In the Sight of God

Smoke on the water,
Fire in the sky.

Deep Purple

'Sonya...'

I looked up. It was Mister Joyce, come up from his cabin. 'Yes?'

'Is it all right if I sit here?'

'Yes, of course. You can sit wherever you like, Mister Joyce.'

'Thank you.' He sat down next to me, in his curious shuffling sideways manner. He sort of slid into place, rather than sitting down like normal people did. 'It's a pleasant morning.'

'Yes, it is.'

It was the day after my outburst in the wheelhouse. I was sitting in the stern of the Marie-Louise, with the bulk of the wheelhouse between me and the sun, which was getting hotter, it seemed, by the minute. Every now and then I had to get up and move round to keep in the shade.

'You can call me Sunny, you know. Most people do, even the grown-ups.'

He looked at me. 'Except your teachers.'

'Yes, and Captain Lowther. She called me Driver Moon most of the time.'

'You're in the Ambulance Brigade, aren't you?'

How had he know that? 'Yes, Goodsir. When I'm allowed to be. They sent me home, you know.'

'Yes, I know that.' His squirrel-daemon crouched on the railing.

'And then I met a man on the train. I suppose you know that too.'

'Yes, I do.'

I sat still for a moment or two. We would have to move again soon if we wanted to stay out of the sun. I wondered if he would let me help him.

'I've had some training, assisting people. Only on the job, but I can help you get about.'

He turned to look at me, and I wondered if I had put my foot in it again.

'That's kind of you, Son... Sunny, but I can get about quite well by myself. I have to stay in practice or I'll forget how to do it.'

'You mean...'

'I mean I could very easy become lazy and let myself be wheeled about everywhere.'

I looked about us. 'That wouldn't work on a boat, would it?'

'No.' He definitely smiled then. It was a nice smile, and I wondered why he didn't use it more often.

'You said last night there were things you wouldn't tell me because I didn't need to know them. Are there any things you can tell me? Like, how old are you?'

'I'm forty-two, since you ask.' Oh. I'd thought he was older than that. He certainly looked it.

'Where do you come from?'

'Where do I live, do you mean? Oxford.'

'I thought so. That's not far from us. We're from near Goring.'

'I know.'

I fought down a surge of anger. He knew, did he? Well, bully for him, Mister Clever-Clogs Joyce!

'Do you make clocks, or just mend them?' I had a vision of him sitting in a stall in the Covered Market in Oxford.

'Both,' he replied.

'It is a big company you work for?'

'Yes, quite big.'

'What's it called?' Maybe I'd heard of it, maybe I hadn't.

'James, Cholmondley, Joyce and Joyce. We've got shops in Oxford, Charlton Kings, Brummagem, London - two, actually - Mancunia, Worcester, Aldbrickham, Wykham, Soton, Truro, Cassiobury and Houghton.We were planning on opening in Argyll and Cambria before this war business blew up. Oh, and there're workshops in Brum and a factory in Tring, in Hertfordshire. My brother Tom runs that for me.'

'Oh. Oh, I see. So the Joyce in James, Cholmondley, Joyce and Joyce is... you?'

'The first one, yes. The second one's my brother.'

'So you're in charge, then?'

'Sort of, but not exactly. It's more like a partnership. Mistress James manages the books and the accounts, Mister Cholmondley is responsible for business development and sales, I'm the master craftsman and chief engineer.'

'Mistress James?'

'She's my old master's widow.'

'Oh, I see. When did your master die?'

'Nearly twenty years ago.'

'She must be quite old, then.'

'Over seventy. She's very alert, though. Nothing gets past her.'

'I don't suppose it does. So, Mister Cholmondley is the salesman...'

'Yes.'

'...and you do all the tricky stuff with clocks and mechanics and springs and stuff.'

'Yes.'

'I get it. It's just like the way it is at home. Daddy's the boss, but he has a factor who looks after the business and sales, and agents who make sure the farms are being run properly. He doesn't have a factory, though. That sounds really good. What do you make there? Apart from clocks?'

'We used to make lots of clocks. All sorts of clocks. Chances are, if you go anywhere by train you'll see one of our clocks hanging over the station platforms. We look after the clock in the tower of the Great Parliament in London as well. We didn't make it, of course. It's much too old for that.'

'So what do you make now?'

'Well, we still make quite a few clocks but we also do munitions work. Mister Cholmondley's idea. We make clockwork timers - fuses, you know. I probably shouldn't be telling you. I expect it's a state secret.' Was Mister Joyce looking uncomfortable?

