by Bev Allen
The Tattooed Tribes
by
Bev Allen
A Wild Wolf Publication
Published by Wild Wolf Publishing in 2015
Copyright Bev Allen 2014
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine or journal.
All characters and locations appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Cover created by Poppet.
Edited by Elaina Davidson.
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To the memory of Peter Grant Rule
who loved the wild wood
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence cometh my help.”
~ Psalms 121:1
Chapter 1
Some large insect had found its way into the depths of one of the woven baskets that decorated the walls. The resulting deep drone and soft thuds added to the tension filling the room.
A young apprentice edged away from his post at the door, lifted the basket down and gave it a firm shake.
The insect fell out, flew across to a closed window and began to beat itself against the glass, buzzing twice as loudly.
The three men at the far end of the room looked up with varying degrees of disapproval. Carefully avoiding eye contact, the boy opened the window and freed the creature before returning to his place.
Jon Harabin had been contemplating the tattoos covering his hands and wrists for want of a better occupation, but now his gaze went from the apprentice to the young woman sitting in front of him, silent for the last three minutes, and said, “Well?”
The word seemed to break her trance.
“Sorry?” she said, a note of faint bewilderment in her voice.
“I asked you why you wish to be apprenticed as a Tribal Liaison Officer,” he repeated with studied patience.
She gave a coy smile and fluttered her eyelids at him.
“I just do,” she replied.
The apprentice paused in his study of the floorboards and slapped a hand over his mouth to smother a laugh, but noting Jon’s expression became very solemn, very quickly.
“Okay … Phoebe,” Jon said, after consulting the file before him. “We’ll try this from a different angle. How long have you wished to be a TLO?”
“Ages,” she responded, leaning forward slightly to allow him a more generous view of her cleavage.
Jon’s left hand clenched, making the tattooed animals writhe.
“Was this after you read ‘Love under the Canopy’, or before?” he asked.
“Before,” she replied instantly. “It was after I saw ‘Passion in Paradise’.”
The apprentice turned his back to hide his face, but his shoulders were shaking. Jon glanced at the men on either side of him. One gazed resolutely at the ceiling; the other had his head down.
“In view of the extensive research you’ve undertaken,” Jon continued, “how do you see your role as an apprentice?”
“Well, um ... I’d ... you know.”
“No, Phoebe, I don’t know. I’ve not read the book, so I’m ignorant of what you think you’ll be required to do.”
She giggled, “You must have read it.”
“No,” he replied with stern finality. “But I have read this!” He thumped a weighty tome onto the table. “The Requirements and Standing Orders of the Tribal Liaison Guild. Have you?”
She looked both mulish and sulky. “If I’d known you were going to be mean, I’d never have applied,” she snapped. “And you’re a fake, nothing like it says in the books.”
The apprentice gave up the effort and howled with laughter.
“I think you’d better go, don’t you?” Jon said.
She flounced out of the room, giving the laughing boy a passing blow with an elbow as she went.
Jon dropped his head in despair. “How many like her have we seen today?”
“I make her the ninth,” the man on the left replied. “And if you laugh like that again, my lad, there’ll be trouble.”
This was directed at his apprentice, still in the throes of hilarity.
“You’re enjoying this,” Jon accused. “Both of you.”
Senior Tribal Liaison Officers Cunliff and Machin exchanged grins and nodded.
“It’s your fault,” Jon growled. “If you’d not agreed to take that bloody woman up into the hills, she’d never have written that bloody book.”
Cunliff threw his hands up in defence. “Orders are orders,” he protested. “And how was I to know what she’d go home and write?”
Love under the Canopy had taken Earth by storm. After nearly five hundred years of senseless conflict, The Great War had finally ended little more than fifty years ago. In the time since most authors had written and re-written their war epics, and the public were bored with the subject and ripe for something new.
Tatiana LeJuene went looking for inspiration and colour among the colonies long cut off from the influence of civilisation.
None had fired her imagination as much as the forest world of Boskgrun. It saw barely fifty years of settlement before war left it to its own devices; forgotten, abandoned and severed from all technology.
Enchanted by all she saw she returned home to write a towering epic of conflict and love between the tribal cultures and the new settlers, seeking homes away from the shattered inner worlds.
She peppered her work with eulogies on the scenery she had encountered, hints of mysterious rituals and customs, and she peopled it with sultry tribal maidens, passionate half-savage warriors, and a brave and handsome Tribal Liaison Officer.
