Tears of the Salamander

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?

Was that what happened when you became Master of the Mountain? Would it be the same with Alfredo himself one day, Sunday after Sunday coming down to face that fear and hate and pretending to worship, because the church was necessary to him, as it had been to his ancestors through the long generations? Had they too been hated and feared, as Uncle Giorgio was now? And Alfredo, too, when his turn came?

No, absolutely not, he decided. He would not join Uncle Giorgio in his aloneness. He would not pay that price of fear and hatred. If those were things the mountain demanded, it would have to find itself a different Master.

These feelings deepened and hardened as the mules plodded steadily up between the vineyards. He was conscious of Annetta following on foot, but falling farther and farther behind. Why should he be allowed to ride and Annetta have to walk? She was older than he was, and worked all day long while he did almost nothing to help. It wasn’t right, any more than it had been right that Uncle Giorgio should have talked about her and Toni the way he had when he’d told Alfredo their story. Two harmless and unlucky people—but if Uncle Giorgio both used and despised them in the way he seemed to, how could Alfredo—how could anybody—learn to love and trust him?

Not that these thoughts came to him in a steady, reasoned flow. They were more a muddle of slowly changing feelings that shaped themselves into glimpses of thought that then hardened into ideas. And now something else, something from outside himself, worked its way into the confusion. When he and Uncle Giorgio had first climbed this path everything had been swamped by the overwhelming presence of the mountain, and the huge energies surging inside it. Then, two days ago, when they had climbed to the crater, he had begun to perceive some of its inner shape, the movements of its molten currents, the places of power where they came closer to the surface, and where their energies could be summoned and directed by someone who had the power and knowledge—Uncle Giorgio now, Alfredo himself, perhaps, later.

It was one of these places, not on the path itself, but up the slope to their left, that now broke into his chain of thought. He looked around and saw that this was where he had waited on that first afternoon while Uncle Giorgio had climbed up between the vines. This was the point from which he had watched the Bonaventura burst inexplicably into flame.

Uncle Giorgio rode past without pausing. Alfredo was following with no more than an inward shudder when the memory worked its way into his vague doubts and discomforts to produce a definite question. A question with two possible answers.

According to Uncle Giorgio, the mountain had been furious with the Bonaventura and his friends for returning its Master to it, and so had destroyed them. If so, then why at that particular moment, when the Master was closest to a place of power, and had most hope of preventing the destruction? Was the mountain just a brainless embodied anger, which had burst out at that moment, regardless of where its Master happened to be?

Or had Uncle Giorgio caused the mountain to do it, choosing this place because, despite his illness, here he still had the power? If so, why? Surely not just out of revenge on the captain for speaking to him as he had. No, it would be because he was determined to remove any witnesses of their journey. Nobody must know that this was where he had brought his nephew. That was how much Alfredo mattered to him, that he would kill four innocent men to preserve his secret. Not for Alfredo’s sake, but for his own.

Either was possible. Alfredo’s mind wavered to and fro. He reached the house with his determination to trust Uncle Giorgio badly shaken, and only one decision made. He must talk to the salamander as soon as he got the chance.

Luck was with him for once. Annetta and Toni were still way down the mountain, but she had left food in covered dishes for them. They had both brought books to the table, and Uncle Giorgio helped himself, sat down and at once started to read, but as soon as Alfredo was seated he closed his book and pushed it aside.

“You ask remarkably few questions,” he said. “Have you no more?”

“Oh, yes, but…I didn’t want to bother you, but…Well, I was wondering about the salamanders. Somebody once told me that if you ask them something they will tell you the truth. Is that right?”

“Yes and no. The truth is in their music. For us, truth exists almost entirely in words. The salamanders do not use words. How can they speak our truth? I have heard you sing, Alfredo. You have an excellent voice and a good understanding, but you sing with the human emotions that are in the words, and this, as it were, contaminates the music. Even our unsung music may be contaminated by the human emotions of the player. But for the salamanders, their truth is in the notes, not in the manner in which the notes are sung. So if you would converse with the salamanders you must train yourself to sing without any emotion that can be put into words. When I converse with my salamander I normally use the fiddle. Before you came I used to sing to it only when I needed my hands to collect its tears. You must learn to treat your voice purely as a musical instrument, like my fiddle. Otherwise the truth that the salamander tells you will be contaminated with apparent meanings, which are in fact no more than echoes of your own hopes and fears. I have so far allowed you to sing to the salamander in that fashion because your singing achieved what was necessary, but before you can attain true understanding of the mountain, and of the task before you, you must train yourself to do as I say. Do you understand?”

“I think so. The organist in the cathedral used to have arguments with the Precentor about it, but the Prince-Cardinal agreed with the Precentor, so that’s what I’m used to—singing as if I meant it, I mean.”

“Whereas I agree with the organist, so you must do your best to unlearn what you have been taught.”

“Last time I sang to the salamander I thought it showed me what it used to be like, living inside the mountain.”

“Of course. But in fact it showed you no more than your own imaginings. When I was a boy I used to have such imaginings, but I trained myself to reject them. When we have eaten you can sing to the salamander again, and practice as you do so.”

“Super flumina? Psalm One Thirty-seven?”

