Tears of the Salamander

ANNETTA PUT DOWN THE TRAY SHE WAS CARRYING, made signs to him to stay where he was and put her finger to her lips, then helped him sit up, stuffed an extra pillow behind him and laid the tray across his knees. There wasn’t much on it, just a bowl of thin broth and a single slice of bread. Alfredo was still hungry, but he spun it out, sipping the broth and nibbling the bread, and was only just finishing as Uncle Giorgio arrived.

“Well, I trust you feel better,” he snapped. “You slept well?”

“Yes, thank you, Uncle Giorgio. I feel almost all right. Just a bit feeble. And, er, empty.”

“No more vomiting? No looseness of the bowels?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t tried yet. There isn’t, er…”

“No doubt. Toni, apparently, has the same sickness, so it will have been the plums that caused it. In an hour’s time you may eat a little more, and again an hour after that. If any sign of the sickness returns, do not eat. Annetta will leave food for you in the breakfast room. Eat nothing else. You understand?”

“Yes, of course. …Can I get up?”

“Yes, but stay in the house, out of the sun. I will see you on my return from Mass.”

He marched out of the room without another word. Alfredo rose, washed and dressed, then finished the remains of last night’s supper, listening intently all the time for the sound of footsteps in the corridor. After that there was nothing to do but wait in his window until Uncle Giorgio left.

All his anxieties came crowding back. His plan was like a chain, each link depending on the one before it. If one link snapped, the plan would fail. What then? Run away, as he had told Annetta? How? Where to? Who on the island would risk the fury of the Master of the Mountain? He tried to force himself to think about the problem, but his mind kept slithering back to the chain, testing it through, link after link after link. And again. And again.

At last Uncle Giorgio appeared from behind the house, already riding his mule, with Annetta striding at his side. Just as he rounded the terrace he turned and looked up at the house. Alfredo waved. Uncle Giorgio raised his hand in brief acknowledgment and headed down the hill. Still Alfredo waited until they had long disappeared among the olive trees, then hurried downstairs.

He found Toni sitting placidly in the kitchen. There was a satchel on the table beside him, which he pushed toward Alfredo with a smile. Alfredo glanced inside. More food.

“Your mother is a marvelous woman,” he told Toni. Toni smiled, but there was no knowing whether he understood the words, or only the tone. Alfredo beckoned to him and led the way out into the yard.

Together they fetched out the two remaining mules and tethered them to separate rings in the stable wall. They gave them nose bags to keep them quiet, and then brought out the two harnesses and the cradle to carry the salamander’s bucket. Alfredo worked out how it assembled and then stood for a while checking round the yard, making as sure as he could that this stage of the plan would really work. The main problem was going to be the weight of the salamander’s bucket, filled with some of the molten mass from the furnace. Strong though Toni was, Alfredo didn’t believe that the two of them could carry it up from the cellars between them, and then lift it into the cradle between the mules. That’s why the second bucket had been so important.

There was nothing more he could think of. He sighed with anxiety and led the way back into the kitchen. The clock said it was still twenty minutes to go before the start of Mass, so he opened the satchel and forced himself to eat. Toni had no such problems.

With five minutes to go he repacked the satchel, took it out and stowed it in one of the saddlebags, went back to the kitchen, lit a lantern with a spill from the fire and led the way down to the cellar. Toni gazed without interest at the massive door of the furnace chamber, and turned inquiringly to Alfredo. Now came the first true test, the first link in the plan. If this succeeded, there would be no going back. If it failed…

Alfredo put the lantern on the floor, aligned his hands in front of his mouth and moved his fingers over the stops of an imaginary recorder. Toni took his real one from under his smock and put it to his lips. Quietly Alfredo began to sing the old Persian chant of summoning. After the first two notes Toni joined smoothly in.

And an Angel of Fire was there, with them, filling the height and width of the gloomy passage with its blazing presence. Alfredo almost lost the chant, stunned by the sudden nearness of such power, so much stronger, more vivid, than that of the two that Uncle Giorgio had summoned to his rite with the starlings. Now he understood what the notes had meant when they had talked about the difference between the Greater and Lesser Angels. Those two had been of the sort that could be commanded by a man with the Knowledge. But this was indeed one of the Greater Angels—perhaps the same one that had appeared before Toni in the rose garden. They could ask it, but it would choose whether to do what they asked.

The Angel waited, impassive, until the chant ended, and even then seemed to ignore Alfredo. Instead it faced Toni directly, bowed its head and waited again. Toni looked to Alfredo for guidance, and now at last the Angel turned to him. He, too, bowed his head as the Angel had done, placed his finger onto the keyhole of the lock, and spoke the two grating syllables with which Uncle Giorgio had commanded the Lesser Angels to light the star around the brazier. He stood back and watched the Angel reach out an arm and place its hand over the lock. A white light gathered itself inside the Angel’s body, pulsed gently down its arm and settled in a dome of pure heat over the lock. The passage filled with smoke and the stench of burnt timber. The Angel withdrew its arm, turned and bowed to Toni, and vanished.

