The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “They don’t know there’s another opera!”

  Irony left him temporarily speechless.

  I’m to be blamed for this—for what the Prince’s Men have done—!

  Paolo tugged at his cuff. “I saw some of the others get out. Keep your head down! I can get us to them without being seen.”

  Conrad flinched. The volcano’s eruption grew louder and more violent. A sound like artillery split the air.

  Before he thought, he was crouched down behind the wall at the back of the San Carlo, Paolo held in his arms and sheltered by his body. Two—three—four explosions sounded. He tilted his head up and caught sight of a burning rock hurtling down. It buried itself somewhere streets beyond, but he felt the shock of its explosion.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Paolo yelped. He looked down to see her eyes wide. She muttered, “Now it’s throwing rocks at us! Let’s go!”

  Conrad scrambled up. He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick squeeze, and then turned his coat collar up as high as he could, his cravat pushed up over his chin.

  The ash in the air smeared his fingers—would be in his hair, he realised. I probably look fifty if I’m a day!

  No one will recognise young Signore Scalese.

  “Let’s go.”

  “This way!” Paolo caught his hand, and pulled.

  Conrad followed her, running over the rock-strewn, uneven earth towards the front of the Palazzo Reale.

  His feet thumped against the stone paving. Rock-bombs detonated above him: air-bursts that made him flinch, and swear at the fire of migraine inflaming every nerve in his body. He bashed his shoulder into one running man, and almost tripped over another.

  “Cor—Brother!” Paolo corrected herself.

  Conrad pinched the wing of his nostril, and the sharp, different pain did what he hoped. His eyes watered and ran, and he blinked away tears and ash. “I’m with you.”

  A skewer of pain pressed into his right eye, and made him absent from the world of fire and black smoke. He followed Paolo, her coat grey now with falling ash. He felt the continual vibration of the ground, and the rattle of falling brickwork. Skirting the edges of the crowds took him closer to the Palace, under the second-floor balcony from which the Kings of the Sicilies gave their speeches.

  A decorative stone pilaster separated from the balcony and smashed down on the piazza. Conrad grabbed Isaura around the body and hurried her forward, at moments lifting her off her feet; coughing as they kicked up almost weightless ash.

  He glanced back once, at the San Carlo’s roof, cracked open like an egg.

  In numb realisation, he thought, Whatever we created—it’s gone.

  With all the irony of a fourth Act reversal, Conrad’s betraying body eased. He felt his muscles unlock from frozen spasm. A warmth of relief spread through his nerves, and left a sluggishness behind.

  Vaffanculo! Why now? Why not before?

  A gust of hot wind met him as they ran out into the open space of the great square.

  Conrad clamped his handkerchief to his mouth. He heard Isaura wheeze, trying to breathe in the choking air. And I hoped it might be better close to the water!

  Paolo abandoned his side, pounding forward across the unpaved earth.

  Conrad’s heart jumped in his chest.

  He raked the bedraggled, bright group of people with an instantaneously-encompassing gaze—Sandrine, green and gold costume covered in ash, handing something over to Paolo—an instrument-case, he saw—and JohnJack in close discussion with Brigida Lorenzani and Velluti. Brigida’s plump face shone purple with exertion. At her shoulder—wonders!—the Conte di Argente.

  Roberto caught his eye. Under his neat but dusty beard, his lips moved in a small cynical smile.

  Yes, I thought you’d run, Conrad mentally admitted. Yes, I thought you’d be with Nora by now, no matter what—

  It was actually good to see Roberto, Conrad realised, dumbfounded. I suppose I’m—well—glad he’s not dead.

  He was dimly aware of Giambattista Velluti, babbling apologies for his truncated performance. Seeing Brigida, JohnJack, Sandrine, and Velluti—Conrad found he couldn’t help but look around for Lorenzo and Estella.

  His eyes stung, and not with the ash.

  With the skill learned on battlefields, he pushed the thoughts aside, mopped his streaming eyes, and looked up.

  And up.