'Fuses for bombs? I thought they were something you lit with a match - like a piece of string.'

'Only in comic books and cartoon kinos!' Mister Joyce laughed. 'No, real bombs and torpedoes have clockwork timers so they go off at exactly the right time. They're very precise. We make the best timer fuses in the world, bar none.'

Torpedoes... Something tugged at me inside. I took a deep breath. 'When did you first start making fuses for torpedoes?'

'Seven or eight years ago. It... it pays very well.'

'And who do you sell them to?' A dreadful suspicion was growing in my mind. Alfie, you don't think... Oh no...

'To start off with, anyone. Elias - Mister Cholmondley, that is - is a brilliant salesman. He travels all over the place. Sunny - what's the matter?'

I stood up. There were hammers thumping in my head, like the Marie-Louise's gas engine. 'You bloody well know what it is. You bastard - don't say you don't know!

'I'm sorry - what do you mean?'

'You know all about me, don't you? Somebody told you all about me. Somebody like that Arthur Shire you're so bloody keen on.' I was standing facing Mister Joyce now, looking down at him. I could have kicked him very easily if I'd felt like it and, by the Blessed Holy Spirit, that was exactly what I wanted to do.

Sunny. It wasn't his fault... Alfie leapt to my shoulder.

Wasn't it? Wasn't it?? I was seized by a deadly certainty.

'Listen to me, Mister oh-so-bloody-clever Master Craftsman Joyce who knows everything. Did Mister Arthur Bloody Shire tell you about my brother? Did he tell you about Gerry? Do you know about him? Do you know his ship was sunk by the Enemy? With a torpedo? With a torpedo with one of your effing precise fuses in it? Did he tell you that, you sodding bastard Goodsir Joyce? You effing murderer!' I was screaming at the top of my voice. Capitaine Fourneaux turned and looked at us and Emmeline picked up Guillaume with a look of worry on her face. I lifted my right foot. I was going to kick Mister Joyce in the guts, as hard as ever I could.

No, Sunny. Don't. Don't.

Why not, Alfie? Give me one good reason why not.

Look at him...

I wasn't going to, but Alfie made me. Mister Joyce was weeping. At first I thought it was because he was afraid I was going to hurt him - and I was - but no. Alfie was talking to Viola, in rapid daemon-speak that I couldn't follow. Then he spoke to me. I had never heard him so pleading or so desperate.

Sit down, Sunny. Don't hurt him. Beautiful Sunny, sit down for me. Please, lovely Sunny, please. Do it for me. Sit down and listen to what Mister Joyce has to say. Please.

Alfie... You do know how to get round a girl , don't you? I reluctantly sat down and listened. This had better be good...

- 0 -

Of course I didn't think I was the only person in the world who had ever lost somebody they loved. I'd seen plenty of dead, dying and injured men by then. But when Mummy died, and then Gerry, it was awful but it was remote. It happened somewhere else - in hospital or at sea, and I was told about it afterwards. And as for the soldiers - I hadn't known them. Not personally. So when Mister Joyce told me about the day he found Professor Lyra Belacqua lying dead in her rooms in Jordan College, and the time when he got to Oxford only just in time to say a few last words to his master before he, too, died, I realised that even though I'd seen a lot of pain and suffering in my life, it wasn't all there was. There was always more, and worse, lying in wait just around the corner.

He loved both of them very much, said Alfie.

That's all very well. All right, I'm sorry for him. Sorry for them, too. But all the same, he killed Gerry.

You don't know that. It might not have been a Joyce fuse in that torpedo. And it wouldn't have been him in any case. He didn't fire the torpedo that sunk Gerry's ship.

He was part of it. "For the want of a nail, the battle was lost." Yes? Remember it? His fuse was the nail that gave the enemy their victory.

I think he knows that.

Well, I hope he's bloody well ashamed of himself!

- 0 -

Emmeline called us in for lunch. Rather, she called me to help her prepare it. I was glad of the chance to do something useful. Mister Joyce sat where I had left him, with his eyes closed.

He's remembering, said Alfie.

Remembering what? Oh, pass me that paring knife, would you?

Remembering another boat, in another world. With another girl. I dug the eyes out of a potato with a vicious twist of the knife.

How do you know?

Viola told me. He's a very unusual man, our Mister Joyce. There's still a great deal we don't know about him.

I don't care much. Look, Alfie, it's been not too bad these past few days, except for him, and I cut a blackened piece off one end of a potato, but I still don't know what we're meant to be doing. I don't know why we're here and I don't know where we're going. I suppose we've got to go with him, haven't we?