Alfredo pushed on the door and it swung open. There was a pool of molten iron on the step below the lock.

Toni seemed dazed by this second encounter with the Angel. Alfredo had to take him by the elbow and lead him into the furnace chamber, where he stood, slowly gazing round with unseeing eyes while Alfredo fetched the things they would need from the stack in the corner: the two buckets with their carrying pole, the ladle and the tongs. He fetched both pairs of dark glasses from the shelf and fitted Uncle Giorgio’s onto Toni for him. He didn’t bother with the lead screen—they would be moving around too much. They would have to take their chance with the emanations.

Now, at last, he raised the lid of the furnace.

There was no sign of the salamander, so he took the lid off the smaller bucket and began to ladle the molten liquid into it. With its bowl barely half full the ladle became almost too heavy for him to control. He stopped when he could no longer lift the bucket by himself.

He closed the furnace, put the lid on the bucket and fastened its clasp. The metal of the bucket itself was already too hot to touch. This was something he hadn’t thought of, but for the moment it didn’t matter. He went over to Toni and removed his dark glasses. Toni seemed to have woken at the change from the glare of the furnace to the dim light of the lantern and was now looking round the chamber in an interested way, as though seeing it for the first time. Alfredo led him to where he wanted him, fetched the carrying pole and slid the hook in under the handle of the bucket.

“Ready?” he said. “You take that end.”

He grasped his end of the pole and lifted it a few inches, waited till Toni had copied him, stood upright and led the way out into the passage. The load was heavy but manageable. They took the stairs slowly, with the bucket swinging uncomfortably to and fro as they climbed. Already Alfredo could feel the heat beaming out from it. Once up they could hurry along the corridors and out through the kitchen into the yard. He settled the bucket down by the stable wall, close to the mounting block, unhooked the pole and went back with Toni to the furnace chamber.

This time, the moment he opened the lid the salamander rose from beneath the surface. Alfredo was expecting it to look at him and he would then sing Levavi oculos—I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills—while he told it through the music what was happening. Instead it stared for a moment at Toni, opened its small round mouth and, unprompted, started to sing. Toni took out his recorder and joined it. The salamander’s song was a strange mixture of wild joy and deep grief, joy at the coming of a new and kindly Master, grief for him, for what he was. The salamander wept.

On an impulse Alfredo picked up Uncle Giorgio’s little ladle and leaned forward to harvest the salamander’s tears. He remembered something that one of the priests in the cathedral had told them, explaining some miracle of healing: “The mind is spirit, but the brain is flesh. A madman has an ailment of the mind, and therefore of spirit. An idiot has one of the brain, and therefore of the flesh.”

Sovereign against all ills of the flesh, he thought.

The song finished and the salamander disappeared beneath the surface. Alfredo tipped the contents of the ladle into the phial, but had to wake Toni from his half-trance before he could give it to him.

“Drink it,” said Alfredo, miming the action. Toni obeyed and gave the phial back. Alfredo hadn’t expected anything much to happen. When Uncle Giorgio, on the verge of death, had drunk the tears it had been some while before they had had any effect. And time was pressing. He picked up the ladle and filled the remaining bucket with as much as he thought they could lift, then picked up the tongs, held them over the furnace and softly began Levavi oculos at last.

The salamander rose and at once reached for the tongs, scrambled up and let Alfredo close them gently on it. It peeped pitifully as he lifted it out and across, and huddled down into the molten heat in the bucket, though it could barely get its whole body beneath the surface. In that brief transfer Alfredo had seen that the salamander was exactly like the pendant he wore round his neck, right down to the hooked barb at the end of its tail.

He was about to close the lid of the bucket when Toni stopped him with a grunt, and then, to Alfredo’s astonishment, picked up the ladle and added another bowlful of the liquid to the bucket. He tested the weight, and only then allowed Alfredo to close and fasten the lid.

As he did so Alfredo noticed that heat was now radiating from its surface in a way it hadn’t done before, and there was a slight roiling motion as if the liquid were slowly coming to a boil. He guessed that this must be something to do with the salamander’s having left it. When he turned he found that Toni had already hooked the carrying pole into the handle of the bucket and was standing ready, but holding the pole some way in from its end, so that he would be taking a larger share of the weight. They left the door of the chamber open and the lantern still burning.