  Now he was clear of the buildings, he could see clear across to the volcano—or as clear as the ash allowed. He could not now see the top of the eruption cloud over Naples. It was over his head, for all they must be seven miles from its base. The black column had visible spikes of lightning shattering back and forth across it. And the crown—

  Miles above him—miles above whatever heights the French aeronauts had reached in their balloon-flights—the black and violet cloud mushroomed out.

  Red lightning flashed in its depths.

  Smoke and ash thundered up from Vesuvius, still climbing, still shaking the earth and the sea like a terrier shakes a rat—

  Nothing much of Naples beyond this piazza was visible. He could just see through the white ash-fog, to men and women screaming through the streets, pulling their children and wagons containing their lives behind them.

  Conrad felt his palms sting. He realised his nails had bitten into the skin.

  He stared back at the root of the huge black column, ash and smoke and fire still rising, darkening the afternoon sky. Soft whiteness sleeted down on the waves.

  Air rasped in his throat, smelling of stone. His ribs felt heavy. He took a hand away from his mouth, and saw blood and ash on his knuckles.

  “Corrado! Paolo found you!”

  Ferdinand strode across the square in a thunder of bright uniforms: his personal guard of riflemen. The singers let him have precedence.

  “I was afraid you’d died in there, Conrad.”

  “Is it safe for you to be out here, sir? I’m told I’m responsible for this, and you hired me.”

  “You, responsible? Oh—after the Teatro Nuovo…”

  Ferdinand looked amused, for a moment, as Conrad had hoped he might.

  The weight of desolation came back into his expression. The King of the Two Sicilies glanced around. “Some of my bell-tower spies might be able to find me if they can see me…”

  Conrad had an idea he knew exactly what the King thought. We’ve lost Naples, and we don’t even have the consolation of beating the Prince’s Men…

  Paolo popped up beside him, instrument case clutched to her chest. Alfredo’s! he realised. Conrad brushed dust off the case of their father’s violin. He rested his arm around Paolo’s shoulders.

  The thought that insinuated itself into the shock of the last hour made its way into speech, without him having to think about it.

  “Sir—do you think the Prince’s Men have won what they want?”

  Nothing but darkness rose in the east. Ferdinand turned his head to look west, towards the afternoon sun, and Pozzuoli, and the Burning Fields. The golden light showed every crease in the skin around his eyes; far too many for a man not yet thirty-five.

  “Conrad, after this—” Ferdinand squinted at the desolation, where the houses of Naples ran out towards the Posillipo road. The sun made something beautiful of the ash-cloud sleeting down.

  “But I expected worse.” Conrad didn’t know the truth of it until he said it aloud. “Yes, this is bad—it’s the end of the city of Naples, like Pompeii, but…”

  Conrad gazed west, in the direction of the Campi Flegrei.

  No eruptions there.

  “Have we won?” he suggested cautiously. “Because of us, is this all the black opera could do?”

  “‘All’ is hardly the word,” the King snapped.

  Like the first silence of snow, ash flattened the distant roar of the eruption plume. Naples emitted no sound at all except human voices, and collapsing and burning buildings.

  “I expected worse,” Conrad repeated. “When Nora said she
was going to call up the Prince of this World…”

  Roberto gave his old sneer. “I assure you, if you had won, you would know about it! As for ‘gods’…”

  Another quake of the ground made Conrad almost lose his footing. Something deep in his gut insisted the earth should not move. He tried to ignore that primitive part of him that spilled fear all through his body. “Have neither of us succeeded, then?”

  Roberto Capiraso chewed his lip. The man gazed towards the unseen Burning Fields, as if he did not stand in a city of fleeing thousands, with an opera company around him, and the King of the Two Sicilies glaring to demand an answer.

  Conrad blinked dust from his eyes, wincing as an arc of afternoon light slashed through the eruption cloud. The sun in his eyes triggered realisation.

  “It’s still afternoon—not much past three, by the Sun—” Conrad met Roberto’s dark gaze, and saw confirmation there. “The black opera’s still playing! Aren’t they? They haven’t reached the end!”

  “Assume that Leonora began at much the same time as the San Carlo—” Roberto finally nodded. “They can’t yet be beyond the start of Act Three.”

