The Scorpion Rules (10 page)

If one of them comes here as a regent's hostage, they will be in for a rude shock.

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.

For instance, a warning.

“There are probably more goats than people in Saskatchewan,” I said. “There are the salvage teams in the cities, and the nomadic bands of Cree ecosystem repair engineers on the high prairies, but no one else. Saskatchewan is big and it's empty. And without resources and expertise, it could kill you.”

“In three to five days, I'd say,” added Xie. Lightly. I could swear I hadn't let my voice slip from behind its textbook mask, and yet I could feel Da-Xia's sudden and enveloping attention. She knew exactly what I was doing.

Han didn't. “Three to five days until what?” he asked.

“Until one runs out of water, most likely.” I could not help but glance at Elián's face as if glancing at the Panopticon. His mouth was stiff and tight. I looked back down quickly. Elián's knee was visible past the heaving side of the goat—his knee, and the twitching lump that was a spider under his clothes. I knew it would be listening. I knew I was at the edge—the barest edge—of what I could possibly say. “Saskatchewan was always marginal, but after the big shift it dried up radically, and the Pan Polar government decided to move the entire population. We diked the mouth of James Bay and let the rivers turn it into a new Great Lake—and the Hudson Shore into a new breadbasket. It is a well-studied model of the rational use of resources.”

My voice was level, but I was pleading with him.
Stop. Think. Don't do this. Please don't do this.

“Rational—” Elián's voice cracked. Without warning he let the goat go and stood up. Bat Brain threw herself backward and kicked out with her hind feet like a war-trained stallion. I had to free my hand, so my dodge came almost too late, and had no grace: I ended up sprawled on my back. The goat took off. Elián towered over me, and the Panopticon loomed behind him. “I'm so sick of
rational
. Tell me something
rational
, Princess Greta. Will your mother let you die?”

Flat on my back in the dust, I answered him, “Of course.”

Through the next few days that “of course” was a blister on the inside of my mouth. Elián ignored me and I ignored him. Even as the nannies came into heat—one could tell because they grew louder than roosters and started to sexually assault the water barrels—I found myself thinking those words, replaying that moment.

Replaying Elián asking what he had no right to ask, what no Precepture child ever asked another.
Will your mother let you die?

Mine would. Of course she would.

She would be grief-stricken. She would hesitate. She would go to war only if all other options failed. The Preceptures
worked
. They made the have-not states reluctant to start wars to get what they needed; they made the have states reluctant to refuse reasonable demands.
Think of it as incentivizing negotiations,
said the Utterances.
Think of it as putting a little skin in the game.

But I had been to Lake Erie. It was little more than a marsh, reedy and loud with blackbirds, dotted with the mines that reclaimed the heavy metals that had once settled at the bottom of the polluted lake. When it was a lake.

My mother would not let that happen to Lake Ontario. I knew she wouldn't. She had been born to a crown, and she had learned a crown's cold courage. She would be appropriately reluctant, but if the Cumberlanders did not back down, she would not accede to their demands. She would let me die.

Of course.

And of course, too, Elián had been up to something, with that string of questions about goats. He'd been fishing for information about the Royal Visit.

That year's visit was by a salvage family out of Saskatoon, trommellers who sorted the rubble of the abandoned city with the aid of rotating drums the size of houses—the trommels for which they were named.

The trommellers and their Royal Visitor came on the first day of September. My cohort happened, by good luck, to be up at Bonnie Prince Charlie's pen on the ridge top, moving the fences to encompass fresh grazing. We could see the open prairie from there.

Rising from it was a plume of dust.

Grego spotted it first—and froze, his iris implants snapping shut.

Han took his arm. “Don't be scared.” No one else would have implied that Grego was scared, but Han did it easily, blandly. “It will be the Royal Visit.”

And it was. We watched the group slowly come into view from the dust, a loose band of walkers driving goats before them with long sticks. They were a strange sight to eyes accustomed to the ranks and sorting of the Precepture—men and women and children, all strolling together. As they came closer, we could see that they all had their heads and faces wrapped against the dust; we could see their long coats made of scraps of colorful cloth, and adorned with flashing bits of metal that made them look, from a distance, like sparkle on water.

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.