The Tattooed Tribes (19 page)

“
Most of the land is like this away to the
east,” Jon told him. “It presents a whole new set of survival
problems.”

Lucien gazed
out over the vast openness, rich with herbage.

“
Horses,” he said softly.

Jon laughed.
“Quicker to walk yourself than trail along behind some great plough
nag,” he said. “And the pencil-legged things folks ride for
pleasure wouldn’t last a week out here. A pack of wolves would take
one look and think it was their birthday.”

“
Not those,” Lucien replied. “But if you
mixed the two together, got size and strength from one and the
running shape of the other …”

Jon gave him a
considering look.

“
Tuck that thought away somewhere you won’t
lose it,” he said. “You’re beginning to think like a
TLO.”

It was not
easy walking over the grass, it was even longer and deeper than it
looked and what seemed to be nothing more than flat undulating land
was undermined and riddled with burrows and holes. Small rodents
appeared and stood on top of mounds of spoil from their burrowing
and regarded the alien invaders suspiciously, before chattering a
warning and disappearing down one of the many holes.

Overhead huge
birds of prey hung on the thermals, cruising the warrens for the
unwary ones.

They walked
all day, but never seemed to get closer to the tree line.

“
Do we know Clieviis and his family came
this way?” Lucien asked that night as they sat around a fire built
from dried grass and bison chips. It didn’t smell anywhere near as
bad as Lucien thought it would.

“
That’s what his other daughters said,” Jon
replied. “And this is where they found what was left of him and his
wife.”

“
What was left?” Lucien queried.

“
Nature’s clean-up crews had been at work,”
Jon replied grimly. “But it was still possible to see how they’d
died.”

“
Oh!” Lucien said. “I don’t think I want to
know any more.”

By noon the
next day they arrived at a low hump of brown earth. It was still a
little bare, but already the grass was reclaiming it and some
colonising herbs had established themselves.

Several of the
warriors went to the mound and began to dig small holes. Lucien
watched as they buried something in each one.

“
What are they doing?” he asked Jon in a
whisper.

“
They’re burying pieces of calm shell
painted with the eye of a forest cat,” Jon replied. “To guide the
dead home through the dark.”

Once Lucien
might have scoffed, but no longer.

One of the
girls stepped forward and ordered all the men to turn their
backs.

“
Why are we doing this?” Lucien asked once
they had all done as they were told.

“
Women’s magic,” Jon replied. “I’ve no idea
what they’re doing and they wouldn’t tell me even if I was rude
enough to ask.”

Whatever
ritual the girls had to perform for Clieviis and his wife did not
take long and was done in silence. Much as he would have loved to
take a quick look, Lucien had learnt enough about The People to
respect their beliefs and he resisted the temptation.

They were all
a little subdued as they fanned out to begin looking for evidence
of who had so cruelly killed two of their own and taken a child
captive.

Everyone
spiralled out from the mound in ever-increasing circles. It was
dull, hot work. Every single piece of grass looked exactly like
every other bit of grass, finding the faint marks where it had been
disturbed in the not so recent past was hard and boring.

As the day
drew on and the mound behind them became indistinguishable from the
land around it, Lucien began to wonder if they would ever find a
trace of the killers.

He was hot and
tired and thirsty and inclined to think they were on a fool’s
errand when ahead of him Jon suddenly raised his hand and pointed
to something. Following his line Lucien saw a small herd of
deer.

They were
obviously downwind of them, because they took no notice of the
strangers in their world. And even when one did lift its head and
looked in their direction, they seemed unconcerned and Lucien
realised they did not perceive two legged creatures as
predators.

Jon took his
rifle from his shoulder and sighted on a yearling hanging on the
edge of the group. The explosion of sound made Lucien jump, despite
the fact he knew it was coming. The near silence of this land had
become normal for him.

“
Fresh meat!” Jon yelled to Lucien, who ran
to the kill as fast as he could.

The deer
startled by the noise had first darted away, but once they saw no
sign of four legged hunters, they returned to cropping the
grass.

Jon was a good
shot and the deer was not even twitching when Lucien reached it.
His mouth was watering as he thought of all the immediate treats to
come. These days the prospect of fresh deer offal made his stomach
rumble rather than rebel.

He and Jon got
down to the bloody business of gutting the animal. They saved the
heart, kidneys and liver, kicking the rest of the pluck to one side
for scavengers.

Flies were
already black on the spilt blood and they dragged the carcass clear
of it to skin and joint the meat.

As they did
so, Lucien caught a glimpse of something in the grass; he
immediately dropped his share of the deer’s weight making Jon
swear.

Not even
hearing the pungent scold, he bent and parted the grass and picked
up what had caught his eye. Silently he handed it to Jon.

“
An arrow,” Jon said, frowning over it.
“With a
copper
arrowhead!”

A few of the
warriors were coming towards them attracted by the gun shot; one
took the find from Jon and compared it to one of his own iron
tipped arrows.

“
Mm,” he said gravely, considering.
“There’s very little free copper around here.”

“
I know,” Jon replied.

“
And none of the river tribes use copper
for weapons,” the warrior said.

“
That I also know,” Jon replied. “Which
means this was made by people I’ve never encountered. And one’s
you’ve never encountered either, my friend.”

The man
frowned and studied the construction of the arrow carefully;
something about it seemed to puzzle him.

“
I’m not so sure,” he replied, a note of
concern in his voice. “And I can’t quite put my finger on
why.”

The two of
them regarded the arrow again, Lucien craning his neck to see if he
could fathom out what was bothering them.

