraa" her mother began, and then sighed again. She seemed uncertain how to begin. She took off her her reading glasses and polished them with a silken ribbon. Her mother hesitated, then started again "Inarraa...do you know why I've asked you here tonight, daughter?"

"Um, well..." Inarraa began, knowing perfectly well why she was there. The young girl looked over her mother's shoulder at one of the wooden squares in the rice-paper and teak screen standing behind her mother's desk as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world just at that moment.

"You are no longer a child, Inarraa" her mother began "you are a young woman, and, up to a point, I have believed in giving you privacy and extending this family's trust in your good judgement. But with that trust comes responsibility on your part, you know."

"I know" muttered Inarraa in a low tone of voice.

"Now,unlike some families, we have never felt it necessary to enforce strict rules of separation. Your friendship with that human Mirah, the Free Trader girl - that is not in any way a problem. However..."

Here it comes thought Inarraa, already wincing in anticipation.

"...when it comes to relations with our human tenants, it is quite another matter. Please understand - everything you do you do as the young mistress, and becomes known very quickly. There has been..." her mother paused "talk. Gossip."

"Oh" said Inarraa, unable to think of any other response.

"Inarraa, on other estates, in other families, for the mistress to carry on a relationship with one of the family tenants is a accepted practice. Indeed, on some of the great estates, it is tradition that family members assemble harems from among their humans! But that has never been and never will be a tradition in this family!"

"We may be, as some would say, members of the lesser gentry, and unlike some of the great estates, we do not claim descent directly from Great Dagon! But we have worked this land far longer that most of those great ones, many of whom are no more than former wholesale fishmongers who bought land and a dubious certificate of ancestry from the Priestesses of Dagon! We have worked on this small estate alongside our humans, unlike those grandees, those newly minted gentry who live in Inquanok, rarely visit their holdings, and who depend on overseers to whip their gambling and whoring funds out of their tenants! Inarraa, do you aspire to that kind of status?"

"No, oh, never, Mother!"

"I should hope not." replied her mother "We did not bring you up that way. But Inarraa, I must tell you that your father and I are very disappointed in you."

"Father knows?" Inarraa looked up at this.

"How could he not?" her mother replied sadly "How could I conceal it from him, when as I say, there has been talk. Shameful talk. Inarraa, your dear father is especially disappointed in you just now."

Disappointed. Her mother and father, unlike the overseer parents of children on the estate, were never angry at or furious with their daughter. They were never more than disappointed. But disappointed was a word that carried all the weight of six hundred years or more of family tradition, of expectations and responsibility. Disappointed was a word that lay on Inarraa's conscience like a massive lead weight of disapproval.

"I'm sorry, Mother" Inarraa said, staring miserably at the floor.

"Inarraa, I understand you are a young woman now and that there are certain, um" Her mother paused.

Now her mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and, for a moment, looked away from Inarraa.

"Certain...certain...temptations. One played with the children of the human tenants when one was a child. One sees a former playmate working in the fields, ahem, as naked as usual - and humans, somehow, manage to be more naked than we seafolk are, all that skin and, ah, other things plainly in view.... " Her mother's discomfort seemed to increase "and, ah, one sees, you see, as if for the first time, how, uh, comely he or she is and, well, one thing leads to another and, um...well, I am well aware of how such things come about "

Now Inaraa looked directly at her mother. Was she about to confide something?

But the moment passed. "It won't do, Inarraa! Surely you can see that. Our humans are simple people, and you cannot trifle with their feelings like this. If you continue,your lover will sooner or later expect, well, favors. She will imagine herself above the rest, and this will sow trouble among the other tenants! How can this end well for her? She is, when all is said and done a human. You cannot recognize her status legally. It is unfair to her; worse, it is cruel to lead her on so. Surely you can see that?"

Inarraa nodded in agreement, knowing what her mother said was true. Already she had been coming to the same conclusions on her own, and had felt more and more uneasy and ashamed as the illicit relationship - that had begun so carefree, so easily that summer - continued on it's course.

