Tears of the Salamander

ALFREDO SAT ON THE WINDOW SEAT IN HIS room, gazing out at the night. His room—Uncle Giorgio had said so, showing him in. It was large—larger than his parents’ had been, above the bakehouse—with a bed big enough for five, and some heavy dark old furniture. In the back of the closet Alfredo had found a small chest, empty apart from a few schoolbooks. The one he opened had the initials A.V.DI S. inside the front cover. The first two were the same as his own—Alfredo Vittorio…No! All three were the same as his own, now—Alfredo Vittorio di Sala. Impossible. The books were old, with underlinings and doodles in the margins. No again, not impossible. Antonio Vittorio di Sala—Father’s name once. This room must have been Father’s room, long ago.

He had stood and stared round it, aching with longing for some whisper of a voice, the ghost of a footfall, a presence, however faint. Nothing. The ache still filled him now as he sat—how often his father must have done the same—staring out at the soft calm night, smelling the sweet calm odors. He needed Father. Father had filled his life. The world was empty without him. Now, Father would have told him what to do, what to think, what to believe, as dread wrestled with amazed excitement in his mind. And all the time he could sense, through the deep layers of rock behind his back and beneath his feet the implacable fiery power of the mountain.

They had climbed back up from the cellars and the silent woman had brought them supper in a small room that seemed only to be used for eating. The food was peasant stuff, but excellent and plentiful, and the forks and spoons were silver, well polished, and there were fine white napkins. Uncle Giorgio ate in silence, as if eating were all that mattered to him in the world. He filled his plate three times, taking small mouthfuls and chewing them well but swallowing without difficulty. Alfredo felt too tense to eat but was too hungry not to, so chewed and swallowed, barely noticing the taste. When they had finished, Uncle Giorgio pushed his chair back and looked at Alfredo for the first time since they had sat down.

“I am too tired for questions,” he said. “I have been very near death. I miscalculated. It is a long time since I was away from here for more than a few days. I was aware that the tears of the salamander begin to lose their virtue once they are shed, but I did not guess by how much. Is there anything you need to know now?”

“Someone … something sang … in the … I don’t know what to call it. …”

Uncle Giorgio smiled for almost the first time since Alfredo had known him.

“In the furnace?” he said. “That was my salamander. It answered your singing and wept for me, so that I could drink its tears and be healed. Is there anything else?”

“The…the Bonaventura…it wasn’t ordinary fire. The mountain did something. I felt it,” said Alfredo.

Uncle Giorgio sighed and shook his head sadly.

“Yes, it is in your blood to feel it,” he said at last. “The mountain destroyed the ship in vengeance for its having brought me back. I am the Master of the Mountain, as our ancestors have been for more than a thousand years, and in full health I could have restrained it. I did what I could, but to my grief I was too feeble. That is my task, to control the rages of the mountain. One day it will be yours. I will tell you more tomorrow.”

And that had been all.

So Alfredo sat at his window while the night wheeled on, trying to think about the salamander, and the mountain, and his uncle. Master of the Mountain! Yes, that was what Father had been saying on the evening of his name-day. “The Mountain must have its Master. …” It had been an extraordinary relief to have even that little explained, however strange the explanation.

And it didn’t even feel all that strange to Alfredo. In fact, it felt somehow familiar—something he hadn’t known but had, so to speak, been all along waiting to know. …And in the same way the terrible thing that had happened to the Bonaventura made sense to him since Uncle Giorgio had explained it.

He thought about Uncle Giorgio—how like he was to Father, and how different. When Father had smiled you could feel how pleased he was. When he had sighed you shared his sadness. His feelings beamed out of him, like the heat from his ovens. But Uncle Giorgio was like the salamander’s furnace—there were great fiery energies inside him—Alfredo was sure of that—but they stopped at the surface. You couldn’t feel them, not in his smile, not in his sigh.

His thoughts went round and round, until he fell asleep where he sat. He woke in the dawn chilled through, though the fire of the mountain had raged through his dreams. He crept shuddering into the bed, his bed, and fell asleep again, this time with no dreams, and didn’t wake until the sun was high. And still he didn’t know what to do or think or feel. There was food in the eating room—bread, fruit, oil, dried fish, water flavored with lime. He was eating with furious hunger when the silent woman came in, nodded and left. She returned a little later and simply stood waiting. Her presence was uncomfortable, so Alfredo pushed his plate away unfinished and rose.

“Please, where is my uncle?” he asked hesitantly.

