Tears of the Salamander (18 page)

“Do not move from that spot and you will be quite safe,” he said. “Watch me. When I raise my right hand, sing the chant. Here are your dark glasses. You will need them later.”

Alfredo waited, his heart beating heavily with a mixture of wonder and terror, and the fierce excitement of being on the edge of strange knowledge. He watched Uncle Giorgio unstopper a large flask and very carefully, gripping the brazier for support and leaning out over the sand so as not to mark its surface in any other way, fill the star-shaped groove with glistening dark red granules. Finished, he restoppered the flask and stood back opposite Alfredo with the brazier exactly between them. He spread his arms wide, raised his head and began to speak.

Persian again, in a deep, strong voice, every syllable clear
and exact. The room rang with the sound. It went on for a long while, but still the tension grew and grew. At last Uncle Giorgio fell silent. He drew his hands together before his mouth in a gesture of prayer. His lips were moving but the words were silent. He glanced at Alfredo, briefly raised his right hand and returned to his praying. Alfredo filled his lungs and sang.

He’d expected he might be too nervous to hit the first few notes, to have to steady himself into the chant, but the sound came strong and true. The air in the chamber prickled, and filled with a snowstorm of glowing flecks that swirled themselves into two tall fiery shapes, two Angels of Fire standing opposite each other one either side of the brazier, so that the four of them, two Angels and two humans, stood at the corner-points of a square. None of them stirred until the chant ended.

Then Uncle Giorgio spoke, two grating syllables. The Angels half-raised their arms. Fire streamed from their fingertips down toward the feet of the brazier. The pattern in the sand became a fiery star. Its flames were not red but an intense violet. They wavered as flames do, but did not spread and thicken. Instead they retained the precise outline of the star they sprang from, growing and growing until their tops bent inward and poured themselves into the bowl of the brazier beneath the cage and filled it.

The starlings showed no sign of being perturbed, but stood side by side on the single perch. One raised a foot and scratched under its chin. Then the flames shot up and enveloped the cage. There was no squawk from the birds, no sudden stench of burning feathers, only a faint odor,
peppery but sweet, filling the chamber. The flames held the shape of the cage, increasing in intensity until Alfredo was forced to use his dark glasses. He could hear Uncle Giorgio’s voice now, a steady mutter, the same dozen words over and over but becoming louder and louder as the light intensified. Despite the protection of his spectacles Alfredo could scarcely see Uncle Giorgio through the glare, but he made out a movement of some kind and at the same moment the Angels stretched out their arms toward the brazier, so Alfredo followed suit. At once he could feel the power being drawn from him, down his arms and out through his fingers. The light blazed stronger than the sun. He had to screw his eyes shut, despite the spectacles. Uncle Giorgio’s voice was a harsh cry of triumph that suddenly snapped short. The light faded away and Alfredo could open his eyes.

Even without the spectacles he was blind. All he knew was that the Angels were gone.

“Stay where you are,” said Uncle Giorgio. “It is not yet safe to move.”

He started to pray again, different words, but again many times repeated with his voice dwindling away. Alfredo waited. Gradually his eyes adapted to the light of the single lamp. Now he could make out that there was only one bird on the perch. The other was lying on its side on the floor. He was unable to think about it. He felt extraordinarily tired and listless.

Uncle Giorgio’s voice faded into silence. His lips stopped moving.

“It is over,” he said in a weak and shaking voice. “Follow me. Bring the lantern.”

He picked up the cage with the birds in it, unlocked the door and led the way out, locking the door behind them as before. He used the hand rope to haul himself up the stairs, and stopped to rest halfway. Alfredo’s legs felt so weak that he could scarcely climb at all. It seemed a very long way back to the study. Uncle Giorgio hung the birdcage on its hook and fetched a different flask and two fresh goblets and poured some of the potion into each. While he waited Alfredo studied the birdcage. Yes, it was as he’d thought, but he hadn’t been able to see clearly enough in the furnace chamber. The bird on the perch was the one from upstairs, the smaller one with the mottled breast. The one that could count was lying on the floor. It didn’t stir. It seemed to be dead. Uncle Giorgio turned, and saw what he was looking at.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said. “They are only birds. This was a test of my powers, not theirs. The older bird lacked the strength to receive what was given it. I do not. For me, perhaps, there is still some risk, but the prize is worth it. For you, none. The younger bird, as you see, is physically unharmed.

“Now the Second Purification. Copy me as you did before.”

He handed Alfredo one of the goblets. They faced each other, intoning the words and sipping from the goblets. The warmth of the potion seeped through Alfredo’s body, making him feel a little less feeble.

“Sit now, and rest,” said Uncle Giorgio. “You are tired?”

“Yes, very.”

“I too. All exercise of power takes strength. No, on second thought, go to your room and lie down. Annetta will bring you some food.”

Alfredo staggered to his feet and left, closing the door behind him. But rising again so soon after sitting down seemed to have taken all strength out of him. He paused, leaning for a while against the wall to let his muscles recover. Behind him, through the door, he heard a scraping sound, and then the shriek of a starling. “One! Two! Three! Four!”

The final shock of understanding flooded his mind. It was like a sudden, fierce blow on the head, blanking out everything else. But for the wall he would have fallen to the ground. At last he pulled himself together and tiptoed away to his room.

