The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  An outraged Viscardo snapped, “Six thousand and six years of humankind, that’s the most that will be possible!”

  Niccolo di Galdi looked contemptuously at Conrad. “Even your prehistoric-lizard-discovering Dr Buckland can find no old human remains, as Darwin avers there must be. Even his ‘Red Lady of Paviland’ is only ancient enough to have lived when our Roman Empire ruled over Britain!”

  Luigi smiled. Multiple voices spoke with him. “Those bones were not the skeleton of a lady, but of a young man—we dyed his bones with red ochre and we laid his body in a cave for burial because we loved him, three and thirty thousand years ago.”

  A deeper silence fell.

  “I remember leaving the forests for the plains, and I remember the first artists marking with that same ochre on the walls of caverns… We can count easily back half a million years—though we looked and walked differently then, but we felt the same. I remember when we grew weary of the hunt, and put seeds in the ground for harvest, and being in those places, built cities—villages, you would call them now. But that was only yesterday; ten thousand years ago.”

  Conrad found himself dazzled at the vision of deep time.

  “There,” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily said mildly. “Proof that the Prince’s Men are wrong. The one true God would remember Creation, as would the Fallen Angel Lucifer; therefore this manifestation is no kind of Deity at all.”

  “Heretic!” The apostate Canon-Regular glared at his king. “It’s proof, on the contrary, that the Prince’s Men are correct—the one true Creator-God has evidently departed from the world, and this is the Prince who has been left in charge to oversee the human race.”

  King Ferdinand looked quizzically back at Conrad.

  “It isn’t proof of anything,” Conrad remarked. He added, “But if it was an indication of anything at all, it would be that the Deity is a creation of man, rather than the other way around. Its knowledge only goes back to when man was beginning to be a conscious animal.”

  “Heretic!” Viscardo hissed. “Darwinist!”

  “If two sides are calling me heretic, I have to be doing something right,” Conrad muttered.

  Conrad looked at the faces of the Returned Dead, meeting their eyes. He found himself wondering what it might be like if human minds could be joined, in the way that human voices are joined in musicodramma, and if they might in the same way create something that is beyond themselves.

  Someone towards the back of the Prince’s Men was still quietly singing. Conrad caught “Quel’anima—” “That soul—”

  “Oh, I understand!” he exclaimed. “It comes down to music, of course. And Aldini’s work on Galvanic forces…”

  “Yes.” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily sounded impatient—and intrigued. “It does?”

  “I was thinking of M. Bichat,” Conrad said.

  “Of course you were!” Tullio’s mutter seemed to find an echo with both Paolo and the King.

  “If you recall—” Conrad turned to the tiers of seats, making it evident he also addressed the Prince. “—Bichat said that he’d dug into the human body as far as it’s possible to go.”

  “Blasphemy!”

  “—Thank you, Signore Viscardo. Monsieur Buchat theorised that the mind—or the soul, if you prefer to think of it that way—comes into existence because we’re alive. Emerging out of some Galvanic force that animates the human body.”

  Ferdinand cocked his eyebrow, in much the same way he had done on the terrace of the Palazzo Reale, when Conrad first met him.

  “And the relevance?” he asked.

  “If the Galvanic force of one body can produce a soul, a mind, then what can the force of thousands—of millions—produce? I wonder if what men call their God emerges, if you like, as a property of millions of intelligent beings alive at the same time?”

  “And you think that this—” Ferdinand struggled for a term that evaded him, and said, finally, “—this entity, is what? An emergent God?”

  In the middle of chaos, Conrad smiled.

  “I like that, sir. Yes. An emergent ‘God.’ It knows what we know, remembers what we remember. And remembers no further back, because we were not intelligent animals in the beginning?”

  Adalrico di Galdi snorted. “My family were never animals!”

  Conrad ignored the Prince’s Man.

  “Not everything it knows will be true. In fact, most of it won’t. If it contains the human body of knowledge, that includes true and false theories, mistaken knowledge, myths, fiction, and misunderstood truth.”

