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.

www.wildwolfpublishing.com

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?”

“
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.”