Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

There was no hope of doing that now. He had no such strength left, nor did Toni. Somehow, that anger must be appeased. Another memory came to him—waiting with Mother in the square in front of the cathedral while Father argued with a fellow baker and his brother Giorgio larked with his cronies, and quietly, for the mere joy of it, singing to himself the music he had just been listening to in the cathedral. That had been the moment that had changed everything, that had set him on the course to the place where he now stood. The gift of the salamanders.

It was as if everything that had happened from that moment to this was part of a single purpose. He turned, raised his arms toward the summit of the mountain and sang.

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. …”

The notes of the descant rose like lark song through the bass thunderings of the mountain. Toni’s recorder joined quietly in, swooping and soaring around the line. And now more music, sweeter and higher than either, as from the unimaginable heat of the gulf below the salamanders raised their voices in exultation at the return of their lost comrade, and the fall of the hated Master, and the new beginning, the different kind of Mastership that his heir would bring.

The mountain paused as if to listen. It groaned, shuddered, and groaned again, and at last, as Alfredo and the salamanders fell silent and the quiet notes of Toni’s recorder faded into the afternoon air, was still.

At the bidding of the salamanders the mountain had acknowledged its new Master.

They stared at each other, shaking their heads in disbelief. The lava was still welling out of the chasm below them, but moving more slowly and in less of a flood. In the pauses between its rumblings they could hear the voices of the alarmed rooks as they circled above the trees, and from far below that the clank of a cracked church bell calling the people to evensong.

Toni pointed over Alfredo’s shoulder. He turned and saw that up the slope, well to their left, the lead mule was wrestling to free itself from something that had trapped it. They trudged and clambered across to it. Somehow a length of chain, trailing from the cradle, had caught under a boulder, and the panicking mule, struggling to wrest it free, had only jammed it faster. Toni grasped the bridle and murmured to the mule and stroked its ears and teased it under its jaws while Alfredo unhitched the chain and released the cradle from the harness. The mule’s panic ebbed away and it stood utterly exhausted, with its head bowed almost to the ground, shuddering, covered with foam, its lungs heaving, while Alfredo removed what remained of its harness.

One saddlebag was still there, with some of the food left in it. They settled on the slope and ate in silence, looking out over the strait. The steady beat of the church bell floated up from the town.

“Right at the end,” said Alfredo, “that burning rope—you did that?”

Toni nodded.

“How did you know?”

For answer Toni leaned across and touched Alfredo’s smock, just at the point where the salamander pendant hung against his chest on the chest. As far as Alfredo knew, he had never seen it, but now he knew it was there. Alfredo wasn’t surprised.

“The salamanders?” he said. “They told you?”

Toni nodded again, and then raised a warning finger as the tolling changed and became a wild rhythmless clangor, joined now by several other bells, sounding the alarm, telling the townspeople that the mountain had woken.

“They’ve taken their time,” said Alfredo, and then, “No, I suppose it hasn’t been that long. It just seemed like it. Well, it’s over now. I think we can hold it.”

But Toni was frowning, and gazing not down toward the town where the sounds came from, but more to the right. Yes, Alfredo could feel it too. Something was happening, something with fire in it, halfway up the hill, about where the Casa di Sala must be…

…and then, from that point, a burst of light, brilliant even in the bright sunshine. With it one dense ferocious impulse, a blast of pure power, not coming from the mountain but bursting from a single center with huge, astounding force. Light-dazzled, stunned, they saw only dimly the blast-wave traveling up the hill, tossing the treetops about as if in a hurricane. The sound of the explosion reached them first, a long, immense, roaring bellow. Before it ended, the blast, an almost solid wave of roasting air, knocked them flat.

Alfredo pushed himself groaningly up out of the darkness and stared down the hill. Half the trees in the wood seemed to be down. Several fires had started. Beyond that stood an uprushing column of dark smoke, rising and rising, which at its top widened into a pale, churning cloud like a child’s drawing of a tree. In only one way was it like the fire of the mountain: It was filled with the same rage.

Toni was already on his feet, staring. He raised both arms high and gave a great wordless shout, a call, a summons.

At the sound the air became full of the Angels of Fire, as usual almost invisible in the afternoon sunlight, but still blazingly there. They hovered, waiting for Toni. He called again and swept his arms down and outward. Remove, he told them. They turned and streamed away toward the strange, still rising cloud until they hovered in a ring around its top. Nets of fire fell from each of them, joined themselves, narrowed in a fiery mesh around the column, bright against its blackness all the way down to the ground. The Angels rose again, picking up cloud and column and, at its base, the sun-bright ball of heat from which it sprang, and bore the whole thing up and away toward the sun.

Alfredo watched the burning mass dwindle to a spark and vanish.

“Well done!” he whispered, stammering with wonder. “How did you…What…? Oh, I think I know. That was the salamander’s furnace. As long as it had the salamander in it…But it started to change as soon as we took the salamander out, and last time I went it was too hot to get near.”

Toni nodded. That was something he’d already known—not guessed, as Alfredo had—just as he had understood the menace of the cloud and known how to overcome it. That knowledge and that power were part of his inheritance. He was now truly Master of the Mountain, come into his birthright. His whole stance expressed his Mastership as he stood gazing down the slope and out over the strait. But then, with a sudden, urgent movement he turned to Alfredo. His whole face was full of questioning worry. His mouth struggled to shape a word.

“Annetta? Your mother?” said Alfredo. “I told her not to follow Uncle Giorgio back, to find somewhere safe, in case there’s an eruption. She told me where, and I said we’d go and look for her there.”

Toni nodded doubtfully, but settled down beside Alfredo to finish their meal. The mule had bolted again, but was too tired to go far and was standing a little way off, braying pitifully for its companion. The town bells still clamored their alarm. Dazedly Alfredo began to wonder what he should do now, how much he dared tell anyone. He glanced up when Toni gave a grunt and rose. The second mule was shambling back across the hillside. The first one staggered to meet it.

“I suppose we’d better go and tell people it’s all over,” said Alfredo.

As he scrambled down toward the mules, it struck him that perhaps he now knew why the two brothers had quarrelled. Uncle Giorgio needed two people to manage the mules, and so had tricked Father into helping him, and when Father had realized what was really happening he’d tried to stop it. Those were the two angry voices the salamander had heard. So it was up here, on this mountainside, that the terrible rift between them had opened, loosing the raging fires between them.