Tears of the Salamander

by Peter Dickinson

  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.”

  Uncle Giorgio spoke flatly, as if he’d forgotten all about the Bonaventura. He was opening his book when he seemed to realize what they’d been talking about, and looked up again.

  “I am truly sorry about what happened to our friends on the ship,” he said. “But we must start to put all that behind us. We have great work to do, Alfredo, you and I.”

  He returned to his book and read for the rest of the meal.

  There was now a curved sheet of metal supported on a wooden framework a little distance back from the furnace. Uncle Giorgio stationed Alfredo behind it.

  “Lead,” he explained. “It will shield your body from the harmful emanations of the furnace. Your head I can do nothing about until I have more lead, but it should not matter for the moment. It is frequent and prolonged exposure to the emanations that is dangerous. Here are your spectacles.”

  Alfredo put them on and the chamber was in darkness. The darkness cracked apart in a glaring line as Uncle Giorgio raised the lid of the furnace unaided. Against the glow Alfredo watched him pick up the little ladle.

  He nodded, and Alfredo began.

  He started with the saddest requiem he knew, but trying to do as Uncle Giorgio had suggested, and almost at once the salamander emerged, weaving its plaintive sweet piping exquisitely into the music, filling Alfredo’s mind with thoughts of the
dead sailors, and of their evening concerts, and their gossipy good nature. Together they wept for Benno and his friends while Uncle Giorgio collected the salamander’s tears with no more apparent emotion than if he’d been milking a goat. At a suitable moment Alfredo prolonged the note and modulated into the psalm. The salamander followed as if it had been expecting the switch.

  “They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters…”

  Now, unwilled, his mind filled with other memories—himself on the sun-baked hillside, watching the ships going to and fro in the Straits, the Bonaventura with the yellow patch on her brown sail, far out across the water…

  “These men know the works of the Lord and the wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth…” And now for him the storm music became the churning energies of the mountain, the Bonaventura bursting into flame, the horror and grief with which he’d watched his friends die. Why? he asked himself. Why?

  Another image came into his mind. He saw the mountain, as if from a short distance, but it was now faintly transparent, so that he could see not only the surface but also, dimly, as if through heavy mist, the branching pattern of dark orange streaks that marked the channels of the fiery mass within. There was a boy, himself, standing on the path directly above one of these streaks, staring out to sea, ashen-faced, his mouth open as if to scream. Farther up the slope, at a point where the streak was brightest, there was a dark, cloudy shape, vaguely human but twice the size of a man and veined with fire like the mountain. It had its arms raised in front of it. Fire streamed from its fingers out toward the sea.

  The mountain seemed to come closer as the boy turned, so that now Alfredo was looking over his own imagined shoulder. Beyond him he watched a mule picking its way down between the vines with Uncle Giorgio slumped and exhausted in the saddle.

  All this in his mind’s eye. At the same time he could feel the salamander’s fear and sorrow, and with his outward eyes could see Uncle Giorgio leaning forward to harvest its tears, and he felt he understood why the creature wept so. The sorrow was for him, Alfredo. The fear was for him. They were emotions he could share, human.

  He stopped where the storm music ended, and the salamander sank beneath the surface. Alfredo stood with his eyes closed, swaying, paralyzed with horror and dread. If he could have moved he would have tried to rush from the room, despite the locked door.

  He hadn’t been thinking that! He hadn’t! He hadn’t!

  It hadn’t come from inside him!

  He’d been doing exactly what he’d been told, trying to sing as if he truly, truly believed that it was the mountain that had destroyed the Bonaventura and Uncle Giorgio had tried to stop it.

  Or had he? Perhaps…

  A hand gripped his elbow.

  “You still sing with too much feeling,” said Uncle Giorgio’s voice. “See how you have exhausted yourself.”

  Alfredo managed to open his eyes. Everything was black. With a shaking hand he removed his spectacles and saw only the dim light of the lantern. The lid of the furnace was closed.

  “I…I tried,” he muttered. “I couldn’t help it. I felt so sad.”

  Uncle Giorgio sighed.

  “What is done, is done,” he said. “Nothing will undo it. …” And then, with an irritated click of the tongue, “Well, we had best not attempt the chant until you are rested. Come to my study half an hour before supper. Meanwhile, learn what you can. You may go.”

  Alfredo stood dazed, bewildered. That sigh. And the few words after…That hadn’t been playacting, pretending. But how could that be the voice of the monster the salamander had shown him?

  The rattle of the lock broke into his trance. Uncle Giorgio took him by the arm and led him out of the room.

  “You had best go and lie down,” he said. “Can you manage the stairs on your own? I have work to do here still.”

  “Yes…yes…I was just dizzy. I’m all right now.”

