Novel - Airman

by Eoin Colfer

  Declan Broekhart loomed over him, tears dripping from his chin. “Because of you,” he whispered. “Because of you . . .” Then he lunged at Conor, reaching not to embrace but to kill. Bonvilain was ready for it. He restrained Declan Broekhart with strong arms.

  “Now, Declan. Be strong. For Catherine. And for young Isabella. We all need you. The Saltees need you.” As he said this, Hugo Bonvilain peered over Broekhart’s shoulder and winked merrily. This combination of grief and lunacy were like physical blows to young Conor. He recoiled from his father, drawing his knees to his chin. What was happening? Was the world mad?

  Declan Broekhart gathered himself, dragging a sleeve across his brow.

  “Very well, Hugo,” he said haltingly. “I am composed now. You were right. That wretch is nothing to me. Nothing. His death would not restore anything. Little Saltee can deal with him. Let us leave here; my wife needs me.”

  Wretch? His father was calling him a wretch.

  “Of course, Captain Broekhart, Declan. Of course.” And so Bonvilain led him out. Two soldiers together, comrades in grief.

  What? What was this? Declan? Little Saltee? Conor used the last of his strength to moan around his mouth strap, calling his father back. And his father did turn back, if only for a moment. If only to deliver a few final withering remarks. He vented these words with his eyes closed, as if even to look at his son was more than he could bear.

  “Your foul actions have taken my king from me,” he said. “And worse, much worse, because of what you have done this day, I have no son. My son is gone, and this . . .” Declan Broekhart paused to struggle with his rage, eventually calming himself. “My son is gone, and you remain. A word of warning, traitor. If I ever see you again, it will be on the day I kill you.”

  These were words that no man should hear from another, but from father to son they were indescribably harsh. Conor Broekhart felt as though he were indeed brokenhearted, as his name suggested. He could do nothing but raise his manacled hands to the lunatic box’s grille and tug repeatedly, jerking his injured head until the pain drove those hateful words from his head.

  “Insane,” said Bonvilain sadly, leading Declan Broekhart from the cell. “But then he would have to be to do what he did.”

  As they left the cell, Bonvilain could barely maintain his show of grief. The waiting guards were ready to draw cutlasses, but Bonvilain shook his head slightly. His manipulation had worked, so Declan Broekhart would live for now. “Take the captain back to his carriage,” he instructed the guards. “I will watch the prisoner myself.”

  Declan grasped Bonvilain’s wrist. “You have been a friend today, Hugo. We have had our fiery moments in the past, but that is behind us. I will not forget your speedy apprehension of the traitor. And I trust he will pay for his part in the king’s murder, and for what he did to Conor. My son.” Broekhart’s face cracked in grief once more.

  How weak the man is, thought Bonvilain. There is no need for such hysterics.

  “Of course, Declan. He shall pay. You can count on it.” They parted with a handshake and Broekhart half walked, half stumbled along the length of the stone corridor. Bonvilain returned to Conor’s cell, to where the wretched boy lay unconscious. A tiny fly in the master spider’s web.

  Bonvilain knelt beside him. He found himself feeling a touch sorry for young Conor. It’s natural, not weakness, he told himself. I am human, after all.

  It was incredible, really, how easily the entire thing had been accomplished. Allow the king to set up his meeting with Victor, then blame the Parisian for Nicholas’s murder. Conor Broekhart had been a delightful bonus, a way to keep the father loyal. Admittedly he had toyed with them both a little, but that was the skill of it. His God-given talent to manipulate people.

  The final part of the plan had only occurred to him after Conor had surprised him in the king’s apartment. Following his near strangulation, the boy’s face had been so swollen that he was barely recognizable. Even his own mother wouldn’t have known him. Bonvilain had ordered the youth to be dressed as a soldier, a ratty old ball wig arranged on his head, and his chin coated with gunpowder stubble. The final trick was to have one of his sergeants, a gifted man with pen and ink, to draw a quick copy of the regimental tattoo on Conor’s forearm. A small touch, but enough to make an impression. With the blood, shadows, wig, and uniform, it was unlikely that Broekhart would know his own son. Especially if he had just been informed that his son had been wrestled out of the king’s window, trying to defend Nicholas, and that this prisoner was one of the traitorous soldiers involved in the plan. A sentry’s corpse had already been found at the base of the wall. Conor’s dead body must have been swept south by the currents.

