The Sound of the Skies

On the first and third Sundays of the month they walked to the Anglican cathedral by the mauka gate, because it was four minutes on foot and eleven by car, and because his father had walked it. The car came round to the front all the same, every first and third Sunday, and stood on the gravel with its engine off and the driver beside it, in case it should rain. It had not rained on a first Sunday in December in living memory. The car came round regardless. It was one of the arrangements of the house that nobody had the authority to stop, since nobody could remember who had started it.

He came out onto the mauka steps at a quarter to eight with his hat in his hand, and the Queen came out beside him with hers on, and Captain Kealoha was waiting at the foot of the steps in the dark blue undress uniform the Guard wore to church, with his cap under his arm and his gloves in his cap, exactly three paces from the bottom step, where he always stood. The morning was perfectly still now. The wind had dropped altogether, the way it did sometimes in December for an hour after sunrise before it made up its mind, and the flag on the roof behind them hung straight down against the staff. The cathedral bell had stopped at three minutes past the half hour. There was nothing to hear but birds, and a car somewhere on Beretania Street, and the gardener’s boy raking the gravel by the barracks very slowly so as to look busy for the King.

“Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning, Your Majesty. Ma’am.”

They went down the steps. Kealoha fell in behind them. The gravel was raked into lines and the King, as he always did, walked on the lines and not between them, so as to spoil as little of the boy’s work as possible.

They were halfway across the lawn to the mauka gate when the thunder began.

---

It came from the west. He did not at first know that it was thunder, because there was no cloud anywhere except the long low bar on the Waiʻanae range, and the sound was not the sound of thunder, either, not quite. It was a dull, heavy, broken sound, very far off, like furniture being moved in a house a long way down the street. It came, and stopped, and came again, and then it did not stop but rolled on, low, continuous, with harder knocks in it at irregular intervals that he felt rather than heard, a faint shiver in the soles of his feet through the grass.

He stopped walking. The Queen stopped with him.

“What is that?” she said.

“Practice,” he said. “The Navy.”

“On a Sunday?”

Kealoha had stopped three paces behind them. He was standing with his head up and turned a little to the left, towards the west, with his cap still under his arm, and his face had the look it had when he was reading his artillery books, which was a look of a man adding up.

“Not on a Sunday, sir,” he said. “The Navy does not fire on a Sunday. Not in the harbour. Not ever.”

“The Army, then.”

“The Army does not either, sir.” Kealoha did not take his eyes off the west. “And that is not guns. Not all of it.”

“Then what is it?”

Kealoha did not answer. The King had never known him not to answer a question.

The gardener’s boy had stopped raking. On the far side of the mauka wall, on Hotel Street, a man on a bicycle had stopped too, with one foot on the ground, and was looking west over the roofs. A dog began to bark somewhere towards Beretania and went on barking. Then, over the roofs, from the direction the man on the bicycle was looking, the smoke came up.

---

He saw it first as a thickening of the air over the plain, a smudge, as though somebody had drawn a thumb across the bottom of the sky. Then it was a column. It rose very straight in the still air, black, absolutely black, blacker than any smoke he had ever seen from the cane fires in the burning season or the yards at Puʻuloa or the cannery stacks, and it went on rising, and as it rose it leaned a little and spread at the top, and while he was watching it another came up beside it, and then a third, further left, towards the airfield at Hickam. The sky behind them was clear blue. They stood against it like trees.

“Kahikina,” said Leinani.

He did not answer her. He was looking at the specks.

They were very high, higher than the smoke, a long way west, over the place where the smoke came from, and there were a great many of them. He had taken them at first for birds. They were not moving like birds. They moved in long slow curves and then one would turn out of the curve and fall, straight down, and be lost in the smoke, and a little after it the sound would come, the harder knock, the shiver in the ground. He watched one fall. He did not understand what he was seeing. He understood it perfectly well and did not allow himself to, and the not allowing went on for some seconds, standing on the lawn of ʻIolani with his hat in his hand, in the way a man will go on holding a door against a wind for some seconds after he knows he cannot.

“Your Majesty,” said Kealoha. “I would like you to go inside.”

“In a moment.”

“Sir.”

“In a moment, Captain.”

The noise was continuous now, and there was a new note in it, a hard fast stammering that came and went, and then a deeper, steadier pounding, a great many guns firing together, and the sky over the plain to the west began to fill with small black flowers. They opened out of nothing, one after another and then dozens at once, black puffs with a flash at the heart of each, hanging in the air and spreading and drifting, and the sound of them came after, a crackle like fat in a pan. He knew what those were. He had seen them before, in the summer, when the Realm’s ships practised on a sleeve towed behind an aeroplane far out to sea, and the papers had printed a photograph. The fleet was firing at the sky.

It was firing at the sky because there was something in the sky to fire at.

He thought: they are not ours. And then he thought, precisely, as though the sentence had been handed to him on a card: it is happening.

---

“Look,” said Leinani, and he looked where she was pointing.

An aircraft had come out of the smoke and was coming towards the city. It was low, much lower than the others, and it came on very fast over the roofs of Kalihi with its engine making a high hard note he had not heard from any aircraft before, and for a moment he thought it was going to come straight over the palace. It did not. It went across the harbour instead, from right to left, banking, so low over the water that he could see the sun on its canopy, and as it banked he saw the underside of its wings, grey-green and pale, and on each wing near the tip a red disc. A red sun. And under its belly, as it came level over the piers below the tower, something small and dark came away from it, and fell, quite slowly, it seemed to him, and went down out of sight behind the roofs of the waterfront.

