Toys

Amphy remembers...

"I had lotsa toys when I was a lil tadpole- toy soldiers an' toy birds with flappin' wings, board games an' a model sailing ship I made myself, a model of a three-master ocean crossin schooner of the Free Traders, all made of wood an' ivory and lil' metal castings! You could set all the sails, raise an' lower th' anchor!"

"It took me a month to put it together, even with my mother helpin' - I is sorry to say she cursed the writers of the instruction sheets now and them, some Inquanok merchants went by the name of Frog & Heller, something like that, but we got it built at last an sailed it around in one of the fish ponds!)."

"Toys in my day wern't no plastic shit neither, but made of polished wood an' veneer and lacquer work, bright enamel color on thin metal! I had hundreds of toys, whole armies of hand painted toy soldiers, kites, all manner of things to play with and to set yore dreams on! So did my cousins an' nieces when they showed up! Even the local lil' human children I played with sometime made their own spinnin' tops and stuff like that, near as good as them store-bought ones. Not to mention that, every year, on them days sacred to th' merciful an' wonder-workin' daughter of the deep, my father'd hand out handfuls of pennywhistles an' other things like that to the children of our tenants!"

"The best toys came from Inquanok City, of course and we had their product lists ever' year, and if I'd been a good lil' tadpole and learned my lessons an' didn't give my tutors a hard time, I got to pick out what I wanted and my dear parents would send away for it."

She pauses. "Funny thing was, a lot of the toy makers an other small manufacturers in Inquanok was humans, not seafolk. They was free humans, who'd bought themselves free from serfdom and came to the city to make their own way. Or sometime Free Traders left the life of the sea and settled in Inquanok and started businesses. Frog & Heller who made them flappy flying birds and them model ships was humans, and actually, so was most of the other toy makers, including those who catered to the higher aristocracy, even the families of the priestesses of Dagon. They didn't have the seafolk prejudice against commerce, saved their money an' worked hard."

Amphy falls silent for a while. Finally she continues. "But the war came, and the anti-human pogroms in the capitol city put an end to all that. A shameful business - the riots, the parading of innocent humans down the streets, the lynchin's and all. Some humans died when their shops was burnt down aroun' them, others were hanged at street intersections, or just cut down as they tried to flee. It took the Municipal Constabulary a long time to restore order, an' some say they didn't try very hard. Them families were as loyal to Great Dagon's realm as anyone else - they had no sympathy for the human Commonwealth, who'd enslaved and killed their human kinfolk when they invaded the lowlands, But it didn't matter how much they'd contributed to the war funds, or how often they proclaimed their loyalty - the rabble didn't care, and their business rivals who'd secretly envied them all along didn't care. There were some who tried to stop it, an here and there a family was spared, a shop left unburnt, sometimes the neighbors would hide children... I heard that Anaraa vos Pashaan, last an greatest poet of the Silver Age among us, stood without fear between a terrified group of humans - most just children! - and a mob screaming for their blood, spread wide her arms and shouted that if they wanted the lives of the innocent then they'd have to take her life as well. She was famous everywhere in Inquanok, and that mob backed off an' slunk away. But that was rare. The vast majority of those who wern't out actually killin' just stood back an' said an' did nothing."

"A shameful business! Those who would never have th' guts to fight in th front lines bravely slaughtering helpless civilians - fellow citizens! - at home. Disgusting! Even I, who hated humans more than you could imagine, when I heard about the riots in Inquanok and the murders, even I was horrified , and thought to myself that we'd shamed ourselves before Great Dagon with the blood of the innocent, and how could we be forgiven for that?"

 

Amphy sighs "But no other choice but to fight on, of course. And after that, no more toys from Inquanok, and no more a lot of other things, either - it turned out the pogroms ended up crippling the Realm economically in all kinds of ways, and it never really recovered. After the war, when we of the Second Main Directorate went through the records of the Special Higher Police and foun' they'd incited a lot of the violence, on account of some crazy bullshit about racial unity, or something. Well, them special higher whores hurt us worse than any spy could ever have. And in turn them secret police bitches met their fate, when the First Marshal and the Army finally openly took over and settled the old rivalry with them once and for all.  But by then the damage had been done. We were purer and poorer, to be sure!"

"Of course, I'd long since done with toys, an' anything else except bitterness and believin' in nothing at war's end. Even survivin' was like ashes in my mouth. Everything was gone an ruined by then. But you'll never know, only I remember now, that los' world of mine before that awful war, when I was Inaraa, not Amphy, happy and mercifully unknowin' what was to come."