Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

Alfredo put the spectacles on and could see nothing. The glass seemed totally opaque, but as soon as Uncle Giorgio raised the lid of the crucible the glare struck through, as strong as that of the glowing embers in the fire pit of one of the bakehouse ovens, but now bearable. The fierce orange surface was as smooth as liquid but didn’t boil or churn, even when Uncle Giorgio, using tongs, fed it with two or three dark lumps, too heavy to be charcoal. They might have been pit coal, but didn’t look like that, either, and didn’t smoke or crackle, despite the intense heat immediately below the surface. Instead they settled slowly into it and sank out of sight.

“Stand still farther back,” said Uncle Giorgio. “This fire is the fire of the inmost sun. It sends out an emanation that alters the nature of the flesh, making it cancerous, as has happened in my own throat. Good. Now sing.”

Fear and excitement dried Alfredo’s mouth. His whole body seemed to be fluttering like the air in the bass pipes of the cathedral organ. He wasn’t sure he could sing at all—there would be none of the usual joy in it—but he sucked and swallowed two or three times, pulled himself together and almost listlessly began.

Before he was through the first bar of the music the fiery surface rippled and the salamander emerged. He could see it clearly through the dark glass of his spectacles. It rose until it was waist deep in the liquid, and then stopped. Its body rippled with the flow of heat, like a burning ember. Apart from the flattish oval of its face it was covered with neat triangular scales. Its eyes were round and slightly pop, and of a black unimaginably deep, full of living fire, like the rest of it—but fire that gave out no light at all. Instead the eyes sucked light into their own blackness. The creature had human-seeming ears but no nose. There were flaps on either side of its neck, like the gills of a fish. Its mouth was a small, round, lipless hole, which widened only a little as it started to answer Alfredo’s singing. The flaps on its neck pulsed gently.

As the first pure, high phrase twined itself in with Alfredo’s, his whole mood changed. All his doubt and fear became longing, all his excitement became love. He knew in that instant that he had found a friend. He and the salamander spoke to each other as if they had known each other since time began. The music was their language, whose notes were words. Alfredo needed the actual words of the psalm only to give him something to sing, to embody the notes. The salamander needed no words at all.

They spoke, as new-made friends do, mainly about themselves, who they were and where they came from. The salamander took Alfredo into the heart of the mountain, into the fiery caverns through which flowed the streams of molten rock in which the salamanders swam, or hauled themselves out onto the glowing ledges to sing. The whole mountain rang with their singing. It was their life, their reason for existence, that they should sing to each other. It was the loss of that that filled the salamander with such longing. So intense was the sung friendship that Alfredo saw and knew and felt these things, as if he himself had lived as a salamander.

He, not in his turn but at the self-same time, took the salamander home. He took it into the bakehouse where the three ovens Father had built beamed out their inner heat as the rich loaves rose—a pale, faint heat, compared to that of the mountain, but still born of the living fire. He took it into the kitchen, where the family sat round their Sunday supper, content in their love for each other. He took it singing up through the twisting street into the glimmering darkness of the cathedral, where eight hundred lit candles glowed for the evening Mass, and the choir processed to their stalls and there sang their sweetest for the glory of God and the delight of the Prince-Cardinal.

Both boy and salamander wept.

Through the blur of his tears Alfredo was mistily aware of Uncle Giorgio leaning over the furnace, with his little ladle in his gloved hand, to catch the drops that fell from the salamander’s cheeks. Then the psalm ended, the salamander withdrew below the surface, Uncle Giorgio closed the lid, and Alfredo was left with the echoes of the music dwindling in his mind.

He removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. By the time he could see clearly, Uncle Giorgio was stoppering a little flask. He slipped it into a pocket, gazed impassively down at Alfredo for several seconds, shook his head as if in reproof, and picked up a strange little dish. It was shaped like one of the bakehouse loaf tins, but would have baked only one small finger-roll, and had a long handle and was made of iron. Carefully Uncle Giorgio wiped its inner surface with a greasy rag.

“Watch,” he commanded.

Crouching beside him, Alfredo saw him reach with both hands beneath the furnace and turn a spigot. A thin stream of golden liquid flowed out into the pan. When it was almost full Uncle Giorgio closed the spigot, rose and set the pan down.

“Pure gold,” he said calmly.

He fetched a second pan, crouched again, half-filled it and set it beside the first.

“Today we will climb the mountain,” he said, and led the way out.

The track was much steeper than the one they had climbed between the vineyards, but the mules scrambled up it sure-footed. The one Alfredo was riding wasn’t the one he’d led up the mountain. Like Uncle Giorgio, he sat sideways in the saddle. They had broad-brimmed straw hats slung behind their shoulders, but for a long while didn’t need to wear them as the path wound up through the shade of dense old woodland. Uncle Giorgio didn’t say a word. Alfredo clung swaying to the saddle. The doubt and dread of yesterday’s climb from the harbor had returned, and became stronger all the time as the layers of rock below him thinned and he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to the central furnace.

It was well past noon when the woods abruptly gave way to a seemingly endless slope of dark gray tumbled boulders, shale and ash. Uncle Giorgio dismounted and Alfredo slid thankfully down. In the last of the shade they tethered the mules and settled down to the luncheon basket that the dumb woman had prepared for them.

They ate in silence. Alfredo was at first almost overwhelmed by his closeness to the churning fires below, in the heart of the mountain, but by the time he was packing the remains of the meal into the saddlebags he was even more conscious of Uncle Giorgio’s steady, absorbed gaze on him.

There had been priests in the cathedral who might stare at you with the same intentness, but Uncle Giorgio’s look was somehow different. That wasn’t what he wanted, whatever the sailors on the Bonaventura might have thought. He and Alfredo had slept in the same cabins all through the voyage, traveled together through lonely woods and across empty hillsides, but he’d never once done or said anything to suggest any physical interest in his nephew. It was as if there was something else he wanted, deeply and passionately wanted, and only Alfredo could give it to him. But Alfredo had no idea what it was.

He closed the last buckle and stood waiting, but Uncle Giorgio made no move.

“Sit down,” he said. “It is too hot to climb.”

Again Alfredo sat. The mules fidgeted. Insects hazed through the mottled shade.

“There are two Great Works,” said Uncle Giorgio suddenly. “They are named the Philosophers’ Stone and the Elixir of Life. Great men have sought them through the ages. With the Stone they hoped to achieve the transmutation of metals, and thus turn lead into gold. With the Elixir they hoped to live forever. They worked by the distillation of acids and the decoction and sublimation of minerals, and by the conjuration of demons, and achieved many things, but not their goals. These cannot be reached by such means.