The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Something blazing and thick with black smoke smashed down from the ceiling of the auditorium. It vaporised the legendary chandelier of the Teatro San Carlo.

  The missile exploded against the far wall of opera boxes. All the space inside the auditorium shuddered, with the shock and violence of artillery-shot. Men and women in fine clothing spilled out of the opera boxes, into the empty air—falling—

  Clothes, and the curtains of the boxes, caught fire.

  Flame leaped up the tiers of seating, up to the galleries exposed to the air—

  Conrad seized at his head, pain blazing along every suture of his skull. Human sound cut the smoky air, ripping into him. The squeal of benches forced across floors—the pounding thud of feet pushing past their neighbour—voices going up in shrieks, shouts—

  As if every one of three thousand men and women struggle, shove, fights for the exits—

  Plaster sheeted down. Splintered wood bounced down and hit the stage. Internal and external pain met.

  The stage floor shook under Conrad’s feet, lifting him. Floorboards flipped up over joists. He threw out his arms instinctively, catapulted forward—

  Plummeting into agony, on his back, half-off the front edge of the stage—

  High over his head, the domed roof of the Teatro San Carlo opened in a lethal flower of marble, brick, and rubble.

  CHAPTER 46

  Everything under Conrad jolted and unsteadily vibrated. A grinding sensation reverberated in his bones.

  Darkness slammed down.

  Conrad clawed, enveloped thickly. Something blinded him; robbed him of air. He thrashed with unconstrained violence. Encumbrance, and the pain of migraine, sent him into true panic.

  —Sudden light.

  The sear and crack of lightning iced the world with white.

  Conrad rolled out of entangling, choking cloth.

  He dropped a foot or so onto his back, hitting wooden planks with his shoulder-blades and the back of his skull. The blast of pain seared so strongly that he bit his tongue, and spat red, swearing blasphemously.

  Dazzled, the sensation of touch told him the cloth in his hands is velvet.

  —Is the blue stage curtain that collapsed when the house shook.

  Conrad broke out in a sudden, painful, coughing laugh. “Fuck—!”

  Scenery flats leaned crazily overhead. Ceiling and floor shook and jolted, in a series of violent knocks. The stage stood up broken—boards tilted crazily up—trapdoor entrances gaping blackly to the cellars. Sprawled bodies lay among rubble. Fleeing figures ran crazily here and there, screaming.

  Pain filled his vision with black sparkles.

  Noise stampeded past him. Men making for the exit? Fire and black ash leaped up drapes, scenery, a woman’s long skirts. A boot landed squarely on his chest.

  A choked-off scream took all his breath.

  Squinting, he found he could see no more than ten or fifteen feet in any direction. A yellow-grey haze filled the opera house.

  Is it fire?

  Is something wrong with my eyes?

  Everything hurt. Every part of his body.

  But everything hurt before.

  There was no blood.

  As well as the hemicrania, his head and back felt physically bruised, as if beaten with clubs.

  Conrad rubbed at his eye-sockets savagely, until tears ran and cleared dust out of his eyes.

  Weak sunlight drifted in through the hole in the theatre’s roof.

  In the vast open air, where there should be song and music, something pale and grey sifted down.

  In England, where it snows more often than here, they have long sunset winter twilights. Such a change from the latitudes where the sun drops into darkness in a matter of minutes. This light is exactly like such a twilight, on a day when it has snowed, and most things are lost in grey, but a few colours are resolvable.

  Snow falls white, but, when thick, makes the air look yellow with its fall. This, that falls now, might be snow… or smoke…

  Not a fault of the eye: something occupied the air. But—he managed to get up onto his knees—not smoke either. The gusts of smoke from the burning were black.

  I can smell something… something else. No idea what—no, I do know!

  A child, in Catania, scrambling up the moorland far enough to catch the taint of it on the wind. Sulphur, and lava, and a flat chemical tang. The smell of volcanic activity.

  Conrad caught grey foam on his palm, feeling it dusty and warm—and it was ash, he realised.

  Vesuvius.

