The Tattooed Tribes

by Bev Allen

  “Disappointed!” she yelled. “You haven’t got a clue. Not a bloody clue. You’ll regret this. The time will come soon when you’ll wish you’d never picked this worthless little bastard out of his gutter.”

  Her eyes were blazing and her bosom was heaving in a way to make Lucien quite forget the throb of his jaw. Suddenly she seemed to break and she slumped, her shoulders heaving as dry sobs rose in her throat.

  “You fool,” she said to Jon. “You blind, stupid fool.”

  With that she turned on her heel and left.

  Lucien looked to Jon for comment, but all he said was, “Let’s finish this packing, we’re wasting daylight.”

  Dawn was still a while off as they made their way to the river. All the time Lucien expected Jon to say something, but he never did and in the excitement of everything he soon forgot the whole incident.

  At one of the narrow jetties jutting into the water, dock workers loaded a long, powered skiff with bales and boxes.

  “She’s ready, Cap’n,” one said to Jon. “Power enough to get to The First Cataract. You’ll have to refuel her there if you’re taking her on upriver.”

  “I’m not,” Jon replied. “I’ll have her towed back down to you.”

  The man nodded and Jon threw his pack in the stern.

  “Lucien,” he said firmly. “We need to get one thing very clear. From the second you step onto the boat you must obey my orders without question. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lucien replied.

  “I wish I could be sure,” Jon said. “Because ...”

  Whatever else he was going to say was interrupted by the arrival of Tim Frain.

  “What’re we waiting for?” he demanded.

  “You!” Jon replied. “But before we start I want to know what’s in those boxes of yours.”

  “Trade goods,” Frain replied.

  “What sort of trade goods?”

  “The usual rubbish.”

  Jon turned to the dockers. “Unload the lot for a full search.”

  “Okay, okay,” Frain said. “There’s nothing for you to get worked up about. It’s just red beads and ribbons. Some perfumed soap, bees wax, cotton wicks and a few bales of silk.”

  Jon fixed him with a cold look. “If I find as much as a pinch of weed or a grain of dust in there, I’ll feed you to the fish,” he warned.

  Frain sneered. “You won’t find any, and why you want to stop honest trade is beyond me.”

  He did not wait for an answer, but went and took a place in the bows.

  Lucien stowed his pack at the stern end with Jon’s.

  “What’s weed and dust?” he asked.

  “Drugs,” Jon replied. “They don’t do anyone any good, but the First Nation people were free of them for centuries and they’ve little or no resistance. What’s recreational amongst the settlers is highly addictive for them.”

  “Oh,” Lucien said, and tried to look nonchalant.

  Jon glared at him. “Hand it over,” he ordered.

  “It’s only a bit of leaf,” Lucien protested. “It’s for me, no-one else.”

  “Now!” Jon ordered.

  Reluctantly the boy handed over the small roll and watched as it met a watery end.

  “You never take any recreational drug upriver,” Jon stated. “Never!”

  “Okay,” Lucien said. “But I don’t see why not.”

  He was to find out when they reached The First Cataract.

  The journey upstream was everything Lucien hoped it would be.

  Frain stayed at the bow end of the boat, leaving Jon to steer the swift craft north and to answer all Lucien’s questions about the animals and birds they saw.

  He gazed in wonder at the heavy tree cover, which came right down to the river’s edge, very different from the south where neat farms lined the banks and the trees were all but gone.

  “Does the forest go on all the way north?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jon replied, smiling at his obvious delight. “Tribal travellers talk of a sea of flowers somewhere over to the east.”

  Lucien’s jaw dropped. “Don’t you want to go there?”

  Jon laughed. “I’d go right now given the chance, but I’ve a job to do.”

  “But once we’ve got rid of Frain …” Lucien began.

  “Whatever made you think he was the job?” Jon asked, but would not be drawn on the subject despite Lucien’s pleas.

  They pulled to shore in the mid afternoon. Frain protested at the early stop, but Jon ignored him.

  In the hours before dusk he began teaching Lucien how to survive beyond so-called civilisation.

  “In order it’s fire, shelter, food,” he told him. “You must never allow your fire to go out, especially out here where some things hunt by night and will see you as dinner. Shelter is easy for now, we can sleep under the boat, but later I’ll show you how to make cover.”

  Lucien knew how to find dry wood for a fire, but did not know how to start one with nothing more than kindling, a flint and a knife blade.

  “Keep your flint in a bag around your neck and your knife on your hip,” he was told. “If you get separated from your pack you’ll still have the means of making fire. I’ll teach you how to do it without a flint as well, but not today.”

  They covered water purification and the unpleasant things that could and did live in the cleanest looking water, and how to dig a proper latrine.

  He also began learning how to tickle for trout, how to make damper bread and which of the many and abundant leaves made a good salad and which was useful as toilet paper.

  “Make sure you get it right,” Jon advised. “An itching backside will drive you crazy.”

  Frain looked on, but did not join in. He ate of his own rations and drank his own water, but was willing enough to share hot coffee, grilled trout and damper bread.

  Lucien loved every second of it except washing the dishes, but only moaned a bit when told to get on with it.