Out in the yard they heaved the bucket up onto the mounting block, fetched the mules, tethered them to rings on either side of the block, slid the poles of the cradle into their harness, and then stationed them so that the central ring of the cradle was close beside the block. Now…

But it wasn’t going to work. In Alfredo’s plan he was simply going to heave the bucket across into its place in the cradle while Toni held the mules steady, but now, faced with the task, he realized it was beyond his strength.

“It’s more than I can manage,” he said, and scrambled off the block, but before he could start back across the yard for the spare bucket and the ladle Toni grunted and stopped him, laying his hand on Alfredo’s arm and tapping himself on the chest. He seemed utterly confident.

“All right,” said Alfredo, taking the bridle. “But watch out. The bucket’s going to be hot. You’ll need a bit of sacking or something.”

Gingerly Toni tested the bucket, frowned slightly and climbed the block. He tested the handle again, this time more firmly, positioned himself, grasped the handle and with a single flowing movement swung it across into the cradle ring. He rose, blowing on his palms, and grinned at Alfredo. Yes, the bucket was hot, but nothing like as hot as Alfredo, or Toni himself, apparently, had expected.

Nothing like as hot as the other one either, it turned out. That was now beaming out heat like the open door of an oven. They used the carrying pole to take it across to the block.

“We can’t pour it in,” said Alfredo. “It would be far too dangerous. I’ll go and get the ladle. You see if you can find a way of getting the lid off. Don’t burn yourself. It must be something the salamander’s doing, keeping the other one cool. It did it in the furnace too.”

He raced off, checking on his way through the kitchen how much time had gone. More than he’d thought. In twenty minutes Mass would be over. As soon as Uncle Giorgio stepped out of the church he’d know that something was happening up on the mountain, and the closer he came to home the more he would feel it and the faster he’d hurry.

It was warm now in the furnace room. More than warm. The furnace was beaming out heat, much like the bucket in the yard. Alfredo snatched up the ladle and raced back. He found Toni crouched over the bucket, his face streaming with sweat while he levered at the clasp with a hoof pick and a screwdriver. Alfredo took the lead mule’s bridle again and watched Toni anxiously, getting his breath back. If Toni didn’t succeed in the next few minutes they’d have to give up, and the salamander must take its chance with what was already in the bucket. …

There was a sudden click. Toni rose and backed away, gasping. He unfastened the clasps on the bucket in the cradle with his bare hands and then used a leather apron he’d found to lift the lid of the other bucket clear. The salamander was again making its peeping complaint, but stopped as Toni ladled the hot liquid in for it, then tipped in what was left in the other bucket and closed and clasped the lid of the one in the cradle. He then calmly began to fold the apron, as if they had all the time in the world.

“We’re in a hurry now,” said Alfredo. “He’ll be coming out of the church in ten minutes. We’ve got to get as far up the mountain as we can before he reaches the top of the wood.”

Alfredo nodded, but finished folding the apron and tucked it into the harness. With the same assurance he gestured to Alfredo to switch to the rear mule. The change in him was astonishing. He now seemed to understand everything that was said to him, and all that was happening, and why, and to be fully aware of the urgency, but at the same time to be completely untroubled, without any of Alfredo’s twanging tensions and anxieties. Nor was there any doubt who was in command. Now, for a while, the mountain had two real Masters, Toni and Uncle Giorgio, and the coming contest would be between them, with Alfredo merely helping Toni as best he could. He accepted the change with relief.

They untied the halters and started up the hill. Uncle Giorgio’s mules were well mannered, as mules go, and used to the mountain, but the cradle was an awkward burden on the steep and twisting track, so they toiled slowly up through the wood, Alfredo with all his inner senses tense for the moment when he would first feel the outburst of Uncle Giorgio’s fury on discovering how he had been betrayed. That would be no merely human rage, he was certain. It would be the rage of the Master, an eruption like that of the mountain. Even here, far up the slope, he was sure to sense it.

By the time they reached the top of the wood he was almost exhausted. Last evening’s loss of food was taking its toll. What he had eaten since wasn’t enough to replace it. His calves and thighs seemed emptied of muscle, barely able to heave him another step upward. His lungs gasped uselessly at the dry, hot air. In the trees’ last shade they halted briefly to drink from the water bottles and cram food into their pockets.

“He must be almost at the house by now,” said Alfredo.

Toni nodded and turned to gaze at the slope above them. He shook his head and beckoned Alfredo forward, then pointed up the slope and offered him the bridle of the lead mule, spreading his hands in a gesture of bafflement. His meaning was obvious. Not enough people climbed the mountain to leave a clear continuous track on the stony surface, and he had never done so.

