Tears of the Salamander

by Peter Dickinson

  For a while, as he set off to explore, Alfredo seemed to be almost back in his dream. Surely the house had something to tell him of those vanished years. The upper floor was arranged on the same plan as the lower one. A wide corridor stretched from end to end of the house, with shorter corridors at either end running back toward the mountain. Only two of these upstairs rooms appeared to be used, his own and Uncle Giorgio’s. This wasn’t one of the grander ones looking out east over the Straits, but lay round at the northwest corner of the house, immediately above the study, with one window facing the mountain and another the trees. A bleak, bare room with a shabby carpet; a narrow, unornamented bed; two chairs; a huge, dark wardrobe and a plain table covered with books. A smaller table beside the bed held a lamp and several medicine bottles. On another small table was a birdcage occupied by a starling, smaller than the one in the study, and with stronger mottling on its breast feathers. It eyed Alfredo, standing in the door. It didn’t speak, but squawked as he left the room. There were no pictures, of saints or anything else. Not even a crucifix on the wall.

  All the other doors on the upper floor opened onto shuttered rooms, about twenty of them in all, some with huge beds whose moth-eaten hangings glinted with gold thread, others completely unfurnished. All smelled of mice, and old mortar crumbling into dust from summer after roasting summer, but as he opened each door Alfredo could almost sense the movements of two faint figures just vanished through the connecting door into the room beyond.

  The ground floor was more interesting. Four huge rooms faced the sea, two on either side of the central hallway. Bars of sunlight slanted through the cracks of their shutters. The northernmost one was a library, with shelves of great dark books reaching toward the ceiling. The furniture was swathed in dust sheets. Curious, Alfredo lifted the corner of a sheet covering a slab almost as large as the high altar in the cathedral and found an ornately carved desk. There was a litter of bird skeletons and feathers under its central tunnel, where a cat or something must have laired. It no longer smelled of rot, so that must have been years ago.

  Next to the library was a reception room twice the size, with its furniture also sheeted, and on the other side of the hallway an equally enormous dining room. The two shadowy presences seemed just to have slipped through its farther doors. Unconsciously Alfredo quickened his pace as he walked along beside the table, counting the sheeted chairs as he passed. Twenty-four on either side, and two at each end. Fifty. He wondered when fifty ladies and gentlemen had last dined here. Oh, for a whisper of their talk, some whiff of that ancient feasting!

  Last, in the southeast corner of the house, was a music room. There were three curving rows of chairs where the same ladies and gentlemen might have sat and sipped their coffee and gossiped in whispers as they half-listened to the tinklings of the two sheeted harpsichords, the thump of the sheeted drums, the whining of the fiddles and tweeting of the flutes and recorders that hung in cases between the windows. Alfredo took a treble recorder from a rack, breathed into it and fingered the stops. The scale came as sweet and true as if it had last played yesterday. But when he lifted the sheet from the front of one of the harpsichords and tried the keyboard, he got nothing but thumps and creaks.

  Coming so soon after the recorder’s sweetness, the dismal sounds spoke to him.

  No, they seemed to be saying. Those elegant evenings are gone, long gone. They won’t come back.

  He closed the lid and pulled the sheet back over it, and as he left the music room he realized that the two ghosts he had been following had also gone.

  The rooms on the other side of the central corridor were smaller. One still seemed to be some kind of estate office, two others were storerooms, the rest were shuttered and sheeted. He could not guess what they’d once been used for. Indeed most of the huge house no longer had any purpose that he could see or feel. How could this be his—anybody’s—home? How could he spend his days—his life—in this emptiness? Alone with a dumb woman and an apparent idiot. And Uncle Giorgio.

