The Tattooed Tribes (9 page)

As they drew
nearer the two men gave a cry of alarm and the canoe sank with just
the odd bubble to show the way it had gone. Both women became
shrill with indignation and admonishments. They were so busy
reproaching the men they failed to notice Jon and Lucien, but the
men exchanged wary glances.

“
Good day,” Jon said, coming to a halt.
“What is going on here?”

“
I would have thought it was perfectly
obvious,” one of the women said. “What business is it of
yours?”

“
I think you’ll find it is very much my
business, madam,” Jon replied and pulled a shield out from his
pocket, holding it up for them to see. “Tribal Liaison Guild,” he
announced. “May I see your permit to be above The First
Cataract?”

The men in the
water showed marked signs of wanting to be elsewhere, but Jon had
casually swung his rifle from his shoulder and, while he was not
exactly pointing it at them, the possibility he might obviously
occupied much of their thinking.

The two women
either did not know the significance of the shield or pretended
they did not.

“
If you are some sort of official,” the
second one said, “you can assist our guides in retrieving our
belongings from the river.”

Jon glanced
across at the two men, both of whom were covertly sidling
downstream, hoping not to be noticed.

“
Stay where you are!” he ordered. “I’ve
recognised both of you, so there’s no point in trying to
hide.”

Both were
chagrined, but resigned and made no further attempt to escape.

Turning back
to the pair of ladies, Jon again said, “I want to see your permits
to be above First Cataract.”

The smaller of
the two glared at him. “You’ve no right to question us.”

“
I think you’ll find I have every right,”
Jon replied. “Show me your permit.”

“
I refuse.”

“
Then under General Order 17 of the Tribal
Lands Access Bill, I am charging both of you with violation of the
provisions therein. I will be issuing you both with a summons to
appear before the magistrates at The First Cataract where you may
be sentenced to a fine not exceeding $10,000 or imprisonment for a
period not less than six months.”

Both women
stared at him in horror.

“
You can’t! We have permission to be here.
Our guides assured us ...”

“
They were lying,” Jon replied. “Weren’t
you, boys?”

There was no
response from the men in the river, who now began to shake with the
cold.

Jon saw it and
smiled. “Getting chilly? Tell these ladies the truth and I might
let you out. You did lie to them, didn’t you?”

A couple of
shrugs followed, and a brief acknowledgement of the undeniable.

“
But they said ...” the other woman
began.

“
Did you check?” Jon asked, interrupting a
stream of protest.

“
No, but ...”

“
Ignorance of the law is no excuse,
especially when there are notices all over the town advising
tourists there is no access without a permit.”

“
We didn’t see any ...”

She stopped as
she saw the cynical look on Jon’s face and coloured slightly.

“
If we saw them, we didn’t fully understand
their meaning.”

Lucien, who
had seen them and understood them, was about to help her with a
detailed explanation, until he caught Jon’s eye and thought better
of it.

“
My next question is,” Jon continued. “What
was in the canoe?”

The two women
exchanged wary glances, but Jon had turned to the two guides.

“
Well?”

“
Nothing much,” one of the men said
quickly.

“
Really? How about I make you raise it and
we have a good look.”

This was
blatantly unwelcome to them, but jumped on with enthusiasm by the
women.

“
We’d be very grateful if you could. We’ve
paid for everything.”

“
Did you buy some nice things?” Jon asked,
with what appeared to be mild and friendly interest.

“
Some really beautiful pearls,” one woman
replied enthusiastically. “And the most exquisite furs, some sort
of spotted cat that ...”

She saw the
expression on Jon’s face, caught the furious gestures her guides
were making, and shut up.

“
Pearls and fur from protected animals,”
Jon said. “The fine and the prison sentence just went up. What else
you did you ‘
acquire
’?”

“
Nothing,” they both said,
swiftly.

Jon turned to
the two men. “Talk!” he ordered.

“
A couple bits of jade, a painted skin and
some shell work,” one replied reluctantly. “It was all in the
canoe.”

Jon looked to
the river where the odd bubble was still rising.

“
Excellent,” he purred. “And it will all be
staying were it is.”

“
But we’ve paid for it!”

“
Well, you’ve lost the lot,” Jon replied.
“And I’ll be issuing both of you with fixed penalty fines for the
offence of being above the barrier and another for illegal trading.
You can be thankful the evidence is at the bottom of the river or
the fine would be fixed in accordance with the value of the
contraband.”

To Lucien’s
amazement and delight, Jon produced a pad of official-looking forms
and proceeded to take down full details from each woman and then
handed each a copy, keeping a duplicate for himself.

“
Please don’t think you can leave without
paying,” he said. “Your names and addresses will be on record back
at The Settlement and I will find you, no matter what.”

Both looked as
if they would have liked to scratch his eyes from his head, but
they snatched the papers from his hand.

He repeated
the process with the two men, who looked exceptionally glum.

“
What is it, Hughie, third or fourth
offence?”

Hughie chose
not to answer.

“
I’d take a tooth brush when you go and
present this,” Jon advised. “I think you may be going away for a
while. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Ladies.”

“
Wait!” one of the women shouted. “How are
we to get back to The First Cataract with only one
canoe?”

“
There’s room for four of you in this one,”
Jon said.

“
But not for us and our luggage!” one
protested.

“
Yes,” Jon agreed. “That is a
problem.”

He looked
thoughtfully at the bags in the beached canoe and then threw each
one far out into the river.

“
Problem solved,” he said. “Come on,
Lucien. Time to go.”

Deaf to the
screams of protest behind him, Jon strode off down the river bank,
Lucien trotting along behind.

