The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “That there’s no God to answer her?” Conrad prompted.

  Before Roberto could answer, Luka Viscardo’s corvid profile drew Conrad’s eye.

  “I believe I see the difficulty.” The Canon-Regular gazed at the collapsed subterranean passageway that separated them as if he hated every brick and clod of earth—and every foot of open air.

  And especially those beyond it.

  Conrad felt every singer and member of the San Carlo opera felt their dusty, gritty, dirty appearance to the full under that censorious gaze.

  “The reason that God has not smitten this enemy, these heretics, this atheist—” Pure hatred illuminated the last word. “—Is that it is our task. The Heavens have not smitten your heretic opera because our first task is to wipe you out.”

  Before Conrad could respond to Viscardo, or let loose the anger that boiled inside him, Leonora stepped past the Dominican canon and surveyed the whole amphitheatre of the Dead.

  “God is capable of making that known, if it’s His will,” she said, deceptively quiet.

  Conrad caught Roberto in a wince, out of the corner of his eye. He knows that tone too, does he? Yes, I suppose he would.

  Lightly, as if he didn’t feel that he bled to look at her, Conrad said, “Your Prince doesn’t seem to be saying much.”

  The younger Silvestri, the Conte di Galdi’s son, raised his voice, glaring at Conrad, Ferdinand, and all and the group standing by the King of the Two Sicilies.

  “We know the desires of the Prince!” A little sententiously, Niccolò di Galdi observed, “Our reward is in Heaven, but our work starts here—we will rule at the side of the Prince of this World! As for you, sire, I regret to say that the theocracy of the Two Sicilies will have no room for Kings.”

  Conrad took a pace forward, putting himself in front of the group of singers and crew.

  “To have a theocracy, you have to have a deity.”

  Conrad waved a dismissive hand at the ranks of the Returned Dead.

  “And to me, it doesn’t sound as if you do.”

  “He may.”

  The interruption came unexpectedly from that quarter of the seating where Luigi Esposito sat among his fellow Returned Dead.

  “We might be God. For example, we can tell you what happens now with Stromboli, Vulcano, Ætna—all of them break and send fire into the air. If I have such knowledge, am I not God?”

  Conrad cast an eye up at the cumulus-cloud-and-lightning darkness of Vesuvius. “Or that could be a very mundane good guess.”

  Luigi’s face has that alert light that means he’s enjoying an argument—any argument, for the sake of an argument—

  Conrad looked around.

  —and that expression appears to have spread to others of the Returned Dead.

  Of course it has! They may have come back from the Dead, but first and foremost, they’re from Naples!

  The gaze of tens of thousands of dead eyes was nonetheless unnerving. Conrad said, “Suppose you do turn out to be knowledgeable and powerful—and for all I know, loving!—does that make you a deity? Or does that make you just a very powerful and old phenomenon?”

  Leonora appeared in his field of vision. She stood on the opposite side of the chasm, a few feet back from the edge.

  If she seemed to address the Returned Dead on the north-western side of the amphitheatre now, Conrad felt the burning of her attention on him like sunlight.

  “This shall be settled.” Leonora sounded grim. She stretched out her arms to the tiers of Dead. “Tell us. Are you the Prince of this World?”

  “No.”

  Conrad barely caught the simple sound before it was gone.

  No?

  Did they say—?

  Leonora, her own voice steady, demanded, “Tell us. Have you broken the rule of the Creator-God? And cured the world’s pain?”

  “No.” The syllable fell into a waiting utter silence. “No.”

  They stared at each other, the Dead in unison and Leonora Contessa di Argente.

  Conrad only looked at Nora. Her chin rose perhaps a quarter of an inch. Nothing but that, and the tightening of the skin at the corners of her eyes, told him how she took her utter failure.

  “How could you do this to us!”

  The voice was not one of the Returned Dead. Conrad recognised Enrico Mantenucci’s accent.

  “We are good men!” The police commandatore held out his hands. “Our hands are covered in blood for you!”