Alfredo had, though only once. He studied the slope and spotted a jut of rock a few hundred paces farther up. That was the crag he had noticed when he and Uncle Giorgio had been making their way down from the crater, because it felt like one of the places where some of the powers of the mountain seemed to run close to the surface and might be summoned forth and used. He pulled his hat from behind his back and fitted it onto his head, then led the way on into the full weight of the sun.

Hardly had they started to climb again when the explosion came. It swept up through the still, hot noon with the onset of a sudden squall. The air seemed to crackle with it. The mountain quivered at its touch. Alfredo staggered. Toni, behind him, cried aloud. Both of them had felt it, and knew what it meant. Uncle Giorgio had reached the furnace chamber and seen the lock melted and the salamander gone. Now it was a question of how fast he could follow. Alfredo attempted to quicken his pace but his legs refused to respond. He huddled into himself, contracted his whole being into the effort to drive himself on, his eyes intent on the next step ahead, only glancing up now and then to check how far it still was to the landmark crag.

They weren’t going to make it, nothing like. His muscles had nothing left to give. His whole body seemed to be on fire with the effort. The world was on fire, a roaring, red haze. There were voices in the roaring, one voice deeper, almost, than sound itself. The voice of the mountain, calling him. He surrendered himself to the voice, to the fire, to the mountain, letting it flood his body with its power, drive his limbs on and up in paces that were suddenly light and easy, like the dance of flames.

He looked up. The whole mountainside was pulsing with flame, flame from the spirit world, the world of the Angels of Fire, invisible except to eyes that could see through the sense of fire. Beside him the mule plodded on unnoticing, seeing only the everyday mountainside. Alfredo saw it rippling with the colors of sunset, like a monstrous ember, and the crag he was aiming for not as a darker jut of rock, but as a white-hot focus of the mountain’s power, bright as the sun-stuff in the salamander’s furnace.

The crag came closer and closer, but all the time, from behind him, he could sense the onrush of the Master’s rage, rapidly gaining on them, sweeping up the hill, faster than any human, any mule or horse, could climb. Just as they reached the crag Toni gave a shout of warning. Alfredo switched hands on the bridle, turned and looked back. The fire vision cleared from his eyes. For a moment there was nothing to be seen, and then the Master burst out from among the trees.

He came in the form of a compact rolling cloud, denser and darker than the thickest smoke and full of orange lightnings. Alfredo’s stomach shrank inside him. How could he ever have imagined he could face this thing? And he was nowhere near where he had wanted to be, high up the slope, close to the heart of the mountain and its inmost fires, before the struggle began. But his only hope was still to stick to his plan. The crag was at least a place from which some of the powers of the mountain could be drawn. Uncle Giorgio had no such advantage. He let go of the bridle, turned aside, and put his back to the rock. The mountain spoke to him through it.

Yes, here! it said.

He squared his shoulders, raised his head, filled his lungs and sang.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away. And like as wax melteth at the fire, so shall the ungodly perish at the presence of God.”

Inwardly the mountain stirred. Something inside Alfredo came alive at the words, his own birthright of rage and the desire for vengeance as he had first become aware of them, lying on the old lava flow across the driveway and listening to the far voices of the salamanders telling him what his uncle had done. He gathered that anger into a compact and burning force and drove it down toward the thing on the slope.

The thing halted. It changed shape, grew a head, arms, legs, human in form, but monstrous. Monstrous in its size, in its horror, in its power. It raised its arms in front of it, and power streamed out of them, visible, implacable, a rolling wave of the same dark smoke-stuff advancing steadily up the slope, its wings moving faster than the center, curving forward into an arc, ready to close round Alfredo, deceiver and betrayer of the Master, and engulf him. Where was Toni? Why wasn’t he helping? Dimly he remembered seeing him climb on past the mules as he had turned to face the Master.

He called the powers of the mountain back, focussed them through himself and beamed them against the wave. It halted, swirled into a vortex, a whirlpool of smoke-stuff that simply sucked them in and made them part of itself. Then it came on.

His resolve, his awareness of his own power, wavered. He sensed another power nearby, above him. He glanced up. Toni was there, on the lip of the crag, facing the coming wave, his recorder ready at his lips.

It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. Desperately he sang on.

“O God, when thou wentest forth before the people, when thou wentest through the wilderness, the earth shook and the heavens dropped. …”

High and fierce, the notes of the recorder threaded the human voice.

Now the mountain answered. Below, behind and above him Alfredo felt the surge of its anger. There was a deafening groan. The whole slope heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. The mules, which had been waiting patiently just below him, apparently oblivious to the struggle, lost their footing. The hind one fell, dragging the other down and its harness free of the cradle, then struggling to its feet and bolting away along the slope. The lead mule rose and reared, squealing. The cauldron was tossed out and came slamming down onto a boulder. The lid flew off and the contents spilled down the slope, with the salamander floundering helplessly in the sun-stuff. It raised its head and gave a piercing scream, a note of pure agony. As if at the sound, the mountain tore itself apart.

