According to Uncle Giorgio, the mountain had been furious with the Bonaventura and his friends for returning its Master to it, and so had destroyed them. If so, then why at that particular moment, when the Master was closest to a place of power, and had most hope of preventing the destruction? Was the mountain just a brainless embodied anger, which had burst out at that moment, regardless of where its Master happened to be?
Or had Uncle Giorgio caused the mountain to do it, choosing this place because, despite his illness, here he still had the power? If so, why? Surely not just out of revenge on the captain for speaking to him as he had. No, it would be because he was determined to remove any witnesses of their journey. Nobody must know that this was where he had brought his nephew. That was how much Alfredo mattered to him, that he would kill four innocent men to preserve his secret. Not for Alfredo’s sake, but for his own.
Either was possible. Alfredo’s mind wavered to and fro. He reached the house with his determination to trust Uncle Giorgio badly shaken, and only one decision made. He must talk to the salamander as soon as he got the chance.
Luck was with him for once. Annetta and Toni were still way down the mountain, but she had left food in covered dishes for them. They had both brought books to the table, and Uncle Giorgio helped himself, sat down and at once started to read, but as soon as Alfredo was seated he closed his book and pushed it aside.
“You ask remarkably few questions,” he said. “Have you no more?”
“Oh, yes, but…I didn’t want to bother you, but…Well, I was wondering about the salamanders. Somebody once told me that if you ask them something they will tell you the truth. Is that right?”
“Yes and no. The truth is in their music. For us, truth exists almost entirely in words. The salamanders do not use words. How can they speak our truth? I have heard you sing, Alfredo. You have an excellent voice and a good understanding, but you sing with the human emotions that are in the words, and this, as it were, contaminates the music. Even our unsung music may be contaminated by the human emotions of the player. But for the salamanders, their truth is in the notes, not in the manner in which the notes are sung. So if you would converse with the salamanders you must train yourself to sing without any emotion that can be put into words. When I converse with my salamander I normally use the fiddle. Before you came I used to sing to it only when I needed my hands to collect its tears. You must learn to treat your voice purely as a musical instrument, like my fiddle. Otherwise the truth that the salamander tells you will be contaminated with apparent meanings, which are in fact no more than echoes of your own hopes and fears. I have so far allowed you to sing to the salamander in that fashion because your singing achieved what was necessary, but before you can attain true understanding of the mountain, and of the task before you, you must train yourself to do as I say. Do you understand?”
“I think so. The organist in the cathedral used to have arguments with the Precentor about it, but the Prince-Cardinal agreed with the Precentor, so that’s what I’m used to—singing as if I meant it, I mean.”
“Whereas I agree with the organist, so you must do your best to unlearn what you have been taught.”
“Last time I sang to the salamander I thought it showed me what it used to be like, living inside the mountain.”
“Of course. But in fact it showed you no more than your own imaginings. When I was a boy I used to have such imaginings, but I trained myself to reject them. When we have eaten you can sing to the salamander again, and practice as you do so.”
“Super flumina? Psalm One Thirty-seven?”
“What you sing is irrelevant, provided it is expressive of sadness.”
“I felt very sad today when we were coming back up the hill. I was thinking about the sailors on the Bonaventura, and me singing the bit about the storm for them from Psalm One Hundred and Seven. It was only last Sunday, and now they’re dead. Would that be all right?”
“Why that? It is a psalm of praise, I think. The music is not in itself sad.”
“I could sing a requiem first.”
“That would be better. And then you may sing the psalm if you wish.”
Uncle Giorgio spoke flatly, as if he’d forgotten all about the Bonaventura. He was opening his book when he seemed to realize what they’d been talking about, and looked up again.
“I am truly sorry about what happened to our friends on the ship,” he said. “But we must start to put all that behind us. We have great work to do, Alfredo, you and I.”
He returned to his book and read for the rest of the meal.
There was now a curved sheet of metal supported on a wooden framework a little distance back from the furnace. Uncle Giorgio stationed Alfredo behind it.
“Lead,” he explained. “It will shield your body from the harmful emanations of the furnace. Your head I can do nothing about until I have more lead, but it should not matter for the moment. It is frequent and prolonged exposure to the emanations that is dangerous. Here are your spectacles.”
Alfredo put them on and the chamber was in darkness. The darkness cracked apart in a glaring line as Uncle Giorgio raised the lid of the furnace unaided. Against the glow Alfredo watched him pick up the little ladle.
He nodded, and Alfredo began.
He started with the saddest requiem he knew, but trying to do as Uncle Giorgio had suggested, and almost at once the salamander emerged, weaving its plaintive sweet piping exquisitely into the music, filling Alfredo’s mind with thoughts of the dead sailors, and of their evening concerts, and their gossipy good nature. Together they wept for Benno and his friends while Uncle Giorgio collected the salamander’s tears with no more apparent emotion than if he’d been milking a goat. At a suitable moment Alfredo prolonged the note and modulated into the psalm. The salamander followed as if it had been expecting the switch.
“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters…”
Now, unwilled, his mind filled with other memories—himself on the sun-baked hillside, watching the ships going to and fro in the Straits, the Bonaventura with the yellow patch on her brown sail, far out across the water…
“These men know the works of the Lord and the wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth…” And now for him the storm music became the churning energies of the mountain, the Bonaventura bursting into flame, the horror and grief with which he’d watched his friends die. Why? he asked himself. Why?
Another image came into his mind. He saw the mountain, as if from a short distance, but it was now faintly transparent, so that he could see not only the surface but also, dimly, as if through heavy mist, the branching pattern of dark orange streaks that marked the channels of the fiery mass within. There was a boy, himself, standing on the path directly above one of these streaks, staring out to sea, ashen-faced, his mouth open as if to scream. Farther up the slope, at a point where the streak was brightest, there was a dark, cloudy shape, vaguely human but twice the size of a man and veined with fire like the mountain. It had its arms raised in front of it. Fire streamed from its fingers out toward the sea.
The mountain seemed to come closer as the boy turned, so that now Alfredo was looking over his own imagined shoulder. Beyond him he watched a mule picking its way down between the vines with Uncle Giorgio slumped and exhausted in the saddle.
All this in his mind’s eye. At the same time he could feel the salamander’s fear and sorrow, and with his outward eyes could see Uncle Giorgio leaning forward to harvest its tears, and he felt he understood why the creature wept so. The sorrow was for him, Alfredo. The fear was for him. They were emotions he could share, human.