Tears of the Salamander (7 page)

“Watch,” he commanded.

Crouching beside him, Alfredo saw him reach with both hands beneath the furnace and turn a spigot. A thin stream of golden liquid flowed out into the pan. When it was almost full Uncle Giorgio closed the spigot, rose and set the pan down.

“Pure gold,” he said calmly.

He fetched a second pan, crouched again, half-filled it and set it beside the first.

“Today we will climb the mountain,” he said, and led the way out.

The track was much steeper than the one they had climbed between the vineyards, but the mules scrambled up it sure-footed. The one Alfredo was riding wasn’t the one he’d led up the mountain. Like Uncle Giorgio, he sat sideways in the saddle. They had broad-brimmed straw hats slung behind their shoulders, but for a long while didn’t need to wear them as the path wound up through the shade of dense old woodland. Uncle Giorgio didn’t say a word. Alfredo clung swaying to the saddle. The doubt and dread of yesterday’s climb from the harbor had returned, and became stronger all the time as the layers of rock below him thinned and he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to the central furnace.

It was well past noon when the woods abruptly gave way to a seemingly endless slope of dark gray tumbled boulders, shale and ash. Uncle Giorgio dismounted and Alfredo slid thankfully down. In the last of the shade they tethered the mules and settled down to the luncheon basket that the dumb woman had prepared for them.

They ate in silence. Alfredo was at first almost overwhelmed by his closeness to the churning fires below, in the heart of the mountain, but by the time he was packing the remains of the meal into the saddlebags he was even more conscious of Uncle Giorgio’s steady, absorbed gaze on him.

There had been priests in the cathedral who might stare at you with the same intentness, but Uncle Giorgio’s look was somehow different. That wasn’t what he wanted, whatever the sailors on the
Bonaventura
might have thought. He and Alfredo had slept in the same cabins all through the voyage, traveled together through lonely woods and across empty hillsides, but he’d never once done or said anything to suggest any physical interest in his nephew. It was as if there was something else he wanted, deeply and passionately wanted, and only Alfredo could give it to him. But Alfredo had no idea what it was.

He closed the last buckle and stood waiting, but Uncle Giorgio made no move.

“Sit down,” he said. “It is too hot to climb.”

Again Alfredo sat. The mules fidgeted. Insects hazed through the mottled shade.

“There are two Great Works,” said Uncle Giorgio
suddenly. “They are named the Philosophers’ Stone and the Elixir of Life. Great men have sought them through the ages. With the Stone they hoped to achieve the transmutation of metals, and thus turn lead into gold. With the Elixir they hoped to live forever. They worked by the distillation of acids and the decoction and sublimation of minerals, and by the conjuration of demons, and achieved many things, but not their goals. These cannot be reached by such means.

“Where is gold found, Alfredo? It is found in the veins of rocks, rocks that once were molten in the heart of mountains such as this. It is found in streams, which have worn those rocks away. All substances, however chill, have fire locked within them. It is not the fire at which we warm our hands on a winter night, or use to cook our food. It is fire from the heart of the sun, which is more, even, than the fire that fills our turning world, and fills this mountain. In it live the salamanders. They take the gross materials of which all things are made and feed upon that inner fire. Heat is generated in the process, enough to turn the molten rock from the mountain, with which I originally filled my furnace, into true sun-stuff. The salamanders pass the rest through their bodies, so that it emerges changed. Some of it is transmuted into gold. Being heavy, the gold that my salamander makes sinks to the bottom of the furnace. But in the mountains it gathers together in pools and rivulets, so that when those places are churned to the surface and cool and become rocks, there are veins of gold running through them.

“Only the salamanders can turn lead to gold. That knowledge is the First Great Work, and I have accomplished it.”

He fell silent, still watching Alfredo with the same heavy gaze, but now as if he expected some response. Alfredo nerved himself to return the look. Uncle Giorgio’s eyebrows rose.

“Are you going to live forever?” Alfredo asked.

“Perhaps,” said Uncle Giorgio, then paused and added, smiling his strange, unpracticed smile, “So, perhaps, will you.”

Before the heat of the day was anything like over, they started on up the slope. Now they truly needed their hats, as they climbed between two fires, that of the mountain below and that of the sun above. Even in the shade of his broad straw brim Alfredo could feel the roasting power of the sun beamed back from the gray litter of old eruptions. If he lifted his head to see how far they still had to go to the summit, the glare at once blinded him. He felt as if they were toiling up into the sun itself, into the true home of the salamanders.

The heat from above was steady and relentless, but that from below varied. Sometimes he was shielded from it by layer upon layer of solid rock. At other times it ran so close to the surface that he felt that Uncle Giorgio, if he had chosen, could with a snap of his fingers have caused it to burst out at their feet.

The feeling was no longer frightening. If anything, there was an exhilaration in being so close to the source of such power. The only thing he had known that was at all like it was standing in his place in the choir with his breath ready drawn for the first full note while he watched for the downbeat of the Precentor’s right hand, telling him to begin. Both the cathedral and this barren, heat-blasted summit were places where he belonged.