The rent opened almost at Alfredo’s feet, releasing a blast of sulphurous heat, forcing him back. The salamander shrieked again. He glanced down the slope and saw that the cloud was now barely twenty paces below the crag. He could see nothing beyond. In a few heartbeats it would all be over. But there was still time for one part of his revenge. The leather apron that Toni had used to handle the bucket had fallen out of the harness as the mules had bolted. He ran, snatched it up and darted across to the salamander. Its golden body, exposed to the naked air, was now streaked with black. It was dying like a dying coal as the heat faded from it, while it desperately tried to drag itself toward the fiery crack that had opened in the mountainside. Alfredo wrapped the apron round his hands, snatched the salamander up, darted back as close as he could get for the heat, and tossed it into the chasm. His hair and eyebrows were scorched before he turned away.

He realized that he had stopped singing. It didn’t matter. In this one thing, at least, he had defeated the man who had murdered his family. Calmly he turned to see how much time was left him before the end. The cloud seemed to have halted, to have lost some of its menace—yes, surely, to be thinning. From the top of the crag, strong and true above the immense rumblings of the mountain, came the sound of Toni’s recorder. It was hard to believe he could draw such sounds, so piercingly fierce and loud, from a simple wooden pipe. What he was playing was no longer the music of the psalm; it was something Alfredo had never heard before, something that seemed to come into Toni’s mouth and fingers in the very moment of playing, but this time not out of the air. He was drawing it forth from the mountain, the music of anger and of fire, and breathing it out through his recorder so that it filled the whole hillside.

Wearily Alfredo climbed up the slope and round onto the crag and stood beside him. From here they could see out over the remains of the cloud and all the way down the slope.

The Master still stood where they had last seen him, unflinching in his monstrous shape, as he fought to exert his power over the mountain. For the moment he seemed to have succeeded. The rent in the hillside ran halfway down from the crag to where he stood, narrower at its lower end than where it had started. There he was holding it, while Toni strove to drive it on. Alfredo waited for the note and joined the contest.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. …”

At the first phrase of the fire psalm, deep below their feet, the host of the salamanders wove their shrill voices into the music. The mountain regathered its strength. Again the hillside heaved. A huge explosion drowned all other sounds. Roasting gases burst out of the gulf, tossing red-hot rocks far into the air, and a great wave of churning lava boiled out and flooded down the slope.

The Master doubled his size and flung his power against it. The onrush paused. Toni’s music changed and became a rapid pattern of intricate shrill notes. A twisting rope of fire coiled itself out of the gulf, floated down toward the sorcerer, and began to curl around him. At the moment it completed the circle he lost his magical shape and became Uncle Giorgio. Released from his hold, the mountain rent itself open all the way down to the trees. The chasm forked, its two arms passing either side of Uncle Giorgio. The rope tightened and snatched him into the flaming gulf.

They stood gasping, stunned, staring dazedly at the huge outflow of lava welling from the rent and flooding down the mountain. Alfredo felt utterly empty, spent. Already exhausted from the climb, he’d now poured out inner strengths, strengths he’d never known were there, in the struggle against the Master. Toni, too, was haggard with the effort, stoop-shouldered and trembling. His face was gray and trenched with deep lines. The likeness was very clear. He was Uncle Giorgio’s son. He had just killed his own father.

Toni recovered first, turning to Alfredo with a worried frown and gesturing at the tide of lava, and then pointing up and over the wood and down to the town below.

There are people down there. My mother, perhaps.

With an effort Alfredo pulled himself together. Behind and below him he could feel the rage of the mountain, unappeased by Uncle Giorgio’s death. Masterless now, it was angry of its own nature, filled with the anger of fire, purposeless, pure and huge, and at last allowed to burst out after so long lying in chains. Burn and destroy! it bellowed in its thunders. Burn and destroy! The madness of fire. How easily an evil-minded Master could harness that anger to his own ends.

Yes, and he had felt it before, that selfsame madness brought across the sea to a northern city and deliberately focussed onto a loving home through the burning glass of Uncle Giorgio’s vengefulness and greed for power. And then again, onto the Bonaventura. And once more, though this time unchannelled, when he and Uncle Giorgio had stood on the rim of the crater, and he had inadvertently woken the wrath of the mountain by singing the fire psalm to it, and it had taken their combined strengths to force it back into its prison.

There was no hope of doing that now. He had no such strength left, nor did Toni. Somehow, that anger must be appeased. Another memory came to him—waiting with Mother in the square in front of the cathedral while Father argued with a fellow baker and his brother Giorgio larked with his cronies, and quietly, for the mere joy of it, singing to himself the music he had just been listening to in the cathedral. That had been the moment that had changed everything, that had set him on the course to the place where he now stood. The gift of the salamanders.

