Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

Yes, here! it said.

He squared his shoulders, raised his head, filled his lungs and sang.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away. And like as wax melteth at the fire, so shall the ungodly perish at the presence of God.”

Inwardly the mountain stirred. Something inside Alfredo came alive at the words, his own birthright of rage and the desire for vengeance as he had first become aware of them, lying on the old lava flow across the driveway and listening to the far voices of the salamanders telling him what his uncle had done. He gathered that anger into a compact and burning force and drove it down toward the thing on the slope.

The thing halted. It changed shape, grew a head, arms, legs, human in form, but monstrous. Monstrous in its size, in its horror, in its power. It raised its arms in front of it, and power streamed out of them, visible, implacable, a rolling wave of the same dark smoke-stuff advancing steadily up the slope, its wings moving faster than the center, curving forward into an arc, ready to close round Alfredo, deceiver and betrayer of the Master, and engulf him. Where was Toni? Why wasn’t he helping? Dimly he remembered seeing him climb on past the mules as he had turned to face the Master.

He called the powers of the mountain back, focussed them through himself and beamed them against the wave. It halted, swirled into a vortex, a whirlpool of smoke-stuff that simply sucked them in and made them part of itself. Then it came on.

His resolve, his awareness of his own power, wavered. He sensed another power nearby, above him. He glanced up. Toni was there, on the lip of the crag, facing the coming wave, his recorder ready at his lips.

It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. Desperately he sang on.

“O God, when thou wentest forth before the people, when thou wentest through the wilderness, the earth shook and the heavens dropped. …”

High and fierce, the notes of the recorder threaded the human voice.

Now the mountain answered. Below, behind and above him Alfredo felt the surge of its anger. There was a deafening groan. The whole slope heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. The mules, which had been waiting patiently just below him, apparently oblivious to the struggle, lost their footing. The hind one fell, dragging the other down and its harness free of the cradle, then struggling to its feet and bolting away along the slope. The lead mule rose and reared, squealing. The cauldron was tossed out and came slamming down onto a boulder. The lid flew off and the contents spilled down the slope, with the salamander floundering helplessly in the sun-stuff. It raised its head and gave a piercing scream, a note of pure agony. As if at the sound, the mountain tore itself apart.

The rent opened almost at Alfredo’s feet, releasing a blast of sulphurous heat, forcing him back. The salamander shrieked again. He glanced down the slope and saw that the cloud was now barely twenty paces below the crag. He could see nothing beyond. In a few heartbeats it would all be over. But there was still time for one part of his revenge. The leather apron that Toni had used to handle the bucket had fallen out of the harness as the mules had bolted. He ran, snatched it up and darted across to the salamander. Its golden body, exposed to the naked air, was now streaked with black. It was dying like a dying coal as the heat faded from it, while it desperately tried to drag itself toward the fiery crack that had opened in the mountainside. Alfredo wrapped the apron round his hands, snatched the salamander up, darted back as close as he could get for the heat, and tossed it into the chasm. His hair and eyebrows were scorched before he turned away.

He realized that he had stopped singing. It didn’t matter. In this one thing, at least, he had defeated the man who had murdered his family. Calmly he turned to see how much time was left him before the end. The cloud seemed to have halted, to have lost some of its menace—yes, surely, to be thinning. From the top of the crag, strong and true above the immense rumblings of the mountain, came the sound of Toni’s recorder. It was hard to believe he could draw such sounds, so piercingly fierce and loud, from a simple wooden pipe. What he was playing was no longer the music of the psalm; it was something Alfredo had never heard before, something that seemed to come into Toni’s mouth and fingers in the very moment of playing, but this time not out of the air. He was drawing it forth from the mountain, the music of anger and of fire, and breathing it out through his recorder so that it filled the whole hillside.

Wearily Alfredo climbed up the slope and round onto the crag and stood beside him. From here they could see out over the remains of the cloud and all the way down the slope.

The Master still stood where they had last seen him, unflinching in his monstrous shape, as he fought to exert his power over the mountain. For the moment he seemed to have succeeded. The rent in the hillside ran halfway down from the crag to where he stood, narrower at its lower end than where it had started. There he was holding it, while Toni strove to drive it on. Alfredo waited for the note and joined the contest.

“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. …”

At the first phrase of the fire psalm, deep below their feet, the host of the salamanders wove their shrill voices into the music. The mountain regathered its strength. Again the hillside heaved. A huge explosion drowned all other sounds. Roasting gases burst out of the gulf, tossing red-hot rocks far into the air, and a great wave of churning lava boiled out and flooded down the slope.

The Master doubled his size and flung his power against it. The onrush paused. Toni’s music changed and became a rapid pattern of intricate shrill notes. A twisting rope of fire coiled itself out of the gulf, floated down toward the sorcerer, and began to curl around him. At the moment it completed the circle he lost his magical shape and became Uncle Giorgio. Released from his hold, the mountain rent itself open all the way down to the trees. The chasm forked, its two arms passing either side of Uncle Giorgio. The rope tightened and snatched him into the flaming gulf.

They stood gasping, stunned, staring dazedly at the huge outflow of lava welling from the rent and flooding down the mountain. Alfredo felt utterly empty, spent. Already exhausted from the climb, he’d now poured out inner strengths, strengths he’d never known were there, in the struggle against the Master. Toni, too, was haggard with the effort, stoop-shouldered and trembling. His face was gray and trenched with deep lines. The likeness was very clear. He was Uncle Giorgio’s son. He had just killed his own father.

Toni recovered first, turning to Alfredo with a worried frown and gesturing at the tide of lava, and then pointing up and over the wood and down to the town below.

There are people down there. My mother, perhaps.

With an effort Alfredo pulled himself together. Behind and below him he could feel the rage of the mountain, unappeased by Uncle Giorgio’s death. Masterless now, it was angry of its own nature, filled with the anger of fire, purposeless, pure and huge, and at last allowed to burst out after so long lying in chains. Burn and destroy! it bellowed in its thunders. Burn and destroy! The madness of fire. How easily an evil-minded Master could harness that anger to his own ends.

Yes, and he had felt it before, that selfsame madness brought across the sea to a northern city and deliberately focussed onto a loving home through the burning glass of Uncle Giorgio’s vengefulness and greed for power. And then again, onto the Bonaventura . And once more, though this time unchannelled, when he and Uncle Giorgio had stood on the rim of the crater, and he had inadvertently woken the wrath of the mountain by singing the fire psalm to it, and it had taken their combined strengths to force it back into its prison.