Tears of the Salamander Page 4

  Alfredo hesitated. The house, the woman, the man, the homecoming itself seemed unbearably scary and strange. But he thought he could feel the mountain watching him, and he was certain that however fast he ran it would have the power to reach out with a tongue of flame and between pace and pace turn him to ashes. Leaving the man to cope with the mules, he numbly followed the others into the house.

  They were waiting for him on the far side of an empty stone-flagged hall. The woman picked up a lit lantern and gave it to Alfredo. She helped Uncle Giorgio on through an archway into a dark passage, and then slowly and carefully down a steep ladder-like stair. At the bottom was an even darker passage. She turned right. They passed several openings—cellars and storerooms, Alfredo saw as they were briefly lit by the lantern. The passage ended in a heavy iron door. Uncle Giorgio pulled a large key from an inner pocket and gave it to the woman. She beckoned to Alfredo to take her place, then unlocked the door, pushed it open, handed the key back to Uncle Giorgio and stood aside. Leaning heavily on Alfredo, Uncle Giorgio dragged himself into the room.

  It was a vaulted chamber, wider than the bakehouse at home, but with a low roof supported by a pair of pillars. In the dimness around the walls Alfredo could see bookshelves, shelves of jars, the gleam of brass vessels and pipes, and what looked like a fiddle in its case. In the center of the room, between the pillars, stood something like the bottom section of a much larger pillar, a bulky brick cylinder with an iron lid. Though no heat came from it, and the chamber felt no warmer than the passage they’d left, Alfredo knew at once what lay beneath that lid. Fire. A compact mass of pure heat, somehow contained within the cylinder, not radiating at all. It was so strange that for a little while he forgot his terror and simply stared as they drew nearer.

  They reached it and Uncle Giorgio let go of Alfredo, propped himself with one arm on the brickwork and with the other reached shakily out and with his bare hand grasped the handle. It was beyond his strength to lift the lid. Alfredo moved round and held his open palm a little above the metal. Still no heat. Cautiously he took hold of the handle. It was faintly warm. He started to heave the lid up and at once his eyes screwed shut of their own accord rather than face the blast of light that struck them. Light like the light of the sun, but with as little heat as that of the moon. There was no smoke, no odor of fire at all. Yet the heat was there, though somehow it stopped at the surface, so that even on bare flesh he couldn’t feel it at all. But it struck and almost overwhelmed his inward senses, more intense than anything he had known or imagined, heat from the heart of the sun.

  He turned his face away but even then could barely open his eyes. The room blazed with light, flinging shadows as intensely black. Uncle Giorgio was beckoning impatiently. Alfredo’s fear returned as he edged back round the glaring crucible. Had he been brought here to be fed into the furnace, a sacrifice to the fire, which would then somehow magically heal Uncle Giorgio’s throat? No, Uncle Giorgio had a book in his hands—the psalter—but they were shaking too badly for him to turn the pages as he wanted. He let Alfredo take it from him and find the place. Alfredo had known without asking. Psalm 137, Super flumina. He showed it to Uncle Giorgio, who nodded. Alfredo turned, closed his eyes, drew a breath, steadied himself and sang to the fire.

  Fire that Father had so loved, and taught him to love; fire that had taken away all that he had loved, his parents, his brother, his home, even the Bonaventura, everything except the act of singing. His grief, his loss, his anguish, welled into the music, welled into words that were already there to take it:

  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion.

  As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein.

  For they that led us away captive required of us a song, and melody in our heaviness: “Sing us one of the songs of Sion.”

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

  He paused, because there was a three-bar rest for the descant at that point in the setting, but another voice sang on, wordless, a full octave higher than his own highest reach, but sweeter and truer than the best voice in the choir.

  Startled, he opened his eyes. Uncle Giorgio, wearing spectacles now, their lenses densest black, was leaning forward, stretching an arm out over the surface of the crucible, holding a small ladle. Something had changed at the center of the glare, too bright for Alfredo to make out, or even to look at for more than an instant. He closed his eyes and rejoined the music two bars late. It didn’t matter. The other voice was ready, eager for his coming. In an exultation of sorrow the two of them sang through to the end. When he opened his eyes again, the glaring surface was just as it had been when he had first seen it. Whatever had been in the midst of it was gone. Uncle Giorgio signaled to him to close the lid.

  After that fierce light the chamber was blackness for a while, despite the glow from the lantern. By the time Alfredo could see, Uncle Giorgio was sitting in the chair, holding the little ladle in his left hand and a small glass syringe in his right. With trembling fingers he dipped the nozzle of the syringe into the bowl of the ladle and sucked out the contents. He tilted his head back and raised the syringe. Alfredo could see the liquid through the glass, just a few drops, golden in the lamplight. Uncle Giorgio squeezed them one by one into the back of his throat. He closed his eyes, bowed his head and sat motionless. Alfredo heard the sawing rasp of his breath, once, twice, three times, but less each time and then silent. He waited, too dazed with the wonder of the singing, his own voice and the other, double but single in the song, for either terror or amazement.

  After a while Uncle Giorgio looked up, drew a deep breath, rose and stretched as if he’d just woken from deep sleep.

  “The tears of the salamander,” he said in a voice like any other man’s, only a little husky. “The ichor of the sun. Sovereign against all ailments of the flesh.

  “And at last, Alfredo, I can welcome you to Casa di Sala. My home, and now yours.”

  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.