It was as if everything that had happened from that moment to this was part of a single purpose. He turned, raised his arms toward the summit of the mountain and sang.

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. …”

The notes of the descant rose like lark song through the bass thunderings of the mountain. Toni’s recorder joined quietly in, swooping and soaring around the line. And now more music, sweeter and higher than either, as from the unimaginable heat of the gulf below the salamanders raised their voices in exultation at the return of their lost comrade, and the fall of the hated Master, and the new beginning, the different kind of Mastership that his heir would bring.

The mountain paused as if to listen. It groaned, shuddered, and groaned again, and at last, as Alfredo and the salamanders fell silent and the quiet notes of Toni’s recorder faded into the afternoon air, was still.

At the bidding of the salamanders the mountain had acknowledged its new Master.

They stared at each other, shaking their heads in disbelief. The lava was still welling out of the chasm below them, but moving more slowly and in less of a flood. In the pauses between its rumblings they could hear the voices of the alarmed rooks as they circled above the trees, and from far below that the clank of a cracked church bell calling the people to evensong.

Toni pointed over Alfredo’s shoulder. He turned and saw that up the slope, well to their left, the lead mule was wrestling to free itself from something that had trapped it. They trudged and clambered across to it. Somehow a length of chain, trailing from the cradle, had caught under a boulder, and the panicking mule, struggling to wrest it free, had only jammed it faster. Toni grasped the bridle and murmured to the mule and stroked its ears and teased it under its jaws while Alfredo unhitched the chain and released the cradle from the harness. The mule’s panic ebbed away and it stood utterly exhausted, with its head bowed almost to the ground, shuddering, covered with foam, its lungs heaving, while Alfredo removed what remained of its harness.

One saddlebag was still there, with some of the food left in it. They settled on the slope and ate in silence, looking out over the strait. The steady beat of the church bell floated up from the town.

“Right at the end,” said Alfredo, “that burning rope—you did that?”

Toni nodded.

“How did you know?”

For answer Toni leaned across and touched Alfredo’s smock, just at the point where the salamander pendant hung against his chest on the chest. As far as Alfredo knew, he had never seen it, but now he knew it was there. Alfredo wasn’t surprised.

“The salamanders?” he said. “They told you?”

Toni nodded again, and then raised a warning finger as the tolling changed and became a wild rhythmless clangor, joined now by several other bells, sounding the alarm, telling the townspeople that the mountain had woken.

“They’ve taken their time,” said Alfredo, and then, “No, I suppose it hasn’t been that long. It just seemed like it. Well, it’s over now. I think we can hold it.”

But Toni was frowning, and gazing not down toward the town where the sounds came from, but more to the right. Yes, Alfredo could feel it too. Something was happening, something with fire in it, halfway up the hill, about where the Casa di Sala must be…

…and then, from that point, a burst of light, brilliant even in the bright sunshine. With it one dense ferocious impulse, a blast of pure power, not coming from the mountain but bursting from a single center with huge, astounding force. Light-dazzled, stunned, they saw only dimly the blast-wave traveling up the hill, tossing the treetops about as if in a hurricane. The sound of the explosion reached them first, a long, immense, roaring bellow. Before it ended, the blast, an almost solid wave of roasting air, knocked them flat.

Alfredo pushed himself groaningly up out of the darkness and stared down the hill. Half the trees in the wood seemed to be down. Several fires had started. Beyond that stood an uprushing column of dark smoke, rising and rising, which at its top widened into a pale, churning cloud like a child’s drawing of a tree. In only one way was it like the fire of the mountain: It was filled with the same rage.

Toni was already on his feet, staring. He raised both arms high and gave a great wordless shout, a call, a summons.

At the sound the air became full of the Angels of Fire, as usual almost invisible in the afternoon sunlight, but still blazingly there. They hovered, waiting for Toni. He called again and swept his arms down and outward. Remove, he told them. They turned and streamed away toward the strange, still rising cloud until they hovered in a ring around its top. Nets of fire fell from each of them, joined themselves, narrowed in a fiery mesh around the column, bright against its blackness all the way down to the ground. The Angels rose again, picking up cloud and column and, at its base, the sun-bright ball of heat from which it sprang, and bore the whole thing up and away toward the sun.

Alfredo watched the burning mass dwindle to a spark and vanish.

“Well done!” he whispered, stammering with wonder. “How did you…What…? Oh, I think I know. That was the salamander’s furnace. As long as it had the salamander in it…But it started to change as soon as we took the salamander out, and last time I went it was too hot to get near.”

