Eoin Colfer - Airman

‘Arrrr,’ said Conor, and meant it.

The spiral staircase passed three floors, all packed with cleaning staff, lawyers, scientists and civil servants, but through a combination of low infant cunning and luck the pair managed to pass the lower floors to the king’s own entrance: impressive oak double doors with half of the Saltee flag and motto carved into each one. Vallo Parietis read the words. Defend the Wall. The flag was a crest bisected vertically into crimson and gold sections with a white blocked tower stamped in the centre.

The door was slightly ajar.

‘It’s open,’ said Conor.

‘It’s open, hostage princess,’ Isabella reminded him.

‘Sorry, hostage princess. Let’s see what treasure lies inside.’

‘I’m not supposed to, Conor.’

‘Pirate Captain Crow,’ said Conor, slipping through the gap in the door.

As usual, Nicholas’s apartment was littered with the remains of a dozen experiments. There was a cannibalized dynamo on the hearthrug, copper-wiring strands protruding from its belly.

‘That’s a sea creature and those are its guts,’ said Conor, with relish.

‘Oh, you foul pirate,’ said Isabella.

‘Stop your smiling then if I’m a foul pirate. Hostages are supposed to weep and wail.’

In the fireplace itself were jars of mercury and experimental fuels. Nicholas refused to allow his staff to move them downstairs. Too volatile, he explained. Anyway, the fire would only go up the chimney.

Conor pointed to the jars. ‘Bottles of poison. Squeezed from a dragon’s bum. One sniff and you ’vaporate.’

This sounded very possible, and Isabella wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not.

On the chaise longue were buckets of fertilizer, a couple gently steaming.

‘Also from a dragon’s bum,’ intoned Conor wisely.

Isabella tried to keep her scream behind her lips, so it shot out of her nose instead.

‘It’s fert’ lizer,’ said Conor, taking pity on her. ‘For making plants grow on the island.’

Isabella scowled at him. ‘You’re being hanged at sundown. That’s a princess’s promise.’

The apartment was a land of twinklings and shinings for a couple of unsupervised children. A stars-and-stripes banner was draped round the shoulders of a stuffed black bear in the corner. A collection of prisms and lenses glinted from a wooden box closed with a cap at one end, and books old and new were piled high like the columns of a ruined temple.

Conor wandered between these columns of knowledge, almost touching everything, but holding back, knowing somehow that another man’s dreams should not be disturbed.

Suddenly he froze. There was something he should do. The chance may never come again.

‘I must capture the flag,’ he breathed. ‘That’s what a pirate captain is supposed to do. Go to the roof, so I can capture the flag and gloat.’

‘Capture the flag and goat?’

‘Gloat.’

Isabella stood hands on hips. ‘It’s pronounced goooaaat, idiot.’

‘You’re supposed to be a princess. Insulting your subjects is not very princessy.’

Isabella was unrepentant. ‘Princesses do what they want – anyway we don’t have a goat on the roof.’

Conor did not waste his time arguing. There was no winning an argument with someone who could have you executed. He ran to the roof door, swishing his sword at imaginary troops. This door, too, was open. Incredible good fortune. On the hundred previous occasions he and Isabella had ambushed King Nicholas, every door in the palace had been locked, and they had been warned by stern-faced parents never to venture on to the roof alone. It was a long way down.

Conor thought about it.

Parents? Flag?

Parents? Flag?

‘Some pirate you are,’ sniffed Isabella. ‘Standing around there scratching yourself with a toy sword.’

Flag, then.

‘Arrr. I go for the flag, hostage princess.’ And then in his own voice, ‘Don’t touch any of the experiments, Isabella. ’Specially the bottles. Papa says that one day the king is going to blow the lot of us to hell and back with his concoctions, so they must be dangerous.’

Conor went up the stairs fast, before his nerve could fail him. It wasn’t far, perhaps a dozen steps to the open air. He emerged from the confines of the turret stairwell on to a stone rooftop. From dark to light in half a second. The effect was breathtaking, azure sky with clouds close enough to touch.

I was born in a place like this , thought Conor

You are a special child , his mother told him at least once a day. You were born in the sky, and there will always be a place for you there.

Conor believed that this was true. He had always felt happiest in high places, where others feared to go.

Conor climbed on top of the parapet, holding tight to the flagpole. The world twirled round him, orange sun hanging over Kilmore Quay like a beacon. Sea glittering below him, more silver than blue, and the sky calling to him as though he actually were a bird. For a moment he was bewitched by the scene, then the corner of the flag crept into his vision.

Arrr , he thought. Yon be the flag. Pride of the Saltees .

The flag stood perfectly rectangular, crimson and gold with its tower so white it glowed, held rigid by a bamboo frame so that the islands’ emblem would stand proud no matter what the weather. It struck Conor that he was actually standing on top of the very tower depicted by the flag.

This may have caused a tug of patriotic pride in an older islander, but to a nine-year-old all it meant was that his picture should be included on the flag.

I will draw myself on after I steal the flag , he decided.

Isabella emerged on to the rooftop, blinking against the sudden light.

‘Come down from the parapet, Conor. We’re playing pirates, not bird boy.’

Conor was aghast. ‘And leave the flag? Don’t you understand? I will be a famous pirate, more famous than Barbarossa himself.’

‘That wall is old, Conor. ’

‘Pirate Captain Crow, remember.’

‘That wall is old, Conor. It could fall down. Remember the slates came off the chapel during the storm last year?’

‘What about the flag?’

‘Forget the flag and forget the goat. I’m hungry, so come down before I have you hanged.’

Conor stamped down off the wall, sulking now. He was about to challenge Isabella, say that she could go ahead and have him hanged for all he cared, and she was a rotten hostage. Whoever heard of a hostage giving the orders. She should learn to weep and wail properly instead of threatening to execute him a hundred times a day.

He was about to say all of this, when there came a dull thump from below that shook the blocks beneath their feet. A cloud of purple smoke oomphed through the doorway, as though someone had cleared a tuba.

Conor had a suspicion bordering on certainty.

‘Did you touch something?’ he asked Isabella.

Isabella was haughty even in the face of disaster. ‘I am the princess of this palace, so I am quite entitled to touch whatever I wish.’

The tower shook again. This time the smoke was green and it was accompanied by a foul smell.

‘What did you touch, Isabella?’

The princess of the palace turned as green as the smoke.

‘I may have removed the cap from the wooden box. The one with the pretty lenses.’

‘Oh,’ said Conor. ‘That could be trouble.’

King Nicholas had explained the lens box to Conor once, delighted to find that the boy’s passion for learning equalled his own.

The lenses are arranged in a very specific order , he had said, squatting low so that his own eye appeared monstrous through the first lens. So when I remove the cap, and light comes in one end, it’s concentrated by successive lenses until it can set paper alight at the other. With this little gadget it might be possible to start a fire from a distance. The ultimate safe fuse.