A Preview

My second novel is called "The Tattooed Tribes". It will be published by Thorstruck Press. Here's the opening few pages. Let me know if you want to read more.



Some large insect had found its way into the depths of one of the woven basket which decorated the walls. The resulting deep drone and soft thuds was adding to the tension filling the room.

Silently a young apprentice edged away from his post by 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 by the door.

Jon Harabin had been contemplating the tattoos covering his hands and wrists for want of a better occupation, but now his eyes went from the apprentice to the young woman who had been sitting in front of him, totally silent for the last three minutes and said,

“Well?”

The word seemed to break her trace.

“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 floor boards and slapped a hand over his mouth to smother a laugh, but catching Jon’s eye became very solemn, very quickly.

“Okay…Phoebe”, Jon said, after consulting the file in front of 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 there 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 was gazing resolutely at the ceiling; the other had his head down.

“In view of the extensive research you’ve under taken,” 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 on 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?” he asked.

“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 that.”

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 and 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 had gone looking for inspiration and colour among the colonies so long cut off from the influence of civilisation.

None had fired her imagination as much as the forest world of Boskgrun. It had seen barely fifty years of settlement before war had left it to its own devices - forgotten, abandoned and cut off from all technology.

Enchanted by all she had seen, she had returned home to write a towering epic of conflict and love between the tribal culture that had grown during the time of isolation and the new settlers seeking homes away from the shattered inner worlds.

She had peppered her work with eulogies on the scenery she had encountered, hints of mysterious rituals and customs, and she had peopled it with sultry tribal maidens, passionate half-savage warriors and a brave and handsome Tribal Liaison Officer.

It had taken the home worlds by storm, firing the public imagination and generating many, many imitators.

Suddenly, from being nothing more than back-water specialists working to reconcile the descendents of the first colonists with the newly arriving ones, Tribal Liaison Officers had become the romantic heroes and heroines of legend and their profession the dream job of thousands.