  Leonora had the ability to make even the most ridiculous opera costume look like clothes: Conrad had noted it in Venezia. Now she walked around the arena, surveying both the Returned Dead and the Prince’s Men, and she moved as if the gilded leather sandals and embroidered blue and gold robe of Queen Isabella were perfectly normal to wear, in the location of a Roman ruin, during the eruption of a volcano.

  Roberto, beside Conrad, said, “She’s beautiful.”

  His voice was choked by more than ash.

  “She walks as if we were safe, here.” Conrad recalled being shown a layer of yard-deep volcanic ash cement beneath the foundations of the Angevin Old Palace, that showed Vesuvius had certainly not been idle for all its centuries, and had reached as far as Naples at least once before.

  She turned her head, surveying the ranks of the dead, dusty in their glorious return to the world of the living. Conrad saw she didn’t fix on any one face when she asked her questions.

  “Some things are beyond your powers,” she speculated aloud, as if she wanted the voice of thousand to confirm it.

  “They are.”

  “And you have no solution for the pain of the world.”

  “It’s written into the construction of the universe,” the voices said, and Conrad could not help looking at the one face he knew.

  Luigi Esposito seemed to have as little individuality as a singer in a choir.

  “Written heart-deep,” the voices in unison said. “So that everything is either predator or prey; predator on what is below it, and prey for what is above. Disease preys on your children only so it can breed, as you do. Faults and mistakes and happenstance are embedded into the world, since in this world they are the only way to bring about change. If there were a God, to alter that—to do it, they would have to destroy the universe and begin again.”

  “You think I wouldn’t ask it?” Leonora muttered under her breath, as argumentative as Conrad had ever heard her. “You’re the god we have—what’s your justification for the existence of pain?”

  “Pain is a consequence. Pain is a protection. Pain is the thread that runs through all life, plant to animal.”

  Conrad said, frustratedly, “It’s not that it won’t answer. It’s that we don’t know the right questions to ask. Or we don’t have the knowledge to understand what the answers mean.”

  He wanted to step forward and put his arm around Leonora, as he always used to; leaving the choice to her of whether she accepted the touch or moved away. That he couldn’t reach her…

  The voices said, “I don’t have the power to end all the world.”

  Leonora snapped, “And you can’t bring about a solace for the pain of it? Create a reward for us, after our suffering here? Give us the afterlife that the churches promise, so that what we’ve endured here will cease to matter?”

  Conrad thought his heart stopped. Just the idea that all the tenuous dreams of the loved dead alive again, an eternity in a world of beauty and no pain, had been for a moment in reach… His throat closed up so that, when he cleared it, the noise came out closer to a sob.

  He thought there was a slight intake of breath, magnified through thousands of throats, as if the voice felt an emotion all too human, like regret.

  “If I could do it, I would,” the voice said, “but that’s beyond me. The world has a billion of you, and I am strong in their strength, but it’s not enough for me to create worlds for each of you after you go through the process of death. I focus all that I am to infuse a vital spirit into those few of you who
need to Return. There’s nothing else I am powerful enough to do.”

  Leonora took a number of swift paces across the rock-starred earth, not tripping, her blue and gold robe whipping around her ankles as she turned.

  “So you can’t mend this world?”

  “No.”

  “And you can’t make enough of an afterlife for us, to forget how much pain and grief and suffering we go through here?”

  “No.”

  “Then—” Leonora straightened, surveying the rising ranks of dusty figures. “Then what can you do? Vaffanculo! What fucking good are you?”

  The pause lasted long enough for Conrad to feel the stone amphitheatre floor shake under his feet with the first quiverings of an earthquake, and hear the distant explosions of rock-bombs plummeting down onto the Burning Fields.

  Each mouth moving in unison with the next, the Returned Dead gave voice again: loud enough to be heard by all.

  “I can tell you the truth.”

  The silence was intense enough that Conrad heard the sulphur pools bubbling beyond the walls of the Flavian amphitheatre.