  The ability to form thoughts returned to him along with the access to memory. Vesuvius.

  Is this…

  He reached automatically for the emotional atmosphere of musicodramma and it was shattered.

  Whatever L’Altezza azteca was doing—is gone.

  Is this the Prince’s Men’s victory?

  Vaffanculo! It must be! They can’t have been stopped, or the eruption wouldn’t be happening!

  Part of him demanded: How much time since—this—happened? The rest of his mind obsessively chanted: We lost, they won, we lost, they won—

  Distant screams came from the upper tiers of boxes.

  Brick and rafters exploded into the air.

  The floorboards under him thrummed like a harp. A dissonant crash raised clouds of dust; black rocks sprayed across the floor.

  Conrad staggered onto his feet. Tremors lost him his balance. He fell to his knees, swung himself violently back up into a square-set crouch—

  I have to get out!

  A swirl of air—no, sea-wind—blew inside the desolate building, clearing the haze far enough that Conrad could see from the stage to the exits.

  The further wall still burned. If there were people there, Conrad could not see them.

  I’m not shaking.

  It’s the earth that’s shaking!

  Something partially collapsed, behind him, in the deep backstage. Clouds of dust and ash pushed out into the air.

  Conrad crawled out from under the remains of the velvet and stood up. A quake shook him.

  He found that he was facing that part of the auditorium that housed the orchestra.

  It was buried under rubble, planks, and the end of an avalanche of bricks stretching up to the first floor boxes. Dust swirled over it, and flickering fires.

  His mind still moving like syrup in winter, Conrad only came up with… Isaura?

  “Isaura! Paolo!”

  For all his force, his voice didn’t penetrate the ash cloud wrapped around him. He choked, his mouth dry and dusty.

  “Isaura!”

  Nothing.

  He would have thrown himself on Roberto to strangle him, but the other man was not there.

  The building shuddered.

  Conrad staggered one step towards the auditorium, and froze.

  He dared not cross that open space under the uncertain roof.

  Stay away from the fire; go out the back way!

  He turned.

  Pain slopped around in him like water in a bucket. All he could do was clench his jaw and push himself onwards.

  The broken stage shuddered under him.

  He became conscious of distant roaring, like the looms in English manufactories. The boards trembled under his feet.

  He lurched forward, in a zigzag to-and-fro, like a man on deck in a hard sea. He tripped flat onto more swags of the fallen stage curtain.

  His shins hurt where he’d fallen over some concealed obstacle.

  Michele Angelotti’s magnificent step-pyramid, he realised. Fallen now. It must have come within feet of crushing him where he originally stood.

  He knelt up, hauled up the thick dusty velvet, and realised he was staring across the stage—what had been the stage—at one end of a diagonally-fallen roof-beam. The other end still perched somewhere up in the rafters, who knows how precariously perched.

  Under the fallen beam lay the body of a slight man in an Aztec robe and bronze head-dress, half-hid
den by the cubit-thick wood. The roof-beam smashed down, one end of it embedded into his hip and chest. His white robe was sopping red. Bone showed under broken metal armour, and pink guts spilled out of body-cavity.

  His dead face was undamaged.

  Lorenzo!

  Conrad thought dazedly, Leave aside the chest-voice high C and Lorenzo Bonfigli was probably the weakest singer among our principals. But he was generous when he sang; he never minded the person with him looking good. I never in six weeks heard anyone speak badly of him.

  Conrad clamped down on his sensitivities and knelt—swaying—to examine the body. He checked for a heartbeat and wiped the man’s face. A touch to his naked eyeball got no result.

  It was a relief to find that Lorenzo wasn’t breathing. What in God’s name could anyone do with him if he was still alive?

  Diego’s medieval armour was visible under Mazatl’s white robe, but it hadn’t saved him.

  Someone should take care of his body, but I can’t move him.

  Conrad climbed to his feet, not sure if he or the building swayed.

  And… he won’t be the only one.

  I need to get out of here before all the roof falls in.