"Now" her mother continued "if, instead of our Lowlands, all this was taking place in the human border kingdoms - there would be no problem at all. There, the humans enslave each other, sell their own kind on the auction block like cattle. If a human master or mistress there wishes to sleep with one of his or her slaves, it is, I understand, no great matter, and if they tire of their concubines they simply get rid of them. The humans of the border kingdoms may treat each other like beasts but that is not the way of the Children of the Sea! Our tenants are tied to the land and our service, but they are not just slaves, they cannot be bought or sold, and they certainly cannot be used as sexual appliances!"

"I receive the latest journals from Inquanok" her mother went on "and I read about these new sciences" her mother spat out the words in contempt "this biology, this so-called evolution that says that humans are no more than beasts, inferior animals! Detestable rubbish! Were we to accept this new teaching, this science - why, soon we'd be no better than the humans in the border kingdoms!

"We have never been overly religious in this family; it's true. From ancient right we could take our place in the yearly rituals to the Other Gods on R'yleh -it's true, I have never found that a very useful or appealing prospect! But one belief of our ancestors I do hold to - that humans are no more beasts than we seafolk are. We are, as the most ancient wisdom tells us, sisters in Great Dagon,born of the same Primordial Egg! Of course, the humans are lesser creatures, but they have a place assigned them by Great Dagon, as do we. Our responsibility is to protect and guide them, and theirs is to serve. Their welfare is our concern, and it is our duty to shoulder the difficult tasks, think for them when they cannot! If you want to see how it would be without our guidance, you need merely look north to the wretched human slaver "free principalities". Or Sanbenetra, that den of vice and infamy!"

"Inarraa, someday you will be mistress of this estate, and that grave responsibility will be yours. Do you think you can continue as you have begun?"

Now truly ashamed, her voice choking with remorse, young Inarraa replied "No, Mother, I know I cannot! I'm so sorry I've let you and Father down!"

Her mother's voice softened " Inarraa. you are our daughter, and your father and I love you dearly. There will be no punishment for this unfortunate incident - you are no longer a small child. I know you understand what the right thing to do is, and I trust you to do it. But..."

Inarraa looked up

"You must do it yourself" her mother said "You, yourself, must go to the poor girl and tell her - it is over, it is over forever. That, I think, will be punishment enough, if punishment is needed. Can I trust you, Inarraa, to do this?"

"Yes, Mother" Inarraa replied, her heart sinking.

And the next day, at the pre-arranged tryst between Inarraa and her human lover, Inarraa told her everything. The young human girl did not argue, did not make a scene; she merely sat on a mossy log in the little sun-dappled grassy hollow that had been the scene of such happiness for them both, and began to sob, great tears rolling down her face as Inarraa watched helplessly.

Later, another human tenant dropped off a package at the big house for Inarraa. Inarraa opened it and found, neatly rolled up and tied with a string, all the poems she had written for the human girl.

After that, Inarraa avoided the part of the rice paddies where she knew the human girl worked. But she never entirely forgot her in the years to come.

The years rolled on, one after the other. Instead of attending school in Inquanok, the young mistress marched off to war, war with the great human Northern Commonwealth that lay beyond the petty border kingdoms. First victory at Sanbenitra, then disastrous defeat at Bloody Ridge, and then the advance of the human armies into the now practically defenseless seafolk Lowlands in what the Commonwealth claimed was a war of liberation.

The Commonwealth armies seemed unstoppable, the fertile Lowlands -source of most of the Realm of Great Dagon's food supplies - forever in their grip, the invasion or reduction by starvation of the Islands and Inquanok only a matter of time, until against all expectations, the seafolk raised new armies, and stopped the human Commonwealth in a desperate stand along the Dragon River. The seafolk stopped them and then threw them back, fighting one bloody, bitter battle after another, driving the hated invader north, until they finally regained the Lowlands from the humans.

As they retreated, the Commonwealth carried out a scorched earth policy, destroying rice paddies and fish ponds, poisoning wells, burning everything that could be set alight, driving as many of the former tenants of the seafolk before them as they could to be "liberated" into forced labor for the Commonwealth. The seafolk inherited a ruined land and a starving population, the once-bountiful Lowlands now a mere shell of what they had once been.

