Free Tears of the Salamander by Peter Dickinson Page A

him to be a child of some demon and would have killed them both. I took them in and sheltered them, and in return they work for me.”
    Alfredo had been mopping up oil from his plate with a corner of bread. He stopped for a moment, and then managed to carry on, still staring at what he was doing as if it had been all that mattered to him, but inwardly stiff with shock. It wasn’t the words, it was the tone his uncle had used, as if everything to do with the story disgusted him, and his own part in it had been a repellent duty. Father might have helped the woman in just the same way, and spoken of what he’d done in much those words, but oh, how different in feeling! No warmth of love and pity for the woman and her child, no heat of anger at the stupidity and superstition of the people, but cold contempt for both her and them, and most of all, or so it sounded, for the father and the defect in his seed.
    He looked up. Uncle Giorgio had re-opened his book but was still looking at him. He groped for a change of subject.
    “You wanted me to do something this afternoon.”
    His uncle breathed slowly out through his nostrils, as if clearing Annetta and her son from his mind, and answered in a more normal voice.
    “Go to your room and learn this by heart,” he said, drawing a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Both thewords and the music. You will not find it easy, as the words are Old Persian, but I have written them out as they are pronounced. The music is from the same country, and unlike either what you sang in the cathedral or the songs you seem to have picked up in the streets. I have used plainsong notation, as being the least unlike the Persian. Do your best. We have not many days before you need to be both word perfect and note perfect. Annetta will come for you when I am ready.”
    “Will you tell me what the words mean, Uncle Giorgio? It’s easier like that. That’s why I was keen to learn Latin. Some of the other boys didn’t—”
    “They would remain meaningless even if I told you. They are, in fact, in the sacred language of the Old Persian priests, who worshipped the sun. They used the chant to invoke certain powers that emanate from the sun. The ignorant might call them demons, but they are in fact Angels of Fire, such as were seen walking with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the furnace of King Nebuchadnezzar.”
    Alfredo studied the paper as he made his way up to his room. It seemed to have been freshly written, presumably by Uncle Giorgio that very morning. The music certainly looked strange, though the choir used to sing plainsong on Fridays in Lent, and some other fast days. Some of the longer notes were marked in a way he didn’t understand. The words were even stranger, full of letters that couldn’t possibly go together despite what Uncle Giorgio said—
zch, gj, qb
—things like that. How could he learn this stuff if he couldn’t even say it?
    He settled in the window, looking east across the strait.The sun had passed behind the house, but still lit the long slope below him, and the baked earth poured its warmth back into the slow wind that swept up from the sea. Other boys might have found its heat too much to bear, but for Alfredo it was strength, life, hope. He felt he was actually in the presence of those Angels of Fire of whom Uncle Giorgio had spoken, invisible but there, riding the hot wind. If the chant was for them, surely he could learn to sing it.
    A memory sidled into his mind. The harbor at home. Alfredo minding the donkey while Father inspected flour, dipping into the sack, running the fine, yellowish powder through his fingers, raising a palmful to his nose to sniff. The flour was of an expensive Moroccan wheat. The ship was from Tangier, very different from the French and Spanish vessels that mostly traded into this port, lower in the water and with a vast, striped sail that hung furled in sagging bundles from one long spar. There was a young man sitting cross-legged in