Tears of the Salamander (21 page)

Alfredo had, though only once. He studied the slope and spotted a jut of rock a few hundred paces farther up. That was the crag he had noticed when he and Uncle Giorgio had been making their way down from the crater, because it felt like one of the places where some of the powers of the mountain seemed to run close to the surface and might be summoned forth and used. He pulled his hat from behind his back and fitted it onto his head, then led the way on into the full weight of the sun.

Hardly had they started to climb again when the explosion came. It swept up through the still, hot noon with the onset of a sudden squall. The air seemed to crackle with it. The mountain quivered at its touch. Alfredo staggered. Toni, behind him, cried aloud. Both of them had felt it, and
knew what it meant. Uncle Giorgio had reached the furnace chamber and seen the lock melted and the salamander gone. Now it was a question of how fast he could follow. Alfredo attempted to quicken his pace but his legs refused to respond. He huddled into himself, contracted his whole being into the effort to drive himself on, his eyes intent on the next step ahead, only glancing up now and then to check how far it still was to the landmark crag.

They weren’t going to make it, nothing like. His muscles had nothing left to give. His whole body seemed to be on fire with the effort. The world was on fire, a roaring, red haze. There were voices in the roaring, one voice deeper, almost, than sound itself. The voice of the mountain, calling him. He surrendered himself to the voice, to the fire, to the mountain, letting it flood his body with its power, drive his limbs on and up in paces that were suddenly light and easy, like the dance of flames.

He looked up. The whole mountainside was pulsing with flame, flame from the spirit world, the world of the Angels of Fire, invisible except to eyes that could see through the sense of fire. Beside him the mule plodded on unnoticing, seeing only the everyday mountainside. Alfredo saw it rippling with the colors of sunset, like a monstrous ember, and the crag he was aiming for not as a darker jut of rock, but as a white-hot focus of the mountain’s power, bright as the sun-stuff in the salamander’s furnace.

The crag came closer and closer, but all the time, from behind him, he could sense the onrush of the Master’s rage, rapidly gaining on them, sweeping up the hill, faster than any human, any mule or horse, could climb. Just as they
reached the crag Toni gave a shout of warning. Alfredo switched hands on the bridle, turned and looked back. The fire vision cleared from his eyes. For a moment there was nothing to be seen, and then the Master burst out from among the trees.

He came in the form of a compact rolling cloud, denser and darker than the thickest smoke and full of orange lightnings. Alfredo’s stomach shrank inside him. How could he ever have imagined he could face this
thing
? And he was nowhere near where he had wanted to be, high up the slope, close to the heart of the mountain and its inmost fires, before the struggle began. But his only hope was still to stick to his plan. The crag was at least a place from which some of the powers of the mountain could be drawn. Uncle Giorgio had no such advantage. He let go of the bridle, turned aside, and put his back to the rock. The mountain spoke to him through it.

Yes, here!
it said.

He squared his shoulders, raised his head, filled his lungs and sang.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away. And like as wax melteth at the fire, so shall the ungodly perish at the presence of God.”

Inwardly the mountain stirred. Something inside Alfredo came alive at the words, his own birthright of rage and the desire for vengeance as he had first become aware of them, lying on the old lava flow across the driveway and listening to the far voices of the salamanders telling him what his
uncle had done. He gathered that anger into a compact and burning force and drove it down toward the thing on the slope.

The thing halted. It changed shape, grew a head, arms, legs, human in form, but monstrous. Monstrous in its size, in its horror, in its power. It raised its arms in front of it, and power streamed out of them, visible, implacable, a rolling wave of the same dark smoke-stuff advancing steadily up the slope, its wings moving faster than the center, curving forward into an arc, ready to close round Alfredo, deceiver and betrayer of the Master, and engulf him. Where was Toni? Why wasn’t he helping? Dimly he remembered seeing him climb on past the mules as he had turned to face the Master.