The mules climbed patiently on. There was no track that Alfredo could see, but Uncle Giorgio led them twisting up and up, always finding the easiest way, as if he had done this many times before. For a while they skirted an enormous silent chasm. Twice they passed near fissures from which rose wisps of yellowish reeking smoke. At last the sun dipped below the peak and for a short while they climbed in shadow, but soon the slope eased and they felt its force again. Briefly, the ground leveled, then dipped, and they were gazing into the crater of Etna.

Alfredo stared down. Before him lay a vast, ragged bowl, slopes of scarred and tumbled light gray rock and at the bottom a darker surface from which rose two cone-shaped mounds, like models of the mountain itself, each with a crater of its own. Dense smoke streamed steadily up from the farther one. The nearer one was still. To another boy, expecting to see a churning fiery surface threatening at any moment to boil up, fill the crater and flood down the mountainside in destroying torrents of molten lava, it would have been a disappointment. Alfredo stood enthralled.

Something was happening to him. He didn’t understand it. He felt…bigger. Hugely bigger. Not bigger inside himself. He was still only a fleck of living matter on the enormous mountain. Bigger, somehow
outside
himself. Sometimes he used to play with Father’s burning glass, fascinated by the way he could use its lens to focus the sunlight into an intense dot that in a few seconds could make a twist of dried grass leap into flame and shrivel into ash. Standing here on the summit of Etna, he had become that burning dot, filled with the pure fire of the sun. The mountain itself was the lens.

“You feel it?” said Uncle Giorgio.

“I could do anything!” whispered Alfredo.

“Yes,” answered Uncle Giorgio just as quietly, drawing the syllable out to become a sigh of satisfaction, exulting in the knowledge of power.
He
knew what Alfredo was talking about.

Without thought Alfredo filled his lungs and started to sing.

Psalm 68 had always been his favorite. For him it was the fire psalm. Where better to sing it, rejoicing in the central fire? Immediately he was rapt, lost in the power of the music. The mountain itself seemed to be shuddering beneath
his feet. He was being battered to and fro. His head rang with a sudden stinging buffet, so that he lost his footing and fell, with all the breath and all the singing knocked out of him. Uncle Giorgio was dragging him to his feet, and the mountain really was shuddering beneath him.

“Quiet!” snapped Uncle Giorgio. “Stupid boy! See what you have done! Listen.”

He was pointing down into the crater. A deep, throbbing rumble rose from below, but threaded through it Alfredo could faintly make out, right at the limits of his hearing, a high, fierce music. He recognized it at once, the voices of not one but a multitude of salamanders, and knew that they were answering his singing, rejoicing in their element.

The rumbling deepened and increased, and became a roar as the floor of the crater below him cracked apart in a great, suppurating red-and-black wound. A blast of roasting wind, reeking of sulphur, swept up the slope, and huge chunks of fiery matter were flung skyward like dead leaves caught in a wind eddy.

“Tell it no!” snapped Uncle Giorgio. “You began it. You must end it. I can only help you.”

Alfredo looked at him, bewildered. He was staring out over the crater, erect and stiff, with his clenched fists held in front of his shoulders, waiting. Alfredo, not knowing what else to do, copied his stance. Uncle Giorgio glanced at him and nodded to him to begin.

How can you tell a mountain no?

The knowledge slid into his mind.

His earlier exhilaration returned, the outside power, the lens through which it poured, the burning dot—only the
dot was now doubled, his own power overlaid with Uncle Giorgio’s, one intense concentration of the pure power of the sun saying to the immense furnace below, “I am your Master. Be still.”

And then it was over. He felt himself unfocussing, separating from the one-ness with his uncle, withdrawing …and he was standing, dizzy with effort, on the lip of the crater as the rocks rained down on the outer slopes and the fiery turmoil stilled and the roaring dwindled to a rumble and then to silence. The wind lifted the smoke aside until he could see the floor of the crater clearly. There was now a third small cone down there, with its own thin plume peacefully drifting away. Distantly in the stillness he could hear the singing of the salamanders, lulling the mountain to sleep.

Utterly dazed, half still exultant, half appalled, by the torrent of power that had rushed through him, he turned toward Uncle Giorgio, expecting a blast of anger at his rashness and folly. But Uncle Giorgio was smiling his thin smile and nodding with inward satisfaction. All he said was “Do not sing on the mountain again, not until you understand more of what you are doing.”

“Isn’t…isn’t the mountain angry with us for stopping it?”

“It is always angry, but it knows its Master. Its Masters, I must say now. That is enough for today. Let us go home.”

It was already drawing toward dusk as they made their way down the mountain. The whole of the Straits was laid out below them, with the fishing boats gathering toward the harbor and larger vessels sailing peacefully on. Alfredo
barely noticed. He was still wrestling with what had happened up at the crater—not outside him, but inside. He had been changed. Such power!
I could do anything!

But…

It had been wonderful, glorious, unimaginable even now, even in memory—memory wasn’t big enough to contain it. …

But did he want it to happen again? And again, until he became in the end what the power made of him?

Like Uncle Giorgio, perhaps?

Could he even help that happening to him, now that he’d started?

He was appalled, terrified. But still deeply, deeply thrilled. Yes, though the actual experience continued to fade in his mind as they made their way down from the crater, it had not been a dream. By an exercise of pure power he had woken the mountain, and stilled it.