Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

NEXT MORNING HE WAS WOKEN BY A SCRATCHING at the door, and by the time his eyes were properly open Annetta was in the room, laying out clothes on his bed and making signs for him to get up and dress. The clothes were stiff and smelled of long storage, and were far grander than he was used to, dark breeches, a ruffled shirt, a brown velvet jacket with brass buttons and black braid trimmings, and buckled shoes, but they fitted well enough. Perhaps Uncle Giorgio had worn them when he was a boy, or perhaps Father. Downstairs he found Uncle Giorgio already halfway through his breakfast. He was dressed in the grand clothes in which Alfredo had first seen him, but without the sword.

“You must eat quickly,” he said. “It is Sunday, and we go to Mass.”

They walked together down the mountain, with Annetta and Toni following well behind and leading two of the mules. The sound of church bells was already floating up the town before they reached the vineyards, and the service was just beginning by the time they were at the church. A verger met them at a side door, bowing to Uncle Giorgio, and cleared a way for them through the crowded transept up into the choir, where he showed them into two elaborately carved stalls that faced east toward the high altar. Alfredo noticed the coat of arms above his seat. The shield had a salamander on it. The missal and psaltery on the shelf in front of him had the same coat stamped onto their bindings. Most of the stalls on the other side of the church were occupied, but the ones immediately to the right of where he sat were empty. The shields above their seats were carved with the head of a horse.

Uncle Giorgio knelt and prayed. Alfredo did the same, grieving for his own lost world, the bakehouse and the cathedral and the people he’d loved. The choir were singing, or attempting to sing, music he knew well. The trebles were thin and squeaky, and both tenors erratic on their top notes. Without thought he improvised a descant, almost under his breath, too quietly for anyone else to hear, but Uncle Giorgio immediately tapped him on the shoulder and shook his head, frowning.

He fell silent. His mind wandered. It was a while before he became aware of a difference. A difference from what? From…yes, from the world outside. The mountain. Wherever he’d been on the island, and from far out to sea, waking or sleeping, the mountain had been simply there, a vast presence, a pressure. Not here, in this church. For all he could feel of it, nothing might lie outside these walls but endless level plain. For the moment he was free of it. Free. It was almost as though the force of gravity no longer bound him to the earth and he could fly, as he sometimes could in dreams. He glanced at Uncle Giorgio, wondering if he felt the same, but as usual his face told nothing.

As the choir began to process down the aisle at the end of the service Uncle Giorgio left his stall, signed to Alfredo to do the same and joined the procession behind the priest. No one else did so. The procession filed into the vestry, but the priest stopped at the door, turned and bowed to Uncle Giorgio, who acknowledged the greeting with a nod.

“I must introduce you to my nephew and heir, Father Hippolyto,” he said. “This is Alfredo di Sala. His parents died recently in a tragic accident, and he has come to live with me.”

The priest, a tall but sagging man with heavy, pasty jowls, seemed to wince with surprise. His hand trembled as he took Alfredo’s and his voice fluttered as he answered.

“I am honored indeed,” he said. “The di Salas have long been our generous patrons, and I pray that they may long continue.”

“I hope so too,” said Alfredo politely.

“We will see you again next Sunday, I trust,” said the priest, clearly trusting nothing of the sort.

“Of course,” said Uncle Giorgio, and turned away with a faint smile on his lips, as though he was enjoying the priest’s discomfort. Alfredo followed, wondering whether the priest was ill, that he trembled so, or only in awe of the grand gentleman, or actually afraid.

They came out of the chill of the church into the blaze of a southern noon, but Alfredo barely noticed the change, because in the same moment the mountain had returned and its pressure closed around him.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Uncle Giorgio looked down at him.

“You will need to get used to it,” he said.

“It’s all right. It was just a surprise. I think I am getting used to it. But it was nice being out of it for a bit.”

“Not merely nice, necessary. I miss very few Sundays. As Father Hippolyto implied, I am an excellent son of the Church.”

“I could sing in there, couldn’t I, without…er…anything happening?”

“You are no longer a chorister, Alfredo,” said Uncle Giorgio severely. “You are a gentleman, and must learn to act as such.”

He sounded and looked entirely serious, but then his lips twitched briefly. It was so unexpected that Alfredo answered with a smile. Uncle Giorgio, straight-faced again, accepted the smile with a nod and walked on.

Alfredo followed, feeling that this once, for the moment, they understood each other. Whatever they might be on the mountain, down here in the town the di Salas were a family of proud and ancient lineage. It was genuinely and unarguably so, but at the same time it was a kind of act, because they weren’t only that. They were also sorcerers of a power that no lineage could match.

It was as if in that shared understanding Alfredo had been allowed on the other side of a barrier, into Uncle Giorgio’s aloneness, into a place where words meant something different from what they seemed to mean, and he understood those meanings. Then, in a few paces, the moment was over. It was Alfredo himself who ended it, shrinking back out of that aloneness, as if knowing by instinct that he would never be able to breathe its pure and joyless air.

Annetta and Toni were waiting with the mules by a mounting block at the side door, Toni cringing down between the animals out of sight from all the people and Annetta gripping his arm so that he shouldn’t actually turn and run. Alfredo climbed clumsily onto the second mule, which without any signal from its rider at once set off after Uncle Giorgio’s.

The square in front of the church was thronged, but nobody greeted Uncle Giorgio as he led the way across it. If anything, people seemed deliberately to be looking the other way and yet somehow to move out of his path. Alfredo saw a group dressed like gentry gossiping on the steps of the church, while a carriage and an open landau, each with a coat of arms on its door, waited below. One of the shields was painted with the head of a horse. The empty stalls next to his must belong to these people. Why hadn’t they been using them? Were even they so afraid of Uncle Giorgio that they didn’t want to worship beside him? Did everybody down here know what he was on the mountain, and were they all afraid of him? Did they all hate him in their hearts? Was that why no one would look at him?

Was that what happened when you became Master of the Mountain? Would it be the same with Alfredo himself one day, Sunday after Sunday coming down to face that fear and hate and pretending to worship, because the church was necessary to him, as it had been to his ancestors through the long generations? Had they too been hated and feared, as Uncle Giorgio was now? And Alfredo, too, when his turn came?

No, absolutely not, he decided. He would not join Uncle Giorgio in his aloneness. He would not pay that price of fear and hatred. If those were things the mountain demanded, it would have to find itself a different Master.