The result enchanted the home worlds, firing the public imagination and generating many imitators. Suddenly, from being nothing more than back-water specialists working to reconcile the descendants of the first colonists with the newly arriving ones, Tribal Liaison Officers became the romantic heroes and heroines of legend, and their profession the dream job of thousands.
Any apprenticeship offered attracted huge numbers of applicants, almost all of them with little or no idea of what was involved but, thanks to the books and the resulting holo-dramas, thinking they did.
Most were weeded out right from the beginning, but many, far too many in Jon’s opinion, managed by various means to make it through to this interview stage.
He was about to share with Cunliff any number of reasons why an intelligent person would have seen all this coming, when the peacemaker on his other side intervened.
“You can’t blame him; there’s always been an idiot element applying. All the books have done is increased the number.”
Jon ground his teeth in frustration. “How many big game hunters, gold prospectors, pearl fishers and tree huggers have we seen this week?”
“I’ve lost count,” Machin replied. “I’m sorry Jon, it’s never easy choosing your first apprentice, even under normal circumstances.”
“Oh well,” Jon sighed, stretching a back not accustomed to chairs. “How many more?”
&nbs
p; “There are half a dozen left of today’s bunch,” the apprentice said, and opening the door shouted, “Next!”
The following two applicants were clones of the previous one. The only difference was one could not stop giggling and the other could not stop blushing.
A man in his forties bustled in, demanding he be accepted as it was his ‘destiny’ to be a TLO. It took some time to convince him applicants over the age of eighteen were not admissible, and he stormed out threatening legal action and other dire consequences.
The following candidate at least fell into the right age range. As Jon watched the tall boy stride into the room the words ‘adventurer’ and ‘gambler’ and for some reason ‘swashbuckler’ sprang into his head. It was old fashioned and it carried some regrettable associations, but the slight swagger and the devil-may-care grin did nothing to help dispel the image.
Yet, did a small tremor about the mouth hint all this posturing might be just for show?
Jon answered the grin with a cold stare and noted with some satisfaction that the air of supreme self-confidence dropped away for a second.
“Name?”
“Ian Davis. I’m nearly eighteen years old and I’ve come to be a TLO apprentice.”
He may have been squashed for a moment, but it was obviously going to take a lot more to keep him down. Jon decided to try. “Have you really? What makes you think it’s that easy?” he asked, just enough contempt in his tone to send colour flooding into the boy’s face, bringing a sparkling flash of anger to his eyes.
“I didn’t mean ...” he began, caught himself, took a deep breath and said, “I meant, I have come to apply.” He then ruined the whole thing by jutting his chin at the three men, adding, “But I know I can do the job, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
Jon experienced a flash of amusement. The boy obviously had a speech prepared, but he had either forgotten his lines or his audience had botched their cues and he was now winging it. He sat back, prepared to be entertained.
“You’d better tell us why,” he suggested.
The flush died from Ian’s face and he leant forward in his chair.
“I’ve wanted to be a TLO since we first came here. I was about four when we arrived and when I saw the trees and the river, I knew all I wanted to do was explore them.”
“At four,” Jon said cynically.
“Yes,” Ian replied.
There was a simple sincerity in this that wiped away the dare-devil look and Jon felt a stir of interest.
“I don’t know why we came here, but I’m glad we did. All Ma does is moan and say it isn’t like ‘home’. And he …” He ground his teeth and Jon could almost see the memory of past confrontations. “He doesn’t understand this place. But I do.”
Seeing the expression on Jon’s face, he stumbled on.
“At least … I think I do. And I want to see all of it, the forests and the rivers and the mountains and I want to see real tribesmen.”
Jon’s interest died, the boy was nothing more than a sensation seeker and he had seen enough variations of them in the last week to last him a lifetime.
“And which of the books have you read?” he asked. “I don’t see you as a ‘Love Under the Canopy’ fan, so was it ‘The Tribal Blade’ or ‘Tattooed Warrior’?”
“That junk!” Ian said scornfully. “My mother reads it, I don’t!”
Jon’s interest dragged itself out of the grave. “None of it?”
Ian grinned, “I did look at the pictures in ‘Tattooed Warrior’. They were great, but most of those books are just stories, they aren’t real.”
“A lot of people think they are.”
“Yeah,” Ian laughed. “I saw some of them while I was waiting. Most of ‘em would faint at the sight of fish guts.”
Again he leaned forward in his eagerness.
“I can catch fish,” he said. “And clean and gut them. And I can make a fire. I’ve done loads of camping. I know the woods, the ones near the Settlement at least, but I want to see the real forest and its people and learn what makes them tick. I want to learn everything.”