For answer the woman opened her mouth and pointed her finger into it, shaking her head as she did so. She then beckoned to him to follow her. The room where they ate was down a side passage at one end of a wide corridor that ran the full length of the house. The woman led him along this, past the hallway and the stairs and then down another side passage. At the far end of this she scratched on a door, waited for an answer, then opened the door and held it for him.

Inside Alfredo found a fair-sized room. One window looked toward the mountain, invisible behind woods. Outside the other one the trees stood closer, almost brushing the panes. Uncle Giorgio was working at a desk, apparently copying something out of a thick book. He glanced up and nodded to the woman. She left, closing the door, and Uncle Giorgio returned to his writing. Alfredo gazed round the room. Apart from the two windows, every inch of the walls was covered with shelves, most of them filled with books, but the ones at the farther end held dozens of labeled jars and flasks, like those in a pharmacist’s shop. There was a long table with glass and brass apparatus on it, delicate scales and small implements. Beside that stood a small brazier, unlit. Above it, hanging from a hook in the ceiling, was a birdcage, containing what looked like a starling.

The bird seemed to notice that Alfredo was looking at it and eyed him back, cocking its head a little to one side.

“One! Two! Three! Four!” it screeched suddenly. And again “One! Two! Three! Four!”

Alfredo jumped at the harsh, inhuman cry and the unmistakably human words. Uncle Giorgio wiped his quill and laid it down, sanded his paper, closed the book, marking the page with a scrap of paper, and rose.

“One! Two! Three! Four!” shrieked the starling as he took a crust of bread from a bag hanging on a peg and wedged it between the bars of the cage. The starling fell on it.

“A reward for speech,” said Uncle Giorgio.

“Can it say anything else?”

“There is no need. Come with me.”

He led the way down to the cellars and along to the furnace room. This time he took a second pair of the black–lensed spectacles from his pocket and gave them to Alfredo.

“I made these for you before you woke,” he said. “Wear them always before I open the crucible, or it will destroy your eyesight. Stand well back, but be ready to sing the psalm when I tell you.”

Alfredo put the spectacles on and could see nothing. The glass seemed totally opaque, but as soon as Uncle Giorgio raised the lid of the crucible the glare struck through, as strong as that of the glowing embers in the fire pit of one of the bakehouse ovens, but now bearable. The fierce orange surface was as smooth as liquid but didn’t boil or churn, even when Uncle Giorgio, using tongs, fed it with two or three dark lumps, too heavy to be charcoal. They might have been pit coal, but didn’t look like that, either, and didn’t smoke or crackle, despite the intense heat immediately below the surface. Instead they settled slowly into it and sank out of sight.

“Stand still farther back,” said Uncle Giorgio. “This fire is the fire of the inmost sun. It sends out an emanation that alters the nature of the flesh, making it cancerous, as has happened in my own throat. Good. Now sing.”

Fear and excitement dried Alfredo’s mouth. His whole body seemed to be fluttering like the air in the bass pipes of the cathedral organ. He wasn’t sure he could sing at all—there would be none of the usual joy in it—but he sucked and swallowed two or three times, pulled himself together and almost listlessly began.

Before he was through the first bar of the music the fiery surface rippled and the salamander emerged. He could see it clearly through the dark glass of his spectacles. It rose until it was waist deep in the liquid, and then stopped. Its body rippled with the flow of heat, like a burning ember. Apart from the flattish oval of its face it was covered with neat triangular scales. Its eyes were round and slightly pop, and of a black unimaginably deep, full of living fire, like the rest of it—but fire that gave out no light at all. Instead the eyes sucked light into their own blackness. The creature had human-seeming ears but no nose. There were flaps on either side of its neck, like the gills of a fish. Its mouth was a small, round, lipless hole, which widened only a little as it started to answer Alfredo’s singing. The flaps on its neck pulsed gently.

As the first pure, high phrase twined itself in with Alfredo’s, his whole mood changed. All his doubt and fear became longing, all his excitement became love. He knew in that instant that he had found a friend. He and the salamander spoke to each other as if they had known each other since time began. The music was their language, whose notes were words. Alfredo needed the actual words of the psalm only to give him something to sing, to embody the notes. The salamander needed no words at all.

They spoke, as new-made friends do, mainly about themselves, who they were and where they came from. The salamander took Alfredo into the heart of the mountain, into the fiery caverns through which flowed the streams of molten rock in which the salamanders swam, or hauled themselves out onto the glowing ledges to sing. The whole mountain rang with their singing. It was their life, their reason for existence, that they should sing to each other. It was the loss of that that filled the salamander with such longing. So intense was the sung friendship that Alfredo saw and knew and felt these things, as if he himself had lived as a salamander.