  Of course, if Declan Broekhart had recognized his son, then Bonvilain himself would have immediately slit his throat. Conor could have taken the blame for that, too. A busy day for the boy. Regicide in the afternoon, patricide in the evening.

  But now, thanks to Bonvilain’s little games, Declan Broekhart thought his son was dead and Conor thought his father despised him for a traitor. Sir Hugo had utter control over the Broekhart family, and should Declan ever turn against him, then Conor could be resurrected and used to blackmail his father. Unswerving loyalty in return for his son’s life. Bonvilain realized that toying with Conor was unnecessary and cruel, but that was the fun of it. His own brazen audacity thrilled him.

  Bonvilain clapped his hands gently three times. Bravo, maestro. Bravo.

  I love this, thought Bonvilain. I exult in it.

  CHAPTER 5: LITTLE SALTEE

  The following evening Conor Broekhart was roughly bundled into a shallow-draft steamboat and shipped off to Little Saltee. He was the only prisoner on deck and was forced to share the aft cage with two pigs and a sheep. There were two guards on the grubby steamboat, and the more senior was eager to share his own importance with Conor.

  “I don’t normally ferry prisoners,” explained the man, an Irishman, aiming a kick at the cage door to make sure Conor was listening. “Only, the warden insisted I ship your bones personally. Myself, as it were; the order came direct from Marshall Bonvilain. So what’s a body to do? Turn down Bonvilain? I doubt it, sonny. Not unless you want to spend the afternoon shaking hands with your maker.”

  Conor was not interested in chatter. He was as lost in this day as a chick wet from the egg. On the surface, things were the same. He recognized Little Saltee’s shape to the north, but it seemed a dreadful place now, even at a distance. Yesterday he had looked upon the island as the seat of justice. Only yesterday? Could it be? How much had happened in one day.

  The ferry’s broad keel hammered the waves, rising a salty mist that the boat steamed through. The spray unfurled across the gunwales, drenching the cage’s occupants. Not a one of them flinched. For a moment Conor felt only blessed cool, then the salt sank into his wounds, causing him to cry out.

  His cry seemed to please his escort. “Ah! Still alive are we, Mister Conor Finn?”

  Mister Conor Finn?

  Conor wasn’t surprised. Bonvilain would not wish his prisoner’s real name known. So he was to be Conor Finn.

  “Conor Finn,” continued the guard. “Friend to smugglers and first-class lunatic. Turf head. Scatterfool. You won’t be enjoying it in our mad wing. Not in the slightest.”

  Conor Finn. Smuggler and lunatic. Bonvilain was taking no chances. Even if there were someone to talk with, who would believe a smuggler and a lunatic?

  “No, Little Saltee is not a place for mirth. No Maypoles nor circus antics. Especially not for Conor Finn. Bonvilain says to take special care of you in the mad wing. And if Bonvilain says it, then Arthur Billtoe does it.”

  Conor squinted through puffy eyelids, taking a serious look at this guard. The man was not unlike a lithograph Victor had once shown him of the pongo abelii, or Sumatran orangutan. His pugnacious features were ringed with a thick fringe of dirty brown and gray hair, the same hair that ran in rivulets into the neck of his ruffled pirate�
��s shirt. He wore thigh boots on squat, powerful legs; and silver rings adorned his fingers. At another time, Conor might have poked fun at this man’s swashbuckling rig. But now his appearance was frightening. How could someone so removed from reality be trusted to perform a guard’s duties?

  Still, there existed somewhere a spark of the old Conor. The Conor from yesterday. “Nice boots, Captain,” he mumbled.

  Billtoe was not angry, not a bit of it. He smiled, revealing half a dozen plug-stained teeth. “Oh, we shall have some sport with you, my lad. You have no idea. I dress how I fancy, and I do what I fancy. In my corner of Little Saltee, Arthur Billtoe is king.”

  The king is dead, thought Conor, leaning back against the animals in his cage. I saw him dead. The animals were bony and shivering and almost as miserable as Conor himself.

