“Yes,” said Uncle Giorgio slowly, “you have the idea. Indeed, you appear to have come to me formed and ready for your destiny.”
A pause, and then, with bitter force, “In you, at least, the blood runs true.”
Alfredo, still with half his mind on the difficult music and half on the Angels of Fire, was jolted into attention. His uncle was staring at him with the same intent strange gaze as when they’d been eating their meal on the mountainside. The sudden anger of the last few words startled him into awareness. Though the anger didn’t seem to be directed at him, it was as if a horrible dark pit had opened suddenly at his feet.
“One! Two! Three! Four!” shrieked the starling, breaking the spell.
Uncle Giorgio picked up his book and said, “Learn what you can of the rest without trying to sing it, and we will then choose times when you can practice in my presence, so that I can control matters as you cannot—not yet. Wait. You had best not sing anything at all unless I am there. This place is full of ancient powers that you may inadvertently awaken. Now you may go.”
ALFREDO LEFT, EVEN MORE BEWILDERED THAN he’d been when he’d come. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, unable to face the loneliness of his room. Strange that he’d crept down here straightforwardly scared of Uncle Giorgio’s anger, and though Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been angry after all—had merely accepted what had happened as an unlucky accident—Alfredo felt he would have preferred the anger to what had in fact happened. Anger at least would have been contact of a sort, a kind of nearness, however uncomfortable. But after those first few moments, even when Alfredo had been standing directly behind his shoulder, learning how to pronounce the words of the chant, Uncle Giorgio had seemed unreachable distances away, barricaded in the fortress of his aloneness.
Yes, he had sounded pleased by how well Alfredo had got on with learning the chant, but pleased in the wrong way, not pleased with Alfredo, his nephew, another human being like himself, but pleased about what had happened, in the way a farmer might be pleased about rain on his vines.
And what did he mean about Alfredo’s destiny? To become Master of the Mountain one day? That was the obvious meaning. But Uncle Giorgio didn’t talk in obvious meanings. Anyway, Alfredo didn’t think he wanted a destiny. A destiny wasn’t anything you had any control over, any choice about. It was something that happened to you, whether you liked it or not. Something Uncle Giorgio wanted to happen. That was what he’d been pleased about.
And that sudden bitter outburst, “At least in you the blood runs true!” So there was someone else, someone in whom it didn’t…and who wasn’t going to have a destiny because of that? Poor brave brother Giorgio, who’d rushed into the blazing bakehouse to try to save his parents? Uncle Giorgio hadn’t been interested in his namesake, though he’d come to his christening. But he hadn’t come to his name-day, or sent him a present, and he’d pushed straight past him at Alfredo’s christening. So he must have seen that first time that Giorgio didn’t have what he was looking for, just as he’d seen that Alfredo did.
But what had Giorgio ever done to deserve such anger? No, not Giorgio. But the someone must have been older than him, or Uncle Giorgio wouldn’t have needed to come at all.
There were certainly secrets. How could there not be? Uncle Giorgio was a sorcerer. Alfredo had felt his power as they had stood on the rim of Etna’s crater and quieted the mountain’s seething fires. But he had felt his own powers waken there as he’d joined the task. Did that mean that he, too, was a sorcerer? Was sorcery what ran in his blood? Sorcery was a mortal sin because it meant consorting with demons. Were the Angels of Fire, so strong and beautiful, demons? And the salamander, who had wept with Alfredo over the loss of all he loved?
Too many questions. All he could do was take them one by one, and find out what happened next. So the first thing to do was to learn the chant. How, if he wasn’t allowed to sing it?
A thought came to him, and instead of climbing the stairs he went on along the corridor into the music room and took the treble recorder from its rack. If he couldn’t sing the music, perhaps he could play it, fix it in his head that way, silently fitting the words to the notes as he went along. Not in here, though. It was too close to Uncle Giorgio’s uncomfortable presence. He made his way out through the empty kitchen, through the blazing heat of the yard and explored southward. Long ago somebody must have terraced and planted this part of the slope to make a formal garden overlooking the magnificent view across the Straits. Now it was overgrown, mostly with the same scrub that covered the uncultivated bits of hillside, mixed in with huge old garden roses, unpruned for years, and the somber rusty-looking columns of ancient cypresses rising in regular rows above the tangle. He followed a path that still seemed used and came to a circular sunken area surrounded by a stone balustrade, with a dry pond and fountain at the center, and statues of old Romans here and there.
This seemed just what he wanted. There was even a stone bench, at this hour in the long shadow of a cypress on the terrace above. He settled there, and instead of starting straight in on the chant decided to get his hands used to the fingering of the recorder with tunes he already knew. The Precentor at the cathedral had encouraged the boys to learn a musical instrument. Some became highly skilled, but Alfredo had been far more interested in singing and had never progressed beyond the recorder. Still, he could play, and now found it comforting in a melancholy kind of way to fill the silence of this forgotten southern garden with the familiar songs of home.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
He thought of the salamander, of their shared grief and loss, and almost wept again as he played. It was some while before he realized he was being watched.
He felt the watcher’s presence before he turned. All he saw was a quick furtive movement at the top of the steps, but he guessed at once who the watcher, now crouching behind the balustrade, must be. Still with his eyes on the steps he put the recorder to his lips and played on. Slowly Toni emerged and crept down the steps, but stopped on the last one. For a while he just stood there, staring, then lifted his hands in a beseeching gesture such as small children use, reaching longing hands toward some bright new toy, but very strange in a full-grown man. Alfredo stopped playing and held out the recorder, offering it to Toni. Toni inched forward, but couldn’t force his feet to carry him more than halfway to the bench, so Alfredo put the recorder down, rose and walked off round the empty pool. As soon as he was safely the other side of it Toni darted forward, snatched up the recorder, put it to his lips and blew.
Of course no sound came. Toni frowned and looked across at Alfredo. Alfredo raised an imaginary recorder to his mouth, placing his fingertips carefully to the invisible stops, and blew gently. Toni studied the recorder and put it to his lips again. His fingers seemed to find their way onto the stops of their own accord. He blew, fluttering them up and down. Notes of a sort emerged. Quite deliberately he started to experiment, discovering one by one what the individual finger movements achieved. Then, astoundingly, he arranged them into a scale. And then, even more astonishingly, he was playing, note perfect, the tune Alfredo had been playing twenty minutes before. When he reached the end he started again, ornamenting the simple tune with pleasing variations. By now he had forgotten to be afraid. He was rapt, lost in the music. Alfredo felt a great surge of sympathy and fellowship. He had known what this was like, when he himself had been caught up, transported, as he and the whole choir used to pour their souls into a Te Deum or Magnificat in the cathedral, and nothing else existed but themselves and the music.