He called the powers of the mountain back, focussed them through himself and beamed them against the wave. It halted, swirled into a vortex, a whirlpool of smoke-stuff that simply sucked them in and made them part of itself. Then it came on.

His resolve, his awareness of his own power, wavered. He sensed another power nearby, above him. He glanced up. Toni was there, on the lip of the crag, facing the coming wave, his recorder ready at his lips.

It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. Desperately he sang on.

“O God, when thou wentest forth before the people, when thou wentest through the wilderness, the earth shook and the heavens dropped. …”

High and fierce, the notes of the recorder threaded the human voice.

Now the mountain answered. Below, behind and above him Alfredo felt the surge of its anger. There was a deafening groan. The whole slope heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. The mules, which had been waiting patiently just below him, apparently oblivious to the struggle, lost their footing. The hind one fell, dragging the other down and its harness free of the cradle, then struggling to its feet and bolting away along the slope. The lead mule rose and reared, squealing. The cauldron was tossed out and came slamming down onto a boulder. The lid flew off and the contents spilled down the slope, with the salamander floundering helplessly in the sun-stuff. It raised its head and gave a piercing scream, a note of pure agony. As if at the sound, the mountain tore itself apart.

The rent opened almost at Alfredo’s feet, releasing a blast of sulphurous heat, forcing him back. The salamander shrieked again. He glanced down the slope and saw that the cloud was now barely twenty paces below the crag. He could see nothing beyond. In a few heartbeats it would all be over. But there was still time for one part of his revenge. The leather apron that Toni had used to handle the bucket had fallen out of the harness as the mules had bolted. He ran, snatched it up and darted across to the salamander. Its golden body, exposed to the naked air, was now streaked with black. It was dying like a dying coal as the heat faded from it, while it desperately tried to drag itself toward the fiery crack that had opened in the mountainside. Alfredo wrapped the apron round his hands, snatched the salamander up, darted back as close as he could get for the heat, and tossed it into the
chasm. His hair and eyebrows were scorched before he turned away.

He realized that he had stopped singing. It didn’t matter. In this one thing, at least, he had defeated the man who had murdered his family. Calmly he turned to see how much time was left him before the end. The cloud seemed to have halted, to have lost some of its menace—yes, surely, to be thinning. From the top of the crag, strong and true above the immense rumblings of the mountain, came the sound of Toni’s recorder. It was hard to believe he could draw such sounds, so piercingly fierce and loud, from a simple wooden pipe. What he was playing was no longer the music of the psalm; it was something Alfredo had never heard before, something that seemed to come into Toni’s mouth and fingers in the very moment of playing, but this time not out of the air. He was drawing it forth from the mountain, the music of anger and of fire, and breathing it out through his recorder so that it filled the whole hillside.

Wearily Alfredo climbed up the slope and round onto the crag and stood beside him. From here they could see out over the remains of the cloud and all the way down the slope.

The Master still stood where they had last seen him, unflinching in his monstrous shape, as he fought to exert his power over the mountain. For the moment he seemed to have succeeded. The rent in the hillside ran halfway down from the crag to where he stood, narrower at its lower end than where it had started. There he was holding it, while Toni strove to drive it on. Alfredo waited for the note and joined the contest.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. …”

At the first phrase of the fire psalm, deep below their feet, the host of the salamanders wove their shrill voices into the music. The mountain regathered its strength. Again the hillside heaved. A huge explosion drowned all other sounds. Roasting gases burst out of the gulf, tossing red-hot rocks far into the air, and a great wave of churning lava boiled out and flooded down the slope.

The Master doubled his size and flung his power against it. The onrush paused. Toni’s music changed and became a rapid pattern of intricate shrill notes. A twisting rope of fire coiled itself out of the gulf, floated down toward the sorcerer, and began to curl around him. At the moment it completed the circle he lost his magical shape and became Uncle Giorgio. Released from his hold, the mountain rent itself open all the way down to the trees. The chasm forked, its two arms passing either side of Uncle Giorgio. The rope tightened and snatched him into the flaming gulf.