  Two yards away, at what must be the very back of the stage area, the church-choir tenor who sang in the chorus of Aztec citizens lay with his head smashed open. Conrad pushed himself back up onto his feet. Texture warned him—he glanced back, and down.

  He had one heel on Michele Angelotti’s yellow curls.

  Angelotti’s body’s head flopped back when he touched it, neck broken.

  He balanced upright on the juddering stage, and saw Estella Belucci on her back. Still on her stage mark. A fine layer of yellow grit covered the mark, the stage, and Estella.

  Surely one’s alive. Conrad picked his way across the shuddering planks.

  Her hand felt warm. Her stage make-up was covered in a layer of fine white ash.

  So were her open eyes.

  His hand came out bloody from under the back of her head. Her skull felt like shattered eggshells in a bag.

  Something creaked above him—the sound of wood under strain.

  He released Estella and straightened up.

  It cracked and let go.

  Conrad flung himself forward. Rafters thundered down from the theatre roof. He fell into a backstage corridor and sprinted for the doors.

  Knocking one aside, that was half off its hinges, he tripped and pitched full-length on the ground.

  The impact stunned him. He rolled forward. The ground trembled under his raw palms. He got up onto his knees.

  “Corradino!”

  A body hit him. He registered a soprano squeal; solid weight.

  “Paolo?—We have to get out of the building!”

  Her frantic hands dragged him up onto his feet, still clinging to his coat. “I thought you were dead! Where have you been?—We are outside! It’s no better!”

  Conrad grabbed her shoulders—for support, he admitted, only to himself. Her blue tail-coat and breeches were uniformly dusty white. So was her hair, and her face, except where blood had run down her cheek and dried. He clutched at her. No obvious wound—

  He evidently had tumbled out through the San Carlo’s stage doors, into the yard at the back.

  But it might as well be indoors!

  A pale yellow-white ceiling swirled overhead. No sun, no clouds, no blue sky. The buildings close to the Teatro stood shrouded as if by snow.

  Those that stood.

  Continuous tremors shook grey snow from tree branches, windowsills, balconies.

  The world looked at if it lay shrouded not in snow, but in drift upon drift of Pozzuoli’s concrete. The road, under the bombardment of thousands of small rocks, might as well have been a stream-bed, black and steaming as if a dragon laired under it.

  The thought of underground fire, of Pozzuoli, gave him an instant answer.

  He seized Isaura’s wrist as she raised her hand to her face.

  She gave him a look of utter confusion.

  “I saw this through the King’s microscope.” Conrad coughed. “He has samples from the Pompeii eruption. Don’t rub your eyes. It isn’t ash from a fire, the way you’d think of it. It’s splintered glass.”

  “Oh Dio!”

  He didn’t release her hand; the grip was familial and comforting.

  The hiss and whoosh of artillery made him duck, pulling Isaura down with him.

  The explosion landed too far away to be seen in these streets of high buildings, but he felt it.

  Belatedly, he realised, Not artillery. The volcano. Rocks.

  “Estella and Lorenzo are dead.” He scrutinised Isaura’s face, feeling in her hair to discover where she bled. “And Michele Angelotti. And—I forget his name, the chorus tenor who came from San Gennaro’s.”

  She could not be more white and shocked. She gripped both his hands. “Corrado, come with me.”

  “Where—?”

  “Away from these buildings!” Paolo-Isaura pulled him towards the street. “It’s not safe anywhere in the streets! Buildings are collapsing! I’ve told anyone else I found to meet right out in the middle of the piazza. Away from everything.”

  A riderless horse galloped past the San Carlo. Conrad caught sight of a team of coach horses dragging an over-turned coach. Down the street, another team pulled the shattered remains of a barouche; something trapped under it that looked like a bundle of old clothes.

  Shouting and screaming filled the air: women, men, and children. Ash-fall flattened every sound.

  “How long since—?”

  His sister muttered, “Vesuvius? I don’t know—”

  He no longer listened.

  He staggered out into the wide piazza, away from the Teatro San Carlo and the Palace.

  That will let me see.