Toni nodded. That was something he’d already known—not guessed, as Alfredo had—just as he had understood the menace of the cloud and known how to overcome it. That knowledge and that power were part of his inheritance. He was now truly Master of the Mountain, come into his birthright. His whole stance expressed his Mastership as he stood gazing down the slope and out over the strait. But then, with a sudden, urgent movement he turned to Alfredo. His whole face was full of questioning worry. His mouth struggled to shape a word.

“Annetta? Your mother?” said Alfredo. “I told her not to follow Uncle Giorgio back, to find somewhere safe, in case there’s an eruption. She told me where, and I said we’d go and look for her there.”

Toni nodded doubtfully, but settled down beside Alfredo to finish their meal. The mule had bolted again, but was too tired to go far and was standing a little way off, braying pitifully for its companion. The town bells still clamored their alarm. Dazedly Alfredo began to wonder what he should do now, how much he dared tell anyone. He glanced up when Toni gave a grunt and rose. The second mule was shambling back across the hillside. The first one staggered to meet it.

“I suppose we’d better go and tell people it’s all over,” said Alfredo.

As he scrambled down toward the mules, it struck him that perhaps he now knew why the two brothers had quarrelled. Uncle Giorgio needed two people to manage the mules, and so had tricked Father into helping him, and when Father had realized what was really happening he’d tried to stop it. Those were the two angry voices the salamander had heard. So it was up here, on this mountainside, that the terrible rift between them had opened, loosing the raging fires between them.

Well, maybe. He would ask the salamanders about it sometime.

The mules seemed relieved to be caught but it took a while to coax them close enough to the lava flow to make a start down the path, scrambling every so often round or over tangles of fallen branches. The flow had now ceased moving, but there were places where the twists of the path took them too close to stand the heat and they had to pick their way down through the trees. The sun was setting by the time they came out onto the old driveway and made their way home along it.

But Casa di Sala was gone. The lava had reached it, buried it and then piled itself up on the terrace below and there finally solidified. There was no sign of the explosion in the furnace room, so that must have happened just before the lava covered everything. Nothing was left. The mountain had made it all part of itself.

They gazed at it for a while and then, without a word, headed on downhill. Alfredo found he was thinking more coherently. What next? Take the mules to the inn. Find Annetta, if possible. Then Signor Pozzarelli. Tell him just enough of the truth to make him understand that the mountain still had a Master. …

As it turned out, Annetta found them, climbing up toward them through the dusk, leading the third mule. Toni ran to meet her, and she flung her arms round him and hugged him, sobbing with relief. After a while he took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her away from him and stood erect, gazing down into her face. His mouth worked. The syllables when they came were slow and grating, like the hinges of a long-closed door, but the word was unmistakable.

“Mama.”

Her face turned white under its tan. Her mouth fell open. She stared at Toni, who simply stood there, smiling and confident. She turned to Alfredo.

“The tears of the salamander,” he said. “My uncle could have done it long ago. He was a horrible man. He killed my family and my friends on the Bonaventura. He was going to steal my body from me. But what he did to Toni—I think it’s worse than anything. His own son!

“Casa di Sala is gone, Annetta. All gone. The mountain’s buried it. We’re going on down.”

It was dusk when they reached the town. It was still in an uproar, windows smashed in by the blast from the furnace, roofs stripped of their tiles, bells stopping and starting, people standing in the streets guarding piles of their precious possessions, ready to flee, others dragging loads toward the harbor in the hope of finding space on some boat, yet others just standing around exchanging rumors. At the inn Annetta made as if to stay with the mules, but Alfredo said, “No. You’ve got to come too.”

One tower of the church had fallen. The square in front was crowded, groups of people standing waiting for news, others hurrying on errands, others on their knees praying. Alfredo pushed and wriggled his way through and up the steps to Signor Pozzarelli’s door and banged the knocker.

“You’ll get a flea in your ear, sonny,” somebody called. “Doesn’t know any more than anyone else.”

And indeed the door was opened by Signor Pozzarelli himself, his face red with anger, his mouth opened to yell.

“Signor di Sala is dead,” said Alfredo firmly.

Signor Pozzarelli bit himself short and stared. He obviously hadn’t recognized Alfredo till he spoke, and no wonder, a filthy boy in torn peasant clothes, Toni just as bad, and equally unrecognizable, and the dumb servant woman.

“Where…? What…?” he stammered. “The mountain…”

“Can we come in? I’ll tell you what happened.”

“The woman? The idiot?”

“Yes, please. He isn’t an idiot. And he was there.”

Signor Pozzarelli snorted, shaking his head in bafflement, but let them through and led them into his office. Both windows were smashed in. Glass littered the floor. Without offering any of them a chair he settled himself behind his desk.

