Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

With five minutes to go he repacked the satchel, took it out and stowed it in one of the saddlebags, went back to the kitchen, lit a lantern with a spill from the fire and led the way down to the cellar. Toni gazed without interest at the massive door of the furnace chamber, and turned inquiringly to Alfredo. Now came the first true test, the first link in the plan. If this succeeded, there would be no going back. If it failed…

Alfredo put the lantern on the floor, aligned his hands in front of his mouth and moved his fingers over the stops of an imaginary recorder. Toni took his real one from under his smock and put it to his lips. Quietly Alfredo began to sing the old Persian chant of summoning. After the first two notes Toni joined smoothly in.

And an Angel of Fire was there, with them, filling the height and width of the gloomy passage with its blazing presence. Alfredo almost lost the chant, stunned by the sudden nearness of such power, so much stronger, more vivid, than that of the two that Uncle Giorgio had summoned to his rite with the starlings. Now he understood what the notes had meant when they had talked about the difference between the Greater and Lesser Angels. Those two had been of the sort that could be commanded by a man with the Knowledge. But this was indeed one of the Greater Angels—perhaps the same one that had appeared before Toni in the rose garden. They could ask it, but it would choose whether to do what they asked.

The Angel waited, impassive, until the chant ended, and even then seemed to ignore Alfredo. Instead it faced Toni directly, bowed its head and waited again. Toni looked to Alfredo for guidance, and now at last the Angel turned to him. He, too, bowed his head as the Angel had done, placed his finger onto the keyhole of the lock, and spoke the two grating syllables with which Uncle Giorgio had commanded the Lesser Angels to light the star around the brazier. He stood back and watched the Angel reach out an arm and place its hand over the lock. A white light gathered itself inside the Angel’s body, pulsed gently down its arm and settled in a dome of pure heat over the lock. The passage filled with smoke and the stench of burnt timber. The Angel withdrew its arm, turned and bowed to Toni, and vanished.

Alfredo pushed on the door and it swung open. There was a pool of molten iron on the step below the lock.

Toni seemed dazed by this second encounter with the Angel. Alfredo had to take him by the elbow and lead him into the furnace chamber, where he stood, slowly gazing round with unseeing eyes while Alfredo fetched the things they would need from the stack in the corner: the two buckets with their carrying pole, the ladle and the tongs. He fetched both pairs of dark glasses from the shelf and fitted Uncle Giorgio’s onto Toni for him. He didn’t bother with the lead screen—they would be moving around too much. They would have to take their chance with the emanations.

Now, at last, he raised the lid of the furnace.

There was no sign of the salamander, so he took the lid off the smaller bucket and began to ladle the molten liquid into it. With its bowl barely half full the ladle became almost too heavy for him to control. He stopped when he could no longer lift the bucket by himself.

He closed the furnace, put the lid on the bucket and fastened its clasp. The metal of the bucket itself was already too hot to touch. This was something he hadn’t thought of, but for the moment it didn’t matter. He went over to Toni and removed his dark glasses. Toni seemed to have woken at the change from the glare of the furnace to the dim light of the lantern and was now looking round the chamber in an interested way, as though seeing it for the first time. Alfredo led him to where he wanted him, fetched the carrying pole and slid the hook in under the handle of the bucket.

“Ready?” he said. “You take that end.”

He grasped his end of the pole and lifted it a few inches, waited till Toni had copied him, stood upright and led the way out into the passage. The load was heavy but manageable. They took the stairs slowly, with the bucket swinging uncomfortably to and fro as they climbed. Already Alfredo could feel the heat beaming out from it. Once up they could hurry along the corridors and out through the kitchen into the yard. He settled the bucket down by the stable wall, close to the mounting block, unhooked the pole and went back with Toni to the furnace chamber.

This time, the moment he opened the lid the salamander rose from beneath the surface. Alfredo was expecting it to look at him and he would then sing Levavi oculos—I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills —while he told it through the music what was happening. Instead it stared for a moment at Toni, opened its small round mouth and, unprompted, started to sing. Toni took out his recorder and joined it. The salamander’s song was a strange mixture of wild joy and deep grief, joy at the coming of a new and kindly Master, grief for him, for what he was. The salamander wept.

On an impulse Alfredo picked up Uncle Giorgio’s little ladle and leaned forward to harvest the salamander’s tears. He remembered something that one of the priests in the cathedral had told them, explaining some miracle of healing: “The mind is spirit, but the brain is flesh. A madman has an ailment of the mind, and therefore of spirit. An idiot has one of the brain, and therefore of the flesh.”

Sovereign against all ills of the flesh, he thought.

The song finished and the salamander disappeared beneath the surface. Alfredo tipped the contents of the ladle into the phial, but had to wake Toni from his half-trance before he could give it to him.

“Drink it,” said Alfredo, miming the action. Toni obeyed and gave the phial back. Alfredo hadn’t expected anything much to happen. When Uncle Giorgio, on the verge of death, had drunk the tears it had been some while before they had had any effect. And time was pressing. He picked up the ladle and filled the remaining bucket with as much as he thought they could lift, then picked up the tongs, held them over the furnace and softly began Levavi oculos at last.

The salamander rose and at once reached for the tongs, scrambled up and let Alfredo close them gently on it. It peeped pitifully as he lifted it out and across, and huddled down into the molten heat in the bucket, though it could barely get its whole body beneath the surface. In that brief transfer Alfredo had seen that the salamander was exactly like the pendant he wore round his neck, right down to the hooked barb at the end of its tail.

He was about to close the lid of the bucket when Toni stopped him with a grunt, and then, to Alfredo’s astonishment, picked up the ladle and added another bowlful of the liquid to the bucket. He tested the weight, and only then allowed Alfredo to close and fasten the lid.

As he did so Alfredo noticed that heat was now radiating from its surface in a way it hadn’t done before, and there was a slight roiling motion as if the liquid were slowly coming to a boil. He guessed that this must be something to do with the salamander’s having left it. When he turned he found that Toni had already hooked the carrying pole into the handle of the bucket and was standing ready, but holding the pole some way in from its end, so that he would be taking a larger share of the weight. They left the door of the chamber open and the lantern still burning.

Out in the yard they heaved the bucket up onto the mounting block, fetched the mules, tethered them to rings on either side of the block, slid the poles of the cradle into their harness, and then stationed them so that the central ring of the cradle was close beside the block. Now…

But it wasn’t going to work. In Alfredo’s plan he was simply going to heave the bucket across into its place in the cradle while Toni held the mules steady, but now, faced with the task, he realized it was beyond his strength.