  Luka Viscardo pounced. “Mistakes! Fiction! This isn’t God the Creator, or the Prince of this World—this is a beguiling demon!”

  King Ferdinand waved the Canon to silence. Viscardo—out of habit, Conrad suspected—obeyed.

  “And the relevance of this to music?” Ferdinand emphasised.

  “Easy, sir. The Emergent God is susceptible to music because we are.”

  He caught a rumble, underfoot, that died away after a long moment. Glancing up, he saw that the Returned Dead no longer all moved in the same unison.

  “They’re no longer a channel,” he said, thinking aloud. “Sir—I think this may be our signal. That we should leave here.”

  Conrad caught movement in his peripheral vision.

  He turned his head just in time to see King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies lift his hand.

  In it was an English duelling pistol, made with exquisite skill to be perfectly accurate.

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily took aim, pointing the pistol across the collapsed sunken passage, at Enrico Mantenucci’s forehead.

  With twenty feet between them, he squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion came simultaneously to Conrad with the spatter and spray of blood. He put up his hands, uselessly, to shield himself from.

  Ferdinand lowered the pistol.

  Wide-eyed, the top of his forehead blown away and his open skull scooped out bloody, Mantenucci’s dead body fell over backwards and fell like a sack behind the rubble.

  “After all,” Ferdinand said, “guns had to come back into use at some point.”

  His lips formed a name that might have been Adriano.

  A signal, and the King’s Rifles fell into order, covering the retreating Prince’s Men—most of whom were lost among the departing Returned Dead.

  Ferdinand ordered, “Now we leave.”

  CHAPTER 55

  The Roman concrete felt gritty under his hands. Conrad sat on the lowest tier of the amphitheatre. His mind felt as senseless as the volcanic stone. Do I have no feeling left—not even for an execution by a King?

  He watched as the Dead of Naples returned, man by man and woman by woman, to their own individuality.

  If something ancient still looked out of some of their eyes… Well, that’s part of being Returned Dead, he concluded.

  He did not look for Nora.

  The vibration of the eruption could be felt through the skin of his hands, where he rested them on the scoured stone. Or it might have been that he shook, tension relieved.

  Sandrine and JohnJack and the other singers made a bright knot of laughter, some distance away across the arena. Conrad wondered briefly why he didn’t join them.

  “Well then, Corradino…”

  Conrad blinked, and rubbed at his eye on the excuse of the dust in the air.

  Luigi Esposito rebuked him. “Wash that out with water, don’t rub it!”

  “Yes, mother.” Conrad snorted. And could not—for the thick heaviness in his throat—say another word.

  The dead police chief smoothed his gloves onto his fingers; both grey with volcanic ash. His smile was no different to when he had been living.

  A little wistfully, he said, “I wonder what now, Corradino.”

  Will he live as long as any Returned Dead? Or will he vanish with these ash-clouds, because they’re the miracle that brought him back?

  A strong shudder of the earth under Conrad’s feet interrupted his attempt to put words toge
ther.

  “Go to the ship.” Luigi’s pale hand rested briefly on Conrad’s shoulder.

  His smile was little more than a crease of the under-lids of his eyes, but it warmed Conrad clear through.

  The pyroclastic flow formed again in swirls and retreating waves. Only Luigi Esposito of all the vanishing Dead lagged and looked back over his shoulder. His smile was not particularly altered by the ash that smudged his flesh, being as innocently sweet and wicked as the choirboy that he had once been.

  His voice came low but distinct. “Don’t grieve, Corrado. We’ll see each other again.”

  Before Conrad could ask what he meant, the police chief was gone, lost in the dispersing crowds.

  “What did he mean?” Conrad asked, out loud. “Luigi of all people doesn’t expect to see us in Heaven!”

  Tullio snorted. “I don’t think we have time to worry about it right now—!”

  The big man staggered as one of the panicking crowd of the living barged into him. He shouldered the man off effortlessly, and turned his body to shelter Paolo-Isaura.