  “Why are we debating this?” Ferdinand demanded.

  “We can still stop her!” Conrad was not aware, until he found himself staring the angry monarch down, how desperate and determined he felt that—whatever it was Nora did—it should be stopped.

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily glared at Conrad; at the aides and theatre crew surrounding them. “I want to know why Enrico and Alvarez haven’t blown them to shreds, yet!”

  This burning city has been Ferdinand’s responsibility since he came to the age of reason. Conrad bit back a snarl.

  “They may be dead,” he said gently. He suppressed the hacking cough that ash wanted to produce. “Sir, I understand that you’d prefer arrest, or military action, but—we know that, for some reason, that’s already failed. What I’m thinking… We still don’t know what the black opera might do. But we do know where they are. Or Enrico and the Colonel wouldn’t have disappeared.”

  He pieced it together slowly and carefully, looking around at JohnJack and the others as he did.

  “The black opera may do nothing—but we think it’s done this.” He gestured at the great plume of liquid rock that blasted into the sky. The admission was bitter on his tongue. “They did it to Tambora, in Indonesia. But they haven’t done more. Not yet.”

  Ferdinand rubbed his hand over his face, looking puzzled, and leaving a trail of grey ash across his skin.

  Conrad spoke carefully. “The San Carlo’s gone. But the opera—the operas—aren’t over. If they’re still singing Reconquista…”

  Ferdinand glanced over his shoulder, at the cloud-shrouded chaos of Naples. “There are no other houses—”

  “No, Sir,” Conrad interrupted. “You want to break up the black opera and arrest the members of the Prince’s Men—if that’s possible, then all well and good. If not—we have four of the best voices in Italy here. So let’s go to the Burning Fields. If we couldn’t out-sing them at the San Carlo—let’s go to the Flavian Amphitheatre and out-sing them there.”

  Conrad met Ferdinand’s gaze, and understood the man’s rigid pallor.

  I’m frightened for me and a handful of others. He’s frightened for every person in the Two Sicilies.

  The King ignored the exploding rocks that shattered in heat and ash, breaking the windows of the Bourbon-Sicily palace. “This—you prepared for this. You had the Count, here, transpose the voice parts…”

  “I didn’t prepare for this, exactly. I thought there’d be trouble, and that—” The faces of Estella and Lorenzo shone clear in his mind’s eye. “—And that there might be casualties.”

  Ferdinand glanced over at the bedraggled singers, costumes dropping pins and strips of fabric, tawdry in the outdoor air. Conrad felt as if he were on the verge of a cavalry attack; all nerves, excitement, fear, and exhilaration.

  Casually, even insolently, Conrad called over to the group of singers, chorus, and musicians that had collected around them on the piazza. “He says, will we go sing il Principe into the dirt?”

  Some of the answers were in thick Neapolitan, some were in the pure Italian of Tuscany. JohnJack said it best:

  “Fuck, yes!”

  Paolo almost danced from one foot to the other. “We were having a success! You heard them, sire! Right up to the minute we started seeing a version of Pliny the Younger, the audience was in South America with Hernan Cortez and the Aztecs. We’ve lost the stage. We’ve lost most of the instruments—but they’ll be playing the same music. So long as we have voices, we still stand a chance. Catso! It doesn’t matter if it’s a concert performance so long as we sing!”

  Ferdinand’s gaze turned distant with calculation. “I’ll send messengers for ship’s marines, sailors, and the rest of our own riflemen, we’ll collect up any other members of L’Altezza, and go down to the royal quay and aboard the Roberto Guiscardo to Pozzuoli. That’ll be far quicker than any roads to the Anfiteatro.”

  Conrad remembered the morning as if it were centuries ago. That’s right. He sent a patrol down to Pozzuoli.

  The officer in charge of the King’s yacht would have ordered it to return, in case the King should have need of it.

  Conrad faced about to take a head-count of singers and crew. It was some minutes before he had a group collected.