It is summer once again in the Lowlands, and we are in Reeasthaa, once a sleepy little village along the old post road connecting the interior to the sea. Very little of the former village remained, most of the buildings either torn down for material for hasty fortifications, or burned to the ground when the Commonwealth decided that they could no longer hold the region. Now the site of the village was occupied by draft animals and silent lines of humans impressed by the seafolk as porters, by quartermaster and military police units of the Army of Great Dagon, and pitiful knots of starving, skeletal humans, too weak to be drafted as porters, who feebly tried to beg scraps of food from the northward-marching columns of advancing seafolk soldiery. Most of the forest cover in the area was gone now, the soil drying and turning into choking dust under the blazing summer sun.

One of the few buildings that survived from former days was the sturdy baked-clay and wattle headquarters of the pre-war Rural Constabulary, now occupied by a small Military Police unit. Inside the headquarters was a Military Police officer, looking over the papers of a Lieutenant who stood before her.

"Lieutenant, ah Inarraa." said the Military Police officer, a somewhat faded seafolk woman, with a strong smell of raw rice spirit about her. "Now that's a name seems familiar. did your family..."

"Our estate was near here, before the war" said Lieutenant Inarraa. All traces of gawky adolescent was gone from the taut, scarred figure who stood on the other side of the desk.

"Ah." said the Military Police officer "Please, please, we don't stand on ceremony here in this backwater, please sit down honorable Lieutenant - I'm getting a cramp in my neck looking up at you. sit down, sit down, honorable one. Name's District Captain Olyshaaa, military police commander and head of reconstruction for this area. which is a rather awkward combination, you'll agree but we make do, we make do. damned little to reconstruct, I'm afraid - the human bitches did a through job when they pulled out of here. "

Lieutenant Inarraa sat down on a repurposed wooden crate, as buzzing flies congregated on a reddish stain on the wall behind the district Captain.

"On leave? Not where I'd choose to spend my leave - down the road a half-dozen miles or so there's a nice new whorehouse and a little casino,don't cheat you too much and the whores don't have too many diseases, not yet, anyway. Classified officers only, so there are some standards! Tell them I sent you and..." The Captain saw the Lieutenant frown and went on hurriedly "But to each their own, I always say. Now, you were saying there's a service we could do for you? We of the Military Police, always ready to help a comrade you know. and what can I do for you, honorable Lieutenant?"

"My family lived in the big house, about a mile east from here, along the Willow Road, on the hill." Lieutenant Inaraa replied. "I've come looking to find out what happened to my parents."

"Your parents" District Captain Olyshaaa hesitated for a moment, and looked intently at Lieutenant Inarraa. She then reached under the table and produced a dirty green bottle topped by a cork "Here honorable Lieutenant, have a drink on me, rice spirits, very smooth. won't blind you, no wood alcohol. Have a drink, talking's dusty work."

Inarraa hesitated, then shrugged, opened the bottle and drank from it, wincing a little as the raw spirits went down, before handing the bottle back to the District Captain. The District Captain took a drink in her turn, and then set the bottle on the table next to her.

"You understand, honorable Lieutenant, there's no possibility that they're alive somewhere. we know that much, at least..."

"I know they're dead. I've already received letters from my cousins. What I want to know is how they died, what happened to them, perhaps..." Lieutenant Inarraa hesitated "where they're buried."

"I'm sorry Lieutenant" the District Captain sighed "The damned humans took care to destroy every record they might of had, and only they really know what happened, exactly. But, yes, we do have a little information. "

The District Captain stood up, crossed over to a pile of bound papyrus notebooks leaning against a dirty clay wall. Pulling one out, she opened it and flipped through it until she found what she was looking for.

"Um." District Captain Olyshaaa began, "Mother, Ayeeeshaa vos Isharaaa, father Minra va Leeythaa. Now, first I want make it clear that your parents were offered help to evacuate when the Commonwealth armies approached. They were warned repeatedly about what might happen. It's true, it turned out later, that the danger was far greater than anyone at the time realized, but they were warned. They refused to leave, apparently, citing the welfare of their tenants as a concern."

