The Preceptures may be home to rulers, but they are also models of environmental rationalism, examples to the world. To that end, the Children of Peace grow our own food and keep chickens and goats. In the Precepture barns, many a young prince has learned the facts of life. Such as: there’s no need for more than one rooster. Or one billy goat. They are (respectively) noisy and smelly, and left to their own devices, they fight for dominance. So, like Talis himself, we kill the troublemakers.
But the fly in the ointment of this ancient system is inbreeding. Go more than two generations with only one billy goat, and you will regret it. Therefore, in earliest September, we inject some fresh blood—or, rather, other vital fluids—into the system, through the services of a billy goat from a different herd. Someone, generations back, decided that this grand event should be known as the Royal Visit.
Fall is the breeding season for goats in any case, but to bring all the nannies into estrus in the right week, we hedge our bets. Ampoules of goat pheromones come in our yearly supply shuttle, with our clothing, salt, medicine, paper, and the handful of other things we cannot make for ourselves. The pheromones are of two kinds. We snap open the thin glass tubes of Essence of Billy Goat and apply it to a buck rag, which can be simply rubbed around the face of the nannies. This is a smelly business, but is nevertheless the better half of the job. The other half, a synthetic hormone, must be applied, shall we say, internally. From the other end. Put it this way: hormone day is not the highlight of our year.
So. There came a day when Elián had a goat named Bug Breath in a headlock, and I was applying the hormonal cream, wrist deep in something I imagine princesses of old got to miss. Da-Xia and Han were working on another goat, beside us. Atta and Thandi had lost control of their goat and were chasing it through the toolshed—I could hear the banging—and Grego allegedly had a headache.
Just watch me, Elián had said. I’d been watching him. To escape from the Precepture . . . one might as well think of escaping from a ship at sea. It would fail, and whatever followed, I was sure, would be slow-thirst terrible.
I should stop him, I knew that. But I did not.
I also did not turn him in.
In the silence of my heart I considered what that meant. Once I would have gone directly to the Abbot. I’d have turned Elián in without thinking twice. But I had held his hand in the evening light since then. I had watched his pulse move in his bared throat since then.
I had changed.
I wanted to talk to Xie about it, or even Thandi—if anyone understood the risks Elián was running in attempting an escape, it would surely be Thandi. But I could not think of how to code it. So I stayed silent, and afraid.
Meanwhile, though, Elián treated me as if I had betrayed him. He was stiff, angry. Even now, with the goat locked—shall we call it intimately?—between us, he spoke mostly to Da-Xia, asking her question after question as if to shut out any possibility of silence. I could not believe he needed to know why we planned to breed half the goats exogamously—he was a sheep farmer, after all. But Xie explained inbreeding anyway. Elián asked why the two breeding groups needed to be kept separate. Xie answered that goats have an intricate pecking order and disrupting it is stressful for them.
It was not right for him to treat me as if I were not there, so I pushed into the conversation: “Don’t sheep have a pecking order?”
There was a second when I thought he’d ignore me. But he managed a brittle smile. “Nah, sheep are so dumb, they get lost in an empty field. You don’t get a lot of what you’d call rich social interaction with sheep.”
Da-Xia shot him a sly look. “Well, Elián, it’s a relief to hear that.”
An insult, with its hint of sexual impropriety, but Elián only laughed—genuinely, contagiously, and at his own expense.
We finished our goat and Elián snagged another by her horns. He made that look easy, but it wasn’t. Han was having trouble. Xie took the moment to rock back on her heels and stretch her spine into an arch. Then she rolled her shoulders forward and cracked out the joints in her fingers. She was—we all were—sweaty and dusty and besmeared with things not pleasant to remark on. “So,” Xie said. “Royalty, Elián. How are you liking it?”
“Still not a prince, Xie. But this is fun, I’ve got to admit it. I could do this all day.” He put the goat—it was Bat Brain, our tree climber—into a headlock and wrestled her to her knees. His tabi-toes curled dusty earth; the muscles in his shoulders rose and rounded. I did not want him to die.
The laughter earlier, or the sheer physicality of the moment, had knocked some of the anger out of him. “Where do we get this goat prince from, anyway?”
“It varies,” said Xie.
And I added, “Most of the remnant populations across Saskatchewan keep goats. Light pastoral use is one of the better ways to live off the land in a near desert. We usually get our visiting bucks from the salvage teams—from Saskatoon or Regina, sometimes as far away as Moose Jaw.”
“You sound exactly like a textbook, do you know that?” he said. “It’s amazing.”
“It’s—” It was powerful, was what it was. It was a mask. It could hide almost anything.