We stood together in our hostage whites and watched them.
Meanwhile, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The old billy was nearly mad from the smell of the nannies, and enraged by the whiff of the approaching Royal Visitor. The slot-shaped pupils of his eyes were wide as the doors of hell, and his horns were draped with the remnants of things he’d tried to destroy—bailing wire from the gate, alfalfa from the feed trough, a skewered hunk of zucchini. Grah! he shouted. I was sure it was goat for Die, infidel!
The visitors came almost within hailing distance. About twenty of them. A woman—the grandmother or great-grandmother, I supposed—and a range of adults, teenagers, children, all together, and arranging themselves just as they liked. They were driving a dozen nannies to be bred with Charlie. The billy—the Royal Visitor himself—had a special escort, a stocky young woman who held him on a lead. Charlie caught wind of the does. Grooouuu, he moaned. (Goat for Hubba, hubba!)
The trommeller family came to a particular stone, and they stopped.
“Why are they stopping?” asked Elián, but in the next moment we could see why. The thing that I’d taken for a stone was a ball of proctors, all tangled together like hibernating snakes. They swarmed apart, a couple dozen of them, mostly of the smaller kind. The visitors put down their gear. The proctors poked and sniffed and climbed into bags. Nursery spiders, like the kind that tormented Elián, climbed up the people themselves.
“They’re being searched for contraband,” said Han.
“Yeah, suppose that’s smart,” said Elián. “Think of what one good pipe bomb could do to this place.”
The next second, of course, he was on his knees—shocked, but still rather misty-eyed with the thought of pipe bombs.
Out among the visitors, one of the adult women had a baby bound to her back. While we watched, a nursery spider climbed up the outside of the papoose board and perched on the baby’s head. It was presumably scanning, though from this distance that could only be inferred. Thandi looked away, and Da-Xia looked sick. To be honest, the whole business struck me, too, as intrusive and excessive. They had only come to breed goats. Elián climbed back to his feet and expressed his unease with a slow drawl. “Gosh. Do you think we’re safe here?”
“The Preceptures are safe,” said Han. What a handicap, in this place, to be bad with subtext. “Talis defends them. Remember Kandahar.”
“It is hard to forget,” said Grego, deadpan, though there was no joke. Truly, we remembered Kandahar. Two hundred years ago, a nation called the Kush had struck against Precepture Seven in an attempt to fetch back their young hostage king. Talis had responded by erasing their capital from orbit. There was not a stick left of Kandahar, not a single survivor.
Shouldn’t take an oracle to interpret that one, said the Utterances. These Children are mine. Touch them and people will be talking about you for centuries.
Grouuuuuu, Charlie howled, and the Royal Visitor sounded his trumpet: Graaallll! The woman holding the visiting billy took a few stumbling steps forward as the goat surged—and the lead broke.
The Royal Visitor was a good-size animal, a black buck with white blazing, and fine curved horns. He took off for us with his head down, fast. Bonnie Prince Charlie bellowed, Han yelped, Grego grabbed Han, Thandi shouted, Xie raised her hands as if in divine dismissal, Atta stepped in front of Xie, and Elián—well, Elián, of course, gave an earsplitting yell and ran forward. He caught the Royal Visitor in a flying tackle. Goat and boy and proctors went spinning in a tumbleweed of black and white.
When the dust cleared, Elián was sitting on the goat’s back, with his hands tight around one horn. He was sporting a bruised eye and a ridiculous grin, and laughing.