Tears of the Salamander (15 page)

That evening, sitting in the kitchen and watching Annetta preparing supper, he wondered where her loyalties really lay. He decided to take the risk.

“Annetta?”

She turned from the stove, eyebrows raised.

“Can you give me something to make me a little bit sick? Not really sick, just so I don’t have to do something. Only
for a morning—I can’t explain. He’d see through it if I was just shamming sick.”

She frowned for a moment, glanced at Toni and stared at her hands. Alfredo could see her thinking
What if the master found out?
He sighed with relief when she straightened, looked him firmly in the eye and nodded.

She laid her spoon down, crossed to her store cupboard and reached to the back of a high shelf for a small lidded pot. She fetched a mug, and her kettle from the back of the stove, took a leaf out of the pot, put it in the mug and mimed filling the mug from the kettle. She pointed at the kitchen clock and made a slow circle in the air.
Wait for an hour
. She then pretended to drink the contents of the mug.

That done, she tipped the leaf out onto the table and added two more from the pot, rinsed the mug carefully and laid it to drain. She pointed at the leaves, held up a finger, clutched her stomach and pretended to retch into her hands. Two fingers, and this time she was in serious pain and vomiting onto the floor. Three fingers, and she started to curl up in agony, then straightened, smiling.

“One leaf would make me a bit ill, and two properly ill, and three I’d be really sick,” said Alfredo. “If I took just one, how long would it be before I threw up?”

She pointed at the clock again, held up her finger and wrapped her other hand round the bottom half of it.
Half an hour
.

“And how long before I got better?”

This time she held up four fingers. Then she poured
water into a bowl, washed her hands, threw the water away and rinsed out the bowl.

“Thank you, Annetta,” he said. “I won’t use it unless I have to—there may be another way.”

He took the leaves up to his room and hid them in a book. Following Annetta’s example, he washed his hands carefully before he came back downstairs.

“A light supper after our midday feast,” said Uncle Giorgio pleasantly enough. “I think we are both too tired for talk.”

Alfredo agreed, with relief, and took up his book. They did not speak again until they said goodnight. That was Tuesday.

All night Alfredo dreamed restlessly of his vengeance. He woke early, and discovered that his confidence had somehow thinned in the night, as if it had become part of the now forgotten dreams. Yesterday his decision to trust the salamanders, his new hatred of his uncle and his determination to take his vengeance if he got the chance had seemed fixed and certain. Now both trust and determination had become doubtful, and without them what right had he to hatred? And even suppose, miraculously, he found the proof he needed, he could see no way forward, and was heavily aware of how little his power was, how few and small his secrets, compared to all that Uncle Giorgio knew from his study, and his long Mastership of the mountain. Fear had returned—not full-fledged panic, but a steady
underlying apprehension, a feeling that he was picking his way along a narrow track with a precipitous drop below, and dared not look down.

The sun was just rising as he went out into the silvery sweet dawn, not with any purpose, simply needing to be away from the house and all it meant. As before he found himself wandering along the overgrown driveway until his way was blocked by the old lava flow.

He gazed a while, unthinking, and then, though it was still full of the chill of night, stretched himself out on it, molded his body to it, made himself part of it, imagined himself seeping down through its hidden veins, feeling his way toward the distant central fires. Faintly now he thought he could hear the singing of the salamanders.

Oh, what is going to happen to me?
he asked them.

The singing paused and resumed, but muddled and uncertain. Like a fever dream. Whoever had written the notes he had found had been right—
Nobody, not even we ourselves,
the salamanders seemed to be telling him,
knows what is going to happen, not until it happens. Till then there is no certainty about it, no truth for us to tell
.

He wasn’t disappointed. In his heart he had known this to be so, just as he knew, too, that it was no use asking them what Uncle Giorgio was planning. They couldn’t see into the minds of men. But the singing of the salamanders, and the fact that he could hear them, were comforting in themselves, so he lay where he was for a while, and then went back to the house for breakfast. As soon as they had eaten Uncle Giorgio took him down to the furnace room.

Alfredo went reluctantly. He wasn’t in the mood for grief. Doubt and fear left no room for it. But sing he must, sing the music of sorrow.

“By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept…”

For once in his life the music didn’t seem to be part of him. Some of the adult choristers had been like that, singing their way through the services by rote, steady on the note from endless repetition, while their minds were on other things—a woman they were keen on, a bit of gossip they’d heard, their next meal. Nevertheless the salamander rose and wept. The sorrow was in the music, as Uncle Giorgio had said. That was all it needed, and its own grief, the grief of exile, which was real, and apparently unending.

How did it come to be here, in this prison?
he wondered.

Alfredo hadn’t intended to ask the question—to question it at all—but it answered. As they sang on together he saw it swimming in the fiery currents of the mountain with its comrades, none of them yet fully grown. They were exploring, as young creatures tend to, the edges of their territory, daring each other to see how far they could go. A music reached them, strange and powerful. The rock above them split open and the current that carried them welled into the world above. Still the music held them, compelling them upward. The salamander raised its head above the surface and looked around. Something seized it from behind and lifted it clear of the molten rock into the killing cold of air.

