Novel - Airman (10 page)

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.”

Conor was momentarily puzzled.
We lunatics?
Then he remembered that Bonvilain had declared him insane. A turf head. A scatterfool.

The American was still talking. “Of course, technically, I am an invalid not a lunatic, but we are all lumped together here on Little Saltee. Lunatics, invalids, violent cases.” He stood slowly, extending a hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Linus Wynter. With a Y. In the middle of Wynter, you understand. You will be seeing a lot of me, but I won’t be seeing much of you, I’m afraid.”

Wynter emerged from the shadows like a stack of brooms falling from a closet. A tall gangle of a man, over fifty, clothed in the ragged remnants of a once fine evening suit. Like Conor, he wore a bandage. But his was tied across the sockets where his eyes had been. Jesse James had done a thorough job with his poker, the scars of which ran in purple welts across Wynter’s high brow.

Wynter tugged on the bandage. “I used to wear an opera mask when I played. Very melodramatic. Very Dickens.”

Conor shook Linus Wynter’s hand as firmly as he could manage. “Conor . . . Finn. That is my name now.”

Wynter nodded, his prominent nose and Adam’s apple sending triangular shadows dancing across his face and neck. “Good. A new name. In Little Saltee it is better to become a different person. The old Conor is dead and gone. A man needs a new sensibility to survive here. Even a very young man.”

Conor flexed his fingers. Pain scraped his tendons, but everything functioned as it should. He examined his prison cell without enthusiasm. It was as rough and ready as his previous cell, with one small barred and glassed window and a couple of wooden pallets.

Something Wynter had said struck him belatedly.
Even a
very young man?
Conor waved his hand before Wynter’s eyes. “How can you tell my age? Have your other senses compensated?”

“Yes, they have; so if you could lower your hand. But I know all about you, young Conor Broekhart or Conor Finn, because you were fevered in the night and kept me awake with your babblings. The king? He is truly dead, then?”

Tears welled on Conor’s eyelids. Hearing a stranger say the words aloud had the effect of planting Bonvilain’s deed in the real world. “Yes. I saw him dead.”

Wynter sighed long and mournfully, running his fingers through fine, graying hair. “That is indeed grave news. More than you know. Bonvilain will drag these islands back to the dark ages.”

“You know Bonvilain?”

“I know a lot about the affairs of the Saltees.” Wynter seemed about to elaborate, his mouth open for the next word, when he paused, cocking his head to one side in the manner of a deer who senses nearby hunters. “Time for histories this evening. Over dinner, perhaps.” He leaned forward, fingers scrabbling through the air like spiders, until they settled on Conor’s shoulders.

“Now, listen to me, Conor Finn,” he said with some urgency. “The guard approaches. They will try to break you today. Watch carefully for trouble. A sly blade. A plank across the shins. Come through this day intact, and tonight I shall teach you how to survive this hell. There is an end to it, and we shall see it, believe me.”

“Break me?” said Conor. “Why?”

“It is the way here. A broken man, or even boy, is not likely to upset production. And on Little Saltee, production is the real king, not Arthur Billtoe.”

Conor pictured the monkey pirate who had ferried him to the prison. It was unlikely that Billtoe would lift a bejeweled finger to protect Conor. “What can I do?”

“Work hard,” replied Wynter. “And trust neither man nor beast. Especially a sheep.”

Before Linus Wynter could explain this unexpected remark, the door’s heavy bolt scraped through its rings with an almost musical sound.

“Top C,” said Wynter dreamily. “Every morning. Wonderful.”

This was a noise that Conor would yearn for over the months to come, a noise he heard in his dreams. The latch’s release signified liberation from his dank cell, but also served as a reminder that the liberation was temporary. Social diarists record that survivors of Little Saltee often suffered from insomnia unless their bedchamber doors were fitted with rusted bolts.

Arthur Billtoe peeped around the door, wearing the cheery expression of a kindly uncle waking his nephew for a plunge in the swimming hole. His hair was slicked back with a smear of grease, and thick stubble poked through his skin like nails driven from the inside. “Ready for the Pipe, are you, Conor Finn?” he said, jingling a set of handcuffs.

Wynter’s fingers gripped tight, like coal tongs. “Mouth shut. Work hard. Mind the sheep. And don’t cross Mr. Billtoe.”

Billtoe entered the cell and clapped the cuffs around Conor’s wrists. “Oh yes, never cross me, little soldier. You lay one finger on me and you will be strapped to a low ring at high tide. And as for the sheep—wise words from the blind man. Sheep are not for stewing here on Little Saltee.”

All this talk of sheep was strange and ominous. Conor guessed that he had a surprise coming, and not the jolly kind.

Traditionally in hostelries and even in prisons around the globe, breakfast is served before a shovel is lifted. Not so on Little Saltee. Here the morning meal was used as an incentive to work harder. No diamonds, no bread. It was a straightforward equation that had proved effective for centuries. Conor had expected a detour to a mess hall, but instead was led directly to the diamond mine, or the Pipe, as the prison’s occupants called it.

