Eoin Colfer: Airman

‘I’ll take care of it, Majesty. Perhaps you would escort Catherine to our quarters?’

‘Nice try, Captain,’ grinned Nicholas, clapping his hands, ‘hoping to keep me out of harm’s way.’ The king was excited again, the old soldier in him relishing the chase. Unlike most old soldiers, he did not relish the kill. These smugglers would be sent to work the diamond mine on the prison island of Little Saltee, but not harmed unless it was unavoidable.

‘Come now, we have dawn light and low tide. Criminals do not like to get up early, so we should catch them napping.’

The king touched his cap to Catherine, then strode off down the jetty towards a small company of Saltee cavalry on horseback. It was, in fact, the entire Saltee Army mounted division. A dozen expert horsemen on Irish stallions. Two of the horses were without riders.

Declan was anxious to stay with his wife, but more anxious to be about his work.

‘I must go, Catherine. The king will injure himself swinging into those caves.’

‘You go, Declan. Keep him safe; the islands need Good King Nick.’

Captain Broekhart kissed his wife and baby, then followed King Nicholas to where the cavalry waited, horses carving spiralled shavings from the jetty planks with their hooves.

‘Your father, the hero,’ Catherine told baby Conor, waving his tiny hand towards Declan. ‘Now, let’s go home and make ready to meet a little princess. Would you like to meet a princess, my stubborn scientist?’

Conor gurgled. It seemed as though he would.

Conor Broekhart was a remarkable boy, a fact that became evident very early in his idyllic childhood. Nature is usually grudging with her gifts, dispensing them sparingly, but she favoured Conor with everything she had to offer. It seemed as though all the talents of his ancestors had been bestowed upon him. Intelligence, strong features and grace.

Conor was fortunate in his situation too. He was born into an affluent community, where the values of equality and justice were actually being applied, on the surface at least. He grew up with a strong belief in right and wrong, which was not muddied by poverty or violence. It was straightforward for the young boy. Right was Great Saltee, wrong was Little Saltee.

It is an easy matter now, to pluck some events from Conor’s early years and say, There it is. The boy who became the man. We should have seen it. But hindsight is an unreliable science and, in truth, there was perhaps a single incident during Conor’s early days at the palace that hinted at his potential.

The incident in question occurred when Conor was nine years old and roaming the serving corridors that snaked behind the walls of the castle chapel and main building. His partner on these excursions was the Princess Isabella, one year his senior and always the more adventurous of the two. Isabella and Conor were rarely seen without each other, and often so daubed with mud, blood and nothing good that the boy was barely distinguishable from the princess.

On this particular summer afternoon, they had exhausted the fun to be had tracking an unused chimney to its source and had decided to launch a surprise pirate attack on the king’s apartment.

‘You can be Captain Crow,’ said little Conor, licking some soot from round his mouth, ‘and I can be the cabin boy that stuck an axe in his head.’

Isabella was a pretty thing, with elfin face and round brown eyes, but at that moment she looked more like a sweep’s urchin than a princess.

‘No, Conor. You are Captain Crow, and I am the princess hostage.’

‘There is no princess hostage,’ declared Conor firmly, worried that Isabella was once again about to mould the legend to suit herself. In previous games, she had included a unicorn and a fairy that were definitely not part of the original story.

‘Of course there is,’ said Isabella belligerently. ‘There is because I say there is, and I am an actual princess, whereas you were born in a balloon.’

Isabella intended this as an insult, but to Conor being born in a balloon was about the finest place to be born.

‘Thank you,’ he said, grinning.

‘That’s not a good thing,’ squealed Isabella. ‘Doctor John says that your lungs were probably crushed by the alti-tood.’

‘My lungs’re better than yours. See!’ And Conor hooted at the sky to show just how healthy his lungs were.

‘Very well,’ said Isabella, impressed. ‘But I am still the princess hostage. And you should remember that I can have you executed if you displease me.’

Conor was not unduly concerned about Isabella having him executed as she ordered him hung at least a dozen times a day and it hadn’t happened yet. He was more worried that Isabella was not turning out to be as good a playmate as he had hoped. Basically he wanted someone who would play the games he fancied playing, which generally involved flying paper gliders or eating insects. But lately Isabella had been veering towards dressing-up and kissing, and she would only explore chimneys if Conor agreed to pretend they were the legendary lovers Diarmuid and Gràinne, escaping from Fionn’s castle.

Needless to say, Conor had no wish to be a legendary lover. Legendary lovers rarely flew anywhere, and hardly ever ate insects.

‘Very well,’ he moaned. ‘You are the princess hostage.’

‘Excellent, Captain,’ Isabella said sweetly. ‘Now, you may drag me to my father’s chamber and demand ransom.’

‘Drag?’ said Conor hopefully.

‘Play drag, not real drag, or I shall have you hung.’

Conor thought, with remarkable wit for a nine-year-old, that if he had actually been hung every time Isabella ordered it, his neck would be longer than a Serengeti giraffe’s.

‘Play drag, then. Can I kill anyone we meet?’

‘Absolutely anyone. Not Papa, though, until after I see how sad he is.’

Absolutely anyone.

That’s something , thought Conor, swishing his wooden sword, thinking how it cut the air like a gull’s wing.

Just like a wing.

The pair proceeded across the barbican, she oohing and he arring , drawing fond but also wary looks from those they passed. The palace’s only resident children were well liked, not at all spoilt, and mannerly enough when their parents were nearby, but they were also light-fingered and would pilfer whatever they fancied on their daily quests.

A certain Italian gold-leaf artisan had recently turned from the cherub he was coating one afternoon to find his brush and tray of gold wafers missing. The gold turned up later coated on the wings of a week-dead seagull that someone had tried to fly from the Wall battlements.

They crossed the bridge into the main keep, which housed the king’s residence, office and meeting rooms. And this would generally have been where the pair would be met with a good-natured challenge from the sentry. But the king himself had just leaned out of the window and sent the fellow running to catch the Wexford boat and put ten shillings on a horse he fancied in the Curracloe beach races. The palace had a telephone system, but there were no wires to the shore as yet, and the booking agents on the mainland refused to take bets over the semaphore.

For two minutes only, much to the princess’s and the pirate’s delight, the main keep was unguarded. They strode in as though they owned the castle.

‘Of course, in real life, I do own the castle,’ confided Isabella, never missing a chance to remind Conor of her exalted position.