"I see." said Lieutenant Inaraa.

"Now, from interviews, it seems that your parents were not interfered with when the first Commonwealth troops came through the area. In general, this appears to have been normal procedure, front-line troops usually ignoring stray civilian seafolk. It is true..."

District Captain Olyshaaa hesitated for a moment "that when a column of Commonwealth troops passed by the estate fields, a certain number of your tenants lined the road and cheered them on as liberators. Not all. As was usually the case, most human tenants sat back to see what would happen before they did anything."

"However" continued District Captain Olyshaaa, looking over her notes "there don't seem to be any records indicating that anyone denounced your parents to the occupying forces, as, sorry to say, was the case in other districts."

"Go on" said Lieutenant Inaraa.

"After the initial occupation, much of what we think we know about the fate of your mother and father is mostly guesswork. We do know that they both survived living in the big house on the hill for several months after that, as we have a scrap of a Commonwealth record noting that the "head of household A.V. Isharaaa" lodged a complaint with the occupying authorities regarding the use of humans as forced labor by the occupiers and the abduction of humans by border slaver gangs in the wake of the armies. No response to these complaints has been found."

"We believe it was about then that their household staff either ran off or was pressed into service as forced labor. About a month later - although our interviewees contradict themselves here - the new relocation policy was announced.We do not know if your mother and father were separated or went together to the the so-called relocation area in their district. We have no information on what happened when they arrived there. "

"What we are certain of is that no one who was called to those relocation areas was ever seen alive again."

Lieutenant Inarraa was silent.

"I'm sorry Lieutenant." The District Captain shook her head "That's really all we know. As for where they might be buried.."

The District Captain crossed over to a map hanging on the opposite wall. "so far we have found mass graves, each holding from a hundred to a several thousand bodies, here, here, here and here. The passage of time, the advanced state of , well, decomposition, and their liberal use of quicklime has made any identification of bodies impossible."

"One other thing" said District Captain Olyshaaa "the so-called 'new relocation policy' was put into effect well before the Commonwealth suffered defeat at the Dragon River, it was put into place when they thought their position in the lowlands was secure. There was no question of military necessity nor were the victims soldiers who had been captured in battle and honorably executed in accordance with the laws of war - they were defenseless, harmless civilians, all of them. This policy was not on account of any panic or last-minute revenge - it had been planned out long beforehand, and was carried out in cold blood." For a moment the District Captain dropped her neutral tone of voice "Gods below curse the rotten bitches, rot them all, damn them to Hell! Murderers!"

"Thank you for your time, honorable District Captain Olyshaaa" said Lieutenant Inaraa with no visible show of emotion "I've found out what I needed to know.

"Ah." said the District Captain "Please, have another drink..."

"Thank you but I must take my leave." replied the Lieutenant "If I start now I can make it to my family's home before nightfall."

"Well, but honorable Lieutenant, where are you going to lodge ? Now, a carriage will take you down to that establishment I mentioned and they do rent rooms for the night. Really, you shouldn't be alone..."

"I have no need to rent a room." said Lieutenant Inaraa "I intend to spend the night at my home."

"Lieutenant..." District Captain Olyshaaa began to say something further about better accomodation down the road.

But by then Lieutenant Inarraa had left.

Lieutenant Inarraa was delayed by a torrential rainstorm that erupted when the was two thirds of the way there, and so night had fallen by the time she arrived at where she remembered her family home had been. Peering into the darkness, through sheets of warm rainh, at first she could see nothing at all, and thought for a few seconds that she had taken a wrong turn scrambling up the hill, missed the location entirely. But then a flash of lightning revealed, here and there, posts sticking up from the muddy ground - the remains of the house's foundation.

Inarraa finally reached the spot where her family home had been. Little remained. A post here, a trampled teak screen here. The occupying Commonwealth troops, before putting what was left to the torch, had used the building as a garbage heap and a latrine. Her face a mask, sometime outlined by sudden flashes of lightning, the torrential rain beating down on her, Lieutenant Inarraa walked back and forth, trying to remember where each room had been, what it had looked like.