Yes, we have.

You're not still holding back on me, are you?

Sunny, I...

I nearly threw the knife down in disgust. Why am I always the last to find out what's happening?

Sunny, be patient.

Pah!

- 0 -

Mister Joyce was late for lunch. Typical man. First he sat around dreaming for hours, then he went and disappeared into the men's cabin for fifteen minutes while our lunch stood on the table, getting cold. When he did finally turn up, it was with a bombshell.

'Sunny...'

'Miss Moon, if you don't mind.'

'Miss Moon, then. We have to leave the Marie-Louise before we get to the next lock. Could you tell Capitaine Fourneaux, please?'

'Why do we have to leave now?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Well stuff you, then.'

'Su... Miss Moon. You are here, and I am here, because we were told to be here. Yes?'

'Yes. But I've had enough of being told what to do.'

'No doubt.' Mister Joyce was grim-faced. 'But you've got no choice.'

'You must do what Monsieur Joyce says,' said the capitaine. 'I can take you no further.'

I had been right, then, about his knowledge of English. Everybody - everybody - was hiding things from me.

'Suppose I say no.'

'Listen to me,' and Mister Joyce's dead left hand knocked against the top of the wheelhouse table, 'If you stay on board, and if the Marie-Louise continues on her present course, then this boat will be destroyed and everybody on board will be killed. Everybody.'

'What? What are you talking about? That's rubbish! How do you know, anyway?'

'I know. I can't say how.'

I turned to the capitaine. 'Do you believe him?' I asked.

'Yes, I do. I trust Mister Joyce absolutely.'

I slapped the table with the palms of my hands. 'Well isn't that just fine and dandy!'

- 0 -

'Moor up under those trees, just above the lock,' said Mister Joyce. 'We'll have our best chance there.'

Engine chugging slowly in reverse, the Marie-Louise edged to the side of the canal a few tens of yards from the lock. A grove of beech trees overhung the towpath, giving it shelter. The sun had been shining down on us all morning but was now concealed behind a bank of clouds. As the barge nudged against the reeds which grew at the water's edge, Emmeline threw the gangplank ashore and ran after it, holding Guillaume in her arms. Their daemons followed them to the grassy strip where the trees met the towpath. I collected my kitbag and Mister Joyce's knapsack and took them ashore.

Next I took hold of Mister Joyce's shoulder. I was tempted to ask Alfie to Change and help us, but I remembered the horrible thing that had happened to us the last time he did that so I didn't. We sidled down the gangplank and joined Emmeline and Guillaume. Mister Joyce looked up at the sky anxiously. I wondered why.

It was only right that Jacques Fourneaux, the captain of the Marie-Louise, should be the last to leave. He stopped the engine and left the wheelhouse, shutting and locking the door behind him. Then he walked very slowly down the gangplank to the canalside. He didn't join the rest of us under the trees, but walked a few yards from his vessel and sat down on the towpath, facing the water. For a second I didn't understand why he didn't come over and sit with us, but then I realised. It was obvious, really.

It seemed that we stayed where we were for hours. The sun came out again and a breeze blew up, ruffling the surface of the canal and shaking the leaves which shaded our heads. It was very peaceful and quiet - there was nothing to be heard but the sound of moving air and, in the distance, the shouts of a crew working their peniche through the lock, about fifty yards away. We can't stay here for ever, I thought.

So it seemed, did Mister Joyce. He kept looking around in a worried manner. What was he looking for? Why did he keep looking up towards the sky? Were we about to be attacked from above - by a Zeppelin, or a squadron of gyropters? I touched his shoulder.

'Mister Joyce? What should we be looking out for?'

'Watch the skies,' he replied.

- 0 -

What happened less than five minutes later is hard for me to describe. I didn't understand it then, and I can't say I understand it very much now. At the time, it was as if the wrath of God had been poured down on us.

Capitaine Fourneaux was sitting, as I've mentioned, on the edge of the canal, with his feet in the water. I watched as his dolphin-daemon Jeanne nuzzled against his legs and he stroked her forehead with a slow steady rhythm. They were talking to one another, I could tell. I'd seen them like this before, every evening after supper. They looked very happy together and Alfie and I smiled to see them so contented. It was looking more and more as if nothing was going to happen and we could soon carry on with our journey. Mister Joyce had been making a fuss over nothing.