  “What?” Leonora said flatly. “You can what?”

  “I can tell you the truth, as we know it. If I don’t know, I will tell you so. No riddles, no prophecies, no revelations. Ask, and if I can answer, I will.”

  The idea of such an opportunity had Conrad frozen, dumb.

  Not God… but if it had the knowledge of something we’d call godlike?

  “If you have no afterlife, is there a god that does? Do we have souls? Do they end in Paradise? Or twittering like ghosts in a world of grey? If our idea of god is wrong, what about the others—have you knowledge of Buddha, or the Muslim god, or the god of the Protestants?”

  He became aware he was gesturing wildly, and willed his hands to his sides. Questions tumbled out:

  “Why are we the only species that’s evolved to think? Are we the only species that’s evolved to think? If pain is the deity teaching the world, what is it teaching the mastiff or the donkey, when they’re beaten daily? Why are men such fools? Why are men such geniuses?”

  A beat of silence filled the ash-shrouded world.

  Leonora, almost absently, said, “Why were there so many subjects willing to be your mouthpiece?”

  Lips moved in unison. “That I can speak through them is convenient for me. But they returned because they each consider that, given the manner of their sudden deaths, they have unfinished business on the face of the Earth. They may be speaking for me now, but they’re still the people of Naples, and they want their children, their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and cousins and god-parents; they want everything that you ripped from them with the eruption of the mountain.”

  Leonora’s pacing abruptly stopped. She didn’t pale—for all he knew, Conrad thought, she couldn’t—but she looked abruptly as if she were fifty years old. “I… I didn’t… I meant…”

  “You did,” the unison voices said. “You took them out of their lives, to give you a channel to the God who made the world. They’re Neapolitan, and stubborn, so more came back than you planned for. I think they plan to stay.”

  A voice from the side of the stage area, irritated, said, “Why waste your time speaking with what’s obviously a demon sent to mislead mankind? You—”

  Leonora didn’t address the man—one of the clerics of the Prince’s Men, Conrad saw. She turned on her heel and gazed up at the ranked dead. “Did any of them find a heaven waiting when they died?”

  “No.”

  It’s one thing to be an atheist by rational conviction and experience. It’s quite another, Conrad thought, to hear all the dead themselves tell you that the heaven of which your parents, tutors, priests, and friends spoke so definitely isn’t there.

  Or at least, is not in the memory of those who have died.

  Or seem to have died.

  We know so very little, and each answer inevitably opens up more questions!

  He missed the officers of the Prince’s Men interrupting Leonora and her response to them. A touch against his upper arm proved to be Isaura, eyes dark, looking in her spoiled evening dress like a refugee on the return from Moscow, or a particularly debauched evening out.

  “Corrado, what will you ask?”

  “I—” have no idea, he had been about to complete, when his thoughts took over his mouth.

  He turned to the dusty people on foot or sitting on the ruined stone stands.

  “Why are there ghosts, if there’s no Heaven to be banned from, or no Hell to go to?”

  To his surprise, he was answered; thousands of different mouths moving with the same sounds.

  “Some of the dead come back in bodies. Some come back only in minds. Through my focus, they form themselves as they wish. Or some, perhaps, as they feel they’re obliged to.”

  It would have been possible to ask which group Alfredo belonged to, he knew. Conrad deliberately let the opportunity pass. There was nothing about his father that he had not had answered by the man’s actions in life.

  He noted Leonora stood back and let him continue.

  Conrad said, “Are we capable of creating a god?”

  Movement caught his eye, off to one side, where the stones of the Anfiteatro’s stands crumbled, sliding in a cascade of dust down to the floor. A roll of heat came off the crack that opened, and he smelled the unmistakable scent of lava.

  “God-like? Perhaps. A god in the sense that people mean the word? No.”

  Conrad couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or relieved.

  Was I asking because I wanted there to be a supernatural power for each of us? Or because I was afraid that the Prince’s Men, if it could be done, would have no compunction in doing it?

