Chapter 3

Samaroc was a mender of nets, and he had the long, bony fingers of someone with a lifetime's acquaintance with them, but he was a craftsman in more than one art, and it was his second skill that I had found interesting. He had been born in Far Sembol, one of the southern sea kingdoms far to the south and west of Montcross, and like many others, he had come to the Vale more than a dozen years before, fleeing the Red Death. The plague had found its way to the Vale anyway, and Samarol had found himself untouched. His wife and daughter had not fared so well though, and for more than a few years, he had been a broken man.

His skills with the nets kept him working and the work kept him alive until the pain of his losses began to fade over the years. He was still something of a gloomy soul, and hard-drinking, but his hands were gifted and he did have the eyes of a true artist. I'd shown him my little bottles of brightly colored minerals and he'd cackled, spraying a fog of anuut-laden spittle in front of him. The alcoholic fumes were almost more than I could stomach at the time, but I'd seen his work on others by then and knew he was the one I sought.

"Plenty of men come to me looking to get a tattoo, boy," He spat after the cackling had died down. "Yer the first to think to bring his own pigments though."

In the course of the following weeks I learned more about the art and craft than I thought I'd need, but Samaroc was a tablet upon which life had writ large, deep, and in blood. He knew it, knew that I agreed with his assessment, and given that, he was more than willing to share what he knew of the 'inker's trade' as he called it, as long as I was also willing to listen to what he thought about whatever struck his fancy. This was never more true than when he learned I was a wizard's apprentice.

"Wizards are a force of nature, its true," he said one day. He was in his cups and so was his current customer, but apparently they had arrived there together, and I was able to watch as Samaroc, laughing and taking an occasional swallow from the jug the two men shared, tik-tik-tik'ed the ink into the skin on the back of the sailor's leg, fashioning a swatch of green-tinted scales below a pair of yellow-tinted fish eyes. He would stop every few minutes to wipe the blood away from the area he was working on. While he did, the sailor would himself take a drink from the jug. I could smell it in the air and knew it was more of the seemingly ever present anuut that was his drink of choice.

"You ever skipped a stone on water boy?" he asked.

"A few times," I answered.

"Wizards are like stones skipped on a puddle," he muttered before getting lost again in his work for a moment. When next he stopped to wipe away the blood he continued as if he'd never stopped. "They come in fast and hard and smack the small pond that is people's lives and then they skip away."

Having seen my master in action, and been in some similar circumstances myself, I could see how he could hold that opinion. It was what he added a moment later that surprised me, particularly when the old salt under the needle grunted in agreement.

"Wizards are like the stone, see ... they skip away so fast after they hit the water that they never really see the effect of all the ripples they leave behind."

When he was finished with his work and the two men were sitting by the hearth finishing their pot of spirits, his face grew harder while at the same time a soft sadness seemed to creep into his eyes.

"The Red Death was one big damned ripple, eh?" he asked no one in particular.

"Ripple driven like a storm-spawned sea," the old sailor added before he took his swallow.

Even if I could have disagreed with them, I don't think I would have been foolish enough to do so then, but the truth was I did agree. I too was one of those ripples that had run far from the force of that which had driven the Red Death.

With his customer gone we talked about the work, and the details of his efforts. I described how I saw him hold the needle board, and how the hand that held the board also rested against the surface he was working, stabilizing it at the same time it let him feel the impact of the needle with each tap.

Several weeks later I got to watch him put a chain down the length of someone's back, completely covering the soldier's spine with links of red and black. I was particularly interested in this work because of the manner in which he made the chain links seem to go over and under each other as he worked his way down. What I envisioned would have a lot of individual components woven together in a similar manner. Again when he was done we discussed what he had done and how he had done it. He seemed particularly interested in communicating to me his timing methods for refreshing the needle's ink supplies, and the common techniques for keeping one's colors from bleeding into each other.

I came to tolerate the smell of anuut, because I soon learned that it was anuut that Samaroc's pigments were dissolved into.

"Doesn't have to be anuut," he offered once when I remarked on the smell of it. "Needs to be something that's as close to the pure drinking spirits as you can get though. Sembolian Brandy's good, but it tends to darken the color too much. 'S why I like the anuut. Pretty neutral when it comes to color. Anuut and specially processed soap fat are the main ingredients I use, but I skip the fat if its not fresh. You don't want to use anything that's likely to turn before it washes out or dissolves away. Done a few like that early on, and wasn't too happy with the results — me or my canvas. The soap fat is hard to come by too, least ways the specially processed stuff is. Not much call for it and not too many what know how to make it right."

I spent the next six weeks first watching, then assisting, as this drunken net mender taught me the art of tattooing. I learned to blend pigments and alcohol, process soap fat, and finally, make my own inks.

I built my own 'hammers' as Samaroc called them. The simplest of these were simply small pieces of wood with needles fastened to the ends of them. The more complex hammers were flexible pieces of bamboo with custom grips and 'tap plates', the places where you struck the hammer to make it flex down and drive the pigment into the skin of your subject. The flexibility of the bamboo and the placement of the plate, along with the length of the needle made each of these hammers unique.

Once I had tools of my own, I began to my first attempts at inking flesh. My first attempts were on pieces of untreated pigskin, but after a few days of that Saramoc moved me on to work on a live animal. "You have to learn to deal with the blood ye'll draw, and manage the swelling, once you start doing pieces that are too big to do in one sitting.

Like the one I had in mind for myself. Four passes, I figured at first, but later that turned into twelve passes when I realized I was going to want to do each color in a separate pass. Threes and fours. Some things are best done in threes and fours, as every wizard knew.

Once he decided I was skilled enough to handle the simpler requests of some of his clients, I began to work on real people. Simple things, crosses, stars, wheels and eyes. Accustomed to working on others, a few months later I did my first tattoo on my own skin. Just a simple signature rune on the back of my left hand for the first one, and its complementing countersign on the back of my right. Both were incomplete by design, but I knew I would finish them some day.

By the time Samaroc decided my apprenticeship was complete, my birthday had come and gone. I was seventeen going on eighteen years now and it was difficult to believe it had been a year and more since the day of my fall.