Tears of the Salamander Page 3

  Alfredo did as he was told, slipping in through the gates in the dusk among a group of latecomers and then finding his way to the harbor. There was no mistaking the Bonaventura. A sailor, leaning on the farther rail, glanced round as the gangplank creaked beneath Alfredo’s weight, raised a hand and returned to his contemplation of the harbor. Alfredo climbed down the companionway. In the pitch darkness of the well, lines of light gleamed around a door. He opened it and found that the light came from a lantern slung from a cabin ceiling. Uncle Giorgio’s valises were on the floor. He took off his boots, lay down in one of the two hammocks and once again waited.

  He was asleep when Uncle Giorgio arrived, bringing a wicker basket with an excellent cold meal for Alfredo: fish salad, oil, good coarse bread, apricots and rough red wine. He himself ate nothing, but sipped slowly from a pot of what smelled like chicken broth, and drank a little wine, swallowing with obvious difficulty.

  “Aren’t you going to have any?” said Alfredo. “It’s very good.”

  Uncle Giorgio shook his head and simply pointed at his throat. He took his flask out of his pocket, weighed it in his hand and put it back. He reached down and from a pocket in his valise took out three similar flasks, which he unstoppered and stood on the table. He poured a dribble of wine into each, swilled it round and sipped it slowly.

  “It was kind of you to get it for me,” said Alfredo. “Thank you very much.”

  Uncle Giorgio nodded, unsmiling. Yes, it had been kind of him. It was proper that Alfredo should recognize the fact. Alfredo still didn’t know what to make of his uncle. There was so much that reminded him of Father: his erect stance and long, stiff stride; the way he drummed the fingers of his right hand on his left wrist as he thought; the way he preferred to sit sideways on at the table while he ate, and would then rise sidelong from his chair—small things, but so like in both men. With Uncle Giorgio barely able to speak it was harder to tell about the big things, but in spite of his apparent kindness—from the huge risk he was taking for Alfredo’s sake to his consideration in bringing a pleasant meal to the cabin, though he himself couldn’t eat any of it—there was one big difference. Father had loved—loved his family, loved his baking, loved other people, loved life. Even in his angers there had been love. Even if his throat had been hurting, the way Uncle Giorgio’s was …No, that wasn’t fair. And in any case, Alfredo wouldn’t have wanted Uncle Giorgio, well or ill, to be just like Father, would he?

  “Is your throat very sore?” he asked.

  Uncle Giorgio nodded, expressionless.

  “Would you like me to sing for you?”

  Uncle Giorgio shook his head, pointed toward the quay and cupped a hand behind his ear. No, not now. People might hear you. We are trying to hide you.

  Alfredo nodded to show he’d understood, but was inwardly puzzled. What about the sailor who’d seen him board? How much could Uncle Giorgio have paid to buy the silence of the whole crew? Perhaps this wasn’t the Bonaventura’s home port. …

  The puzzle deepened as the days went by. They had sailed at dawn on that first morning, heading almost due into the rising sun. Uncle Giorgio spent all day on deck, breathing the sea air to ease his throat. When Alfredo had asked if he should come up too he had just nodded. Two sailors rigged a hammock for him, and Alfredo sat on a coil of rope beside him. Uncle Giorgio produced an old book from a pocket, opened it and pointed at a page before passing it to Alfredo. It was a psalter, in Latin of course, with a plainsong notation for each psalm. The book was open at Psalm 137, Super flumina Babylonis.

  “This chant, Uncle Giorgio?” asked Alfredo, showing the book.

  Raised eyebrows—What else do you suggest?

  “There’s one of the cathedral ones. Most of them…”

  The nod—Yes—interrupted him. He’d been going to explain that he knew several settings—the psalm was popular with composers—but only one that was suitable for a single treble voice, a prolonged descant continuing through the whole setting above the intertwining voices of the choir, but beautiful in its own right. As a junior until this year he had never got to sing it, in fact had heard it only twice, but both times had silently sung it through in his mind for hours after the service had ended. One day, he had promised himself, he would sing it aloud for the Prince-Cardinal. Instead he was singing it for a sick man, and perhaps a few sailors if they cared to listen, on the deck of a small boat out on the open sea. But he sang it with his whole heart, as he would have in the cathedral. It was music. It was all he had left, still.