  Uncle Giorgio. Something had happened in the study that morning. For a few moments—for a few words only—“Too late…and too soon”—there had seemed to be a different Uncle Giorgio. Different in what way? In…in thereness. This was something Alfredo hadn’t realized about Uncle Giorgio before. Normally, even when you were with him, he was somehow utterly alone. Only sometimes, faintly—when Alfredo had been singing to him, or when he’d just drunk the salamander’s tears and healed his throat—had he been there in the way he’d been there with Alfredo in the study for those few moments. But then, immediately afterward, he’d been alone again, and talking out of that loneliness in words that perhaps meant one thing on Alfredo’s side of the barrier and something quite different on his own. Perhaps that’s what he’d been smiling about—those different meanings. They’d amused him.

  “The day will come when each of us loves the other as much as we love ourselves.”

  But you didn’t love other people like that. You loved them from the outside. Perhaps Uncle Giorgio didn’t know very much about love. No, it wasn’t going to be easy. But who else was there?

  He worked his way back through these lesser rooms to the corridor leading to Uncle Giorgio’s study. Reluctant to go farther, and desperate for human company, company of any kind, he turned back and along the similar corridor at the southern end of the house. The first room here was the one they ate in, and beyond that, presumably, the kitchens—at least the silent woman brought their meals from that direction. Yes, because the third door he came to was open, and through it he could see her standing in front of a grim old iron stove. At the sound of his footstep she turned, frowning.

  “May I come in?” he said.

  She nodded and turned back to the stove. By her movement and attitude he guessed that the frown had not been for him, and as soon as he was in the room he knew what the trouble was. The chimney was drawing well enough, but the fire itself was out of balance—“unhappy,” Father would have said. He crossed the floor and knelt beside the woman. As he opened the fire door she gave a warning hiss.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I know about ovens. My father’s a baker. Was.”

  One sniff of the curious bitter reek of the smoke told him what the problem was. Elder is a mean wood, and always has been. No careful baker will have it in his stack, or anywhere near. There was a story that a smith once refused to shoe a pilgrim’s ass for charity, and St. Martin cursed the man, saying that the timber from the trees round his smithy would never again draw true. They were elders, of course. Even Father, who had little time for saint lore, almost believed the tale. The log would reek the kitchen out if he tried to remove it now, so he rose and rummaged though the timber stack behind the stove, choosing two billets of well-dried ash, always an easy-tempered wood, and better yet, a stout piece of old olive that would burn with a steady, golden heat right to its last embers. He eased them in round the elder and closed the door. Before he had finished adjusting the dampers he could feel the fire steadying to its work. A couple minutes later the woman sensed it too, for she turned to him, smiling, and bowed her head in thanks.

  “My pleasure,” said Alfredo. He sorted through the stack, picking out the elder logs. When he’d found them all he showed one to the woman.

  “Bad wood,” he said. “Where shall I put them?”

  She pointed to a door, and he carried them out and found himself in a courtyard between the two wings, with the main house to his right, and to his left a range of stables and storage sheds. Behind these he found the log piles, so he stacked the pieces of elder neatly to one side and carried an armful of better wood back to the kitchen to replace them. The woman smiled her thanks once more as he returned, and he settled onto one of the benches by the kitchen table. The company of the woman, however silent, was better than the emptiness of the rest of the house, and the company of a working fire almost as good.

  After a while the strange young man came in from the garden, saw Alfredo and
turned to run, but the woman clucked at him and he came creeping on in and sat at the end of the other bench, as far as he could get from Alfredo. The woman ladled food from a pot and put it in front of him, with a hunk of coarse bread. He grasped her hand—for reassurance about this stranger, Alfredo guessed—and she rumpled his hair affectionately. The man ate his meal with a spoon, sitting sideways at the table, hunching protectively over his bowl and glancing at Alfredo every mouthful, like a dog fearful that its food is about to be snatched away by a bigger dog. As soon as he’d eaten he crept out.

  Uncle Giorgio brought a book to luncheon to be alone with, but after a while he half-closed it, keeping his finger in the page, and glanced inquiringly at Alfredo. Alfredo took his chance.

  “The woman—I don’t think she can talk—and the man who was working in the garden when we came…?”