“Well?” he snapped, trying to take control of the situation.

Alfredo wasn’t put out. He’d thought this all through on his way down the mountain.

“My uncle was a very bad man,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? But everyone was afraid of him, because he was Master of the Mountain. He was the only one who could control it.”

“Peasant gossip,” said Signor Pozzarelli.

“You didn’t think so when we came here to make my uncle’s new will,” said Alfredo. “You knew that if he wanted he could have made the mountain burn this whole town to the ground. He pretty well told you that his heir would be able to do that too, didn’t he? And it’s true. Only I’m not his heir.”

Confidently he crossed to the fireplace and lifted the screen away. The fire was laid and ready for lighting. He looked at Toni and nodded.

Toni merely glanced toward the hearth and paper, and kindling and logs were instantly ablaze, and flames roaring up the chimney.

“Signor Pozzarelli,” said Alfredo formally. “Let me introduce Signor Antonio di Sala, my uncle’s only son, his true heir. You knew that, didn’t you? He was the person my uncle named in his old will, wasn’t he? He is now Master of the Mountain. The mountain destroyed my uncle and chose him instead. He has all my uncle’s powers. He put the mountain back to sleep after it had destroyed my uncle. I saw him do it, I was there. Toni isn’t a fool, Signor Pozzarelli. You understand? Look at him.”

In fact Signor Pozzarelli was already doing so, and now watched Toni hold up a warning finger and simply nod. His smile was only half humorous. Signor Pozzarelli understood.

“You’ve still got the old will, haven’t you?” said Alfredo. “I was right about Signor Antonio being named as heir? And the new one? My uncle had copies, I suppose, but they’re gone—the mountain’s buried them.”

“In that case I have the only copies, Signor Alfredo.”

“May I see them, please.”

Signor Pozzarelli rose and crunched across the splintered glass to rummage among the pile of folders on the shelves behind him. He handed the two wills across. There was a sheet of paper attached to the old one with a note saying that it had been superseded by a new will dated last Tuesday. At the back of the new one was the list of Uncle Giorgio’s properties that Signor Pozzarelli had mentioned that day. Alfredo glanced through it. It looked as if Uncle Giorgio had owned practically half the town, and a lot of farms, too. The inn had belonged to him, and so had Signor Pozzarelli’s own house. He detached the list and put it at the back of the old one.

“Would this still be valid if the other one disappeared?” he said.

“Indeed yes. But…”

Alfredo turned and placed the new will and the note that had been with the old one on the burning logs and stood and watched them burn, thinking about his next move.

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning back. “You were going to tell me something.”

“Er, well, yes. It was that the willful destruction of a valid legal document is a serious criminal offense, but perhaps, since you were the named beneficiary…”

“It didn’t happen,” said Alfredo. “There’s two other witnesses here. But there was something else…Signor Antonio will be twenty-one next year, won’t he? And then he’ll be able to turn a tenant out of his house if he wants?”

“Not if he thereby breaks the contract of tenancy,” said Signor Pozzarelli anxiously. His own contract had only a couple of years to run, Alfredo had noticed.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “But suppose somebody’d been a loyal servant to the di Salas for ages, he could give them their house as a reward.”

“Indeed yes, he could.”

“I was just interested. I’m sorry. But that’s all right then, and you’re still Toni’s guardian. He’ll need somewhere to live, and some money for clothes and so on. I hope you can fix all that.”

“I will start to look for a suitable property first thing tomorrow. In the meanwhile you’ll stay at the inn, perhaps.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to take us across, or they’ll throw us out, looking like this. You’ll have to tell them something about what’s happened. It’s a bit difficult. My uncle was a sorcerer, as well as being Master of the Mountain. He could make gold, and he was going to try and live forever. He was going to use me for that. That’s why he made me his heir, you see. The same with Toni, long ago. Annetta thought it was because he wanted Toni to become a sorcerer, like himself, and she thought that was wicked, so she taught him how to pretend to be an idiot. That’s right, isn’t it Annetta?”

She nodded confidently. Her lips twitched. He turned back to the lawyer.

“Toni didn’t dare learn to talk in case my uncle found out, which is why I’m talking for him now. The important thing he wants me to tell everyone is that he doesn’t want to be a sorcerer. He wants to be a good Master, and look after everyone, and keep them safe from the mountain. Will you tell people that? They’ll listen to you. They all know the mountain’s got to have a Master, don’t they, though I don’t expect they talk about it much.”

“Indeed yes, indeed.”

Signor Pozzarelli paused and turned to Toni.

“Signor Antonio, I am honored to be the first to welcome you to your inheritance.”

Alfredo smiled to himself. Barring an Angel or two, he thought. And the salamanders.