Billtoe explained Little Saltee’s routine on the way. “Salts with a tum full of grub are inclined to be satisfied and dopey,” he said, chewing on a hunk of bread that he stored in his pocket between bites.

To Conor, who hadn’t tasted a morsel in twenty-four hours, this was yet another form of torture. His hunger pangs were soon subdued by Billtoe’s revolting habit of half swallowing each mouthful, then regurgitating it to relish the taste once more. Each regurgitation was accompanied by a convulsion that ran along Billtoe’s spine like a flicked rope.

Though Conor was repulsed, he knew his hunger would soon return, gnawing on the lining of his stomach, as if his body had turned on itself in desperation. He was distracted from his hunger by the peal of a church bell in the distance. This was something of a mystery in a such a godforsaken place.

Billtoe seemed cheered by the sound. “Say your prayers, boy,” he cackled. The guard jabbed his rifle butt into Conor’s spine, pushing him along a cobbled passageway lit by torches and dawn glow from roof portholes. The surf crashed against the granite wall on their left, which was half natural, half hewn, as though the island were growing through the structure. Each wave’s crash shook the entire corridor and set a hundred rivulets pulsing through mortar as crumbly as cheese.

“Below sea level, we are,” explained Billtoe, as though Conor needed telling. “A while back the prison and the mine were two separate things. But the Trudeaus’ greed and the inmates’ labor drew them together. The prison basement was heading that way and eventually the two met up. Just a matter of bashing through a wall. It was fortunate for us guards in the mad wing. Now there’s no need for us to venture out in the elements. We let the lunatics work the Pipe—half the time they don’t even know it’s dangerous, and most of them will work until their hands bleed if you tell ’em that’s what Mummy would want.”

This exposition was delivered in a cheery tone that belied Billtoe’s cruel nature. If it had not been for the gun butt in his back and the burning Saltee kiss on his hand, Conor might have believed the guard a decent man. They passed along a maze of corridors, dotted with strong doors and collapsing arches. The entire prison basement seemed in danger of imminent cave-in.

“Looks like the whole place is coming down, don’t it?” said Billtoe, reading Conor’s expression. “It’s been looking like that since I got here. Doubtless this pit will outlive you. Though you being a Salt, that’s not much of a boast.”

Salt.
Conor had heard the term before. This was what Little Saltee inmates were called. Forever branded as such by the
S
on their hands. He was a Salt now.

They emerged from the corridor into an open area that might have been a pantry in previous centuries. The walls were smeared with faded spice marks and flour swabs. The central flagstones had been excavated and ladders thrown down to the area below. Roughly a score more guards stood around, tooled with standard rifles but also more personal weapons. Conor spotted Indian blades, whips, dirks, cutlasses, American six-shooters, blackjacks, and even one samurai sword. The Saltee tradition of hiring mercenaries had left its mark on local weaponry. The guards lounged about, smoking, chewing, and spitting. They feigned ease, but Conor noted that every last man of them had a fist on some weapon or other. This was a dangerous place to be, and it didn’t do to forget it.

The ladders dropped down to open water. Deep, black, and ridged with whatever light could find it. More guards were ranged about the cave walls below, keeping their boots above the waterline. Several convicts wrestled with a scaffolding rig, taking the weight of a huge brass bell that swung pendulously in the confined space, knocking stone splinters from the cave wall where it struck and sending huge cathedral bongs booming through the upper level.

“Welcome to the Pipe,” said Billtoe, spitting bread crumbs.

Conor knew something of the island’s geology from Victor’s teachings and quickly realized what was happening here. The Saltee diamond pipe was brewed in the gullet of a volcano on the other side of the world, sliced off by a glacier and deposited off the Irish coast. This meant that someday, the diamond supply would run out, especially considering the constant and eager mining by the Trudeau family. This was not the first time underwater mining had been used to bolster diamond supplies, but King Nicholas had banned the practice within six months of his coronation. This brass bell was a diving bell, from the belly of which prisoners could chip rough diamonds from the underwater section of the Pipe. King Nicholas’s decrees were being overturned before his body was cold. Bonvilain had clearly been plotting for long, bitter years.

“That bell is ancient,” Conor said, almost to himself. “It must be a hundred years old.”

Billtoe shrugged theatrically, then unlocked Conor’s handcuffs. “That fact doesn’t bother me, being that I’m not the one going down in it, thank God. A man could get hurt and worse, as you will find out this fine morning. Down you go.”

Another shove from Billtoe’s rifle butt sent Conor stumbling toward a broad ladder poking from the cave’s shadows.

The ladder beams jabbed him in the chest, preventing a tumble into the hole and the end of a very short mining career. “One coming down,” Billtoe shouted.

The senior guard scowled up through the gloom. Conor recognized him as Billtoe’s partner of the previous evening. His main distinguishing features were a seeming lack of any hair and a pinched stance that made him appear almost hunchbacked. “We don’t need another, Arthur,” he cried. “Full complement, we have. Even if a few croak it in the bell.”