“
If this was left by whoever killed
Clieviis, they were strangers,” the warrior concluded. “Why would
strangers come here and kill a bridal party?”

“
I’ve no idea,” Jon replied. “And I’ve no
idea why Clieviis would come out here to meet
strangers.”

The man gave a
snort of derision.

“
He was my sixth wife’s second cousin,” he
said. “And I should perhaps not speak ill of him so near the place
of his departure, but he was a fool, blinded by the status of his
wife and daughters. There was nothing he wouldn’t have done to
raise it higher, even to the point of making them beyond the price
any family could pay.”

“
A man blinded by ambition,” Jon suggested,
and the warrior nodded.

“
I wonder just how blind,” he muttered to
himself. “However, that will have to wait. We must get this meat
smoked.”

While Lucien
and the men took the deer back to the mound, Jon searched the
surroundings and when he re-joined them he told of the remains of a
camp fire in the direction of the river.

“
How many?” one of the warriors
asked.

“
Difficult to say,” Jon replied. “The sign
is old and it has rained, but more than five, less than twenty I
would guess.”

“
We will follow them.”

“
We will indeed,” Jon agreed.

Chapter
13

In little more
than a day it became obvious the party they were following was
heading in one direction, but the trackers constantly checked there
was no deviation.

Jon began to
teach Lucien how to look for sign, encouraging him to learn from
the other experienced men. There was little for them, as grass
recovers quickly from passing disturbance, but Lucien discovered
that in the long light of early morning and evening, shadows can
show things direct sun hides.

He also learnt
a great deal more about human spoor than he wanted to know.

Two days hard
march took them over the dome of the grassland and back into woods.
The trail became easier to follow, broken twigs, crushed under
growth and the occasional snag of deer skin or fabric on a sharp
thorn.

“
They’re heading back to the river,” Jon
noted. “Iesgood may already have found some trace of
them.”

Eventually
they reached the river and began following it east again. Every now
and then they would find more evidence of their quarry, until early
one afternoon they came to a bend and found a muddy beach full of
familiar canoes.

Vlic spotted
them just after the guards gave a signal and ran to greet
Lucien.

“
They were here,” he said excitedly. “They
must have had canoes waiting, because Dad thinks …”

“
Quiet!” his father ordered. “Noisy
brat.”

Vlic grinned
at him, but shut up for a while.

“
Greetings, Harabin
bietriwer
” Iesgood said formally. “We arrived
yesterday.”

“
It’s good to see you,” Jon replied. “We’ve
tracked them here. Did you find evidence of their camp and how many
they are?”

“
It wasn’t hard,” Iesgood replied, “They
made no attempt to conceal their presence. We’ve tidied up
since.”

Jon’s eyebrows
flew up; this was not normal tribal behaviour, to leave detritus
lying around.

“
Do you know where they’ve
gone?”

“
Upriver by canoe,” Iesgood replied. “We
found no traces of them on the way here, but we did find a broken
paddle when we arrived.”

He signalled
and one of his men came forward with the paddle. He handed it to
Jon for inspection.

“
No wonder it broke,” Jon remarked,
frowning. “Who the devil made this?”

“
Someone who knows how it should be done,
but who either didn’t have the skill or the patience to do it
properly,” Iesgood replied.

Jon showed
Iesgood the arrowhead they had found back in the meadow.

“
This has been cast,” Iesgood said. “Then
sharpened. No attempt has been made to beat it to a better
shape.”

“
Copper is easy to work,” Jon said. “But
not the best material for the job.”

“
This wasn’t made by someone good at his
craft,” Iesgood concluded. “It makes me wonder about …”

“
Interesting,” Jon replied. “My thoughts
were heading in that direction as well.”

They both fell
disappointingly silent at this point and Vlic groaned, but knew
better than to pursue the matter.

Lucien, of
course, did not know better and was full of questions.

“
Who do you think made it?” he asked,
eagerly examining the paddle. He was not entirely sure what was
wrong with it or why it had broken, but suspected the wood might
have been ill chosen and, as he looked more closely, he saw it had
split around a large knot hole.

When he looked
closer still he saw the shape was ill conceived and it would have
been hard to maintain a smooth, even stroke, and the handle was
roughly finished with no thought to the state of the paddler’s
hands.

“
I don’t know,” Jon answered, taking it
from him and handing it back to Iesgood.

“
No-one from The People would make a paddle
as bad as this,” Lucien stated confidently.

Iesgood and
Jon exchanged a glance.

“
What?” Lucien demanded, seeing the
look.

“
Best keep quiet,” Jon advised.

“
But …”

“
Lucien!”

“
Oh, all right!” he growled and walked away
to discuss the whole thing with an equally intrigued
Vlic.

“
There’s something Dad’s not telling me. I
know he suspects something, but he won’t come out with it. And none
of the other men are talking either.”

Curiosity
eating at both of them, they speculated for a while, but came to no
sensible conclusion, so they made do with telling each other what
had happened since they were separated.

They did not learn anything more around
the huge camp fire either. There was a long and serious discussion
about what to do next, an improvised talking stick being passed
from hand to hand as every idea and suggestion was thrashed out.
Lucien, Vlic and the other boys were disgusted to find the stick
never seemed to end up in their hands and all
their
brilliant schemes never got an airing.

There was
little to base a decision on, so in the end it was decided the war
band would stick to the original plan, continue on upstream until
the river divided itself into many tributaries; they would then
separate to look for traces down every branch.

“
We must be weeks behind them,” Lucien said
bitterly to Jon.