It had struggled desperately, but it was gripped firm between two meshes of metal and was carried to where two huge creatures were waiting—Alfredo recognized these as a pair of horses or mules—with a large object slung on
poles between them. An arm reached from beneath the salamander and opened the lid of the object, which was filled with glowing coals. It was lowered into the life-giving heat and there released. As the lid was closed upon it it could hear, close by, two human voices, loud with anger, and farther off, the horrified wails of its comrades mourning its loss.

Then darkness and endless jolting, and the embers cooling, cooling, until it lost consciousness. And finally waking to find itself in this furnace, also then filled with coals which were just enough to keep it alive, and were constantly replenished until out of its own natural process it had transmuted what was fed to it into the true stuff of the sun in which it now lived, and had lived for thirty long years.

It was an account of cruelty and horror and loss. The salamander wept, but Alfredo did not weep with it or for it. Deliberately he used his thoughts of vengeance as a kind of harness to hold his tears and his voice in check, to stay dry-eyed, to sing the notes clearly and truly. So as he watched Uncle Giorgio coolly harvesting the tears of his prisoner, his resolve seemed to harden. That his uncle should treat the wonderful creature so! And Toni, too, and Annetta. And probably, all too probably, Alfredo himself.

Yet still it was not quite enough. Some final, definite proof must be found, and then he would have vengeance on his uncle, and part of that vengeance would be somehow to free the salamander, take it back up the mountain and release it into the fiery torrents that were its home.

At last Uncle Giorgio closed the lid of the furnace and
removed his spectacles. Alfredo did the same and wiped his eyes.

“That is better,” said Uncle Giorgio approvingly. “But there is still too much feeling. You must not exhaust yourself so. There is more important work waiting for you.”

He tipped the little draught of tears into his phial and started to tap off the molten gold from beneath the furnace. Trying to look as if he were simply waiting for him to finish, Alfredo let his glance wander round the chamber, all dim and shadowy after the furnace glare, in case there was anything here that would help him in his enterprise. Yes, in the corner to his left what looked like the selfsame large lidded iron bucket that Uncle Giorgio had used to carry his captive down the mountain; beside it a similar smaller bucket; and propped behind them a heavy ladle, an instrument like a large pair of tongs, each arm ending in a circular metal grill, and a stout pole with a hook at the center so that two people could carry the buckets between them.

Uncle Giorgio rose from his crouch, holding the little pan into which he had been running the gold from the bottom of the furnace, and put it back on the table. A thin film of still-molten metal covered what he had collected five days ago. Uncle Giorgio turned the full pan over, rapped it sharply with a wooden mallet and pocketed the little ingot that fell out.

Lost in his thoughts of vengeance, Alfredo gazed vaguely at the two pans, one now empty, one half full, as if they, too, might help him somehow to free the salamander, until Uncle Giorgio broke the trance.

“Yes, Alfredo, pure gold. The First Great Work,” he purred, and turned to leave.

Alfredo pulled himself together and on the way out took a good look at the door and its lock. Both seemed formidably sturdy. As usual Uncle Giorgio put the key back in his pocket as soon as he had locked the door.

“I have work to do now,” he said. “You will be able to amuse yourself until luncheon?”

“Yes, of course, Uncle. I’ll go for a walk in the woods. So I don’t need to take my hat.”

“Good boy.”

Alfredo wandered in a seemingly aimless manner out to the driveway in case Uncle Giorgio was watching from the study windows. For a while he simply stood and stared at the lava flow, lying massively inert in the dappled shade. At length he lay down once more, molded his body to the coarse rock and waited. This was not something he could make happen in a hurry, or even coax into happening. A bird fluted and was answered from deep among the trees. A faint breeze blew and died away. And then, slowly, slowly, the mountain drew him into itself as it had done before, and they became one. Far off and faint, he heard the singing of the salamanders.

Again he waited. The music changed, telling him they were aware of his presence. He shaped his question formally in his mind.

You have shown me how my father and my mother and
my brother died, and who killed them. What proof can you give me that what you tell me is true?

The answer came instantly, in a rapid burst of excited song, and he was back in the furnace room, gazing, as he had done barely half an hour ago, at two small rectangular pans, one empty, the second half-full and with a thin molten layer covering the solid metal beneath, and a hand closing round a small gold bar.

That was all, and the salamanders showed him no more.

What did it mean? The answer came like a thunderclap. He lay and forced his mind to do the sums. Five days ago Uncle Giorgio had drawn a pan and a half from the furnace. In those five days enough more matter had passed through the salamander’s body to add little more than a film of gold to what was already in the pan. How many such fillings to fill a whole pan? Eight? Call it six, to be on the safe side. Five sixes were thirty, plus half of that was forty-five, so it had taken forty-five days to produce the gold that Uncle Giorgio had drawn the day after his return to Casa di Sala. Perhaps it was less. Call it forty, to be on the safe side again. And perhaps he hadn’t drawn any in the last few days before he left, so call it thirty-five. He must have been five weeks away from Casa di Sala, at least.

But sixteen days after the fire in the bakery Uncle Giorgio had told the priests in the cathedral that he had come posthaste on hearing the news of the tragedy. That can’t have been true. A house fire in a distant northern city? Not the sort of news that travels fast. But suppose Alfredo’s father had made arrangements for his brother to be told at once if anything should happen to him—in that
case how long for the news to get to Sicily? Say five days. That would leave eleven days for Uncle Giorgio to travel north, setting up the elaborate arrangements for their escape route. Yes, it could just be done.