He, not in his turn but at the self-same time, took the salamander home. He took it into the bakehouse where the three ovens Father had built beamed out their inner heat as the rich loaves rose—a pale, faint heat, compared to that of the mountain, but still born of the living fire. He took it into the kitchen, where the family sat round their Sunday supper, content in their love for each other. He took it singing up through the twisting street into the glimmering darkness of the cathedral, where eight hundred lit candles glowed for the evening Mass, and the choir processed to their stalls and there sang their sweetest for the glory of God and the delight of the Prince-Cardinal.

Both boy and salamander wept.

Through the blur of his tears Alfredo was mistily aware of Uncle Giorgio leaning over the furnace, with his little ladle in his gloved hand, to catch the drops that fell from the salamander’s cheeks. Then the psalm ended, the salamander withdrew below the surface, Uncle Giorgio closed the lid, and Alfredo was left with the echoes of the music dwindling in his mind.

He removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. By the time he could see clearly, Uncle Giorgio was stoppering a little flask. He slipped it into a pocket, gazed impassively down at Alfredo for several seconds, shook his head as if in reproof, and picked up a strange little dish. It was shaped like one of the bakehouse loaf tins, but would have baked only one small finger-roll, and had a long handle and was made of iron. Carefully Uncle Giorgio wiped its inner surface with a greasy rag.

“Watch,” he commanded.

Crouching beside him, Alfredo saw him reach with both hands beneath the furnace and turn a spigot. A thin stream of golden liquid flowed out into the pan. When it was almost full Uncle Giorgio closed the spigot, rose and set the pan down.

“Pure gold,” he said calmly.

He fetched a second pan, crouched again, half-filled it and set it beside the first.

“Today we will climb the mountain,” he said, and led the way out.

The track was much steeper than the one they had climbed between the vineyards, but the mules scrambled up it sure-footed. The one Alfredo was riding wasn’t the one he’d led up the mountain. Like Uncle Giorgio, he sat sideways in the saddle. They had broad-brimmed straw hats slung behind their shoulders, but for a long while didn’t need to wear them as the path wound up through the shade of dense old woodland. Uncle Giorgio didn’t say a word. Alfredo clung swaying to the saddle. The doubt and dread of yesterday’s climb from the harbor had returned, and became stronger all the time as the layers of rock below him thinned and he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to the central furnace.

It was well past noon when the woods abruptly gave way to a seemingly endless slope of dark gray tumbled boulders, shale and ash. Uncle Giorgio dismounted and Alfredo slid thankfully down. In the last of the shade they tethered the mules and settled down to the luncheon basket that the dumb woman had prepared for them.

They ate in silence. Alfredo was at first almost overwhelmed by his closeness to the churning fires below, in the heart of the mountain, but by the time he was packing the remains of the meal into the saddlebags he was even more conscious of Uncle Giorgio’s steady, absorbed gaze on him.

There had been priests in the cathedral who might stare at you with the same intentness, but Uncle Giorgio’s look was somehow different. That wasn’t what he wanted, whatever the sailors on the Bonaventura might have thought. He and Alfredo had slept in the same cabins all through the voyage, traveled together through lonely woods and across empty hillsides, but he’d never once done or said anything to suggest any physical interest in his nephew. It was as if there was something else he wanted, deeply and passionately wanted, and only Alfredo could give it to him. But Alfredo had no idea what it was.

He closed the last buckle and stood waiting, but Uncle Giorgio made no move.

“Sit down,” he said. “It is too hot to climb.”

Again Alfredo sat. The mules fidgeted. Insects hazed through the mottled shade.

“There are two Great Works,” said Uncle Giorgio suddenly. “They are named the Philosophers’ Stone and the Elixir of Life. Great men have sought them through the ages. With the Stone they hoped to achieve the transmutation of metals, and thus turn lead into gold. With the Elixir they hoped to live forever. They worked by the distillation of acids and the decoction and sublimation of minerals, and by the conjuration of demons, and achieved many things, but not their goals. These cannot be reached by such means.

“Where is gold found, Alfredo? It is found in the veins of rocks, rocks that once were molten in the heart of mountains such as this. It is found in streams, which have worn those rocks away. All substances, however chill, have fire locked within them. It is not the fire at which we warm our hands on a winter night, or use to cook our food. It is fire from the heart of the sun, which is more, even, than the fire that fills our turning world, and fills this mountain. In it live the salamanders. They take the gross materials of which all things are made and feed upon that inner fire. Heat is generated in the process, enough to turn the molten rock from the mountain, with which I originally filled my furnace, into true sun-stuff. The salamanders pass the rest through their bodies, so that it emerges changed. Some of it is transmuted into gold. Being heavy, the gold that my salamander makes sinks to the bottom of the furnace. But in the mountains it gathers together in pools and rivulets, so that when those places are churned to the surface and cool and become rocks, there are veins of gold running through them.