  “Follow me!” the King called. He broke out coughing himself, and strode off through the ash-fog

  Conrad followed Ferdinand around the end of the Palazzo Reale complex of buildings, and down a private road, busy with shepherding members of the company. Halfway down the once-white marble steps that led to the King’s private dock, he realised:

  Didn’t they find Adriano Castiello-Salvati here?

  Something bumped his arm. He glanced up to find it was Ferdinand, shading his eyes with both hands, staring out at the ash-darkened Bay beyond the King’s Dock.

  The dock was bare.

  It had occurred to Conrad not long after he began the libretto—in fact, while he was in prison—that in the event of the Prince’s Men having a genuine ability, the central administration of the Sicilies would have to be evacuated.

  Conrad had thought cynically that, among the things that needed to be saved from Naples, there would be a significant amount of the Treasury, which could not be moved before, in case it gave things away to the Prince’s Men.

  Has someone made off with that?

  Ferdinand faced about. “There she is!”

  The King sounded unusually relieved. He led off, back towards the piazza. His troops encompassed the San Carlo singers, making an arrowhead of purpose among thronging, panicking crowds.

  Conrad took advantage of his height to crane over their heads, as they came to the edge of the square. Swirls of ash and smoke rolled in—and a sea-wind caught them, blowing Conrad’s vision clear.

  From the road running around the Bay, he could see as far as the yacht Roberto il Guiscardo.

  The white yacht didn’t move—must be anchored out in the harbour, Conrad realised.

  “Why hasn’t it come in to moor at the King’s Dock?—Merda!”

  He couldn’t help rubbing the heel of his hand across his eyes. Leaking tears, and the wind off the sea, cleared his vision.

  “O ciel!” Paolo whispered, at his side.

  Hundreds of small boats surrounded the Roberto il Guiscardo.

  Men—and women, and children—scrambled frantically up the yacht’s curved wooden sides, over the rail, in through the gun-ports, up the rigging—

  All of them refugees from Naples, all terrified of the black column of ash searing into the air over the city. Even at this distance Conrad could see that the ship’s rigging shone white, covered in a pale layer of ash.

  The Roberto Guiscardo, top-heavy with people and volcanic ash, rolled over and sank.

  CHAPTER 48

  Conrad stared, open-mouthed.

  I did not j
ust see a ship disappear!

  I did not just see our last chance to get to Nora disappear.

  Ferdinand shouted urgent orders to his men. Conrad was dimly aware of him arranging a rescue, rationalising the efforts of all the small boats paddling and sailing about, picking up swimmers.

  “Horses.” Conrad spoke aloud. “We might still get through by road.”

  “Have you seen them!” Roberto Capiraso kicked at the increasing layer of ash and coughed. “If you mounted up and fought through these mindless idiots—it would only be for the beast to break a leg a hundred yards on.”

  Grimly, Conrad realised: The man is right.

  He looked to see if there might be other ships the King could commandeer. Nothing.

  Everything that has the ability to float has put out to sea.

  He recalled the King saying the Prince’s Men survived Tambora that way.

  A glance over his shoulder showed him the streets around the Palazzo Reale crammed full of people, shrieking and running. They wanted their King’s help; so much was evident.

  “Every street around here will be blocked. We won’t get a carriage out of Naples by any road. If we make it to the harbour, we won’t find more boats than there are here. Without the Guiscardo we’re stuck here.”

  Conrad refused to look up over the roofs of buildings at the searing plume of Vesuvius’s eruption. My knees are weak enough as it is. Seeing it again might rob him of all ability to act. He concentrated his vision on the shoreline of Naples harbour—seeing how the water pulled back a little, exposing the beginnings of mud—and on the thronging fishing boats and small craft.

  Even if we could use them, we can’t get to them.

  Conrad turned to speak to the King.

  Ferdinand’s expression changed.

  It brought Conrad’s head around in the direction the King was looking, so fast that his neck cracked.

  The shape became clear on the murky water, emerging from ash. Masts, with topsails set; prow, gun-port, sail—

  A lean, rakish forty-gun frigate curved into the Bay of Naples.

  “That ship.” King Ferdinand snapped his fingers at one of his lieutenants.