Now, suddenly the feelings returned. The mountain spoke in his mind. Not with its full thunder, but with a deep, rumbling whisper.
“Here.”
Where? A little below him and to his left a small crag jutted from the slope. Beside it ran a hidden fault line in the underlying rocks, a place where the central fires rose close to the surface.
“Let me out,” it seemed to be whispering to him. “Let me burn.”
And he could have done it. If he had chosen, he could have reached them from here with his mind and woken the mountain again, and then stilled it.
Yes, and there had been another such place, much farther down, below the house, among the vineyards…
He halted for a moment, turned and gazed out to sea. Suppose…
Suppose its Master were absent or ill, could the mountain wake of its own accord and direct its power in a single beam that would set one of those boats blazing? Yes, it could.
And could Alfredo have held it back, as Uncle Giorgio said he had tried to do for the Bonaventura, and would have done if he hadn’t been so close to dying?
No, not yet. He had the power, but not the skill. That was something he would need to learn.
How did he know these things? Nobody had told him, but he hadn’t needed to work them out, or decide them. They were already there in his mind, certainties. They were part of something that had come to him at the summit, when he and Uncle Giorgio had been saying no to the mountain, focussed together, almost one person…a kind of leakage between them.
Down the slope Uncle Giorgio had halted and was looking inquiringly back to see why Alfredo had stopped.
Had anything leaked the other way, he wondered as he hurried on down. What secrets of his did Uncle Giorgio now know?
He was very grateful to Uncle Giorgio for all that he’d done for him, and almost sure that he wished him well, but what went on inside him—his thoughts and feelings, hopes, terrors, suspicions, guesses—that was private. If Uncle Giorgio knew anything about it…
He didn’t like the idea at all.
It was almost dark before they reached the woods, but Uncle Giorgio took a lantern from the saddlebags, lit it with flint and tinder and led their way down the twisting track through the trees. It must have been midnight before they reached home, but the silent woman had supper waiting for them. Alfredo was more than half asleep by the time he climbed the stairs.
NEXT MORNING ALFREDO AGAIN WOKE LATE. His dreams had been full of fire, but all he could remember of them was a brief glimpse of two boys, far up the slopes of Etna, joyfully pelting each other with balls of fire.
The image haunted him as he dressed. Two brothers might play like that, if the power was in them. Father and Uncle Giorgio, for instance, before they quarrelled…There must have been a time…That’s what the dream seemed to be telling him. …Or had they hated each other from the very first? He wanted to learn to love and trust Uncle Giorgio, who’d run such terrible risks, had very nearly died, for Alfredo’s sake. His uncle wasn’t the sort of person it was easy to love or trust, but he felt it was his duty. There was no way he could learn to unlove his own father, and just take Uncle Giorgio’s side in the quarrel. But perhaps he could somehow heal the rift. Not between the brothers themselves any longer, now that one of them was dead, but perhaps somehow inside himself…If only he knew what had happened.
He ate his breakfast slowly, trying to think all this through, and it was toward noon before he went to look for Uncle Giorgio. He found him, as yesterday, in his study, reading and making notes in the margin of his book. He looked up and arranged his features into a smile—with a bit more practice he would soon be quite good at that. He was certainly trying.
“You slept well, Alfredo?”
“Yes, thank you, Uncle. I dreamed about you, I think.”
“A good dream, I hope?”
“Well, it felt happy while I was dreaming it. There were these two boys up on the mountain playing snowballs—there was snow one year at home and we all rushed out and snowballed each other—only these boys weren’t using snow, they were doing it with fire…and I…I thought…”
He broke off as Uncle Giorgio rose abruptly from his chair and swung away to the window, where he stood staring out at the trees and tapping his fingernails on his wrist. When he spoke it was as if his throat had become suddenly sore again.
“You imagined that they might be your father and myself. No, Alfredo, we never did that. Nor could we have. Though we are Masters of the Mountain, given the chance its fire will consume our flesh as readily as it will any other man’s. You think often of your father, Alfredo?”
“All the time. …I’m sorry, but…I know you didn’t…”
“It is not to be wondered at. I do not blame you.”
“Will you tell me why you…why you…not now. …I know you’re busy, but…”
Uncle Giorgio turned from the window and came back to his chair and sat down.
“We disagreed about something of great importance to both of us,” he said quietly. “Do you need to know more?”
“I…I loved him,” said Alfredo. “He was…I don’t know how to say it. …He was everything. But now…You’ve done a lot for me. You nearly killed yourself for me. I want to love you, too. But if you hated each other…You see…?”
For a long while Uncle Giorgio didn’t answer, but simply sat looking at him, once or twice shaking his head as if rejecting some thought.
“Too late…,” he muttered, and then, in a different, firmer tone, “…and too soon.”
He turned back to his book, but after reading two or three lines he looked up with his thin, unreadable smile.
“You are an admirable child and have admirable sentiments,” he said in his normal dry voice. “I have every confidence that the day will come when each of us loves the other as much as we love ourselves. But for the moment I am not ready to tell you what you think you want to know, and you are not ready to hear it. That time too will surely come, and then you will know as much about the matter as I do myself. But not this morning. This morning I will prepare and set you a task to do after luncheon. Meanwhile, go where you want, indoors or out. Nothing will harm you. Only if a door is locked, do not try to open it. This is your home now, and you must learn its ways, as I and your father did when we were boys.”
For a while, as he set off to explore, Alfredo seemed to be almost back in his dream. Surely the house had something to tell him of those vanished years. The upper floor was arranged on the same plan as the lower one. A wide corridor stretched from end to end of the house, with shorter corridors at either end running back toward the mountain. Only two of these upstairs rooms appeared to be used, his own and Uncle Giorgio’s. This wasn’t one of the grander ones looking out east over the Straits, but lay round at the northwest corner of the house, immediately above the study, with one window facing the mountain and another the trees. A bleak, bare room with a shabby carpet; a narrow, unornamented bed; two chairs; a huge, dark wardrobe and a plain table covered with books. A smaller table beside the bed held a lamp and several medicine bottles. On another small table was a birdcage occupied by a starling, smaller than the one in the study, and with stronger mottling on its breast feathers. It eyed Alfredo, standing in the door. It didn’t speak, but squawked as he left the room. There were no pictures, of saints or anything else. Not even a crucifix on the wall.
All the other doors on the upper floor opened onto shuttered rooms, about twenty of them in all, some with huge beds whose moth-eaten hangings glinted with gold thread, others completely unfurnished. All smelled of mice, and old mortar crumbling into dust from summer after roasting summer, but as he opened each door Alfredo could almost sense the movements of two faint figures just vanished through the connecting door into the room beyond.