Finally she found a torn scrap of paper near where her bedroom had been. She sat down on a fallen teak beam, staring at the scrap of paper trying to read it by the fitful flashes of distant lightning, trying to decide if the writing she thought she could see was her mother''s handwriting. As she held it, the scrap of paper disintegrated in the rain.

After a while, Inarraa buried her face in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time.

It was almost noon by the time Lieutenant Inarraa returned from the ruined house, bearing a small bag of scraps she'd retrieved from the wreckage.

" Next cart goin' north, honored one?" replied a soldier leaning against a broken down haywain "Be one along any minute, Lieutenant."

"I'll wait, then" said Lieutenant Inarraa

"No shortage of transport goin' north, honored one!" Another soldier laughed "North's where the war is!"

As Lieutenant Inaraa waited, she became aware of a commotion among the group of starving human beggars behind her. She ignored it, until she heard a voice cry out "The young mistress! It's the young mistress!" Then she turned, and saw one of the beggars pointing at her and repeating "The young mistress! She's returned! It's the young mistress." an excited murmur arose among the other humans.

Slowly, Inarraa walked towards the human who was pointing her out to the others. as she got close, the rail-thin human - a female - turned excited, glistening eyes on her, tears running down her cheeks. "Daughter of the deep be praised, it's the young mistress come back to us! It's Inarraa!"

"Yes" said Lieutenant Inarraa "I'm Inarraa."

"Oh Inarraa," the human cried, relief and hope in her wasted face " we've had such a terrible time since this awful war started. No food, beaten and enslaved by those soldiers from the North, and what happened to your poor parents, Inarraa! But you're back! You're back! You remember me, don't you, Inarraa? From the old days, the good days? remember those poems you wrote me? Remember?"

"Yes" said Lieutenant Inarraa "I remember you. How could I forget?"

The two soldiers were disputing the result of a dice roll, and several carters were watering their giant ground sloths and checking the strapping on their cartloads, when they heard a wet, butcher-block sound. They turned to see Lieutenant Inarraa, bloody short sword in one big webbed hand, standing over a headless human corpse, the body shuddering as it pumped great gouts of bright red blood into the dirt. The severed head stared blindly into the sun as the remaining humans shrieked and tried to back away, tried to flee, betrayed by their thin starved bodies, as the Lieutenant, her face a mask of blind fury, advanced on them, blade drawn.

"Uh, say, wait a second" said one of the quartermasters, making no move to get near sword-wielding Inarraa. One of the soldiers laughed and another said "real temper that Lieutenant's got!"

Just as Inarraa was about to strike at another screaming human, helplessly curled up in a fetal position at her feet, awaiting the fatal blow, a strong arm gripped Inarraa's sword arm and another encircled her torso, The District Captain breathed rice spirit in Inarraa's ear and said rapidly "Uh, know how you feel, just calm down now all right, you made your point but, uh, we kind of need them for hauling, you know. Overlook this one, whats a human more or less, but kinda a black mark on my record if you slaughter the rest why would you want me to have a black mark on my record?"

After a long,tense moment, the district Captain felt Lieutenant Inarraa's body relax. "You going to be all right now, honorable one? Can I let go now?" After another moment Inarraa nodded, and the District Captain let go. Looking about, the District Captain spotted a carriage. "they're going north, hurry and I can get you right on there, get you on your way! All right?"

" Lieutenant Inarraa reporting back from leave, ready for duty, honored Company Commander!" Inarraa said as she stood at attention.

"Your leave still runs for another four days,Lieutenant" replied her Company Commander "what are you doing back here so soon?"

"Begging the honored one's pardon" said Inarraa "rear area didn't agree with me! Thought I would come back early."

"Well, fine" said the Company Commander. "Just as well, they're going to be cutting leaves short anyway. Word's been passed down - we're going on the offensive again, into the Northlands! You'll have your work cut out for you, Lieutenant!"

"I can't think of anything I'd like better, honored Company Commander!" Lieutenant Inarraa said.