  He did not fully understand why the next morning Jon insisted all traces of their camp be removed, and Frain was sneeringly contemptuous.

  “Why bother!”

  “It’s not our land,” Jon replied. “We’re visitors, we clean up after ourselves.”

  “There’s a hell of a lot of people who think it is our land,” Frain jeered. “Just cos those primitives were here first ...”

  “Run for office,” Jon suggested. “Go back and do some campaigning and see how far you get.”

  Frain stamped away to check on his cargo.

  Chapter 6

  It took the best part of week to reach The First Cataract. On the way they saw plenty of traffic going the other way.

  “Some bands must have come in to trade,” Jon told Lucien. “That’s this season’s profits going by.”

  “Can’t this bucket go any faster?” Frain yelled. “I’m missing a business opportunity here.”

  “You could walk,” Jon suggested.

  To the south the river was wide and it got wider as it made its way to the western ocean, but on its way to the sea it encountered bands of hard rock which impeded its progress. What men called The First Cataract was one of these outcrops.

  The river boiled and cascaded over huge jutting boulders and massive slabs of rock worn smooth by thousands of years of pounding water.

  Lucien stared in amazement at the expanse of white before them.

  “How do we get past?” he asked, awed by the power of water.

  “We don’t!” Jon replied. “Well, we do, but not by boat. We go by land until the rapids are behind us.”

  The jetties below the falls were full of boats being loaded for the rapid journey back downstream. Frain was eager to get his goods on shore and begin whatever business he had to transact.

  He flipped Lucien a short string of cheap trade beads.

  “Here, kid. Treat yourself to a woman!”

  Then he disappeared into the crowds.

  Lucien looked at the red be
ads in his hand.

  “What do I do with these?” he asked.

  “They’re as good as money here,” Jon replied. “If you don’t mind what you buy and who you buy it from.”

  They made their way up the rutted, muddy slope to the town, which clung to the bank above, and Lucien’s eyes grew huge again.

  This was a frontier town, not a place to settle and raise a family, but somewhere to trade and make money. Most of the buildings were constructed of wood, but there were tents and even up-turned boats being used to house shops and bars, and a dozen other activities Lucien could only guess at.

  The streets were unpaved and in places they were ankle deep in mud, or at least what he hoped was mud.

  Everywhere the atmosphere was a curious mix of frenetic haste and slow, steady degradation. In the space of fifteen minutes Lucien witnessed two fights, one possibly fatal, discovered exactly what Frain had meant by ‘a woman’ and saw his first real tribesman.

  He looked in horror and pity on the comatose figure leaning against a step, his body inches deep in muddy filth, salvia dribbling from his slack mouth.

  Across his left hand were fish, deer and wild fowl and on his right a tattooed wolf.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

  Jon shrugged. “Dust probably; they still tend to walk when it’s weed.”

  Having spotted one victim of the settler’s drugs, Lucien saw more, some out for the count like the first one, but others shuffling around with vacant expressions.

  They made their way to the local Tribal Liaison office, a solid non-descript stone structure tucked away behind the main drag.

  “Harabin!” the man behind the desk shouted joyfully. “Good to see you, bietriwer!”

  “And you, Argent,” Jon replied, shaking hands, “My apprentice, Lucien Devlin.”

  “Greetings, biey.”

  “Biey?” Lucien asked, after a hand clasp. He noted Mr Argent’s hands were as heavily tattooed as Jon’s.

  “Boy,” Jon explained. “Lad, son, youth. It means all of them.”

  “We’ve much to talk about, Jon,” Argent said urgently. “Can Lucien entertain himself until we’re done?”

  Jon considered the eager boy.

  “Come here,” he ordered, fixing Lucien with a stern look. “You can go and explore, but no more than that. Don’t get into trouble and be back here in two hours. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” Lucien said.

  “You’d better,” Jon threatened. “Scoot!”

  To be fair, Lucien had no intention of disobeying as such, but he did not feel the order had been completely serious. Had Jon seen the grin on his face as he left, he might have made the terms and conditions clearer, but Lucien was long gone.

  The exact value of the trade beads in his pocket occupied much of his thinking and he reckoned the best way to find out was to buy something.

  And the best thing to buy was beer!

  Finding a place selling beer was easy; he watched until he saw a couple of bouncers eject a drunk, and followed them back inside.

  He was delighted to find there were no inconvenient questions asked about age and even more thrilled to find his string of thirty beads would buy him ten beers.

  Sensibly he decided not to have too much, so he alternated pints with some clear liquid served in shot glasses. It slipped down easily and quickly, but he had a bit of trouble stopping it from slipping back up just as easily and quickly.

  A couple of pints and a couple of these reduced his bead count to fourteen, and he decided to have another beer and then see what eleven would get him.

  He gave serious thought to the original idea of a woman, but although he knew where and how to buy beer, he was unsure of the logistics of buying sex, and rejected the plan.

  Another beer and chaser reduced his cash to three and he had enough sense left to realise more beer was not a good idea, but a very civil gentleman offered to relieve him of the last beads in exchange for a roll of weed.