  “What of them?”

  “Who are they? I mean, I don’t even know their names. …”

  “Her name is Annetta and his Toni. He is her son. She was born dumb, but otherwise healthy. He in his turn was born with his mind deformed. The true cause was a defect in the father’s seed, but the people of this island are very ignorant. Her family believed him to be a child of some demon and would have killed them both. I took them in and sheltered them, and in return they work for me.”

  Alfredo had been mopping up oil from his plate with a corner of bread. He stopped for a moment, and then managed to carry on, still staring at what he was doing as if it had been all that mattered to him, but inwardly stiff with shock. It wasn’t the words, it was the tone his uncle had used, as if everything to do with the story disgusted him, and his own part in it had been a repellent duty. Father might have helped the woman in just the same way, and spoken of what he’d done in much those words, but oh, how different in feeling! No warmth of love and pity for the woman and her child, no heat of anger at the stupidity and superstition of the people, but cold contempt for both her and them, and most of all, or so it sounded, for the father and the defect in his seed.

  He looked up. Uncle Giorgio had re-opened his book but was still looking at him. He groped for a change of subject.

  “You wanted me to do something this afternoon.”

  His uncle breathed slowly out through his nostrils, as if clearing Annetta and her son from his mind, and answered in a more normal voice.

  “Go to your room and learn this by heart,” he said, drawing a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Both the words and the music. You will not find it easy, as the words are Old Persian, but I have written them out as they are pronounced. The music is from the same country, and unlike either what you sang in the cathedral or the songs you seem to have picked up in the streets. I have used plainsong notation, as being the least unlike the Persian. Do your best. We have not many days before you need to be both word perfect and note perfect. Annetta will come for you when I am ready.”

  “Will you tell me what the words mean, Uncle Giorgio? It’s easier like that. That’s why I was keen to learn Latin. Some of the other boys didn’t—”

  “They would remain meaningless even if I told you. They are, in fact, in the sacred language of the Old Persian priests, who worshipped the sun. They used the chant to invoke certain powers that emanate from the sun. The ignorant might call them demons, but they are in fact Angels of Fire, such as were seen walking with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the furnace of King Nebuchadnezzar.”

  Alfredo studied the paper as he made his way up to his room. It seemed to have been freshly written, presumably by Uncle Giorgio that very morning. The music certainly looked strange, though the choir used to sing plainsong on Fridays in Lent, and some other fast days. Some of the longer notes were marked in a way he didn’t understand. The words were even stranger, full of letters that couldn’t possibly go together despite what Uncle Giorgio said—zch, gj, qb—things like that. How could he learn this stuff if he couldn’t even say it?

  He settled in the window, looking east across the strait. The sun had passed behind the house, but still lit the long slope below him, and the baked earth poured its warmth back into the slow wind that swept up from the sea. Other boys might have found its heat too much to bear, but for Alfredo it was strength, life, hope. He felt he was actually in the presence of those Angels of Fire of whom Uncle Giorgio had spoken, invisible but there, riding the hot wind. If the chant was for them, surely he could learn to sing it.

  A memory sidled into his mind. The harbor at home. Alfredo minding the donkey while Father inspected flour, dipping into the sack, running the fine, yellowish powder through his fingers, raising a palmful to his nose to sniff. The flour was of an expensive Moroccan wheat. The ship was from Tangier, very different from the French and Spanish vessels that mostly traded into this port, lower in the water and with a vast, striped sail that hung furled in sagging bundles from one long spar. There was a young man sitting cross-legged in the bow, pattering on a drum in his lap while he sang in a high nasal wail, rapid repetitive notes tailing away into longer ones sung with a curious gargling tremolo. Alfredo didn’t think Morocco was anywhere near Persia, and the sailor’s song wouldn’t have fitted the notes he’d been staring at, but he could see at once that if he’d needed to write that song down this was how he’d have tried to do it. It was the same kind of music.

