Airman

PART 2:
FINN
CHAPTER 5:
LITTLE SALTEE

The following evening Conor Broekhart was roughly bundled into a shallow-draught 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 goat. There were two guards on the grubby steamboat, and the most 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 hull hammered the waves, raising a salty mist that the boat steamed through. The spray unfurled across the gunwales, drenching the cage’s occupants. Not one of them flinched. For a moment Conor felt only blessedly 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 orang-utan. His pugnacious features were ringed with a thick fringe of dirty brown and grey 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 round the tip of Galgee Rock and on to a crescent beach below Little Saltee’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 bowline.
‘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 was 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 on to 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 him 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. Fresh water. Something else too. Natural anaesthetic in the weeds perhaps. Before Conor could appreciate this unforeseen bliss, the clouds in the pool moved towards 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 manacle’s 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 trousers 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 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 II, the king of the Saltees before Nicholas. King Hector had been far more interested in exploring other continents than 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.