Tears of the Salamander (9 page)

“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.”

A
LFREDO LEFT, EVEN MORE BEWILDERED THAN
he’d been when he’d come. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, unable to face the loneliness of his room. Strange that he’d crept down here straightforwardly scared of Uncle Giorgio’s anger, and though Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been angry after all—had merely accepted what had happened as an unlucky accident—Alfredo felt he would have preferred the anger to what had in fact happened. Anger at least would have been contact of a sort, a kind of nearness, however uncomfortable. But after those first few moments, even when Alfredo had been standing directly behind his shoulder, learning how to pronounce the words of the chant, Uncle Giorgio had seemed unreachable distances away, barricaded in the fortress of his aloneness.

Yes, he had sounded pleased by how well Alfredo had got on with learning the chant, but pleased in the wrong way, not pleased
with
Alfredo, his nephew, another human being like himself, but pleased
about
what had happened, in the way a farmer might be pleased about rain on his vines.

And what did he mean about Alfredo’s destiny? To become Master of the Mountain one day? That was the obvious meaning. But Uncle Giorgio didn’t talk in obvious meanings. Anyway, Alfredo didn’t think he wanted a destiny. A destiny wasn’t anything you had any control over, any choice about. It was something that happened to you, whether you liked it or not. Something Uncle Giorgio wanted to happen. That was what he’d been pleased about.