  “By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept, when I remembered thee, O Sion…”

  The sailors did indeed listen. Three of the four stopped their work to do so—the fourth was the helmsman. There were calls of “Bravo!” “Bravissimo!” when he finished. Uncle Giorgio merely nodded approval. Alfredo leafed back a few pages to another favorite. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” he sang, though the setting was not quite so good for a single voice. He was about to look for another one when Uncle Giorgio stopped him with a gesture, looked up at the sun, then at his watch, rose, but staggered as the boat heaved to the swell and would have fallen if a sailor hadn’t caught his elbow and helped him aft.

  Alfredo watched the confrontation with the helmsman. It began calmly enough. From Uncle Giorgio’s gestures he wanted the boat to head farther south. The helmsman shook his head and spoke briefly. Uncle Giorgio became more vehement. The helmsman held his course. Uncle Giorgio seized his arm. The helmsman shoved him away, handed the helm to one of the other men and yelled at Uncle Giorgio that he was the captain of this #!?#!! boat and no #!?#!! passenger was going to tell him how to mind his ship, no matter how much #!?#!! money he’d paid to smuggle his fancy boy off the island, and if Uncle Giorgio didn’t like it he’d turn the boat right round and take him back where he’d come from and the hell with the money. Voice like that, there’d be somebody who’d pay as much to get the boy back.

  To show he meant what he said he dug into his breeches pocket, pulled out a small canvas bag and flung it on the deck at Uncle Giorgio’s feet.

  Uncle Giorgio stared at him, his face set and pale as bone. Alfredo could actually feel his fury, its need to burst out, engulf, destroy, in the same kind of way that he had been able to feel a surge in one of the oven fire pits when a sudden shift of wind increased the draft in the flue, feel it and close the dampers long before the extra heat could seep through into the oven, or the bakehouse. So now. Alfredo watched and felt Uncle Giorgio grimly applying his own inward dampers as he turned away. The sailor helped him back to the hammock. The ship sailed on, due east.

  That afternoon Uncle Giorgio managed to doze for a while. One of the sailors was splicing a cable, whistling as he worked, a tune Alfredo didn’t know. When he went to listen the sailor looked up, and stopped whistling.

  “What’s with the old boy, then?” he asked. “Skipper’s got a short fuse, but the rule is, never speak to the man at the wheel, leave alone grab hold of him. Even a landsman should’ve known that.”

  “He’s sick,” explained Alfredo. “His throat’s very bad, and he’s running out of his medicine. He’s got much worse since we left. …He hasn’t told me, but if he doesn’t get more medicine soon I think he might die. That’s why he’s desperate to get, er, home.”

  He had hesitated because he still had no idea where they were going. If it was “home,” it would still be strange to him. The sailor appeared not to notice, but unconsciously answered the question for him.

  “Well then,” he said, pointing to the right of their course, just as Uncle Giorgio had done. “Sicily’s that way, five days in the right wind, which this isn’t. Lot of tacking, it’d mean. So skipper’s heading for the mainland, and then he’ll turn along the coast and we’ll have the shore breezes all the way to the Straits, and a lot less tacking. Get there quicker in the end. You tell the old boy that.”

  “How long will it take this way?”

  “Seven, eight days. Or we could pul
l in at Ostia, say, and get him some medicine there. Laudanum would be better than nothing, I’d have said—stop it hurting so bad.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Putting in for the stuff and then getting back on course? Better part of a morning, maybe. You ask him about that, and I’ll have a word with the skipper, tell him what the hurry is. He’ll do his best. He’s not the type to hold a grudge.”

  Before he could return to his splicing Alfredo asked him about the tune he’d been whistling. It was a popular drinking song, which he sang for Alfredo in a wheezy tenor, and Alfredo then sang it back to him, ornamenting the chorus as he went. They laughed together when he’d finished and Alfredo went back to Uncle Giorgio and told him what the sailor had said. After that he read to him from a Latin book called Arcana Ignea, which seemed to be about using fire to turn things into other things, but was full of strange words Alfredo didn’t understand.