“Only the salamanders can turn lead to gold. That knowledge is the First Great Work, and I have accomplished it.”

He fell silent, still watching Alfredo with the same heavy gaze, but now as if he expected some response. Alfredo nerved himself to return the look. Uncle Giorgio’s eyebrows rose.

“Are you going to live forever?” Alfredo asked.

“Perhaps,” said Uncle Giorgio, then paused and added, smiling his strange, unpracticed smile, “So, perhaps, will you.”

Before the heat of the day was anything like over, they started on up the slope. Now they truly needed their hats, as they climbed between two fires, that of the mountain below and that of the sun above. Even in the shade of his broad straw brim Alfredo could feel the roasting power of the sun beamed back from the gray litter of old eruptions. If he lifted his head to see how far they still had to go to the summit, the glare at once blinded him. He felt as if they were toiling up into the sun itself, into the true home of the salamanders.

The heat from above was steady and relentless, but that from below varied. Sometimes he was shielded from it by layer upon layer of solid rock. At other times it ran so close to the surface that he felt that Uncle Giorgio, if he had chosen, could with a snap of his fingers have caused it to burst out at their feet.

The feeling was no longer frightening. If anything, there was an exhilaration in being so close to the source of such power. The only thing he had known that was at all like it was standing in his place in the choir with his breath ready drawn for the first full note while he watched for the downbeat of the Precentor’s right hand, telling him to begin. Both the cathedral and this barren, heat-blasted summit were places where he belonged.

The mules climbed patiently on. There was no track that Alfredo could see, but Uncle Giorgio led them twisting up and up, always finding the easiest way, as if he had done this many times before. For a while they skirted an enormous silent chasm. Twice they passed near fissures from which rose wisps of yellowish reeking smoke. At last the sun dipped below the peak and for a short while they climbed in shadow, but soon the slope eased and they felt its force again. Briefly, the ground leveled, then dipped, and they were gazing into the crater of Etna.

Alfredo stared down. Before him lay a vast, ragged bowl, slopes of scarred and tumbled light gray rock and at the bottom a darker surface from which rose two cone-shaped mounds, like models of the mountain itself, each with a crater of its own. Dense smoke streamed steadily up from the farther one. The nearer one was still. To another boy, expecting to see a churning fiery surface threatening at any moment to boil up, fill the crater and flood down the mountainside in destroying torrents of molten lava, it would have been a disappointment. Alfredo stood enthralled.

Something was happening to him. He didn’t understand it. He felt…bigger. Hugely bigger. Not bigger inside himself. He was still only a fleck of living matter on the enormous mountain. Bigger, somehow outside himself. Sometimes he used to play with Father’s burning glass, fascinated by the way he could use its lens to focus the sunlight into an intense dot that in a few seconds could make a twist of dried grass leap into flame and shrivel into ash. Standing here on the summit of Etna, he had become that burning dot, filled with the pure fire of the sun. The mountain itself was the lens.

“You feel it?” said Uncle Giorgio.

“I could do anything!” whispered Alfredo.

“Yes,” answered Uncle Giorgio just as quietly, drawing the syllable out to become a sigh of satisfaction, exulting in the knowledge of power. He knew what Alfredo was talking about.

Without thought Alfredo filled his lungs and started to sing.

“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 let the ungodly perish at the presence of God…”

Psalm 68 had always been his favorite. For him it was the fire psalm. Where better to sing it, rejoicing in the central fire? Immediately he was rapt, lost in the power of the music. The mountain itself seemed to be shuddering beneath his feet. He was being battered to and fro. His head rang with a sudden stinging buffet, so that he lost his footing and fell, with all the breath and all the singing knocked out of him. Uncle Giorgio was dragging him to his feet, and the mountain really was shuddering beneath him.

“Quiet!” snapped Uncle Giorgio. “Stupid boy! See what you have done! Listen.”

He was pointing down into the crater. A deep, throbbing rumble rose from below, but threaded through it Alfredo could faintly make out, right at the limits of his hearing, a high, fierce music. He recognized it at once, the voices of not one but a multitude of salamanders, and knew that they were answering his singing, rejoicing in their element.

The rumbling deepened and increased, and became a roar as the floor of the crater below him cracked apart in a great, suppurating red-and-black wound. A blast of roasting wind, reeking of sulphur, swept up the slope, and huge chunks of fiery matter were flung skyward like dead leaves caught in a wind eddy.

