Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

He thought of the salamander, of their shared grief and loss, and almost wept again as he played. It was some while before he realized he was being watched.

He felt the watcher’s presence before he turned. All he saw was a quick furtive movement at the top of the steps, but he guessed at once who the watcher, now crouching behind the balustrade, must be. Still with his eyes on the steps he put the recorder to his lips and played on. Slowly Toni emerged and crept down the steps, but stopped on the last one. For a while he just stood there, staring, then lifted his hands in a beseeching gesture such as small children use, reaching longing hands toward some bright new toy, but very strange in a full-grown man. Alfredo stopped playing and held out the recorder, offering it to Toni. Toni inched forward, but couldn’t force his feet to carry him more than halfway to the bench, so Alfredo put the recorder down, rose and walked off round the empty pool. As soon as he was safely the other side of it Toni darted forward, snatched up the recorder, put it to his lips and blew.

Of course no sound came. Toni frowned and looked across at Alfredo. Alfredo raised an imaginary recorder to his mouth, placing his fingertips carefully to the invisible stops, and blew gently. Toni studied the recorder and put it to his lips again. His fingers seemed to find their way onto the stops of their own accord. He blew, fluttering them up and down. Notes of a sort emerged. Quite deliberately he started to experiment, discovering one by one what the individual finger movements achieved. Then, astoundingly, he arranged them into a scale. And then, even more astonishingly, he was playing, note perfect, the tune Alfredo had been playing twenty minutes before. When he reached the end he started again, ornamenting the simple tune with pleasing variations. By now he had forgotten to be afraid. He was rapt, lost in the music. Alfredo felt a great surge of sympathy and fellowship. He had known what this was like, when he himself had been caught up, transported, as he and the whole choir used to pour their souls into a Te Deum or Magnificat in the cathedral, and nothing else existed but themselves and the music.

Where had it come from? he wondered. Who had taught Toni the scales?

Nobody. It must be something to do with this place, something to do with the salamanders.

Toni finished the tune and lowered the recorder. He stared around with a dazed look in his eyes. Alfredo watched him come back to the bitter understanding of who and where and what he was. His face crumpled. He flung the recorder on the ground and rushed whimpering up the steps and out of sight.

Alfredo picked up the recorder, climbed the steps and gazed around, half expecting some fresh eruption of fire magic to have been awakened by their music, but all he saw was the long slope below him and the heat-hazed view across the Straits, all he heard was the endless whine of cicadas reinforcing the stillness of a late-summer afternoon.

He made his way back to the house by the same route he’d come. Annetta was in the kitchen, paring vegetables. Toni would be very upset, he guessed, so it was only fair to tell her why. She too was clearly disturbed, but managed to make him see that she wasn’t angry with him.

“Is it bad for him?” he asked. “He looked so happy while he was playing, but if you want me to hide the recorder…”

She shook her head, pointed to the wall opposite the stove and put her finger to her lips. He understood at once. She was pointing at Uncle Giorgio’s study in the opposite wing of the house. Don’t tell Giorgio .

He nodded and repeated her gesture.

He put the recorder back in its rack and went up to his room. As he climbed the stairs he realized that he had found the exchange comforting. It meant several things: chiefly that he now didn’t need to make up his mind whether to tell Uncle Giorgio what had happened; but also that Uncle Giorgio’s powers were limited—he wasn’t instantly aware of everything that happened in and around his house, even when it was somehow involved with magic, as Toni’s almost magical discovery of his gift for music must have been; and thirdly that Annetta herself wasn’t Uncle Giorgio’s devoted slave but an intelligent and independent woman who might even accept Alfredo as a friend. And perhaps he could make friends with Toni, too. It would be a strange friendship, lived in music. But that was a good enough place to live.

Uncle Giorgio brought a book to supper and read while he ate, so at first it was a silent meal. After a while he seemed to notice the fact and laid his book aside.

“I apologize,” he said. “I am used to reading over my meals. Perhaps you should do the same, at least until we have come to some arrangement for your education. There are Latin histories on the upper shelves of column D—Livius should be within your grasp—and there are dictionaries below and to their left. I fear that there is not much in the house to amuse a child. You must see what you can find.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Alfredo. “There’s a little recorder in the music room. Is it all right if I play that?”

“Why not?”

“I thought it might be a way of learning the chant without actually singing it.”

“Ah…Yes, if it helps. But if anything happens stop at once and come and tell me,” said Uncle Giorgio, and returned to his book.

So after supper Alfredo explored the library, using a cunning folding ladder to climb to the top shelves. He found the Livius history and a battered old Latin dictionary small enough to carry around, and then hunted for something more amusing. Most of the books were too large to handle comfortably, and in strange heavy lettering, difficult to read, or in languages he didn’t know. There were others whose alphabet wasn’t the one used for Latin and Italian. Most of these he recognized as Greek, but some were even stranger, Arabic or Turkish, he guessed, or Persian, like the words of the chant. He didn’t find anything about salamanders or other kinds of fire magic, nor a history of the di Salas or anything useful about the mountain, though there was some stuff about it in a huge Geography of Sicily, as big as a small tabletop. He guessed that all the magic books—anything with secrets in it—would be in Uncle Giorgio’s study. He took the ones he’d chosen, fetched the recorder upstairs.

For a while he sat in the window, doggedly working through stories about ancient kings. Then, leafing through the dictionary in search of a word, he found a folded sheet of paper somebody must have been using as a bookmark. Unfolded, it turned out to be a series of jottings—notes, he guessed, on some book the writer had been reading, using the dictionary to help him. The handwriting was old-fashioned and hard to decipher, but a word caught his eye. Salamandri . The word before that looked like lacrimae. Lacrimae salamandri . The tears of the salamander. Excited now, he forgot about the history and until it became too dark to read he wrestled with the notes. It wasn’t Uncle Giorgio’s writing—nobody alive now, but someone long ago. There were scrawls he couldn’t read at all. Even in the better-written bits there mostly weren’t enough words he could make out to get any sense out of the Latin. By the time it got too dark to read he’d got as far as the tears of the salamander…against all ills of the flesh, and from what Uncle Giorgio had said he knew that the missing word had to mean sovereign, though it didn’t seem to be in the dictionary. Lower down there was something about one who has knowledge and Angels of Fire, Greater or Lesser . He gave up as it was getting too dark to read, and played the recorder and watched the stars rise one by one over Italy.