Here at last was a possible candidate, not perhaps an ideal one, and Jon was still bothered by the reckless air, but compared to most of what he had seen so far, there was potential here.
“Give me your file,” he said.
A wary look spread across Ian’s face. “File?”
“Yes. I’d like to see your school reports and your examination results,” Jon replied. “You aren’t yet eighteen, so parental consult will be required. I presume they’ll be assisting you with the indenture fees.”
The colour drained from Ian’s face. “Indenture fees?”
“Yes, fees,” Jon agreed. “We don’t train you for nothing.”
“Oh.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Um ... how much are we talking about?”
“Five hundred. Plus another twenty for drawing up the contract of indenture.”
“Five hundred and twenty!” Ian gasped.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Could I work it off?”
“How? As an apprentice you get paid a tiny allowance. We feed you, clothe you and teach you. Your fees barely cover those costs.”
Suddenly the devil was gone and with him went the self-confidence, the swagger and the eager light in Ian’s eyes. What remained was a whey-faced boy who only just controlled his wobbling lower lip by clamping his jaws tight.
“There’s no way round it?” he finally asked, a small break in his voice.
“None I know of.”
“I see.” He sat in unmoving silence for a minute; then shot to his feet. “I’m sorry I wasted your time,” he said and fled the room.
“Damn,” Machin said. “I thought he might have been the one.”
Jon was not so sure, there was much about Ian that bothered him, but he knew the boy’s wounded look would remain with him for a long while.
Oddly disheartened, the three Master TLOs called a halt to the proceeding for the day and retired to the comfort of dinner and a bottle.
Things were not much better the following day. A succession of over romantic boys and girls were interspersed with a number of shady characters whose motives for wanting access to the hinterland were suspicious at best.
One of these enterprising gentlemen went so far as to offer a considerable bribe and all three Masters took enormous pleasure in hurling him out of the building and into a convenient patch of mud.
However, there was one promising candidate- a girl. Jon was not sure how he felt about this, there were plenty of women Master Officers and girl apprentices, but he did not feel competent to take on a member of the opposite sex as his first trainee.
There was something about this young lady, though, to make him wonder if he was being foolish.
She was a little older than the usual applicants; tall, slim, with her hair drawn back in a bun, and exuded an air of mature self-confidence. Her face was interesting rather than pretty, with a firm jaw that might or might not speak of character.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said, sitting in a tidy way free of nervous twitching. “My name is Stacey Wainwright and I am eighteen years old. I realise this is a little older than you prefer, but my parent wanted me to finish high school before I applied for this work. I graduated top of my class with extra credit in ecology, woodcraft and survival training. My medical shows me to be in perfect health and my psych tests reveal no hidden phobias to make me unfit for encounters with the less cuddly types of wildlife.”
Cunliff and Machin exchange a quick approving look- this was more like it- but the choice would and must be Jon’s, so they sat back to allow him to question the girl.
“Impressive,” Jon said cautiously. “But it doesn’t tell me why you want this job.”
“My father is Congressman Eric Wainwright who has, as I’m sure you are aware, been involved with The Tribal First Nation and the Colonial Resources Department for many years
.”
“I thought your name was familiar,” Jon said dryly.
“Please don’t judge me by my father,” she replied, without rancour. “His views on the need for the tribes to embrace a way of life more in keeping with the needs of modern society are well known, but I don’t necessarily agree with him. While I believe some movement could be made in that direction, I also feel it should not be made without the full understanding and consent of The First Nation.”
“Big of you,” Jon muttered under his breath.
If she heard him, she chose to pretend she had not.
“I want to be part of the process that reconciles the interests of both the tribes and the new settlers.”
“Why not work in your father’s department?”
“As I said, I don’t feel my father’s views are necessarily those that will best serve both parties. While I understand the need for new land to settle, I feel the inherent rights of The First Nation cannot and must not be ignored. After all, these people were abandoned by us for over five hundred years; they have rights that must be respected.”
“And a way of life that must also be respected,” Jon said.
“I agree, but there must be flexibility as well. This world was colonised by us, it technically still belongs to us and we have rights over its natural resources the tribes must eventually come to understand.”
“Within reason, Ms Wainwright,” Jon replied. “And within limits. What do you see as the role of a TLO and your role should I accept you and you make Journeyman?”
She sat back with a smile, toying with the heavy bracelet she wore on her left wrist; she obviously felt she had won some small point.
“I see the role as it has been for the last fifty years, providing a buffer between the tribes and the new settlers. Making sure the natural resources are harvested responsibly and not exploited recklessly.”