Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

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.”

ALFREDO 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.

And that sudden bitter outburst, “At least in you the blood runs true!” So there was someone else, someone in whom it didn’t…and who wasn’t going to have a destiny because of that? Poor brave brother Giorgio, who’d rushed into the blazing bakehouse to try to save his parents? Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been interested in his namesake, though he’d come to his christening. But he hadn’t come to his name-day, or sent him a present, and he’d pushed straight past him at Alfredo’s christening. So he must have seen that first time that Giorgio didn’t have what he was looking for, just as he’d seen that Alfredo did.

But what had Giorgio ever done to deserve such anger? No, not Giorgio. But the someone must have been older than him, or Uncle Giorgio wouldn’t have needed to come at all.

There were certainly secrets. How could there not be? Uncle Giorgio was a sorcerer. Alfredo had felt his power as they had stood on the rim of Etna’s crater and quieted the mountain’s seething fires. But he had felt his own powers waken there as he’d joined the task. Did that mean that he, too, was a sorcerer? Was sorcery what ran in his blood? Sorcery was a mortal sin because it meant consorting with demons. Were the Angels of Fire, so strong and beautiful, demons? And the salamander, who had wept with Alfredo over the loss of all he loved?

Too many questions. All he could do was take them one by one, and find out what happened next. So the first thing to do was to learn the chant. How, if he wasn’t allowed to sing it?

A thought came to him, and instead of climbing the stairs he went on along the corridor into the music room and took the treble recorder from its rack. If he couldn’t sing the music, perhaps he could play it, fix it in his head that way, silently fitting the words to the notes as he went along. Not in here, though. It was too close to Uncle Giorgio’s uncomfortable presence. He made his way out through the empty kitchen, through the blazing heat of the yard and explored southward. Long ago somebody must have terraced and planted this part of the slope to make a formal garden overlooking the magnificent view across the Straits. Now it was overgrown, mostly with the same scrub that covered the uncultivated bits of hillside, mixed in with huge old garden roses, unpruned for years, and the somber rusty-looking columns of ancient cypresses rising in regular rows above the tangle. He followed a path that still seemed used and came to a circular sunken area surrounded by a stone balustrade, with a dry pond and fountain at the center, and statues of old Romans here and there.

This seemed just what he wanted. There was even a stone bench, at this hour in the long shadow of a cypress on the terrace above. He settled there, and instead of starting straight in on the chant decided to get his hands used to the fingering of the recorder with tunes he already knew. The Precentor at the cathedral had encouraged the boys to learn a musical instrument. Some became highly skilled, but Alfredo had been far more interested in singing and had never progressed beyond the recorder. Still, he could play, and now found it comforting in a melancholy kind of way to fill the silence of this forgotten southern garden with the familiar songs of home.