Tears of the Salamander

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Tears of the Salamander Page 7

by Peter Dickinson


  ALFREDO LEFT, EVEN MORE BEWILDERED THAN he’d been when he’d come. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, unable to face the loneliness of his room. Strange that he’d crept down here straightforwardly scared of Uncle Giorgio’s anger, and though Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been angry after all—had merely accepted what had happened as an unlucky accident—Alfredo felt he would have preferred the anger to what had in fact happened. Anger at least would have been contact of a sort, a kind of nearness, however uncomfortable. But after those first few moments, even when Alfredo had been standing directly behind his shoulder, learning how to pronounce the words of the chant, Uncle Giorgio had seemed unreachable distances away, barricaded in the fortress of his aloneness.

  Yes, he had sounded pleased by how well Alfredo had got on with learning the chant, but pleased in the wrong way, not pleased with Alfredo, his nephew, another human being like himself, but pleased about what had happened, in the way a farmer might be pleased about rain on his vines.

  And what did he mean about Alfredo’s destiny? To become Master of the Mountain one day? That was the obvious meaning. But Uncle Giorgio didn’t talk in obvious meanings. Anyway, Alfredo didn’t think he wanted a destiny. A destiny wasn’t anything you had any control over, any choice about. It was something that happened to you, whether you liked it or not. Something Uncle Giorgio wanted to happen. That was what he’d been pleased about.

  And that sudden bitter outburst, “At least in you the blood runs true!” So there was someone else, someone in whom it didn’t…and who wasn’t going to have a destiny because of that? Poor brave brother Giorgio, who’d rushed into the blazing bakehouse to try to save his parents? Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been interested in his namesake, though he’d come to his christening. But he hadn’t come to his name-day, or sent him a present, and he’d pushed straight past him at Alfredo’s christening. So he must have seen that first time that Giorgio didn’t have what he was looking for, just as he’d seen that Alfredo did.

  But what had Giorgio ever done to deserve such anger? No, not Giorgio. But the someone must have been older than him, or Uncle Giorgio wouldn’t have needed to come at all.

  There were certainly secrets. How could there not be? Uncle Giorgio was a sorcerer. Alfredo had felt his power as they had stood on the rim of Etna’s crater and quieted the mountain’s seething fires. But he had felt his own powers waken there as he’d joined the task. Did that mean that he, too, was a sorcerer? Was sorcery what ran in his blood? Sorcery was a mortal sin because it meant consorting with demons. Were the Angels of Fire, so strong and beautiful, demons? And the salamander, who had wept with Alfredo over the loss of all he loved?

  Too many questions. All he could do was take them one by one, and find out what happened next. So the first thing to do was to learn the chant. How, if he wasn’t allowed to sing it?

  A thought came to him, and instead of climbing the stairs he went on along the corridor into the music room and took the treble recorder from its rack. If he couldn’t sing the music, perhaps he could play it, fix it in his head that way, silently fitting the words to the notes as he went along. Not in here, though. It was too close to Uncle Giorgio’s uncomfortable presence. He made his way out through the empty kitchen, through the blazing heat of the yard and explored southward. Long ago somebody must have terraced and planted this part of the slope to make a formal garden overlooking the magnificent view across the Straits. Now it was overgrown, mostly with the same scrub that covered the uncultivated bits of hillside, mixed in with huge old garden roses, unpruned for years, and the somber rusty-looking columns of ancient cypresses rising in regular rows above the tangle. He followed a path that still seemed used and came to a circular sunken area surrounded by a stone balustrade, with a dry pond and fountain at the center, and statues of old Romans here and there.

  This seemed just what he wanted. There was even a stone bench, at this hour in the long shadow of a cypress on the terrace above. He settled there, and instead of starting straight in on the chant decided to get his hands used to the fingering of the recorder with tunes he already knew. The Precentor at the cathedral had encouraged the boys to learn a musical instrument. Some became highly skilled, but Alfredo had been far more interested in singing and had never progressed beyond the recorder. Still, he could play, and now found it comforting in a melancholy kind of way to fill the silence of this forgotten southern garden with the familiar songs of home.