The flash came first. Then a column of black and orange stood up out of the waterfront below the tower, a quarter of a mile from where he stood, and swelled, and leaned, and after it came the sound, a single flat blow that he felt in his chest and in the soles of his feet, and in the windows of the palace behind him, all of which spoke at once. A second aircraft came after the first, lower still, along the line of the waterfront, and there was a hard fast stammering from it, a long tearing sound like cloth, and then it was gone over Kakaʻako, and the sound went with it.

It had not been the anchorage. It had not been six miles off. It had been the harbour of Honolulu, at the bottom of King Street, where the freighter had been lying at the pier with its riding lights on at a quarter to six.

Somebody screamed, on Hotel Street, not loudly. The man on the bicycle had got off it and was standing in the road. The dog had stopped barking.

He had seen that sun on the flag of the consulate on Nuʻuanu Avenue every day for three years. He had seen it on the Emperor’s birthday on the little paper flags the children of the language schools waved in Aʻala Park, and on the side of the freighters that brought the soy sauce and the rice and took away the scrap iron, and on a fan in the Queen’s sitting room that the consul’s wife had given her. He had seen it a thousand times and never once thought of it as anything but a sign hung out by people from somewhere else to say where they were from. It was painted on the wing of an aircraft that had just flown across his harbour at three hundred feet.

“Japanese,” said Kealoha, behind him, very quietly, as though to himself. “Those are Japanese.”

Leinani’s hand was on his arm. It had been on his arm all along, he realised, since they came down the steps, and he had not noticed it until now, when it closed.

---

The front door of the palace banged open behind them.

He turned round. It was Kaʻai. The Chamberlain was coming down the mauka steps two at a time, with his coat open and one hand on the rail, and the King, who had known him all his life, understood that he had never in all that time seen Kaʻai hurry. It was more frightening, in a way he could not account for, than the smoke.

Kaʻai stopped at the bottom of the steps and stood for a moment getting his breath, and then he came across the gravel to them, and did not bow, which was the second thing.

“Sir,” he said. “The telephone.”

“Who is it?”

“The operator, sir. At the exchange. She rang through on her own account, she has nobody on the line, she says she is calling everybody she can. She says the Navy yard has been on to the exchange screaming for doctors, and that the airfield at Hickam is on fire, and that there are aircraft over the anchorage bombing the ships. And that they have bombed the harbour here, sir. Our harbour. The piers below the tower. She saw it from the exchange window.” Kaʻai stopped. “She is a girl of about nineteen, sir. She was crying. She asked me to tell the King. I said I would.”

“Thank you, Kaʻai.”

“She asked me if it was the Japanese, sir. I said I did not know.”

“It is the Japanese,” said the King.

He heard himself say it. It was the first thing he had said aloud since it began that had any meaning in it, and his voice sounded entirely ordinary, which surprised him. Kaʻai looked at him and then looked away west, at the columns of smoke, which had joined at the top now and made a single darkness that was spreading slowly along the sky towards Waiʻanae, and at the black flowers still opening under it, and his face did not move, not even its one degree.

“Yes, sir,” Kaʻai said. “The wireless is still playing music. I had it on in the office. They are playing a programme of hymns. I thought you should know that also.”

---

The sound had changed again. Under the guns there was a new deep thudding, irregular, nearer, and with each one the windows of the palace behind them buzzed in their frames. One of the black flowers opened much nearer than the rest, over Kalihi, and then another over the harbour, and a few seconds after that there was a sound like a handful of gravel thrown on a tin roof, somewhere towards Kakaʻako, and the gardener’s boy by the barracks dropped his rake and ran.

Across the lawn, at the barracks, the doors had opened. Men of the Guard were coming out in their shirtsleeves, some with their tunics in their hands, and the sergeant was in the middle of the parade shouting in Hawaiian, and nobody was quite obeying him, because nobody, the King saw, knew what the order was for. There was no order in the book for this. The Guard had been raised to stand at the gates of ʻIolani, and to be looked at, and it was standing at the gates of ʻIolani, and nobody was looking at it. Everybody was looking west.

Kealoha put his cap on.

“Sir,” he said, “I am going to turn out the Guard. Then I am coming back for you. I would be very grateful, sir, if you and the Queen were inside when I come back.”

“Go on, Thomas,” the King said.

He had never called him by his Christian name. Kealoha looked at him for a moment, very startled, and then saluted and ran, properly ran, across the gravel towards the barracks, spoiling all the lines.

---

He stood on the lawn with the Queen and his Chamberlain and looked at the west.

Six miles. He could not see the anchorage. He had never been able to see it. There was the plain and the low ground beyond Kalihi and the cane and the long flat line, and above the line the darkness spreading, and in the darkness, now and then, a flash, and then the sound. Somewhere under that darkness the Realm’s fleet was at its moorings, the battle line that had come in on Friday past the harbour mouth while half the city cheered from the sea wall, and Mrs Higa had cried, and he did not know what was happening to it, and he could not see, and nobody who could see was going to come and tell him for a long time. And a quarter of a mile away, at the bottom of his own street, below the tower, the waterfront was burning, and that he could see perfectly well. That was the first thing he understood clearly about the day, standing there on his own lawn in his Sunday clothes: that what was happening to the Realm he was going to learn by report, a piece at a time, out of order, from people who did not know either; and that what was happening to his city he was going to have to watch.

The second thing he understood came a little after, and it was not a thought so much as a direction, the way the needle of a compass is not a thought.

He said to the Queen, “We will not go to the cathedral this morning.”

“No,” said Leinani.

On the far side of the mauka wall, on Hotel Street, the man with the bicycle was standing in the middle of the road and looking now not west at the smoke but at the palace, at its open doors and its flag hanging down against the staff in the still air, and at the three people standing on the lawn in their Sunday clothes; and when the King looked back at him, he did not look away.

“Inside, sir,” said Kaʻai. “If you please.”

The King put on his hat, because he did not know what else to do with it, and went back up the steps.