  The ash-cloud of the retreating dead began to move with something other than eerie unison. Conrad watched the animating principle that had spoken through them ebb, visibly, like the tide of the sea.

  Scuffles of pushing and shoving broke out on the tiers. Prince’s Men—churchmen—Ferdinand’s soldiers—

  Conrad shaded his eyes with his arm, looking up the rake of the steps to the silhouetted arches. Dust condensed there, hiding the upper reaches of the amphitheatre from view, and dulling the pearly sky.

  “We’re losing the arena miracle,” Conrad deduced.

  Tullio’s elbow dug into his ribs.

  Movement caught his eye at the far north-eastern end of the amphitheatre.

  The concrete of the arena floor buckled, both sides of the dividing access passage, like a book with a ripped spine.

  “Shite!”

  Dust stung his eyes. Through blurring vision he saw underground brick walls, and supporting subterranean arches. Chambers that might have been long-hidden gladiator-barracks and beast-pits exposed, at that far end of the amphitheatre—

  Not far enough away!

  The arena floor near the south-eastern entrance collapsed. A whorl of gases shot up from the corridor below—a gulf two storeys deep.

  Light gleamed up. The edges of the broken amphitheatre floor stood out boldly black.

  In the depths, something glowed orange and red.

  Conrad took a step forward before he could stop himself; his stomach lurching with terror. Once experienced, the distinctive smell is not mistakable for anything else. Sulphur and molten basalt!

  “Scheisse!” Conrad spun round.

  No help to be had.

  He instantly saw that. Luigi, gone—almost all of the Returned Dead seemingly gone—

  He breathed in, unguarded. A throat-choking smell seared his gullet. He couldn’t get out the oaths he wanted for coughing.

  “I agree!” Tullio evidently took the tone for the meaning. “Let’s go!”

  Paolo-Isaura nodded at the centre of the arena. One single figure was not a part of the running, panicking crowds. She paced forward, almost at the lip of the sunken underground passage, and Conrad met her eyes without any sense of shock.

  Of course. Leonora.

  “What do we do about her?” Paolo muttered hesitantly.

  Tullio snapped, “Nothing. We can’t reach her. You can see that!”

  Conrad ran forward.

  True, we can’t reach her. For the same reason we’ve been safe over here; she can’t reach us.

  No safe way over that gulf—but when did Nora ever care about safe?

  Not knowing if he faced someone who might kill him, or someone he must rescue, he slowed and picked his way between rubble across the arena, completely focused. Men coughed on both sides of the arena as they shouted would-be orders. Two women from the chorus clung to each other and cried. A dozen men he recognised from the Prince’s ranks sprinted for the north-eastern rake of stone seating, and were driven back by a whirl of volcanic dust. All of it existed before Conrad’s eyes—and meant nothing.

  Nora!

  Footsteps scraped the stone.

  Roberto paced beside him; matching him stride for stride. The bearded man’s gaze was fixed on Leonora.

  “Be careful of her.” Conrad couldn’t find the right words that would not offend the proud man. “She—This must have been a shock to her.”

  “…Yes.” Roberto did no more than nod.

  Conrad found himself slowing, despite himself. A mound of ancient fluted pillars lay to their right, rolled out of the way after falling from the rim of the amphitheatre, some time in the last two thousand years.

  Picking his way between marble rubble, he had a momentary light-headed fantasy of using a pillar to cross the underground gulf like a fallen tree. It would take a Titan’s strength to even shift one!

  He looked up as the ground cleared and he could walk.

  The impromptu stage-area on the far side was deserted now, except for Nora.

  Her gaze was entirely inward.

  An open pit broke the surface of the arena, not ten feet to one side of her; where the ancient Romans would have winched up wild beasts to loose on their gladiators. She took no apparent notice of her danger as she walked past it, towards them.

  Towards the empty gap that divided them; the unguarded drop into the sunken access passage.

  “Get away from there!”

