The Tattooed Tribes (7 page)

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 beads 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.”