“Tell it no!” snapped Uncle Giorgio. “You began it. You must end it. I can only help you.”

Alfredo looked at him, bewildered. He was staring out over the crater, erect and stiff, with his clenched fists held in front of his shoulders, waiting. Alfredo, not knowing what else to do, copied his stance. Uncle Giorgio glanced at him and nodded to him to begin.

How can you tell a mountain no?

The knowledge slid into his mind.

His earlier exhilaration returned, the outside power, the lens through which it poured, the burning dot—only the dot was now doubled, his own power overlaid with Uncle Giorgio’s, one intense concentration of the pure power of the sun saying to the immense furnace below, “I am your Master. Be still.”

And then it was over. He felt himself unfocussing, separating from the one-ness with his uncle, withdrawing …and he was standing, dizzy with effort, on the lip of the crater as the rocks rained down on the outer slopes and the fiery turmoil stilled and the roaring dwindled to a rumble and then to silence. The wind lifted the smoke aside until he could see the floor of the crater clearly. There was now a third small cone down there, with its own thin plume peacefully drifting away. Distantly in the stillness he could hear the singing of the salamanders, lulling the mountain to sleep.

Utterly dazed, half still exultant, half appalled, by the torrent of power that had rushed through him, he turned toward Uncle Giorgio, expecting a blast of anger at his rashness and folly. But Uncle Giorgio was smiling his thin smile and nodding with inward satisfaction. All he said was “Do not sing on the mountain again, not until you understand more of what you are doing.”

“Isn’t…isn’t the mountain angry with us for stopping it?”

“It is always angry, but it knows its Master. Its Masters, I must say now. That is enough for today. Let us go home.”

It was already drawing toward dusk as they made their way down the mountain. The whole of the Straits was laid out below them, with the fishing boats gathering toward the harbor and larger vessels sailing peacefully on. Alfredo barely noticed. He was still wrestling with what had happened up at the crater—not outside him, but inside. He had been changed. Such power! I could do anything!

But…

It had been wonderful, glorious, unimaginable even now, even in memory—memory wasn’t big enough to contain it. …

But did he want it to happen again? And again, until he became in the end what the power made of him?

Like Uncle Giorgio, perhaps?

Could he even help that happening to him, now that he’d started?

He was appalled, terrified. But still deeply, deeply thrilled. Yes, though the actual experience continued to fade in his mind as they made their way down from the crater, it had not been a dream. By an exercise of pure power he had woken the mountain, and stilled it.

Now, suddenly the feelings returned. The mountain spoke in his mind. Not with its full thunder, but with a deep, rumbling whisper.

“Here.”

Where? A little below him and to his left a small crag jutted from the slope. Beside it ran a hidden fault line in the underlying rocks, a place where the central fires rose close to the surface.

“Let me out,” it seemed to be whispering to him. “Let me burn.”

And he could have done it. If he had chosen, he could have reached them from here with his mind and woken the mountain again, and then stilled it.

Yes, and there had been another such place, much farther down, below the house, among the vineyards…

He halted for a moment, turned and gazed out to sea. Suppose…

Suppose its Master were absent or ill, could the mountain wake of its own accord and direct its power in a single beam that would set one of those boats blazing? Yes, it could.

And could Alfredo have held it back, as Uncle Giorgio said he had tried to do for the Bonaventura, and would have done if he hadn’t been so close to dying?

No, not yet. He had the power, but not the skill. That was something he would need to learn.

How did he know these things? Nobody had told him, but he hadn’t needed to work them out, or decide them. They were already there in his mind, certainties. They were part of something that had come to him at the summit, when he and Uncle Giorgio had been saying no to the mountain, focussed together, almost one person…a kind of leakage between them.

Down the slope Uncle Giorgio had halted and was looking inquiringly back to see why Alfredo had stopped.

Had anything leaked the other way, he wondered as he hurried on down. What secrets of his did Uncle Giorgio now know?

He was very grateful to Uncle Giorgio for all that he’d done for him, and almost sure that he wished him well, but what went on inside him—his thoughts and feelings, hopes, terrors, suspicions, guesses—that was private. If Uncle Giorgio knew anything about it…

He didn’t like the idea at all.

It was almost dark before they reached the woods, but Uncle Giorgio took a lantern from the saddlebags, lit it with flint and tinder and led their way down the twisting track through the trees. It must have been midnight before they reached home, but the silent woman had supper waiting for them. Alfredo was more than half asleep by the time he climbed the stairs.