Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

He was asleep when Uncle Giorgio arrived, bringing a wicker basket with an excellent cold meal for Alfredo: fish salad, oil, good coarse bread, apricots and rough red wine. He himself ate nothing, but sipped slowly from a pot of what smelled like chicken broth, and drank a little wine, swallowing with obvious difficulty.

“Aren’t you going to have any?” said Alfredo. “It’s very good.”

Uncle Giorgio shook his head and simply pointed at his throat. He took his flask out of his pocket, weighed it in his hand and put it back. He reached down and from a pocket in his valise took out three similar flasks, which he unstoppered and stood on the table. He poured a dribble of wine into each, swilled it round and sipped it slowly.

“It was kind of you to get it for me,” said Alfredo. “Thank you very much.”

Uncle Giorgio nodded, unsmiling. Yes, it had been kind of him. It was proper that Alfredo should recognize the fact. Alfredo still didn’t know what to make of his uncle. There was so much that reminded him of Father: his erect stance and long, stiff stride; the way he drummed the fingers of his right hand on his left wrist as he thought; the way he preferred to sit sideways on at the table while he ate, and would then rise sidelong from his chair—small things, but so like in both men. With Uncle Giorgio barely able to speak it was harder to tell about the big things, but in spite of his apparent kindness—from the huge risk he was taking for Alfredo’s sake to his consideration in bringing a pleasant meal to the cabin, though he himself couldn’t eat any of it—there was one big difference. Father had loved —loved his family, loved his baking, loved other people, loved life. Even in his angers there had been love. Even if his throat had been hurting, the way Uncle Giorgio’s was …No, that wasn’t fair. And in any case, Alfredo wouldn’t have wanted Uncle Giorgio, well or ill, to be just like Father, would he?

“Is your throat very sore?” he asked.

Uncle Giorgio nodded, expressionless.

“Would you like me to sing for you?”

Uncle Giorgio shook his head, pointed toward the quay and cupped a hand behind his ear. No, not now. People might hear you. We are trying to hide you.

Alfredo nodded to show he’d understood, but was inwardly puzzled. What about the sailor who’d seen him board? How much could Uncle Giorgio have paid to buy the silence of the whole crew? Perhaps this wasn’t the Bonaventura ’s home port. …

The puzzle deepened as the days went by. They had sailed at dawn on that first morning, heading almost due into the rising sun. Uncle Giorgio spent all day on deck, breathing the sea air to ease his throat. When Alfredo had asked if he should come up too he had just nodded. Two sailors rigged a hammock for him, and Alfredo sat on a coil of rope beside him. Uncle Giorgio produced an old book from a pocket, opened it and pointed at a page before passing it to Alfredo. It was a psalter, in Latin of course, with a plainsong notation for each psalm. The book was open at Psalm 137, Super flumina Babylonis.

“This chant, Uncle Giorgio?” asked Alfredo, showing the book.

Raised eyebrows— What else do you suggest?

“There’s one of the cathedral ones. Most of them…”

The nod— Yes —interrupted him. He’d been going to explain that he knew several settings—the psalm was popular with composers—but only one that was suitable for a single treble voice, a prolonged descant continuing through the whole setting above the intertwining voices of the choir, but beautiful in its own right. As a junior until this year he had never got to sing it, in fact had heard it only twice, but both times had silently sung it through in his mind for hours after the service had ended. One day, he had promised himself, he would sing it aloud for the Prince-Cardinal. Instead he was singing it for a sick man, and perhaps a few sailors if they cared to listen, on the deck of a small boat out on the open sea. But he sang it with his whole heart, as he would have in the cathedral. It was music. It was all he had left, still.

“By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept, when I remembered thee, O Sion…”

The sailors did indeed listen. Three of the four stopped their work to do so—the fourth was the helmsman. There were calls of “Bravo!” “Bravissimo!” when he finished. Uncle Giorgio merely nodded approval. Alfredo leafed back a few pages to another favorite. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” he sang, though the setting was not quite so good for a single voice. He was about to look for another one when Uncle Giorgio stopped him with a gesture, looked up at the sun, then at his watch, rose, but staggered as the boat heaved to the swell and would have fallen if a sailor hadn’t caught his elbow and helped him aft.

Alfredo watched the confrontation with the helmsman. It began calmly enough. From Uncle Giorgio’s gestures he wanted the boat to head farther south. The helmsman shook his head and spoke briefly. Uncle Giorgio became more vehement. The helmsman held his course. Uncle Giorgio seized his arm. The helmsman shoved him away, handed the helm to one of the other men and yelled at Uncle Giorgio that he was the captain of this #!?#!! boat and no #!?#!! passenger was going to tell him how to mind his ship, no matter how much #!?#!! money he’d paid to smuggle his fancy boy off the island, and if Uncle Giorgio didn’t like it he’d turn the boat right round and take him back where he’d come from and the hell with the money. Voice like that, there’d be somebody who’d pay as much to get the boy back.

To show he meant what he said he dug into his breeches pocket, pulled out a small canvas bag and flung it on the deck at Uncle Giorgio’s feet.

Uncle Giorgio stared at him, his face set and pale as bone. Alfredo could actually feel his fury, its need to burst out, engulf, destroy, in the same kind of way that he had been able to feel a surge in one of the oven fire pits when a sudden shift of wind increased the draft in the flue, feel it and close the dampers long before the extra heat could seep through into the oven, or the bakehouse. So now. Alfredo watched and felt Uncle Giorgio grimly applying his own inward dampers as he turned away. The sailor helped him back to the hammock. The ship sailed on, due east.

That afternoon Uncle Giorgio managed to doze for a while. One of the sailors was splicing a cable, whistling as he worked, a tune Alfredo didn’t know. When he went to listen the sailor looked up, and stopped whistling.

“What’s with the old boy, then?” he asked. “Skipper’s got a short fuse, but the rule is, never speak to the man at the wheel, leave alone grab hold of him. Even a landsman should’ve known that.”

“He’s sick,” explained Alfredo. “His throat’s very bad, and he’s running out of his medicine. He’s got much worse since we left. …He hasn’t told me, but if he doesn’t get more medicine soon I think he might die. That’s why he’s desperate to get, er, home.”

He had hesitated because he still had no idea where they were going. If it was “home,” it would still be strange to him. The sailor appeared not to notice, but unconsciously answered the question for him.

“Well then,” he said, pointing to the right of their course, just as Uncle Giorgio had done. “Sicily’s that way, five days in the right wind, which this isn’t. Lot of tacking, it’d mean. So skipper’s heading for the mainland, and then he’ll turn along the coast and we’ll have the shore breezes all the way to the Straits, and a lot less tacking. Get there quicker in the end. You tell the old boy that.”

“How long will it take this way?”

“Seven, eight days. Or we could pull in at Ostia, say, and get him some medicine there. Laudanum would be better than nothing, I’d have said—stop it hurting so bad.”