d 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 around his mouth. “And I can be the cabin boy that stuck an ax in his head.”
Isabella was a pretty thing, with an 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 mold 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. “Dr. 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 toward dress-up and kissing, and she would only explore chimneys if Conor agreed to pretend that the two of them were the legendary lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne, 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 hostage princess.”
“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 had 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 we 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 spoiled, and mannerly enough when their parents were nearby; but they were also light fingered and would pilfer whatever they fancied on their daily quests. One afternoon, a particular Italian gold leaf artisan had turned from the cherub he was coating to find his brush and tray of gold wafers missing. The gold turned up later, coating the wings of a week-dead seagull, which 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 be where the pair would have been met with a good-natured challenge from the sentry. But the king himself had just leaned out 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 and 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.
“Arrrr,” said Conor, and meant it.
The spiral staircase ascended through three floors, all packed with cleaning staff, lawyers, scientists, and civil servants; but through a combination of infant cunning and luck, the pair managed to pass the lower floors to reach 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 legend. Defend the Wall. The flag was a crest bisected vertically into crimson and gold sections, with a white blocked tower stamped in the center.
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 hearth rug, 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 had explained. Anyway, a 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 of them 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 shining for a couple of unsupervised children. A stars-and-stripes banner was draped around 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 man’s dreams should not be disturbed.
Suddenly, he froze. There was something he should do. The chance might 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 when Isabella and he had ambushed King Nicholas, every door in the place had been locked, and they had been warned, by stern-faced parents, never to venture onto 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 onto the 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.
He climbed on top of the parapet, holding tight to the flagpole. The world twirled around him, the orange sun hanging over Kilmore like a beacon. The sea glittered below him, more silver than blue, and the sky called 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 fly 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 might have caused a tug of patriotic pride in an older islander, but to a nine-year-old, all it meant was that his image should be included on the flag. I will draw myself on after I steal the flag, he decided.
Isabella emerged onto the rooftop, blinking against the sudden light. “Come down from the parapet, Conor. We’re playing pirates, not bird boy.”