  “No, wait!” Paolo-Isaura clung to his arm, almost too heavy to be dragged, thin though she looked. “We have to hide you—”

  Conrad felt a sweat of cold fear on his neck, behind his ears, down his spine.

  He had reason to be aware of every yard of the seven miles or so that separated Vesuvius’s vast crater from the city. Twice that distance away at Cape Misenum, in the first century AD, Pliny had only been aware of a faint plume of smoke. Here…

  He couldn’t look away from the eruption cloud, black and purple, shot all through with lightning, and appallingly solid. As if someone had turned a powerful hose of earth on, and pointed it into the sky, and let it blast straight up…

  He couldn’t look at the top of the eruption cloud without tipping his head back far enough for his neck to crick, and his vertebrae to spurt pain across his neck, skull, and eye-sockets. Mesmerised, he stared up at the towering stream of cloud, ash and rock that jetted up towards the sky. Great cumulus clouds of ash rolled straight up out of the summit. The sun shone down on the black clouds and cast shadows of the eruption plume on the slopes.

  Spills of ash ran down the steep sides of the cone. Black earth sprayed up in what must be titanic quantities, to be visible in Naples itself. The solid-looking clouds rolled up in a pillar of ash, red at the base, now, and white at the very edges.

  Conrad craned his head back, staring up, heart in his mouth. Lightning zagged across the rising ash-plume.

  At some certain height—he could not even guess how far above the earth—the thundering pillar of ash ceased to jet upwards, and began to spread out. Tendrils of cloud reached across the sky, groping towards Naples itself. The spreading umbrella cloud would be invading villages and towns all around the slopes—but for some reason he could not take his eyes off the monster invading the coastline and sea between himself and the mountain. The shape of an umbrella pine, and its furthest reaching arms were shedding a black rain, that became a white snow where it was backed by buildings or hills. Falling ash…

  The earth continually quaked and shuddered underfoot. He wrapped his arms tightly around his sister, his chin resting on the top of her head.

&
nbsp; “We can’t stay here.” Isaura’s voice came muffled from his jacket.

  The last remnants of snow decorated the mountain’s summit, despite a late spring day below in Naples. Thunderheads of cloud rolled up from the mouth of the crater. Great bolts of lightning arced from one to the next—so loudly that he swore he could hear the lightning over every scream, sob, and shattering quake that shook the city.

  Conrad felt it more in his chest and gut than heard it with his ears. He felt a twist of cold fear. How am I supposed to protect her from this?

  “We failed,” he said bleakly, hugging Paolo closer, and feeling her grip on him tighten. “This is what they wanted. Naples is their blood sacrifice.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Paolo took her face out of his coat. Tears left runnels in the grey ash sticking to her cheeks.

  It will at least sluice the volcanic ash out of her eyes, Conrad thought. She put both hands to his coat collar and yanked it up.

  He hissed, knocked her arms away automatically, and swore at the fire of hemicrania stiffening his neck and skull with pain.

  “What are you doing!”

  “We have to hide you!”

  Standing under the spreading eruption plume of Vesuvius, Conrad wondered, mundanely, Have I gone as mad as I feel?

  “Hide? Me?”

  He couldn’t help equal sarcasm landing on each word.

  “Out in the piazza, they’re fighting—the men that came out of the Pit are just a mob!—some are terrified and some are furious—”

  Her voice rose. She made a visibly arduous effort at control.

  “Corrado, for Our Lady’s sake, don’t let anyone know you’re the poet of the opera!”

  Pain made him sharp. “What?”

  “I heard them talking—they’re all saying it was you that made this happen!”

  Conrad stared, so taken aback that he forgot to be terrified.

  Paolo-Isaura gestured at the ruined Palazzo.

  “They’re saying that your Terrore di Parigi got the Teatro Nuovo struck by lightning—and now your L’Altezza azteca has made Vesuvius erupt!”

  “But—But!”

  “First the Teatro Nuovo and now the San Carlo—It makes sense to them!”

  “But—! But the black opera—!”