Tears of the Salamander (11 page)

Uncle Giorgio knelt and prayed. Alfredo did the same, grieving for his own lost world, the bakehouse and the cathedral and the people he’d loved. The choir were singing, or attempting to sing, music he knew well. The trebles were thin and squeaky, and both tenors erratic on their top notes. Without thought he improvised a descant, almost under his breath, too quietly for anyone else to hear, but Uncle Giorgio immediately tapped him on the shoulder and shook his head, frowning.

He fell silent. His mind wandered. It was a while before he became aware of a difference. A difference from what? From…yes, from the world outside. The mountain. Wherever he’d been on the island, and from far out to sea, waking or sleeping, the mountain had been simply
there,
a vast presence, a pressure. Not here, in this church. For all he could feel of it, nothing might lie outside these walls but endless level plain. For the moment he was free of it. Free. It was almost as though the force of gravity no longer bound him to the earth and he could fly, as he sometimes
could in dreams. He glanced at Uncle Giorgio, wondering if he felt the same, but as usual his face told nothing.

As the choir began to process down the aisle at the end of the service Uncle Giorgio left his stall, signed to Alfredo to do the same and joined the procession behind the priest. No one else did so. The procession filed into the vestry, but the priest stopped at the door, turned and bowed to Uncle Giorgio, who acknowledged the greeting with a nod.

“I must introduce you to my nephew and heir, Father Hippolyto,” he said. “This is Alfredo di Sala. His parents died recently in a tragic accident, and he has come to live with me.”

The priest, a tall but sagging man with heavy, pasty jowls, seemed to wince with surprise. His hand trembled as he took Alfredo’s and his voice fluttered as he answered.

“I am honored indeed,” he said. “The di Salas have long been our generous patrons, and I pray that they may long continue.”

“I hope so too,” said Alfredo politely.

“We will see you again next Sunday, I trust,” said the priest, clearly trusting nothing of the sort.

“Of course,” said Uncle Giorgio, and turned away with a faint smile on his lips, as though he was enjoying the priest’s discomfort. Alfredo followed, wondering whether the priest was ill, that he trembled so, or only in awe of the grand gentleman, or actually afraid.

They came out of the chill of the church into the blaze of a southern noon, but Alfredo barely noticed the change,
because in the same moment the mountain had returned and its pressure closed around him.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Uncle Giorgio looked down at him.

“You will need to get used to it,” he said.

“It’s all right. It was just a surprise. I think I
am
getting used to it. But it was nice being out of it for a bit.”

“Not merely nice, necessary. I miss very few Sundays. As Father Hippolyto implied, I am an excellent son of the Church.”

“I could sing in there, couldn’t I, without…er…anything happening?”

“You are no longer a chorister, Alfredo,” said Uncle Giorgio severely. “You are a gentleman, and must learn to act as such.”

He sounded and looked entirely serious, but then his lips twitched briefly. It was so unexpected that Alfredo answered with a smile. Uncle Giorgio, straight-faced again, accepted the smile with a nod and walked on.

Alfredo followed, feeling that this once, for the moment, they understood each other. Whatever they might be on the mountain, down here in the town the di Salas were a family of proud and ancient lineage. It was genuinely and unarguably so, but at the same time it was a kind of act, because they weren’t only that. They were also sorcerers of a power that no lineage could match.

It was as if in that shared understanding Alfredo had been allowed on the other side of a barrier, into Uncle Giorgio’s aloneness, into a place where words meant something different from what they seemed to mean, and he
understood those meanings. Then, in a few paces, the moment was over. It was Alfredo himself who ended it, shrinking back out of that aloneness, as if knowing by instinct that he would never be able to breathe its pure and joyless air.

Annetta and Toni were waiting with the mules by a mounting block at the side door, Toni cringing down between the animals out of sight from all the people and Annetta gripping his arm so that he shouldn’t actually turn and run. Alfredo climbed clumsily onto the second mule, which without any signal from its rider at once set off after Uncle Giorgio’s.

The square in front of the church was thronged, but nobody greeted Uncle Giorgio as he led the way across it. If anything, people seemed deliberately to be looking the other way and yet somehow to move out of his path. Alfredo saw a group dressed like gentry gossiping on the steps of the church, while a carriage and an open landau, each with a coat of arms on its door, waited below. One of the shields was painted with the head of a horse. The empty stalls next to his must belong to these people. Why hadn’t they been using them? Were even they so afraid of Uncle Giorgio that they didn’t want to worship beside him? Did everybody down here know what he was on the mountain, and were they all afraid of him? Did they all hate him in their hearts? Was that why no one would look at him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“
Super flumina?
Psalm One Thirty-seven?”

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

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

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

“I could sing a requiem first.”

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