“
You can be a bit of a bastard, can’t you,”
he said, not without admiration.

“
When necessary,” Jon replied. “You might
like to remember it.”

They walked on
for another hour or so, Lucien torn between a burning desire to
know the extent of Jon’s authority and where the women had been to
acquire their illicit souvenirs.

“
Can you really fine people?” he asked at
last.

Jon nodded.
“And arrest them and take them into custody. We’re policemen as
well as everything else.”

This was an
interesting and wholly delightful aspect of being a TLO Lucien had
not known of before. Thinking about it kept him quiet for the next
mile or so, his reverie only broken when Jon stopped to draw his
attention to a shy speckled deer on the opposite bank. She had come
down to drink, wary of predators, her huge ears twisting and
turning to catch every tiny sound.

She caught
Lucien’s intake of breath and her head came up quickly to look for
the source of potential danger and in an instant she was gone,
fading back into the trees like a shadow.

Distracted
from thoughts of law enforcement, Lucien turned to ask the next
question that buzzed in his head.

“
If all trading is forbidden,” he said “How
come those old biddies were able to do it?”

“
Missionaries,” Jon replied, spitting the
word like it was made of vomit.

“
Missionaries?”

“
Yes, idiots who think they are bringing
the word of God to the poor benighted savages.”

“
But no-one from the settlements is allowed
to live up here, are they?”

“
You would’ve thought not, wouldn’t you,
but unfortunately a few were allowed to set up a place further
along one of the smaller tributaries. It provides somewhere for a
lot of dubious business to go on.”

“
It’s a cover?”

“
No,” Jon sighed. “Life would be a damn
sight easier if it was. The Guild could then get it shut down in a
heartbeat, but while things we don’t like may go on around it, the
people who run it are honest. Mistaken, but honest.”

“
About what they believe in,” Lucien
said.

“
Possibly, but they would say different.
No, what they’re mistaken about is what they think The Tribes
believe in. There was a bit of fancy legal chicanery a few years
ago and as a result, we can’t stop selected groups from trying to
contact the tribes for reasons having nothing to do with the
exploitation of raw materials or trade or anything else like that.
They do so at their own risk and they get no assistance from us,
but it has meant a bunch of stupid do-gooders have made it their
business to come and interfere with life here. Or try
to.”

They had been
following the course of the river and came to a bend where a small
beach had formed, well sheltered by trees.

Jon surveyed
it with an expert eye.

“
We’ll set up camp here for tonight,” he
said, unshipping his pack. “You find firewood and I’ll get some
bait.”

By the time
Jon had filled a large empty seed case with fat wriggling grubs dug
from a rotten log, Lucien had a fire going and had laid out the bed
rolls.

Jon left him
to try his luck long lining for fish and disappeared into the woods
for a while. When he returned he had a brace of rabbits slung over
his shoulder and something that looked like a football, but turned
out to be the biggest mushroom Lucien had ever seen.

As they ate he
turned the conversation back to the subject of missionaries. “They
don’t understand tribal customs, but they want to stop them.”

“
What customs? What don’t the missionaries
like?”

“
I think the main one is that tribesman
don’t believe what the missionaries believe,” Jon replied. “But
they’ve latched on to a couple of other things as well. Their
biggest bug bear is child marriage, or rather what they think child
marriage is.”

He helped
himself to another piece of the fish Lucien finally managed to
catch, wrapped it in a thin slice of grilled mushroom and chewed on
it ruminatively.

“
I suppose it’s a difficult concept for
people raised to a different set of values,” he said. “Among The
People men own virtually nothing, only their weapons and tools of
their trade. They don’t even own the clothes on their backs, they
are provided either by their wife or mother or another female
family member. Everything, literally everything else is owned by
the girls, homes, food, children, the whole shooting
match.”

Lucien’s eye
brows flew up at this. His father had some very definite ideas of
what was his and his alone, among them things Lucien considered to
be either his or his mother’s.

“
A woman’s status is governed by how
wealthy she is,” Jon continued. “And she acquires wealth by the
bride-price men, or rather their families, are willing to pay to
marry her.”

“
But she can’t get married too often, maybe
twice or three times,” Lucien pointed out.

Jon laughed.
“She can get married a lot more times than that. Most girls have
been married a dozen times by the time they’re five!”

“
That’s disgusting!” Lucien protested
despite himself.

“
And you’re making the same mistake as the
missionaries,” Jon replied. “These aren’t
real
marriages; they’re short term contracts between
families. A boy ‘
marries
’ a girl,
usually his own age, and his family pays for the privilege. The
marriage sometimes only lasts a couple of hours, especially in the
case of babies, but as they get older the boy will go and live with
his ‘wife’s’ family for a few weeks or months. He gets to mix with
other people and he gets to learn from another father figure who
may have skills his own doesn’t have.”

Jon paused to
reflect. “Eventually, when a girl is old enough and has acquired
enough wealth and status marriages, she’ll have a proper wedding
and a proper bridegroom. Quite often it’ll be one of the lads she’s
been ‘married’ to before, especially if he’s made enough high
status marriages himself to prove he’s worthy of her. It’s a chance
for everyone to build good relationships without the hazards of
dating, and it allows them to cement strong family bonds and to
break them without animosity or acrimony.”

Lucien
pondered all this and filed it away for future reference. “But
outsiders think it’s for real,” he guessed. “Kids being married as
babies.”

Jon nodded.
“And there’s worse, at least they think there is. When someone is
admitted to a tribe it’s done by marrying in. My first wife was
only three when we got hitched.”