“That’s why he’s been so careful about me, seeing I had good food, shielding me from the furnace. And it’s why he pretended to be ill when he took me to make his will. He didn’t want people to be surprised when he died suddenly. And he wanted to make sure that Signor Pozzarelli was afraid of me, so he won’t try and cheat him when he thinks he’s only got this kid to deal with. And it’s why he had to keep Toni around when really he hated him, in case he couldn’t use me. There wasn’t anyone else with the Mastership in his blood. But he didn’t want to use him if he could possibly help it, in case what was wrong with Toni’s brain meant that his own mind wouldn’t work properly in it.
“And perhaps there’s something wrong with Toni’s seed, too, because he got it from my uncle—that’s important, because he wants to have a son later on who’s got the Mastership in his blood, so that when he’s an old man again he can put himself into a new body again. That’s how he’s going to live forever, you see. That’s the Second Great Work. But now he won’t need Toni anymore and he can get rid of him.
“Only I think we might be able to stop him. My uncle’s told me how to get into the furnace room. He doesn’t know that, but he has. But I’ll need Toni for that. And you, too, for other things. All right?”
She didn’t hesitate, but nodded firmly.
He told her his plan.
“I know it’s dangerous,” he said. “He’s so much stronger than me. He’s still Master of the Mountain. But we’ve got to try.”
She thought grimly about it, sighed, and nodded again. She patted his shoulder encouragingly before she left. It will be all right, she was telling him. And Thank you.
When the day began to cool he took his recorder out to the rose garden. Before he reached the sunken garden he heard the sound of Toni’s playing, a long, complicated phrase, repeated and repeated, but each time with small unexpected variations. For a while he stood and listened, astonished yet again by the ease and subtlety with which Toni performed. And all his own invention, utterly untaught. It was as if music was the air he breathed, and all he had to do was draw it into himself and breathe it out again as audible sounds, just as the salamanders did with their element of fire. And when Alfredo joined him and they played together there seemed to be no doubt in either of their minds who was the master and who the pupil.
Uncle Giorgio still looked tired at supper that evening and spoke little, but ate steadily and watched to see that Alfredo did the same. As he rose from the table he said, “Tomorrow I must again make preparations, and it would be better for you and Annetta and the idiot to be elsewhere. Do not climb the mountain again—that will overtire you.”
“I could go out along to the rose garden and read. It’s nice there, and there’s some shade from the cypresses. Annetta could bring me some food.”
“Good. But take some exercise. Walk in the woods a little to give yourself an appetite. Then on Sunday we will go to Mass and show ourselves to be good Christians, and to refresh ourselves. I am still tired and will need all my strength. And in the afternoon you and I together will begin the preliminaries to the rite, so that on Monday we are fully prepared.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Alfredo.
“You are an excellent boy. Indeed, you are all that I had hoped.”
As usual there were layers of meaning beneath the simple words, but now Alfredo understood what they might be.
He went to bed tense with expectation and hope and fear. Time had the feel of a river just before it reaches a weir. He could look back and see all that had happened laid out in order, full of swirls and crosscurrents and flurries. He could look forward, beyond the next couple of days, and see an unreadable tumult of foam. But between him and the lip of the weir the surface was almost smooth, tense, drawn silky taut by the pull of the coming drop. Despite that, he fell asleep at last, slept heavily, and woke in broad daylight.
Downstairs he found that Uncle Giorgio had already breakfasted, but the tension had returned in full force, and he longed to be out of the house, so he ate nothing and left by the front door. He didn’t immediately go out to the rose garden, but instead went northward into the old driveway, and stretched himself out once more on the lava flow.
He lay down and again molded his body to the night-chilled rock, imagining himself part of it, part of the mountain itself, letting his tension ease as that imagination became real, until he and the mountain were one thing, down to its white-hot roots, out to its farthest spurs and screes. The salamanders swam in his fiery veins, sang in his mind. It was a gift from the mountain. He guessed that even among the di Salas, only those whom the mountain had chosen could attain this understanding. You needed to give yourself to the mountain before it could return the gift. Perhaps, from the way Uncle Giorgio talked about the mountain and the salamanders, he had never himself achieved this, for all his skill and knowledge. He couldn’t give himself. But another di Sala, long ago—whoever it was that had written the book from which the notes in the dictionary had been taken—must have lain like this on another outcrop, and so come to his understanding.
Yes, he thought. Now I too understand. It all depends on the Master.
There were two mountains. There was one as he had first known it, full of the fury of fire, dangerous, unpredictable in its rages, vengeful, hated and feared. That was Uncle Giorgio’s mountain.
But if Alfredo’s father had been Master…He also had a furious temper. He was a true di Sala. Anger was his birthright. It was in his blood. But his mountain would not have been like that. Those who lived below it would have understood its power, and seen perhaps its fury. But the fury would not have fallen on them. They would have thought of it not with dread, but with awe. Not with hatred, but with love.
Yes, sang the salamanders in his mind. That is the mountain as it ought to be. That is our mountain.
Now it was Alfredo’s turn. He moved through the molten heart of the mountain and made himself known to the salamanders. Stilling their singing, they gathered round him. He sang to them in his mind, telling them everything he had seen and done and intended to do.
They answered with a burst of song, a complex polyphony of interwoven hopes and fears—eagerness to see their lost comrade freed, and the end of Uncle Giorgio’s hated Mastership, dread of his powers and the vengeance he might take if Alfredo failed. And something else, a different kind of excitement. Alfredo understood what it was only when their singing changed itself and became the strange repeated phrase that Toni had been playing, effortlessly improvising, yesterday in the rose garden. New music, a new Master, a new world.
He listened for a while and then withdrew himself into his body, still lying on the lava flow out in the world of air.
There was somebody there—Toni of course, but this time sitting on the rock beside him, peacefully waiting.
“You heard?” he said. “You were there too? They can’t help us, but they wish us well.”
Toni nodded, apparently understanding. Together they went out to the rose garden.
Later Annetta came with food. She had questions to ask. It was a slow process, though she was very clever about it, gesturing expressively with her hands and nodding or shaking her head as Alfredo guessed his way to her meanings. How was he so sure Uncle Giorgio would go to Mass?