They stood gasping, stunned, staring dazedly at the huge outflow of lava welling from the rent and flooding down the mountain. Alfredo felt utterly empty, spent. Already exhausted from the climb, he’d now poured out inner strengths, strengths he’d never known were there, in the struggle against the Master. Toni, too, was haggard with the effort, stoop-shouldered and trembling. His face was gray and trenched with deep lines. The likeness was very clear. He was Uncle Giorgio’s son. He had just killed his own father.

Toni recovered first, turning to Alfredo with a worried
frown and gesturing at the tide of lava, and then pointing up and over the wood and down to the town below.

There are people down there. My mother, perhaps.

With an effort Alfredo pulled himself together. Behind and below him he could feel the rage of the mountain, unappeased by Uncle Giorgio’s death. Masterless now, it was angry of its own nature, filled with the anger of fire, purposeless, pure and huge, and at last allowed to burst out after so long lying in chains.
Burn and destroy!
it bellowed in its thunders.
Burn and destroy!
The madness of fire. How easily an evil-minded Master could harness that anger to his own ends.

Yes, and he had felt it before, that selfsame madness brought across the sea to a northern city and deliberately focussed onto a loving home through the burning glass of Uncle Giorgio’s vengefulness and greed for power. And then again, onto the
Bonaventura
. And once more, though this time unchannelled, when he and Uncle Giorgio had stood on the rim of the crater, and he had inadvertently woken the wrath of the mountain by singing the fire psalm to it, and it had taken their combined strengths to force it back into its prison.

There was no hope of doing that now. He had no such strength left, nor did Toni. Somehow, that anger must be appeased. Another memory came to him—waiting with Mother in the square in front of the cathedral while Father argued with a fellow baker and his brother Giorgio larked with his cronies, and quietly, for the mere joy of it, singing to himself the music he had just been listening to in the
cathedral. That had been the moment that had changed everything, that had set him on the course to the place where he now stood. The gift of the salamanders.

It was as if everything that had happened from that moment to this was part of a single purpose. He turned, raised his arms toward the summit of the mountain and sang.

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. …”

The notes of the descant rose like lark song through the bass thunderings of the mountain. Toni’s recorder joined quietly in, swooping and soaring around the line. And now more music, sweeter and higher than either, as from the unimaginable heat of the gulf below the salamanders raised their voices in exultation at the return of their lost comrade, and the fall of the hated Master, and the new beginning, the different kind of Mastership that his heir would bring.

The mountain paused as if to listen. It groaned, shuddered, and groaned again, and at last, as Alfredo and the salamanders fell silent and the quiet notes of Toni’s recorder faded into the afternoon air, was still.

At the bidding of the salamanders the mountain had acknowledged its new Master.

They stared at each other, shaking their heads in disbelief. The lava was still welling out of the chasm below them, but moving more slowly and in less of a flood. In the pauses between its rumblings they could hear the voices of the alarmed rooks as they circled above the trees, and from far below that the clank of a cracked church bell calling the people to evensong.

Toni pointed over Alfredo’s shoulder. He turned and saw that up the slope, well to their left, the lead mule was wrestling to free itself from something that had trapped it. They trudged and clambered across to it. Somehow a length of chain, trailing from the cradle, had caught under a boulder, and the panicking mule, struggling to wrest it free, had only jammed it faster. Toni grasped the bridle and murmured to the mule and stroked its ears and teased it under its jaws while Alfredo unhitched the chain and released the cradle from the harness. The mule’s panic ebbed away and it stood utterly exhausted, with its head bowed almost to the ground, shuddering, covered with foam, its lungs heaving, while Alfredo removed what remained of its harness.

One saddlebag was still there, with some of the food left in it. They settled on the slope and ate in silence, looking out over the strait. The steady beat of the church bell floated up from the town.

“Right at the end,” said Alfredo, “that burning rope—you did that?”