  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

  He thought of the salamander, of their shared grief and loss, and almost wept again as he played. It was some while before he realized he was being watched.

  He felt the watcher’s presence before he turned. All he saw was a quick furtive movement at the top of the steps, but he guessed at once who the watcher, now crouching behind the balustrade, must be. Still with his eyes on the steps he put the recorder to his lips and played on. Slowly Toni emerged and crept down the steps, but stopped on the last one. For a while he just stood there, staring, then lifted his hands in a beseeching gesture such as small children use, reaching longing hands toward some bright new toy, but very strange in a full-grown man. Alfredo stopped playing and held out the recorder, offering it to Toni. Toni inched forward, but couldn’t force his feet to carry him more than halfway to the bench, so Alfredo put the recorder down, rose and walked off round the empty pool. As soon as he was safely the other side of it Toni darted forward, snatched up the recorder, put it to his lips and blew.

  Of course no sound came. Toni frowned and looked across at Alfredo. Alfredo raised an imaginary recorder to his mouth, placing his fingertips carefully to the invisible stops, and blew gently. Toni studied the recorder and put it to his lips again. His fingers seemed to find their way onto the stops of their own accord. He blew, fluttering them up and down. Notes of a sort emerged. Quite deliberately he started to experiment, discovering one by one what the individual finger movements achieved. Then, astoundingly, he arranged them into a scale. And then, even more astonishingly, he was playing, note perfect, the tune Alfredo had been playing twenty minutes before. When he reached the end he started again, ornamenting the simple tune with pleasing variations. By now he had forgotten to be afraid. He was rapt, lost in the music. Alfredo felt a great surge of sympathy and fellowship. He had known what this was like, when he himself had been caught up, transported, as he and the whole choir used to pour their souls into a Te Deum or Magnificat in the cathedral, and nothing else existed but themselves and the music.

  Where had it come from? he wondered. Who had taught Toni the scales?

  Nobody. It must be something to do with this place, something to do with the salamanders.

  Toni finished the tune and lowered the recorder. He stared around with a dazed look in his eyes. Alfredo watched him come back to the bitter understanding of who and where and what he was. His face crumpled. He flung the recorder on the ground and rushed whimpering up the steps and out of sight.

  Alfredo picked up the recorder, climbed the steps and gazed around, half expecting some fresh eruption of fire magic to have been awakened by their music, but all he saw was the long slope below him and the heat-hazed view across the Straits, all he heard was the endless whine of cicadas reinforcing the stillness of a late-summer afternoon.

  He made his way back to the house by the same route he’d come. Annetta was in the kitchen, paring vegetables. Toni would be very upset, he guessed, so it was only fair to tell her why. She too was clearly disturbed, but managed to make him see that she wasn’t angry with him.

  “Is it bad for him?” he asked. “He looked so happy while he was playing, but if you want me to hide the recorder…”

  She shook her head, pointed to the wall opposite the stove and put her finger to her lips. He understood at once. She was pointing at Uncle Giorgio’s study in the opposite wing of the house. Don’t tell Giorgio.

  He nodded and repeated her gesture.

  He put the recorder back in its rack and wen
t up to his room. As he climbed the stairs he realized that he had found the exchange comforting. It meant several things: chiefly that he now didn’t need to make up his mind whether to tell Uncle Giorgio what had happened; but also that Uncle Giorgio’s powers were limited—he wasn’t instantly aware of everything that happened in and around his house, even when it was somehow involved with magic, as Toni’s almost magical discovery of his gift for music must have been; and thirdly that Annetta herself wasn’t Uncle Giorgio’s devoted slave but an intelligent and independent woman who might even accept Alfredo as a friend. And perhaps he could make friends with Toni, too. It would be a strange friendship, lived in music. But that was a good enough place to live.

  Uncle Giorgio brought a book to supper and read while he ate, so at first it was a silent meal. After a while he seemed to notice the fact and laid his book aside.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I am used to reading over my meals. Perhaps you should do the same, at least until we have come to some arrangement for your education. There are Latin histories on the upper shelves of column D—Livius should be within your grasp—and there are dictionaries below and to their left. I fear that there is not much in the house to amuse a child. You must see what you can find.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Alfredo. “There’s a little recorder in the music room. Is it all right if I play that?”

