Odds Bodds

Since I've been tweeting about the fun of researching goat sex, I thought this week's teaser for Children of Peace could be about, well, goat sex. Here we have Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax, Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, and blood hostage to Precepture Four, discussing the matter. (If you want to know why the children of kings are raising goats in the first place, the first chapter is over here.)

So, then: August. It is perhaps a strange thing that the children of kings and presidents should concern themselves with the sex lives of a herd of milch goats, but come the end of August, it was time to do just that.

The Precepture strives to be self-sufficient, a model of environmental rationalism. To that end we 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 off the trouble makers.

In their season the male offspring of the flock and the herd provide the Precepture with welcome doses of meat, for those who choose to partake. Most of us do. We are the children of realpolitik, not sentimentalists. Our herds give us meat, and we eat it.

But the fly in the amber of this ancient system is inbreeding. Go more than two generations with only one billy goat, and you will regret it. It’s only a handful of newly come Children who balk at eating (as one young Jainist rajan told me earnestly) food with a face, but all of us dislike it when our food is born with two faces. 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. (While waiting to be executed, we Children take our humor where we can.)

Fall is the breeding season for goats in any case, but to bring all the nannies into estrus at the right day, we hedge our bets. Ampoules of goat drugs come in our yearly supply shuttle, with our clothing and our salt and our medicine and the handful of other things we cannot make for ourselves. They are in two kinds. The first is pheromones: 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 job, and can be a dangerous one. I have seen many a nanny driven mad by lust: they bleat as if you were killing them and some of them bite or even ram like billies. Last year mild-mannered Dipsy had pinned Han against a fence and broken three of his ribs, provoking a diplomatic incident of a scale our Precepture hadn't seen since Bihn killed herself with a pitchfork when we were all ten.

Anyway, the buck rag is the better half of the job. The other half, a synthetic hormone, must be applied, shall we say, internally. From the other end. Briefly I will say: this 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. ....