  Tentatively he tried it out, la-la-la, feeling foolish, knowing he was nowhere near the music he was supposed to be singing, or anyone would want to listen to, let alone anything he could believe he could conjure the Angels of Fire with. When the choir had been learning something new, singing it la-la-la, the music had never seemed to come alive for him till they’d started to fit the words in. Even these impossible words might be better than la-la-las. Without any hope at all he gave it a go.

  The notes slid smoothly out of his throat and his mouth shaped them into something like the mysterious syllables. And in a moment they were there, the Angels of Fire, visible presences, soaring like hawks in the steadily rising air. Their bodies were great embers, rippling with inner heat. They had the faces of lions, maned around with flame, and their wings were plumed with flame. Their glances were the lightning that sparks the drought-parched hills ablaze.

  Terrified, remembering what had almost happened when he had sung the fire psalm on the crater of Etna, Alfredo closed his lips and clamped both hands across them. Instantly the breeze was once again empty air. Shuddering despite the heat, he retreated into the room. What had he done? Was it too late to undo it? Uncle Giorgio would know, but…did he dare face that cold anger, and tell him? Yes, he decided, he must.

  When he reached the study he had to force his hand to scratch at the door. Uncle Giorgio called, and he pushed it open. It was just as bad as he’d feared.

  “What is this? I said I would send for you.”

  “Please, Uncle…I may have…I saw them…the Angels of Fire…when I sang the words…”

  The anger vanished, leaving only the coldness, the aloneness.

  “You have learned the chant already?”

  “Only the first line. It was there. In my mouth. In my head. I don’t know what the words mean, but the music…I once heard this sailor…the ship was from Tangier…”

  Uncle Giorgio cut him short with a gesture.

  “Some there have the Knowledge,” he said, “though theirs is of the sea. Tell me what you did and what you saw.”

  “I was sitting at my window trying to learn the music, but I couldn’t, not without the words, though I wasn’t sure I could even say them. But when I tried I could, and then I saw the Angels. They were gliding on the wind. Like burning birds. I stopped as soon as I saw them. I remembered…”

  “I had not thought the chant would be effective without my presence. Never mind. Sing what you have learned so far. You may read it if you wish. Is there anything you wish to ask me first?”

  “Yes, please. How do I say this—you’ve written it g, h, z—and this…?”

  “Come here. Give me the paper
.”

  With Alfredo looking over his shoulder, Uncle Giorgio read the whole chant slowly through while Alfredo silently mouthed the words behind him.

  He handed the paper back and Alfredo sang the first line, hesitantly, stumbling so that he barely held the chant. Mouth and throat had forgotten most of what they’d seemed to know up at his window. The line was repeated and he managed better second time through. Uncle Giorgio seemed to be only half listening. His face was set, his eyes half closed, and once or twice he whispered a few words beneath his breath. As the last long note faded Alfredo glanced out the window, half expecting to see the Angels of Fire sweeping past on the wind, but nothing stirred except the leaves of the trees, not one burning feather or flake of flame.

  “Yes,” said Uncle Giorgio slowly, “you have the idea. Indeed, you appear to have come to me formed and ready for your destiny.”

  A pause, and then, with bitter force, “In you, at least, the blood runs true.”

  Alfredo, still with half his mind on the difficult music and half on the Angels of Fire, was jolted into attention. His uncle was staring at him with the same intent strange gaze as when they’d been eating their meal on the mountainside. The sudden anger of the last few words startled him into awareness. Though the anger didn’t seem to be directed at him, it was as if a horrible dark pit had opened suddenly at his feet.

  “One! Two! Three! Four!” shrieked the starling, breaking the spell.

  Uncle Giorgio picked up his book and said, “Learn what you can of the rest without trying to sing it, and we will then choose times when you can practice in my presence, so that I can control matters as you cannot—not yet. Wait. You had best not sing anything at all unless I am there. This place is full of ancient powers that you may inadvertently awaken. Now you may go.”