  The steamer swung around the tip of Galgee Rock and onto a crescent beach below Little Wall’s turreted gate. The sun was setting between gun ports and cast a red light across the sand. Crabs scuttled in rock pools, fighting for scraps, and a funnel of gulls inland marked the gaol’s kitchen just as surely as any flag. Billtoe opened the cage carelessly, hauling Conor out by his manacle’s chain while his partner secured the bow line.

  “Here we are, Mister Conor Finn. I should warn you, men don’t much like soldiers on Little Saltee. Be you soldier or be you not, you’re wearing the trousers.”

  For the first time, Conor regretted his height. He could easily pass for enlisting age, though there was no beard on his chin. I wish I could fly, he thought, gazing longingly into the morning sky. Leave this nightmare behind. Fly home to . . .

  But he could never fly home. No more lessons with Victor. No more models of gliders and airships. No more fencing with Isabella. And his father had sworn to kill him on sight, a promise infinitely more painful than the act itself would be. A large part of Conor wished his father had made good on his promise immediately.

  Billtoe tumbled Conor over the gunwale onto a low wooden jetty, into the restraining arms of the second guard. “Let’s get the fleas off him, Mister Pike,” he said. “Feed him some slop, and get him ready for the mine.” Arthur Billtoe dug a plug of chewing tobacco from his pocket, stuffing it between bottom teeth and lip. “We’re soldier boy’s family now, so let’s send him off to work with a Little Saltee kiss. A nice long one.”

  The guards urged Conor along the slipway with prods from their rifle butts. As they passed into the prison proper, Conor noticed that the curtain wall was at least twelve feet thick and built of solid granite. Hundreds of years ago, Raymond Trudeau had ordered the prison built from the rock dug from the island itself. As the walls went up, the prison went down. There were cave-ins and floods, and prisoners died; but prisoners dying had never been enough to stop the mining until King Nicholas took the throne. Now that Bonvilain was in charge, inmate safety would hardly be high on the agenda.

  The guards bustled Conor beneath a portcullis, its black iron teeth clanking with every wave shudder. They emerged into a wide courtyard overlooked by salt-blasted crenellations and at least a dozen Sharpshooters.

  In one corner of the courtyard was a sunken pool, which had been roughly walled. The pool was six feet by six. The depth was made unclear by the clouds of algae and slime lurking below the surface. The water stank of stagnation and rot.

  “In you pop,” said Billtoe cheerily, a second before heaving Conor over the lip with a forearm.

  “Kill anything, those mites will,” Conor heard him say in the fraction of a moment before the murky water closed over him, and his manacles dragged him to the spongy bed. Conor tensed every sinew and muscle, expecting more saltwater pain, but instead the water soothed his cuts. Freshwater. Something else, too. Natural anaesthetic in the weeds, perhaps. Before Conor could appreciate this unforeseen bliss, the clouds in the pool moved toward him purposefully. They were alive! Conor was on the point of opening his mouth to yell out, when his good sense prevailed. He was underwater. Opening his mouth would mean inviting these microscopic characters into his gut. He sucked his lips between his teeth, sealing them tight, and fought the manacles’ weight so that he could pinch his nostrils closed. His ears would have to fend for themselves.

  The mites went to work on Conor’s person, scraping his skin with their infinitesimal teeth. To Conor this seemed like macabre torture; but to his person, these mites were a boon. Plant spores, agitated by the mites, disinfected his wounds, which the mites cleaned by eating all traces of infection. They chipped off blood and scab, diving deep into gashes, chewing back to the bare wound. They ate loose hair and dirt, even gnawing the fake regimental tattoo on the boy’s forearm. The only things they ignored were the dots of gunpowder on Conor’s jowls, but those were sluiced off by the currents created by his own thrashings.

  Conor didn’t believe the guards would let him drown. Bonvilain would not deliver him to this place so that he could be murdered in the courtyard. Nevertheless the nibbling mites pushed him to the brink of despair; and had the guards not gaffed his chain and lugged him from the pool, he would have opened his mouth and accepted flooded lungs rather than endure another second of mites scouring his skin.

  Conor lay gasping on the rough flagstones, their ridges hard against his forehead. There were mites on him still. He could feel their vibrations on his eyebrows and in his ears, their buzzing on his skin. “Get them off,” he begged his captors, hating himself for doing it. “Please.”