“What you sing is irrelevant, provided it is expressive of sadness.”

“I felt very sad today when we were coming back up the hill. I was thinking about the sailors on the Bonaventura, and me singing the bit about the storm for them from Psalm One Hundred and Seven. It was only last Sunday, and now they’re dead. Would that be all right?”

“Why that? It is a psalm of praise, I think. The music is not in itself sad.”

“I could sing a requiem first.”

“That would be better. And then you may sing the psalm if you wish.”

Uncle Giorgio spoke flatly, as if he’d forgotten all about the Bonaventura. He was opening his book when he seemed to realize what they’d been talking about, and looked up again.

“I am truly sorry about what happened to our friends on the ship,” he said. “But we must start to put all that behind us. We have great work to do, Alfredo, you and I.”

He returned to his book and read for the rest of the meal.

There was now a curved sheet of metal supported on a wooden framework a little distance back from the furnace. Uncle Giorgio stationed Alfredo behind it.

“Lead,” he explained. “It will shield your body from the harmful emanations of the furnace. Your head I can do nothing about until I have more lead, but it should not matter for the moment. It is frequent and prolonged exposure to the emanations that is dangerous. Here are your spectacles.”

Alfredo put them on and the chamber was in darkness. The darkness cracked apart in a glaring line as Uncle Giorgio raised the lid of the furnace unaided. Against the glow Alfredo watched him pick up the little ladle.

He nodded, and Alfredo began.

He started with the saddest requiem he knew, but trying to do as Uncle Giorgio had suggested, and almost at once the salamander emerged, weaving its plaintive sweet piping exquisitely into the music, filling Alfredo’s mind with thoughts of the dead sailors, and of their evening concerts, and their gossipy good nature. Together they wept for Benno and his friends while Uncle Giorgio collected the salamander’s tears with no more apparent emotion than if he’d been milking a goat. At a suitable moment Alfredo prolonged the note and modulated into the psalm. The salamander followed as if it had been expecting the switch.

“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters…”

Now, unwilled, his mind filled with other memories—himself on the sun-baked hillside, watching the ships going to and fro in the Straits, the Bonaventura with the yellow patch on her brown sail, far out across the water…

“These men know the works of the Lord and the wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth…” And now for him the storm music became the churning energies of the mountain, the Bonaventura bursting into flame, the horror and grief with which he’d watched his friends die. Why? he asked himself. Why?

Another image came into his mind. He saw the mountain, as if from a short distance, but it was now faintly transparent, so that he could see not only the surface but also, dimly, as if through heavy mist, the branching pattern of dark orange streaks that marked the channels of the fiery mass within. There was a boy, himself, standing on the path directly above one of these streaks, staring out to sea, ashen-faced, his mouth open as if to scream. Farther up the slope, at a point where the streak was brightest, there was a dark, cloudy shape, vaguely human but twice the size of a man and veined with fire like the mountain. It had its arms raised in front of it. Fire streamed from its fingers out toward the sea.

The mountain seemed to come closer as the boy turned, so that now Alfredo was looking over his own imagined shoulder. Beyond him he watched a mule picking its way down between the vines with Uncle Giorgio slumped and exhausted in the saddle.

All this in his mind’s eye. At the same time he could feel the salamander’s fear and sorrow, and with his outward eyes could see Uncle Giorgio leaning forward to harvest its tears, and he felt he understood why the creature wept so. The sorrow was for him, Alfredo. The fear was for him. They were emotions he could share, human.

He stopped where the storm music ended, and the salamander sank beneath the surface. Alfredo stood with his eyes closed, swaying, paralyzed with horror and dread. If he could have moved he would have tried to rush from the room, despite the locked door.

He hadn’t been thinking that! He hadn’t! He hadn’t!

It hadn’t come from inside him!

He’d been doing exactly what he’d been told, trying to sing as if he truly, truly believed that it was the mountain that had destroyed the Bonaventura and Uncle Giorgio had tried to stop it.

Or had he? Perhaps…

A hand gripped his elbow.

“You still sing with too much feeling,” said Uncle Giorgio’s voice. “See how you have exhausted yourself.”

Alfredo managed to open his eyes. Everything was black. With a shaking hand he removed his spectacles and saw only the dim light of the lantern. The lid of the furnace was closed.

“I…I tried,” he muttered. “I couldn’t help it. I felt so sad.”

Uncle Giorgio sighed.

“What is done, is done,” he said. “Nothing will undo it. …” And then, with an irritated click of the tongue, “Well, we had best not attempt the chant until you are rested. Come to my study half an hour before supper. Meanwhile, learn what you can. You may go.”

Alfredo stood dazed, bewildered. That sigh. And the few words after…That hadn’t been playacting, pretending. But how could that be the voice of the monster the salamander had shown him?

The rattle of the lock broke into his trance. Uncle Giorgio took him by the arm and led him out of the room.

“You had best go and lie down,” he said. “Can you manage the stairs on your own? I have work to do here still.”

“Yes…yes…I was just dizzy. I’m all right now.”

“Good boy.”

Alfredo staggered off along the passage. Before he reached the stair he heard the lock rattle again behind him.