The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Conrad turned his head to share a look of congratulation with Ferdinand—but the King stared off towards the south-east, as if there were not an opera being sung within paces of him.

  Something’s wrong, Conrad realised.

  Ferdinand abruptly strode towards the south-eastern side of the amphitheatre. Conrad forced himself bodily, painfully, away from the singing, and followed.

  “Sir, what—”

  “Look.”

  The archway entrance framed everything beyond it, distinct and clear as a watercolour miniature.

  The King stared with intensity into the south and east.

  Rock thundered up from Vesuvius: boulders and cumulo-nimbus dust flooding up into the lightning-threaded pillar.

  Ferdinand was not looking at it. He stared through one of the arched openings towards the hills where the Grotto of Posillipo cut through, and the sea beyond that.

  Absently, as if Conrad were one of his aides and advisors, Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily pointed towards the choppy blue waters.

  “We can’t see that from here.”

  “Sir?”

  “This land’s too low-lying.” The dusty creases in Ferdinand’s face deepened. He spoke quietly, under the penultimate scene of Reconquista and L’Altezza. “My Natural Philosophers warned me… If, one day, the lava beneath the Burning Fields should swell, and lift the land, then…”

  Then we’re standing on top of a hell about to be opened.

  Conrad made out the shape of Egg Castle on its tiny peninsula, but not the Palazzo Reale, or around the headland into the old city.

  He didn’t know the country well enough to guess how many inches of lift should be needed before they could see not only Vesuvius, but the waters of the Gulf of Napoli at its foothills, from here.

  Impossible that the solid earth itself should rise under my feet! And yet… “I believe Pliny wrote something the same.”

  As before—when he had visualised the sun, not rising, but rounding the curve of the earth as a racehorse rounds a bend in the course—his perceptions shifted. The physical earth, a byword for permanence, became a thin skin over magma and sulphur-gas, swelling like one of Montgolfier’s balloons.

  Ferdinand turned away from looking at Sorrento, and Amalfi. He gazed at Vesuvius, and made a choking sound.

  Far over the eastern hills, the lightning-threaded tower above Vesuvius faltered.

  Its upward eruption hesitated.

  —The ash and smoke column over Vesuvius dropped.

  It broke only for a moment. In a heartbeat, Conrad saw the boiling clouds of magma continue to blast upwards, threaded by jagged bolts of Galvanic force.

  The crater flooded over.

  Unimaginably-hot gas boiled over the lip of the crater and ran down the mountain-side—surged down, faster than a galloping horse—faster than a thought.

  Conrad felt the other man’s grip tighten, hard enough to bruise. The onrushing front of dirty-white cloud slammed into the outlying hamlets on the foothills. They were wiped out in a moment.

  “The Bay—!” Conrad’s heart stuttered in his breast with a brief moment of hope. Naples, across the bite that the Golfo di Napoli takes out of the land. Surely it can’t cross the sea—

  The surge did not die out on the lower slopes of the mountain, nor at the edge of the sea.

  It flowed out onto the water.

  The billowing front of the cloud shot out onto the waves without hesitation. White steam went up in gouts from the foot of the flow—steam that might even cushion it above the sea; buoy it up as it hurtled on.

  Seconds away from the city.

  Risen land or not, Conrad could not see around the headlands into Naples itself. He witnessed the blossoming grey cloud jet out across the waters of the Gulf, aiming directly for Naples harbour.

  The hills towards Posillipo cut off his view. He could only imagine what was happening seven miles away.

  Conrad shivered, picturing the boiling steam and rock surging up over the hills, towards the defenceless amphitheatre.

  Ferdinand breathed the words, as if the mountain itself could hear him. “We’re too far from the eruption—surely?”

  Will another six or seven miles save us from the volcano? Conrad wondered. I doubt it.

  Seven miles between Pozzuoli and Naples… Two hours or more for a man on foot. An hour or less for a man on a good horse. And for the edge of the cloud of ash and gas, rocks and fire, that has spewed out of Vesuvius—

  Minutes, only. The few miles between Naples and the Anfiteatro Flavio will make no difference. Such a distance was nothing when it came to Pompeii.