  Somewhere at the back of his head he decided Jon was better off not knowing about this, so he hid it in his flint bag.

  Spent out and feeling the need to lie down, he made his way in what he thought was the direction of the office.

  When he woke up he wondered where he was. The wooden ceiling above him was unfamiliar and the bed under him felt wrong. He tried to sit, but the pain in his head rapidly changed his mind. Unfortunately the need to be sick overcame the need to lay still.

  Where to vomit was going to be difficult, but he was taken firmly by the scruff of the neck and his face was thrust into a bucket.

  “In there, you bloody brat!” Jon told him and Lucien obliged, several times.

  “Oh God,” he whimpered as he was pushed back onto the pillow, “Oh dear Lord God.”

  “Drink this!” Jon commanded.

  “Please no.”

  “Drink it! And swallow this.”

  Weakly protesting Lucien drank the fizzy liquid and swallowed the pill. He thought it would come straight back up, but it had some magical quality that kept it down.

  Slowly the nausea and the pain began to fade, but his head felt bruised inside and his mouth had a warm velvet coating he wanted rid of quickly.

  He also hurt!

  This seemed very unfair, his head ached and his guts heaved and surged, but he knew why. This other pain seemed a cruel and unnecessary addition.

  Careful experimentation showed he had possibly been in a fight, but he did not remember anyone hitting him.

  Thinking did his head no good at all, so he muttered, “What hit me?”

  “Nothing,” Jon replied. “You fell down a flight of steps and landed at a local copper’s feet. He was going to throw you in the drunk tank, but he found your papers and brought you here.”

  “I feel sick again.”

  Jon took him by the hair and pushed his face back in the bucket. Lucien had in fact changed his mind, but the smell in the bucket demanded action and got it.

  “Shower!” Jon snapped, when the worst was over. “Now! And then we’re going to have a talk.”

  Twenty minutes later Lucien sat at a table trying not to look at the breakfast laid out before him. He was starving, but the thought of pancakes, butter and syrup made him shudder and the small people in his head trying to kick their way out through his eyeballs did not help.

  “Eat,” Jon ordered, loading his plate.

  “I’d rather not,” Lucien replied.

  “Do as you’re told.”

  He might have wanted to die, but this jolted him back into the land of the living.

  “I don’t like people telling me what do to!” he growled.

  Jon stared at him for a second and then he laughed. “So you’ve told me,” he replied. “But you signed the indenture papers.”

  Thinking hurt, but Lucien considered this.

  “I know I have to do what you say when we’re out there,” he replied carefully. “But what I do on my own time is nothing to do with you or anyone else.”

  Again Jon laughed. “Let me guess,” he said mockingly. “You never read those papers, did you?”

  A chill hand caressed Lucien. “Might have,” he replied.

  “But not the part about my owning you, body and soul, until you make journeyman.”

  Lucien jaw dropped. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s what it amounts too,” Jon replied. “Oh, I’m not allowed to sell you or do you any permanent harm, but beyond that the rules are fairly flexible. I’ve agreed to care for you and train you, and in return you’ve promised to be a very, very good boy and do exactly as you’re told. All the time.”

  “But …”

  “There are no ‘buts’, Lucien. Being a Liaison Officer is no joke. You’ve a hell of a lot to learn and the Guild doesn’t allow untrained puppies to bugger up years and years of careful diplomacy.”

  “I …”

  “Shut up and listen,” Jon instructed. “You’re my first apprentice. I thoug
ht I saw something in you that might make a good officer, but I wasn’t sure. Despite this, I decided to give you a chance, put my reputation on the line and see if my instincts were right. I’m beginning to have doubts about my ability to judge someone.”

  Lucien’s face fell and some of the stern lines on Jon’s face softened.

  “When you’ve eaten and you’re feeling better, you’ll read those papers. If you still want to do this, we’ll carry on, but if you can’t accept the conditions, I’ll make arrangements for you to go back downriver and we’ll call it a day.”

  With that he turned from Lucien, poured himself coffee and added syrup to a large pile of pancakes.

  Lucien nursed his head for a while and toyed with some food. After the first few bites the acid in his stomach started doing its job and stopped torturing him and he was able to clear his plate and look for more.

  He still felt bruised and shaky, but Jon was obviously not going to speak to him again until he had read the damned papers.

  Reading hurt his eyes, but he forced himself to follow the legal jargon and his heart sank. He was not a slave, but he was not free to do what he wanted. In essence Jon Harabin stood in loco parentis, only it was a more binding relationship and one he could only walk away from if Jon dismissed him or he made journeyman. If he ran, the Guild had the right to find him, punish him and make sure he never stood a chance of being a Liaison Officer ever.

  “What if I never make journeyman?” he asked in a small voice.

  “It’s automatic at twenty-one,” Jon replied. “But if you’re any good you’ll have made it before then.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was nineteen, but I had an excellent Master.”

  Lucien did some sums. He was sure Jon was very good as well, so in three years’ time he could be free to do what he wanted and have the skills to do it.

  On the other hand, he had never been good with authority, neither at home or in school. It was not a hard decision to make, but it cost him a lot of pride.