  Uncle Giorgio lay and listened with closed eyes until the skipper came over and rather stiffly told Uncle Giorgio that he was now making the best speed he could, and offered to put in at Ostia for laudanum. Uncle Giorgio took out his watch, tapped it with his forefinger and firmly shook his head.

  No. I cannot spare the time.

  The passage took eight days. Benno, the sailor Alfredo had talked to, told him that on their usual trading voyages up and down the coast they preferred not to sail in the dark, so they anchored every night if they could; but now they were keeping watches and sailing on. The wind held and the weather was fine. The fourth day was a Sunday, and at Benno’s request Alfredo sang church music for them, the part of Psalm 107 about ships in a storm, though of course he couldn’t get the full tumultuous effect with only his single voice. By now all five of the crew had become solicitous for Uncle Giorgio’s health—not only for his sake, Alfredo guessed. It would be most unlucky to have him die on board. In the evenings, when both watches were on deck for supper, they would hold concerts for him, Alfredo singing treble, Benno and one of the others tenor, the captain a fine baritone and the fourth sailor fancying himself as a bass.

  Uncle Giorgio listened unsmiling, and at the end acknowledged their efforts with a nod, as he did when anything else was done for him. He never complained or showed any sign of impatience. He endured.

  IN THE DAWN OF THE EIGHTH MORNING BENNO took Alfredo up to the bow and pointed. To their left lay the landmass of Italy, as it had all along, but now it seemed to curve round, blocking their path. Straight ahead, outlined against the pallid dawn sky, stood a mountain, a single flattened cone, from whose point rose a thin plume of smoke, drifting east away on the wind.

  “Etna,” said Benno. “Bloody great fire inside it, Alfredo. Bursts out sometimes. You don’t want to be anywhere near it when it does that.”

  Alfredo stared. Yes, he realized; already, before he had seen it, even in his last dreams of the night, he had been vaguely conscious of that monstrous furnace, nearing.

  All morning the mountain came closer and grew huger. Now Alfredo, if he closed his eyes, seemed able to trace through the layers of rock around them the channels of fiery matter that fed the smoking cauldron at the peak; and he could sense too, though much more vaguely, the immeasurable mass of fire below, a furnace the size of the turning world. He was both enthralled and terrified.

  This morning Uncle Giorgio didn’t ask to be sung to, but with signs got the sailors to re-sling his hammock so that he too could watch the mountain. He had been growing steadily weaker; swallowing gruel or wine was a painful struggle; each breath he took ended with a rasping croak. “You will get him home and then he will die,” Benno had whispered yesterday. “That is something. It’s better to die at home.” But this morning Uncle Giorgio seemed a little stronger.

  By noon they were sailing through a strait between Italy and what Benno said was the island of Sicily. The mainland receded on their left and the coast continued on their right. There the mountain soared, rising directly from the sea. In midafternoon they landed at a small harbor at its foot.

  Alfredo said good-bye to the crew. Uncle Giorgio paid the captain, counting out several gold coins, and walked slowly but erect down the gangplank, but from there on leaned heavily on Alfredo’s shoulder, croaking with the effort of each step. Two of the crew followed with the baggage. They reached an inn where Uncle Giorgio seemed to be known, not as a friend, but as a grand person to be treated with deference. If anything, they seemed a bit scared of him. While he sat and rested in the courtyard they brought him wine and olives, which he left untouched. Two mules were led out to be saddled and harnessed. One was loaded with the baggage, and Uncle Giorgio was helped—lifted, really—onto a mounting block and thence onto the back of the other. Alfredo took the halter of the pack mule and they started up a lane that soon became a many-branching track between the vineyards that covered the lower slopes of the mountain.