  His gaze took in Luka Viscardo, among the Dominicans in the yet-living part of the audience.

  And I suppose Signore Viscardo wouldn’t hesitate to make doubly sure his god existed, and wasn’t being impersonated by a devil or demon or heretic deity?

  Or am I doing him a disservice?

  Leonora broke off from her discussions with her fellow Prince’s Men and strode back across the stage area. This time Roberto stepped forward, as if he would intercept her; their gazes crossed like swords.

  Conrad pulled him back by the arm, until he stood in the same group with Tullio, Isaura, and the King.

  “She has no idea what to do!” the Count whispered, sounding furious—with himself, Conrad thought, and not with Nora.

  “I do.”

  Conrad felt as if his head cleared. He nodded to his sister, and touched Tullio’s arm as he passed; acknowledgements, more than anything else, that he was glad to have them with him today.

  Five yards back from the stands, he cocked his head and looked up at them, rank on rank of Returned Dead, right up to the skyline.

  “Excuse me.” Conrad let what determination he had cut through the interruptions by the Prince’s Men. Heads turned to look at him, all as one.

  “I have a question,” Conrad said. “Can you control the eruptions of Vesuvius and the Burning Fields? Ætna and the others too, maybe, but, selfish as it sounds, here in particular. Is there anything you can to do to stop the volcanic eruptions before all of the Phlegraen Peninsula and Naples goes up?”

  The Dead surveyed him. He caught a smile—Luigi’s, he noted, seeming almost individual.

  “I know what has been seen,” the voices said. “Thick lava moves slowly, sticks in the stone throats of volcanoes, and they erupt. Make molten stone thinner, and no blockages occur. Lava will seep out onto the land, but that will be all. And—this I can do.”

  “Wait a short time,” the voice that was not the Prince of the World added. “Until it’s safe to leave.”

  Conrad leaned forward, hands on his knees, head hanging down. He drew in air slowly.

  A waterfall of questions flowed towards the Returned Dead, every man present keen to question it—them—before it was time to leave. Entreaties and queries came from all sides.r />
  Thousands of voices produced a sound like a long roll of summer thunder, oddly distinct against the noise of the eruption.

  “Look at her!” Roberto Capiraso tilted his head towards Leonora, where she spoke with the officers of the Prince’s Men. “She’s making it up, now, as she goes along!”

  We are the two men who know her best in the world—

  “You’re right,” Conrad said.

  The Count shrugged. “Well—I suppose, so would I, if I had that gang of jackals at my heels!”

  Diverted, unable to hide amusement, Conrad said, “Actually, I think you do.”

  Capiraso made to speak, stopped, and folded his arms decisively.

  The flood of questions continued. Why is the universe cruel? Am I damned? Is my wife, my husband, cheating on me? How do I avoid Hell? What is the secret of happiness? Is there a purpose to our existence?

  A boy, no more than twelve, narrowed his eyes and demanded, “Are you the god that created the world?”

  Voices rolled like thunder.

  “The beginning is hidden in fire and aether. In the time of dreams, creation was by beast-headed men, and ancient pantheons. Now that dreams are fading, you know of more time than I do, but the beginning is still hidden.”

  “What?” Tullio said blankly.

  “I think it means geological time.” Conrad snorted. “It’s not God, whatever it is—and they shouldn’t treat it as if it had those kind of answers. It’s not a deity. It’s—the Library of Alexandria!”

  He heard Canon-Regular Viscardo bellowing up at the ash-coloured mass of men and women.

  “Are you a demon?”

  The unified voice came back: “Yes and no.”

  Ferdinand leaned over to speak to Conrad. “Look—her advisors are bewildered! They haven’t got what they expected.”

  “I wonder what they have got, sir.”

  “I was hoping, as our resident atheist, you might be able to tell me.”

  Conrad shook his head.

  “I might have a better question,” he said.

  It was easy to concentrate on the face of Luigi, and ignore how many other voices might speak if he spoke.

  “How far back into the past do you remember?”