No wonder, then, that those who lived at the foot of the mountain looked forward to Toni’s Mastership with hope.
Alfredo was aware of all this, but just now was wholly absorbed in the music—not, like Toni, rapt and oblivious in his singing, because his own voice was in the process of breaking and he was singing almost sotto voce, glad of the confident baritone beside him. Instead he was listening critically to the sounds from the choir. It was now four months since he and Toni and Signor Pozzarelli had traveled to Palermo to look for a professional choirmaster. Toni had offered a suitable salary to compensate for the move to a small provincial town, so they’d interviewed several applicants and chosen the youngest, himself a one-time choirboy, now at the start of his career. His effect was already noticeable. The setting of the psalm was ambitious for a country church, but the choir were making a go of it. The new tenor held things together, and both old basses were improving Sunday by Sunday. Best of all, everyone, even the most recalcitrant treble, was beginning to sound interested.
Yes, Alfredo thought, he could live with this. There was no need to break his ties with the mountain, as Father had been forced to do. The new house, when it was built, up among the vineyards, would not be a copy of the old one. He and Annetta and Toni had discussed it in detail. It would in fact be two houses to start with, one for Annetta and Toni and himself to live in like ordinary people, with Annetta still doing most of the cooking, and a girl, perhaps, to do the cleaning. But that would be screened behind a much grander-seeming main house, with space for a sensible level of entertaining, including, of course, a music room. One day, probably, Toni would marry—though it was no use the two Signorinas Ricardi competing with each other in cuteness and coyness from across the aisle. He would choose a girl who wanted to live the kind of life he liked—the innkeeper’s younger daughter seemed a good bet, and Annetta approved of her. But even when a third house had to be built for them the new Casa di Sala would still be smaller than Uncle Giorgio’s. And it would feel like somebody’s home.
But that wasn’t a matter of bricks and tiles and beams and furniture and so on. A home is a place where a few people feel at home with each other, and Toni and Annetta and Alfredo already felt at home in the farmhouse they’d moved into—one of Toni’s that happened to be empty. Alfredo didn’t think much about his own future beyond the next few years. One day, presumably, he, too, might marry and have children—not just to ensure that the mountain would always have a di Sala to be its Master—but it was still hard for him to imagine it. Rather less vaguely he hoped to travel, and listen to the great choirs of Rome and Venice, and farther afield—there was said to be wonderful music in Vienna, and even in far-off London. But however far he went and for however many years, one thing was certain—he would in the end come back. He had given himself to the mountain, and the mountain had saved him. These fields and vineyards and olive groves, these woods, this single, harsh, barren peak with the undying fire beneath it, this was where he belonged, and nowhere else.
PETER DICKINSON is the author of many books for adults and young readers and has won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal (twice), the Guardian Award and the Whitbread Award (also twice). His novel Eva was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Fiction Honor Book. Eva was also selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, as were his novels AK and A Bone from a Dry Sea. The Lion Tamer’s Daughter and Other Stories was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal. His most recent book was The Ropemaker, which was selected as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Peter Dickinson has four grown children and lives in Hampshire, England, with his wife, the writer Robin McKinley.
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Copyright © 2003 by Peter Dickinson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dickinson, Peter.
Tears of the salamander / Peter Dickinson.
p. cm.
Summary: When Alfredo, a twelve-year-old choir boy in eighteenth-century
Italy, loses his family in a fire, he goes to live with Uncle Giorgio, who he
discovers is a sorcerer in control of the fires of Mt. Etna with sinister
plans for his nephew.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54793-4
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Fire—Fiction. 3. Salamanders—Fiction.
4. Singing—Fiction. 5. Uncles—Fiction. 6. Orphans—Fiction. 7. Etna,
Mount (Italy)—Fiction. 8. Italy—History—18th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D562Te 2003
[Fic]—dc21
2003000584
v3.0