  Alfredo climbed in a daze, half stunned by the nearness of the central fires. He had no idea where they were going, and Uncle Giorgio sat with his head bowed and the reins slack, by sheer willpower forcing his body to last out this final stage of the dreadful journey. But the mules seemed to know the way and plodded steadily on. Now they were sidling up a spur. On the ridge Uncle Giorgio seemed to drag himself up from his trance of endurance, reining his mule back and turning it off the track. With a gesture to Alfredo to stay where he was, he headed up between two rows of vines, halted some distance into the vineyard and stared out to sea. Alfredo turned to see what he was looking at.

  It was a stupendous view. This side of the mountain was now in shadow. So were the orange roofs of the harbor, but the sea beyond, though hazy with heat in the distance, glittered and dazzled. Toy boats dotted the busy sea-lane. Which of them was the Bonaventura? There—with the yellow patch on the brown sail. Would they still have concerts each evening, Benno happily wheezing, the captain holding the others steady, the bass booming mellowly, but erratic on the note? What did they really think of their two curious passengers, the dying merchant and the choirboy? Uncle Giorgio had evidently paid them well, to buy their silence as well as their passage, but how could he rely on them once they were no longer under his eye? Benno, in particular, was a chatterbox. …

  Something was happening inside the mountain, a surge, a change. The hairs on Alfredo’s neck stirred as his whole skin crawled. It was coming…! No, not here…Farther …There! Oh, Mother of Jesus!

  The Bonaventura exploded into flame, the flames themselves invisible in the sunlight but the smoke surging suddenly upward in dense, churning bulges, renewed and renewed from below as the breeze thinned and scattered them. Alfredo stared, aghast, stunned, unable to think or feel. All he could do was stare at the smoke of the burning vessel as it rose in dark masses above the silky water.

  A shod hoof clicked on shale behind him.

  Slowly, still too numb to grasp what had happened, he turned and watched his uncle coming down between the vines. He had let go of the reins and was sitting bowed and swaying, grasping the pommel of the saddle to hold himself in place. As he reached the path the fury of the mountain seemed to recede. Alfredo felt its fires quieten beneath his feet.

  Unguided, Uncle Giorgio’s mule turned on up the path. Alfredo’s mule started to follow. The tug on his arm from the reins broke the trance. Feeling returned—shock, grief, horror, terror—overwhelming thought. Terror was strongest. He turned to run, to race back down to the harbor and beg for a passage on the first boat leaving. But the halter was wound round his hand and dragged him back as the mule plodded on up the path, forcing him to follow until he could slacken it enough to free himself. He cast a despairing look out to sea as he stumbled and struggled, and now at last remembered that even there he wouldn’t be safe—hadn’t he seen what happened to the Bonaventura? And as the distance between him and Uncle Giorgio increased, he seemed to sense the inexplicable angers of the mountain gathering themselves to strike again, as if the only safety for him lay within his uncle’s protection. Wi
th a violent shudder he pulled himself together and hurried to catch up.

  Soon they left the vineyards behind and climbed among ancient gray olive trees, with rough grass beneath them, until they reached a stone wall, higher than a man, stretching along the hillside. The mules turned left, rounded a corner and climbed a steep ramp to an upper level. Here Alfredo discovered that the wall had been built to retain a wide terrace, at the back of which stood a long, low house with a densely wooded slope beyond. The house was large but shabby, with mottled and peeling cream-colored walls beneath the wide eaves of a wavy-tiled orange roof. To one side of it a man was listlessly hoeing.

  At the sound of hooves he looked up, stared slack-jawed and with a strange bubbling cry rushed out of sight round the corner of the house. The mules began to follow him, but at the next corner of the house they were met by a woman in peasant clothes—tall, gaunt, skin brown as the leather of a boot—who without a word of greeting seized the bridle of Uncle Giorgio’s mule, turned it and led it back the way they had come. The man came creeping behind, clearly ready to scuttle away again.

  The woman halted at the front door and tapped on Uncle Giorgio’s knee. He let go of the pommel and simply tumbled into her arms. She was as strong as a strong man, took his weight easily, settled him on his feet, drew his arm round her shoulder and put hers round his waist and half-led, half-carried him into the house. At the door she turned and signed to Alfredo to follow.