Then something did happen. Something strange, unusual, but not so very threatening. Not to begin with - it was actually rather beautiful. A grid - a criss-cross of green light - suddenly appeared in the sky above us, completely covering its dome from the hills to the north and east to the open plains to the south. The lines that made up the grid sparkled and pulsed slowly. I could not see where the grid had come from, but I watched it in fascination as it whirled and spun about out heads. Then in the blink of an eye it changed, so that it looked like the lines of latitude and longitude do on a globe when you look down on it from the North Pole. It was like the pattern the wires make on a dartboard. It moved around the sky in a slow hypnotic dance before settling with the bulls-eye of the dartboard more or less directly over our heads. I was beginning to feel a little uneasy. What was it? Why was it so interested in us?

Then the grid vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and I relaxed again. Was that it? Was that all? Could we go back to the Marie-Louise now and carry on? I wondered who else had seen the glowing green lines, and what they had made of them. But before I could say anything about it, a low humming noise started; almost inaudible at first, but growing in volume until it was about as loud as the sound a streetcar makes. It felt more like a pressure on the ears than a sound you could hear. I noticed that the surface of the canal had become absolutely flat, as if somebody had laid a piece of glass on top of it. The air above this mirror-flat water was infused with a greenish haze. At the same time, I felt my hair - which had grown to be about an inch long by now - standing up on end.

I turned to ask Mister Joyce what was going on, but he was standing up - somehow he had got to his feet without help - and was shouting to Capitaine Fourneaux and Jeanne.

'Get out of the water! Both of you! Now! Get out now!' he bellowed. I called out to Mister Joyce. 'Why? What's wrong? Where should we...' but I never finished my sentence. A lance of indigo light crashed down from the open, blameless sky and stood - a miles-high pillar of fire - impaled in the water of the Rhine-Rhone Canal, half-way between us and the lock. It was white at its heart, surrounded by jabbing spikes of searing violet. It hurt. My eyes closed tight-shut in self-defence, leaving a red after-image in the inside of my eyelids. It was like the fiercest bolt of lightning you ever saw; and with it came a terrible boom and crash of thunder, louder than anything you ever heard. Louder than guns, louder than rockets, louder than bombs, edged with an eerie, sizzling crackle and a wail of tormented air, squeezing my insides like the tightest of belts or a lunatic's strait-jacket.

I felt like the Prophets of Yahweh must have done when the Pharaoh of Ygypt was overthrown by the Majesty of the All-Highest. The God-light bloomed, and the thunder of His anger echoed in the land around us. God was looking directly down on us, and the light of His eyes was blinding and terrible.

And then it stopped, and the shock of its ending was as awful as that of its coming. It had lasted, I found out later, for only fifty thousandths of a second.

- 0 -

The Marie-Louise had a steel hull and that, according to Mister Joyce, was what saved her from immediate destruction. The charge had slipped past her, or something like that. It was "short-circuited", he said afterwards. The gangplank, however, was wooden, and as the beam struck the water it burst into flame, scattering glowing splinters towards us. Then there was a white flash of steam from underneath the hull and the whole vessel lifted out of the canal for several seconds, before falling back with a terrific splash that soaked us all. The water slopped and surged against the canal banks.

The Marie-Louise was safe, but not her skipper. Neither Jacques Fourneaux nor his daemon had had enough time to get clear of the water and they'd taken the full impact of the lightning-bolt. Jeanne was thrown spinning into the air. She twisted and writhed and howled in pain as her body, trailing black smoke and wrapped in flickering orange fire, was catapulted out of the water by the force of the blast and landed on the towpath next to us. Simultaneously, Capitaine Fourneaux's clothes burst into flames. I stood up and ran towards him, thinking that I could maybe roll him in the grass and put out the fire, but I was too late; not that it would have done any good. I caught only the briefest glimpse of his charred head and blackened face as his body pitched forward and fell into the canal, its glowing embers extinguished in a final hiss and rush of vapour. Jeanne screamed one last agonising time and faded from sight.

Oh no. Oh no. That didn't have to happen. Why hadn't Jeanne got out of the water and lain on the bank with the rest of us? She could have done, couldn't she, for half an hour or so, even though she was a water-daemon? She'd have been safe then, and the capitaine would still be alive now. I turned and ran past Emmeline and Guillaume into the grove of trees, crashing into their trunks and branches in my blindness, and was violently sick.

- 0 -

'Orbital strike,' said Mister Joyce eventually, his voice quivering with shock. 'They called down an orbital strike on us, for the love of Christ. How could they do such a thing? Heaven have mercy on us!'