He didn’t go to bed, but sat in his favorite place in the window, sorting the whole thing through in his mind, fitting his new knowledge in with the old. By the time Annetta arrived with a tray of food he had it all pieced together, a single clear structure, a working machine with one terrible purpose.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said. “Have you got time now? It’s important.”

She nodded and he told her what had happened that morning in the furnace room and the study, finishing with the cry of the starling.

“That was the young bird from his bedroom,” he said. “I heard him pushing a crust into its cage, and it did what the old bird always did and counted up to four. It couldn’t count before. Now it can. What he’d done, you see, was put the old bird’s mind, its soul, what makes it
it,
into the young bird’s body. That’s what he’s going to do on Monday—put himself into me. He ought to be dead, you see. The emanations from the furnace should have killed him long ago. He didn’t know about that when he started. It’s only the tears of the salamander that have been keeping him alive. But after Monday it won’t matter because he’ll have a new young body.

“That’s why he’s been so careful about me, seeing I had good food, shielding me from the furnace. And it’s why he pretended to be ill when he took me to make his will. He didn’t want people to be surprised when he died suddenly. And he wanted to make sure that Signor Pozzarelli was afraid of me, so he won’t try and cheat him when he thinks he’s only got this kid to deal with. And it’s why he had to keep Toni around when really he hated him, in case he couldn’t use me. There wasn’t anyone else with the Mastership in his blood. But he didn’t want to use him if he could possibly help it, in case what was wrong with Toni’s brain meant that his own mind wouldn’t work properly in it.

“And perhaps there’s something wrong with Toni’s seed, too, because he got it from my uncle—that’s important, because he wants to have a son later on who’s got the Mastership in his blood, so that when he’s an old man again he can put himself into a new body again. That’s how he’s going to
live forever, you see. That’s the Second Great Work. But now he won’t need Toni anymore and he can get rid of him.

“Only I think we might be able to stop him. My uncle’s told me how to get into the furnace room. He doesn’t know that, but he has. But I’ll need Toni for that. And you, too, for other things. All right?”

She didn’t hesitate, but nodded firmly.

He told her his plan.

“I know it’s dangerous,” he said. “He’s so much stronger than me. He’s still Master of the Mountain. But we’ve got to try.”

She thought grimly about it, sighed, and nodded again. She patted his shoulder encouragingly before she left.
It will be all right,
she was telling him. And
Thank you.

When the day began to cool he took his recorder out to the rose garden. Before he reached the sunken garden he heard the sound of Toni’s playing, a long, complicated phrase, repeated and repeated, but each time with small unexpected variations. For a while he stood and listened, astonished yet again by the ease and subtlety with which Toni performed. And all his own invention, utterly untaught. It was as if music was the air he breathed, and all he had to do was draw it into himself and breathe it out again as audible sounds, just as the salamanders did with their element of fire. And when Alfredo joined him and they played together there seemed to be no doubt in either of their minds who was the master and who the pupil.

Uncle Giorgio still looked tired at supper that evening and spoke little, but ate steadily and watched to see that Alfredo did the same. As he rose from the table he said, “Tomorrow I must again make preparations, and it would be better for you and Annetta and the idiot to be elsewhere. Do not climb the mountain again—that will overtire you.”

“I could go out along to the rose garden and read. It’s nice there, and there’s some shade from the cypresses. Annetta could bring me some food.”

“Good. But take some exercise. Walk in the woods a little to give yourself an appetite. Then on Sunday we will go to Mass and show ourselves to be good Christians, and to refresh ourselves. I am still tired and will need all my strength. And in the afternoon you and I together will begin the preliminaries to the rite, so that on Monday we are fully prepared.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Alfredo.

“You are an excellent boy. Indeed, you are all that I had hoped.”

As usual there were layers of meaning beneath the simple words, but now Alfredo understood what they might be.

He went to bed tense with expectation and hope and fear. Time had the feel of a river just before it reaches a weir. He could look back and see all that had happened laid out in order, full of swirls and crosscurrents and flurries. He could look forward, beyond the next couple of days, and see an unreadable tumult of foam. But between him and the lip of the weir the surface was almost smooth, tense, drawn
silky taut by the pull of the coming drop. Despite that, he fell asleep at last, slept heavily, and woke in broad daylight.

Downstairs he found that Uncle Giorgio had already breakfasted, but the tension had returned in full force, and he longed to be out of the house, so he ate nothing and left by the front door. He didn’t immediately go out to the rose garden, but instead went northward into the old driveway, and stretched himself out once more on the lava flow.

He lay down and again molded his body to the night-chilled rock, imagining himself part of it, part of the mountain itself, letting his tension ease as that imagination became real, until he and the mountain were one thing, down to its white-hot roots, out to its farthest spurs and screes. The salamanders swam in his fiery veins, sang in his mind. It was a gift from the mountain. He guessed that even among the di Salas, only those whom the mountain had chosen could attain this understanding. You needed to give yourself to the mountain before it could return the gift. Perhaps, from the way Uncle Giorgio talked about the mountain and the salamanders, he had never himself achieved this, for all his skill and knowledge. He couldn’t give himself. But another di Sala, long ago—whoever it was that had written the book from which the notes in the dictionary had been taken—must have lain like this on another outcrop, and so come to his understanding.