  “Why not?”

  “I thought it might be a way of learning the chant without actually singing it.”

  “Ah…Yes, if it helps. But if anything happens stop at once and come and tell me,” said Uncle Giorgio, and returned to his book.

  So after supper Alfredo explored the library, using a cunning folding ladder to climb to the top shelves. He found the Livius history and a battered old Latin dictionary small enough to carry around, and then hunted for something more amusing. Most of the books were too large to handle comfortably, and in strange heavy lettering, difficult to read, or in languages he didn’t know. There were others whose alphabet wasn’t the one used for Latin and Italian. Most of these he recognized as Greek, but some were even stranger, Arabic or Turkish, he guessed, or Persian, like the words of the chant. He didn’t find anything about salamanders or other kinds of fire magic, nor a history of the di Salas or anything useful about the mountain, though there was some stuff about it in a huge Geography of Sicily, as big as a small tabletop. He guessed that all the magic books—anything with secrets in it—would be in Uncle Giorgio’s study. He took the ones he’d chosen, fetched the recorder upstairs.

  For a while he sat in the window, doggedly working through stories about ancient kings. Then, leafing through the dictionary in search of a word, he found a folded sheet of paper somebody must have been using as a bookmark. Unfolded, it turned out to be a series of jottings—notes, he guessed, on some book the writer had been reading, using the dictionary to help him. The handwriting was old-fashioned and hard to decipher, but a word caught his eye. Salamandri. The word before that looked like lacrimae. Lacrimae salamandri. The tears of the salamander. Excited now, he forgot about the history and until it became too dark to read he wrestled with the notes. It wasn’t Uncle Giorgio’s writing—nobody alive now, but someone long ago. There were scrawls he couldn’t read at all. Even in the better-written bits there mostly weren’t enough words he could make out to get any sense out of the Latin. By the time it got too dark to read he’d got as far as the tears of the salamander…against all ills of the flesh, and from what Uncle Giorgio had said he knew that the missing word had to mean sovereign, though it didn’t seem to be in the dictionary. Lower down there was something about one who has knowledge and Angels of Fire, Greater or Lesser. He gave up as it was getting too dark to read, and played the recorder and watched the stars rise one by one over Italy.

  NEXT MORNING HE WAS WOKEN BY A SCRATCHING at the door, and by the time his eyes were properly open Annetta was in the room, laying out clothes on his bed and making signs for him to get up and dress. The clothes were stiff and smelled of long storage, and were far grander than he was used to, dark breeches, a ruffled shirt, a brown velvet jacket with brass buttons and black braid trimmings, and buckled shoes, but they fitted well enough. Perhaps Uncle Giorgio had worn them when he was a boy, or perhaps Father. Downstairs he found Uncle Giorgio already halfway through his breakfast. He was dressed in the grand clothes in which Alfredo had first seen him, but without the sword.

  “You must eat quickly,” he said. “It is Sunday, and we go to Mass.”

  They walked together down the mountain, with Annetta and Toni following well behind and leading two of the mules. The sound of church bells was already floating up the town before they reached the vineyards, and the service was just beginning by the time they were at the church. A verger met them at a side door, bowing to Uncle Giorgio, and cleared a way for them through the crowded transept up into the choir, where he showed them into two elaborately carved stalls that faced east toward the high altar. Alfredo noticed the coat of arms above his seat. The shield had a salamander on it. The missal and psaltery on the shelf in front of him had the same coat stamped onto their bindings. Most of the stalls on the other side of the church were occupied, but the ones immediately to the right of where he sat were empty. The shields above their seats were carved with the head of a horse.

  Uncle Giorgio knelt and prayed. Alfredo did the same, grieving for his own lost world, the bakehouse and the cathedral and the people he’d loved. The choir were singing, or attempting to sing, music he knew well. The trebles were thin and squeaky, and both tenors erratic on their top notes. Without thought he improvised a descant, almost under his breath, too quietly for anyone else to hear, but Uncle Giorgio immediately tapped him on the shoulder and shook his head, frowning.