  “The Anfiteatro will be flooded by rock and gas before the Burning Fields can blow up.” Conrad was amazed to hear himself sound calm, even bored.

  It’s wonderful what panic will do.

  “We’re going to die.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily, in filthy uniform and aged grey by ash, gazed towards the scarred, steaming flank of the volcano. Conrad thought he must be picturing the streets of Naples now: super-heated ash and molten rock racing over houses and streets.

  Looks like neither side will get to finish the opera.

  Stubborn, something not optimistic enough to be called hope reasserted itself. Survival, perhaps.

  He reached out for the King’s arm and led Ferdinand back across the Anfiteatro Grande.

  Neither the singers nor instrumentalists moved, all their attention on the shuddering plume of rock jetting up from the distant mountain. They froze, Conrad thought, as if they thought how the collapse of the eruption might be worse than the eruption itself.

  He glanced swiftly at the opera of the Prince’s Men. The white figure of Leonora busily went from one to another of the singers, and back to the conductor. No one but Leonora moved.

  With a considerable amount of schadenfreude, Conrad thought. Yes, these things are different in performance than rehearsal!

  The concrete and brickwork of the arena floor had been worn by hundreds of years of weather and dirt, before il Principe uncovered it, and footing was everywhere uncertain. The King moved as if he were a blind man. The remaining captain of the King’s Rifles came forward as they returned, with a dozen men, who formed up around Ferdinand as personal escort.

  Conrad made quickly towards Isaura. “Paolo! If we can start again before they do—”

  Paolo’s gaze went past him. She pointed up.

  “Look at that…!”

  Light vanished.

  The very top of the amphitheatre seating vanished into surging waves of ash, boiling down from the obscured sky like sea-haze.

  Nothing so cool, so damp, as fog.

  Conrad’s flesh shrank. As if his bones could bodily cringe away from the extreme heat so few yards above—only a handful of seconds until death—a horrible death—skin crisped and fat melted, like a cooked animal, but all too fast to realise; a man’s body will be steam and gas within less than a heartbeat—

  He sprinted out across the arena, no thought in his mind except reaching Nora. Even knowing that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t cross twenty or thirty feet of open gap, he needed to get closer to her.

  It’s too much, even for her, she can’t survive it.

  The Prince’s Men can’t have intended this!

  A running body cannoned into him.

  Conrad stumbled over broken earth and fell, not so far from where the collapsed underground passageway split the amphitheatre. His hands smarted with grit. He pushed himself up onto his feet—and saw the Conte di Argente, equally stunned, scrambling up from where the collision had knocked him.

  A shriek, half pain and half joy, came from Leonora. Her hands covered her mouth. She stood in front of the other singers, staring up the ranked tiers of seating, poised on her toes—

  Conrad spluttered a hysterical laugh. She might have been a parlour-maid at a fair, entranced by exploding coloured fireworks. The incongruity of it made him choke.

  Rober
to stared, bewildered, first at Nora, then up at the top tiers of seating.

  Still tasting blood in his mouth, where he had bitten his tongue, Conrad stared where il Superbo did.

  White ash, swirling around the top of the amphitheatre. Swirling faster. Ash and superheated gas rose as if it were a blinding snowstorm.

  Lightning cracked through the Anfiteatro Grande, turning the clouds white like sunrise.

  A hot wind blew down around him, tightening around his forehead like an iron band, and centring in his right eye with an abrupt burst of hemicrania.

  One hand over his eye, sheltering it even from this light, Conrad watched the ash whip in wind-devils and tornadoes, circling lower, until he felt nauseous and dizzy trying to follow it.

  Cumulus clouds of ash and sulphur and fire flowed up and over the broken lip of the Anfiteatro walls, rolling further in, and further down towards the arena…

  Conrad barely noticed the musicians of the Prince’s Men, on the far side of the auditorium, surging down to the bottom of the steps.

  The white gases flowed in through every arched entrance, at every level of the Flavian Amphitheatre except the lowest. Any remnant of grass or scrub left after the Prince’s Men scraped the tiers clean now crisped up into ash. Bricks cracked under intense heat.

