By the time they reached the top of the wood he was almost exhausted. Last evening’s loss of food was taking its toll. What he had eaten since wasn’t enough to replace it. His calves and thighs seemed emptied of muscle, barely able to heave him another step upward. His lungs gasped uselessly at the dry, hot air. In the trees’ last shade they halted briefly to drink from the water bottles and cram food into their pockets.
“He must be almost at the house by now,” said Alfredo.
Toni nodded and turned to gaze at the slope above them. He shook his head and beckoned Alfredo forward, then pointed up the slope and offered him the bridle of the lead mule, spreading his hands in a gesture of bafflement. His meaning was obvious. Not enough people climbed the mountain to leave a clear continuous track on the stony surface, and he had never done so.
Alfredo had, though only once. He studied the slope and spotted a jut of rock a few hundred paces farther up. That was the crag he had noticed when he and Uncle Giorgio had been making their way down from the crater, because it felt like one of the places where some of the powers of the mountain seemed to run close to the surface and might be summoned forth and used. He pulled his hat from behind his back and fitted it onto his head, then led the way on into the full weight of the sun.
Hardly had they started to climb again when the explosion came. It swept up through the still, hot noon with the onset of a sudden squall. The air seemed to crackle with it. The mountain quivered at its touch. Alfredo staggered. Toni, behind him, cried aloud. Both of them had felt it, and knew what it meant. Uncle Giorgio had reached the furnace chamber and seen the lock melted and the salamander gone. Now it was a question of how fast he could follow. Alfredo attempted to quicken his pace but his legs refused to respond. He huddled into himself, contracted his whole being into the effort to drive himself on, his eyes intent on the next step ahead, only glancing up now and then to check how far it still was to the landmark crag.
They weren’t going to make it, nothing like. His muscles had nothing left to give. His whole body seemed to be on fire with the effort. The world was on fire, a roaring, red haze. There were voices in the roaring, one voice deeper, almost, than sound itself. The voice of the mountain, calling him. He surrendered himself to the voice, to the fire, to the mountain, letting it flood his body with its power, drive his limbs on and up in paces that were suddenly light and easy, like the dance of flames.
He looked up. The whole mountainside was pulsing with flame, flame from the spirit world, the world of the Angels of Fire, invisible except to eyes that could see through the sense of fire. Beside him the mule plodded on unnoticing, seeing only the everyday mountainside. Alfredo saw it rippling with the colors of sunset, like a monstrous ember, and the crag he was aiming for not as a darker jut of rock, but as a white-hot focus of the mountain’s power, bright as the sun-stuff in the salamander’s furnace.
The crag came closer and closer, but all the time, from behind him, he could sense the onrush of the Master’s rage, rapidly gaining on them, sweeping up the hill, faster than any human, any mule or horse, could climb. Just as they reached the crag Toni gave a shout of warning. Alfredo switched hands on the bridle, turned and looked back. The fire vision cleared from his eyes. For a moment there was nothing to be seen, and then the Master burst out from among the trees.
He came in the form of a compact rolling cloud, denser and darker than the thickest smoke and full of orange lightnings. Alfredo’s stomach shrank inside him. How could he ever have imagined he could face this thing? And he was nowhere near where he had wanted to be, high up the slope, close to the heart of the mountain and its inmost fires, before the struggle began. But his only hope was still to stick to his plan. The crag was at least a place from which some of the powers of the mountain could be drawn. Uncle Giorgio had no such advantage. He let go of the bridle, turned aside, and put his back to the rock. The mountain spoke to him through it.
Yes, here! it said.
He squared his shoulders, raised his head, filled his lungs and sang.
“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away. And like as wax melteth at the fire, so shall the ungodly perish at the presence of God.”
Inwardly the mountain stirred. Something inside Alfredo came alive at the words, his own birthright of rage and the desire for vengeance as he had first become aware of them, lying on the old lava flow across the driveway and listening to the far voices of the salamanders telling him what his uncle had done. He gathered that anger into a compact and burning force and drove it down toward the thing on the slope.
The thing halted. It changed shape, grew a head, arms, legs, human in form, but monstrous. Monstrous in its size, in its horror, in its power. It raised its arms in front of it, and power streamed out of them, visible, implacable, a rolling wave of the same dark smoke-stuff advancing steadily up the slope, its wings moving faster than the center, curving forward into an arc, ready to close round Alfredo, deceiver and betrayer of the Master, and engulf him. Where was Toni? Why wasn’t he helping? Dimly he remembered seeing him climb on past the mules as he had turned to face the Master.
He called the powers of the mountain back, focussed them through himself and beamed them against the wave. It halted, swirled into a vortex, a whirlpool of smoke-stuff that simply sucked them in and made them part of itself. Then it came on.
His resolve, his awareness of his own power, wavered. He sensed another power nearby, above him. He glanced up. Toni was there, on the lip of the crag, facing the coming wave, his recorder ready at his lips.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. Desperately he sang on.
“O God, when thou wentest forth before the people, when thou wentest through the wilderness, the earth shook and the heavens dropped. …”
High and fierce, the notes of the recorder threaded the human voice.
Now the mountain answered. Below, behind and above him Alfredo felt the surge of its anger. There was a deafening groan. The whole slope heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. The mules, which had been waiting patiently just below him, apparently oblivious to the struggle, lost their footing. The hind one fell, dragging the other down and its harness free of the cradle, then struggling to its feet and bolting away along the slope. The lead mule rose and reared, squealing. The cauldron was tossed out and came slamming down onto a boulder. The lid flew off and the contents spilled down the slope, with the salamander floundering helplessly in the sun-stuff. It raised its head and gave a piercing scream, a note of pure agony. As if at the sound, the mountain tore itself apart.
The rent opened almost at Alfredo’s feet, releasing a blast of sulphurous heat, forcing him back. The salamander shrieked again. He glanced down the slope and saw that the cloud was now barely twenty paces below the crag. He could see nothing beyond. In a few heartbeats it would all be over. But there was still time for one part of his revenge. The leather apron that Toni had used to handle the bucket had fallen out of the harness as the mules had bolted. He ran, snatched it up and darted across to the salamander. Its golden body, exposed to the naked air, was now streaked with black. It was dying like a dying coal as the heat faded from it, while it desperately tried to drag itself toward the fiery crack that had opened in the mountainside. Alfredo wrapped the apron round his hands, snatched the salamander up, darted back as close as he could get for the heat, and tossed it into the chasm. His hair and eyebrows were scorched before he turned away.