  The guards did so, chuckling, with buckets of salt water lined up for the purpose. The salt sting traced burning lines along his body, like sections of the barbed wire King Nicholas had imported from Texas. But even this sting was preferable to a million mites’ teeth.

  Billtoe swiped the seat of Conor’s pants with his boot. “Up you get, Conor Finn. Move now if you want a bed, otherwise it’s sleep in the open. Makes no difference to me, but they’re cranking the bell in the Pipe tomorrow, and you’ll need all your energy for the bell.”

  This talk of pipes and bells was gibberish to Conor. A church orchestra perhaps? Conor doubted that there would be anything as spiritually uplifting as church music in this place. He stood slowly, head to one side, dislodging the last of the mites. “What were those creatures?” he asked, his voice strange in his own clogged ears.

  “Feeder mites,” answered Billtoe. “Freshwater parasites. It takes real care to breed those little beauties. This is the only pool of ’em outside of Australia, thanks to Wandering Heck. We heat it special.”

  Conor minded this little lesson closely. Victor had told him never to disregard information. Information was what saved lives, not ignorant heroics. And yet all the information inside Victor’s head hadn’t managed to save his own life. Wandering Heck’s proper title was King Hector the Second, the king of the Saltees before Nicholas. King Hector had been far more interested in exploring other continents than in running his own country, a fact that must have suited Marshall Bonvilain.

  Conor stood, allowing his arms to sag low, so the ground could bear the weight of his chain. Something hissed near his left eye. A heated hiss. Conor was too beaten down by the day to react. Otherwise he could have delayed the inevitable until a few more guards were summoned. As it was, a single guard was more than sufficient to hold him against the wall. Arthur Billtoe pinned his left hand to the stone with a red hot cattle brand. “A Little Saltee kiss,” said Billtoe. “Hope you enjoy it.”

  Conor stared at it incredulously for a moment, watching the water boil off, smelling the scorched reek of his own flesh. There was no pain. But it was coming, and there was no way on earth to avoid it. I want to fly away from this place, thought Conor. I need to fly away. The pain arrived, and Conor Broekhart flew away, but only in his tired mind.

  CHAPTER 6: IN THE MIDDLE OF WYNTER

  Morning arrived early on Little Saltee, heralded by a single cannon shot aimed toward the mainland. The shot was a Saltee tradition that had been missed only twice in the six hundred years since King Raymond II had inaugurated
the custom. Once in A.D. 1348 when an outbreak of plague wiped out half the population in less than a month, and then again in the Middle Ages when Eusebius Crow’s pirate fleet had all but overrun Great Saltee. The single cannon shot served both to awaken the prisoners and to remind Irish smugglers, brigands, or even government forces that the Saltee forces were vigilant and ready to repel all attackers.

  Conor Broekhart awoke on a wooden pallet to the sound of cannon echo. He had slept deeply in spite of all that had happened. His body needed time without interruption to repair itself and so had granted him a night of dreamless sleep. Numerous pains assaulted his senses, but the most urgent sang from his left hand.

  A Little Saltee kiss.

  So it was all real, then. The king’s assassination. The orphaning of dear Isabella, and his own father’s threats of murder. All real. Wincing, Conor raised his hand to inspect the wound, and was surprised to find it covered with a neat bandage. Green fluid oozed through the material’s border.

  “Do you like that dressing, boy?” said a voice. “The green muck is plantago. I put some on your face, too. Cost me my last plug of tobacco from one of the guards.”

  Conor squinted across the cell’s gloom. A pair of long, thin legs poked from the shadows. A skinny wrist was draped over one knee, long fingers tapping on imaginary piano keys. “You did this?” asked Conor. “The dressing? I have . . . I had a friend who was good with medicines.”

  “As a young man I rode with the Missouri Ruffians for a year during the Civil War,” continued the man, his accent American. “I learned a little about medicine. Of course, when they learned that I was a Yankee spy, Jesse James himself took a poker to my skull. I suppose he thought I’d seen enough.”

  “Thank you, sir. I was not expecting kindness in this place.”

  “And you won’t see much,” granted the Yankee. “But what you do see shines like a diamond in a bucket of coal. Naturally, we lunatics are the kindest of the bunch.”