  Run! Conrad urged himself.

  His rational mind threw back the counter: Where?

  Nora didn’t run. She held her arms out, as if she welcomed the flow of magmitic heat; as if she thought she could not be harmed by it.

  A blast of air hit Conrad in the face, so sharply that he threw up both hands against it, uncovering his throbbing eye. Anticipation of scalding heat tensed his spine and shoulders—

  The air felt cold.

  No, not just cold, Conrad thought wonderingly.

  Frozen.

  It blew in his face for as long as a man might count five. A wind, cold as that in the passes over the Alps, chilled his outstretched fingers—and was gone. The air in the amphitheatre was only the warmth of early spring.

  “I don’t understand,” he breathed, barely conscious he spoke aloud.

  A few yards away, Roberto Capiraso made an incoherent sound, and turned his head frantically, staring around the stone bowl of the Anfiteatro Flavio.

  The great rolling clouds flowed in—and seemed somehow to clot.

  Conrad frowned.

  Clumps and clusters of ash grew smaller and more dense. Separating out, coalescing out of the storm. Smaller still: as if they were no more than the height of a man—

  Vapour and dust flowed into the amphitheatre, last remnant of the pyroclastic surges that must have devastated Naples.

  Out of it, now—created of its substance—onto brickwork that cracked as it cooled—the dead came walking.

  They took up ten or twenty rows of the upper seating easily, overflowing further down every moment.

  Lightning dazzled from the volcano’s towering pillar of cloud. Seen by violent splashes of light, Conrad made out first one man, then a woman, then three children running, another man… a dozen men… a hundred…

  Thousands, Conrad mutely thought.

  Filling the amphitheatre. Thousands of people.

  Precipitating out of the volcanic ash that has taken Naples.

  Sweat rolled down his temples, collecting coldly between his shoulder-blades.

  “Corrado! There—” Tullio’s hand caught at his.

  Grey gasses crept to the lowest of the tiers, close by. A figure emerged from the swirl of the pyroclastic cloud, all white and ash-colours—but solid; no ghost or apparition.

  He brushed himself off as he emerged, and ended still dusty with ash, but recognisably in the colours of human flesh. The man wore a smart police uniform with cape and gloves; his dead face white and his dead eyes lively with amusement.

  “Luigi?”

  It was impossible to say more. Conrad’s throat closed up with immediate overwhelming grief.

  Luigi Esposito seated himself on the lowest tier, one knee crossed casually over the other, as if he were still a living man. He removed his hat with its cockade and carefully brushed it, dust-coloured as it was.

  Conrad could not see what had killed him.

  Heat, pressure, lava, gas—it could be anything…

  Realisation hit him.

  Every man, woman, or child that walks out of the ash-cloud has Returned Dead from Naples.

  They walk so close together that their shoulders rub. Thousands—and still there seems no end of them.

  “The first miracle was clear air.” Conrad heard Tullio grunt assent. “And the second, freedom from any weapon that could strike them from a distance.”

  “Suppose this is the third, padrone.”

  “Part of it,” Conrad muttered.

  There’s whatever she plans to do at the last.

  Conrad turned away from his dead friend Luigi and stared across the broken earth, open pits, and sprawled hostages on the arena floor. The earth was chill underfoot. A last wisp of cloud covered him, briefly; he had to cover his mouth, and hack a cough that felt like cold nails in his chest, but the ash whirled and lifted, and took the feeling of suffocation with it.

  The Returned Dead, uncovered by the dissipating surge, occupied all the upper seats of the amphitheatre, and considerably further down the rows nearer to Leonora and her minimal scenery and other singers. In a theatre that is known to have seated forty thousand in its heyday, they make it a quarter or even a third full.

  Ferdinand’s mouth set in one hard line. “My people!”

  Conrad wished he was close enough to see Nora’s face clearly.

