Tears of the Salamander (5 page)

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.

I
N THE DAWN OF THE EIGHTH MORNING
B
ENNO
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. With 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.

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:

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.