  He fell silent. His mind wandered. It was a while before he became aware of a difference. A difference from what? From…yes, from the world outside. The mountain. Wherever he’d been on the island, and from far out to sea, waking or sleeping, the mountain had been simply there, a vast presence, a pressure. Not here, in this church. For all he could feel of it, nothing might lie outside these walls but endless level plain. For the moment he was free of it. Free. It was almost as though the force of gravity no longer bound him to the earth and he could fly, as he sometimes could in dreams. He glanced at Uncle Giorgio, wondering if he felt the same, but as usual his face told nothing.

  As the choir began to process down the aisle at the end of the service Uncle Giorgio left his stall, signed to Alfredo to do the same and joined the procession behind the priest. No one else did so. The procession filed into the vestry, but the priest stopped at the door, turned and bowed to Uncle Giorgio, who acknowledged the greeting with a nod.

  “I must introduce you to my nephew and heir, Father Hippolyto,” he said. “This is Alfredo di Sala. His parents died recently in a tragic accident, and he has come to live with me.”

  The priest, a tall but sagging man with heavy, pasty jowls, seemed to wince with surprise. His hand trembled as he took Alfredo’s and his voice fluttered as he answered.

  “I am honored indeed,” he said. “The di Salas have long been our generous patrons, and I pray that they may long continue.”

  “I hope so too,” said Alfredo politely.

  “We will see you again next Sunday, I trust,” said the priest, clearly trusting nothing of the sort.

  “Of course,” said Uncle Giorgio, and turned away with a faint smile on his lips, as though he was enjoying the priest’s discomfort. Alfredo followed, wondering whether the priest was ill, that he trembled so, or only in awe of the grand gentleman, or actually afraid.

  They came out of the chill of the church into the blaze of a southern noon, but Alfredo barely noticed the change, because in the same moment the mountain had returned and its pressure closed around him.

  He stopped dead in his tracks. Uncle Giorgio looked down at him.

  “You will need to get used to it,” he said.

  “It’s all right
. It was just a surprise. I think I am getting used to it. But it was nice being out of it for a bit.”

  “Not merely nice, necessary. I miss very few Sundays. As Father Hippolyto implied, I am an excellent son of the Church.”

  “I could sing in there, couldn’t I, without…er…anything happening?”

  “You are no longer a chorister, Alfredo,” said Uncle Giorgio severely. “You are a gentleman, and must learn to act as such.”

  He sounded and looked entirely serious, but then his lips twitched briefly. It was so unexpected that Alfredo answered with a smile. Uncle Giorgio, straight-faced again, accepted the smile with a nod and walked on.

  Alfredo followed, feeling that this once, for the moment, they understood each other. Whatever they might be on the mountain, down here in the town the di Salas were a family of proud and ancient lineage. It was genuinely and unarguably so, but at the same time it was a kind of act, because they weren’t only that. They were also sorcerers of a power that no lineage could match.

  It was as if in that shared understanding Alfredo had been allowed on the other side of a barrier, into Uncle Giorgio’s aloneness, into a place where words meant something different from what they seemed to mean, and he understood those meanings. Then, in a few paces, the moment was over. It was Alfredo himself who ended it, shrinking back out of that aloneness, as if knowing by instinct that he would never be able to breathe its pure and joyless air.

  Annetta and Toni were waiting with the mules by a mounting block at the side door, Toni cringing down between the animals out of sight from all the people and Annetta gripping his arm so that he shouldn’t actually turn and run. Alfredo climbed clumsily onto the second mule, which without any signal from its rider at once set off after Uncle Giorgio’s.

  The square in front of the church was thronged, but nobody greeted Uncle Giorgio as he led the way across it. If anything, people seemed deliberately to be looking the other way and yet somehow to move out of his path. Alfredo saw a group dressed like gentry gossiping on the steps of the church, while a carriage and an open landau, each with a coat of arms on its door, waited below. One of the shields was painted with the head of a horse. The empty stalls next to his must belong to these people. Why hadn’t they been using them? Were even they so afraid of Uncle Giorgio that they didn’t want to worship beside him? Did everybody down here know what he was on the mountain, and were they all afraid of him? Did they all hate him in their hearts? Was that why no one would look at him?

 

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