  Judging by how she stalked and gestured, driving her musicians back into place, there was nothing left now of the Contessa, or of the ferocious singer of Venezia. If she distantly seemed brought down to skin and bone, what was left was the stubborn, determined, charity-child, fire in her eyes to let her have her ambition’s way with the world.

  I wish I could get close enough to speak to her without shouting. Ask why she did this—because she has done this—

  “They’re her audience,” Conrad said aloud.

  Roberto Capiraso frowned. “They needed no audience in Indonesia.”

  “Then why else are they here?”

  Roberto shook his head. It was obvious he’d been told nothing about it.

  Economically making use of the people who formed her “blood sacrifice,” so that she can get emotional reactions to the black opera—

  If that’s so, why didn’t she do it before now?

  If Conrad walks across the arena and (supposing he survives) shouts and asks her what she plans to do—he knows she’ll tell him what il Principe have always claimed. Change the Mind of God.

  Is it for this she’s calling the recently dead of Naples back—?

  The ash-clouds flowed on down onto the middle rows of seating, and stopped. Luigi remained an isolated figure.

  Conrad took in, at a glance, the appallingly small number of men on their side. Ferdinand’s riflemen—those who were not prisoners—sprawled along the lower tiers, gabbling like old gossips as they stared up at the Returned Dead of Naples. That and the hostages formed any audience sympathetic to L’Altezza azteca.

  Conrad tried not to despair at the pitifully small number of singers and musicians. It may not matter.

  Roberto made some urgent explanation and left the King’s side; Paolo, violin in hand, strode with him back to their singers. Conrad followed. Sandrine and Spinelli stood hand in hand. Velluti absently dusted at his white robes, all his covert attention on Leonora, seventy yards away.

  “Corrado?” Brigida Lorenzani looked up from pinning a length of borrowed green cloth around her hips—torn from JohnJack’s robe, by the colour. It gave her an impromptu skirt under her shining breastplate. “What do we do? Is there anything we can do?”

  “Pick up from where we broke off,” JohnJack said, with a wary glance down the arena. “Corrado—we’re stronger if we have
her musicians too. If she can stop them panicking.” His dusty round face moved into a wry grin. “If her people are having hysterics, what are we supposed to do?”

  Conrad caught Paolo’s eye. She put her violin to her shoulder, with an encouraging word to Roberto Conte di Argente, and joined the oboist and flautist.

  Conrad halted beside the Count, leaning to look at the score one of the King’s aides held.

  Roberto gave an odd smile. “You trust me, then? Not to sabotage as I conduct?”

  “I don’t think you ever cared about the Prince’s Men. You played spy for them, and saboteur, but that was all for Nora. Now she’s—” Conrad spoke with all the control he could muster. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word betrayed. “—Lost your trust, you’ll do anything to see Reconquista fail. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  The Count snorted in sour amusement.

  “Besides,” Conrad finished, “guns have to start working again sometime. And then Tullio Rossi can shoot you dead.”

  “Not even killed by a gentleman. That will sting.”

  Despite the desperate strangeness of the situation, Conrad couldn’t help a snort of amusement.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and saw the Prince’s Men still stumbling about. Instinct moved him to turn, where he stood beside Roberto, and address the singers and musicians.

  “I think it’s simple.” Conrad spoke loud enough for the acoustics of the auditorium to let him be heard. “The Prince’s Men have brought an audience. Clearly, they think the Returned Dead are theirs. I say—I say we have to win their audience.”

  Light and shadow danced on the rough earth: the shadows of the ejection plume, and its lightnings. Distance dulled its fierceness.

  We’re not so far from Misenum, Conrad realised, where Pliny saw the eruption merely as an umbrella-tree of smoke pouring up into the sky.

  Pliny didn’t have to contend with what’s happening outside at this moment.

  And even so, Pliny the Elder went in ships to take off refugees, and met his death on those beaches.

  Conrad gathered his thoughts and his resolution. He pushed the pain in his skull as much into the background as he could. He met their eyes as he looked along the row of them, sitting on the first step: JohnJack, Sandrine, Brigida, Velluti. Paolo’s wide excited eyes, and the different but equally grave frowns of King Ferdinand and il Superbo.