  “Good boy.”

  Alfredo staggered off along the passage. Before he reached the stair he heard the lock rattle again behind him.

  HE LEFT THE HOUSE BY THE FRONT DOOR. THE shock of the midmorning sun halted him on the steps. He sank down and sat there with his head in his hands, gasping and shuddering, reliving over and over the thing the salamander had shown him, picking at it with his mind, trying to tease out some clue whether it was the truth, or whether perhaps he had misread it, or whether it really was, as Uncle Giorgio had told him, only an echo of some hidden nightmare of his own.

  After a while he rose and, as if trying to leave all those horrors behind him, turned north alongside the façade and followed an overgrown driveway into the wood beyond. Yes, of course, he thought vaguely, once there would have been the gentry’s carriages coming and going to and from the house, but none seemed to have used this way for many years. A couple hundred yards into the woods he found out why. The driveway was completely blocked by a mass of soft gray rock twice as high as a man.

  Still half in the trance of shock, he stood and stared at it. At first his mind seemed empty, as if the storm of horror that had swept through him had whirled everything away as it went, leaving clear stillness behind, like the morning he had woken from his fever. Thoughts stole back into that emptiness, arranging themselves neatly in their places, making a pattern that when it was finished would tell him what kind of man Uncle Giorgio really was. Everything depended on that, everything.

  The rock—it was lava, he guessed—had spewed from the erupting mountain, flowing molten down the slope and solidifying here. Did that tell him anything?

  Well, yes, perhaps. It was like the Bonaventura all over again. Had Uncle Giorgio for some reason failed to prevent it from happening, Master of the Mountain though he was? Or had he wanted to be alone in his aloneness, with no more comings and goings of gentry in their carriages, and so caused it to happen?

  And something else. Those gentry…the empty stalls in the church…were they afraid to worship alongside him…? The priest was afraid of him. …The people in the square wouldn’t look at him. …Did they hate him as well as fear him? Suppose he was truly the kind of man the salamander had shown Alfredo…Oh, yes, they would have cause!

  Mother and Father—certainly they’d been afraid. …

  (“You’re not going to let him wear it?”

  “Better than not letting him.”)

  Had they hated him too? Had they known what he was?

  Yes, and that might be why the two brothers had quarreled. Father had seen the kind of Master Uncle Giorgio would become and hadn’t liked it, and (of course) had said so. Anger was in their blood, like the anger of the mountain, ancient, brooding, unappeasable. It was not like the frozen lava that blocked the driveway—it did not cool.

  Then why had Alfredo’s parents let him wear such a giver’s gift?

  Those snatches of conversation heard through the kitchen door. “The mountain must have its Master. That is the one thing on which we have ever been able to agree.” And Alfredo was the last of the di Salas in whom the blood ran true. …Thousands upon thousands of innocent lives might be lost if there was no one to control the mountain’s rages. To Father that would have been more important than any family quarrel. So, despite everything, he had invited Uncle Giorgio to the christenings of his sons. And allowed Alfredo to accept the gift.

  But surely Alfredo’s parents would never have given him up, as a child, to a man they feared and hated, however great the promised destiny. Of course not. “He must make up his own mind when he is old enough to understand.” So…

  As the possibility flooded through him the storm came back. The gray lava flow and the silent shadowy wood seemed to sway and heave. He staggered and fell forward onto the rock, and clung there, gasping with the shock of knowledge. He could not face it. He could not face it. Could it truly be as he had imagined? Could it?

  Slowly his shudderings eased, but he still lay clutching the rock. There was a kind of comfort in it. Once it
had flowed molten in the heart of the mountain, and the salamanders had swum in its currents. Even now, he discovered, it was not truly inert. It was still, as it were, veined with the memories of fire. And along those veins, faintly, from far away, he could hear the salamanders singing. They were singing to him, showing him something. Somehow he forced his inward eyes, so far screwed tight shut, to open and look.

  He saw through the eyes of a boy sitting in the vestry of the cathedral, less than a month gone by, full of the kindly heat of Father’s ovens and the glory of the music he was about to sing. He felt as that boy had felt, felt again the appalling eruption into that peace of the full madness of fire. This was no mere memory. He saw and felt it in the same fashion as with the salamander’s help he had just now watched the scene on the mountainside. The cathedral walls were dimly transparent, as were the houses beyond, so that through this cloudy mass he could make out the very street on which the bakery stood, and the inn a little way down on the other side. At an upper window of the inn stood a known shape, a manlike thing, too large for a man, and darkly glowing with inner fire. The Master of the Mountain raised his arms. The fire burst from his fingers and streamed across the street. The bakery exploded into flame.

  The vision faded and the singing of the salamanders dwindled away.

  “If asked they will tell you the truth.”