'I'm sorry,' I said, still heaving and shaking with the horror of it all, 'but I don't understand. What's an orbital strike?' We had gathered together in the heart of the beech-grove, Mister Joyce, Emmeline, Guillaume and me. Guillaume was whimpering and clinging to his mother, his daemon frozen in mouse-form. Emmeline stared straight ahead, rigid in shock. I had seen that look before, in the eyes of the wounded soldiers in the admissions ward of the field hospital.

He made no attempt to answer my question. 'We must go,' he said. 'We must go now. Now! Before they can recharge their weapon.'

'But Emmeline? Guillaume? What about them? What about Capitaine Fourneaux?'

'We can't help any of them now. Just say goodbye. Come on! Now! You've got to help me get out of here.' He sounded terrified.

I glared at him, hoping the disgust I was feeling towards his cowardice was showing in my face.

'Yes. All right, Mister Joyce. If you need someone to get you out of trouble I suppose it's going to have to be me. Though what I'm doing, staying next to a target like you, I couldn't say. I must be stupid.'

Mister Joyce's face was bleaker and more full of sorrow and fear than I had yet seen it. His Viola huddled by his side, her grey fur flattened by the water that had fallen on us. 'A target, eh? Me - a target? That's rich. That's very rich.'

He shook his head. 'It wasn't me they were aiming for, Miss Moon. Not me. It was you.'

'He's right,' said Alfie.

Oh. I looked at Mister Joyce. 'Are you saying all this... this... is because of me? Are you saying it's all my fault?'

'Sunny,' said Mister Joyce, and I didn't mind him calling me "Sunny", not that time, 'It's no good talking about fault. No, it's not your fault. You didn't press the trigger that fired the weapon that did all this. You didn't tell anyone to do it, nor did you fail to do something that could have stopped it.'

'So...'

'But - you were the target, just the same, and Emmeline and Guillaume have lost a husband and a father because he was too close to you. He liked you very much; did you know that?'

'And he was killed for it.'

'That, and his love for his daemon. He knew how much she would suffer if he took her out of the water.

'Sunny, we can't always predict the consequences of our actions. You're not to blame for what's just happened, but you were the cause of it. Indirectly, anyway.'

Just as Mister Joyce...

...was only the indirect cause of Gerry's death. Yes, Alfie, I know. I'm not stupid. I haven't missed the point.

'All we can do,' Mister Joyce continued, 'is what we believe to be right - we and our daemons between us. That's all - the rest is in the hands of... I mustn't say.'

'I suppose you can't say how you knew we were in danger, either.'

'No, Miss Moon, no. Not yet, anyway.' Now, can you help me up? It works best if you stand on my left side - like so - and put your right arm around my shoulders. Just a moment, I'll take this useless thing off.' Mister Joyce removed his Norfolk jacket. Underneath it there was a kind of harness for his artificial arm. I took hold of it and he ducked his head out from underneath. 'Throw it away. It's no use to me now. You'll have to leave your kitbag behind - it's too heavy.'

'Can I keep some of my things?'

'Just a few. They've got to fit in my knapsack and you've got to carry it.'

'Oh, I see.' I opened up my kitbag and rescued some underclothes, my prayer-book, a handkerchief or two, the photo of Gerry, my notebook and my pencils. Then I pulled out the officer's sword. 'I'll take this,' I said.

'Can you use it?'

'I'll learn. And I'm not leaving it behind. It cost me too much.'

I looped the sword's hilt through my belt. Now I was carrying it the same way I had in London. I slipped my arms through the knapsack's straps, helped Mister Joyce to stand up and put my right arm across his shoulder as he had asked me. Alfie and I turned to face Emmeline and Guillaume.

'Madame... Guillaume... Je suis désolée. Très désolée. Je...' I didn't know enough Frankish to say how terribly sorry I was for the pain and distress I had brought them. I'm not sure I could have expressed myself adequately in English, either.

Emmeline looked up, her face red and blotchy. 'Bonne chance, Sunny,' she said. 'Bonne chance, Peter.' I stared fixedly at the ground.

'Au revoir, Emmeline. Au revoir, Guillaume.' We turned away from them and set off, shuffling clumsily to begin with, along the towpath towards the lock.

- 0 -

The lock-gates had been torn from their mountings by the sky-blast and were strewn in pieces along the side of the canal . I could see a man's body lying trapped under one of them. It was not moving and no sound came from it. Water was streaming through the lock and over the wrecked barge which rested, tilted at a crooked angle, on its bed. Soon, I guessed, the stretch of canal above us would be completely drained and the Marie-Louse would be stranded on the mud like a fishing-boat at low tide. We passed the stricken crew with hardly a word, still sobbing and retching in our misery and shame.