  He made fists, aching to shout but only daring to raise his voice slightly in case he panicked her:

  “Nora!”

  Roberto’s voice came almost in unison. “Leonora!”

  Is she desolated that her ‘god’ has left her?

  Conrad scowled.

  Is she listening?

  The earth jerked, laterally.

  A fountain of bricks, stone blocks, earth, trailing grass, roots, and concrete flew up from the gap in the arena floor.

  The ground grated underfoot. Debris thumped down with unimpressive bumps that could crack a skull, or a spine—

  “Nora!” Conrad bellowed.

  Pozzuoli concrete pushed up under his feet. It sent him sprawling down on his back in ash and gravel—away from the open access passage.

  Conrad choked on sulphur, and dragged himself up on hands and knees. He could get no further.

  Through streaming eyes, he saw lava glimmer in the underground Roman passage.

  Something sheered, deep below; Conrad felt it through his grazed fingers.

  Roberto Capiraso threw himself towards Leonora’s lone figure, as if he could leap the thirty feet of open space between them.

  “Roberto!” Conrad’s mind chittered No! Not possible! No!

  Vibration juddered through the ground.

  The tumble of fallen pillars broke apart and rolled.

  Marble cylinders skidded in terrible slow deliberation. Roberto lurched forward, rising earth pushing him into a staggering run. Fluted stone shook up ash from the arena floor, billowing in choking clouds.

  Roberto vanished in the ash.

  Conrad scrambled up. One foot twisted under him.

  Leonora stepped up to the crumbling edge of the sunken subterranean passage, close enough that, if she held her hand out in front of her, it would be over the drop.

  “Nora—” Intended as a shout, it came out a whisper.

  The underground corridor split.

  Cracks raced south-east, tearing across the arena floor. Tiers of seating shattered; brick arches exploded. It split north-west—

  The arena floor ripped open under Leonora’s feet.

  She dropped like a stone statue into the depths.

  CHAPTER 56

  Pain and grief wrenched at him so hard that he couldn’t breathe the iron-tasting air.

  Sweating, he tried to push himself to his feet, and failed. His belly twisted. He knelt. Furnace heat blasted up, half-blinding him.

  Co
nrad stripped off his coat, and wrapped it around his arm to shield his face. Holding it tight against his dry, burning eyes, he groped forward on hands and knees. Closer to the cleft splitting the arena floor.

  His hands encountered nothing of Leonora, neither herself or—he swallowed, hard—her body.

  Why should it? I saw her fall.

  The sides of the cleft dropped thirty feet—to a heaving bulge of black lava. Rising gases made his eyes sting and blur.

  The unbearable heat pushed him into a backward crawl. Conrad crabbed his way away from the cleft’s edge, spasming with coughs.

  His face was wet, he dumbly realised; although it dried almost immediately in the heat.

  The pain of her absence reduced him to a dumb animal. If he could have bitten off a limb to free himself from its steel fangs, he would have done it instantly.

  Stronger tears ran down his face, hot droplets trickling from the point of his chin and spattering in the grey ash.

  He felt every muscle and ligament tense, pull taut—the impulse to spring up and run into the gap in the earth thrumming through him.

  What would it be? The pain of a fall, moments of agony before molten stone burns me to death? That’s nothing—

  The earth buckled and threw him into the air.

  He fell flat on rubble, breath knocked out of his chest. As he landed, his foot hit something that gave.

  A deep male scream cut off abruptly, in choking coughs.

  I recognise that voice—!

  “Roberto!”

  Fallen stone cylinders became clear through swirling dust—ancient, lichen-covered pillars, all around him, tumbled like children’s skittles.

  Roberto Capiraso slumped against a section of fluted marble. Ash made his hair and beard all but white: he looked sixty.

  That’s not just ash. He saw it too.

  Conrad pushed himself up into a crouch, the shaking ground making him stagger. Broken concrete scraped his arms. He was in his shirt-sleeves, coat discarded at some unnoticed moment, and now irrecoverably gone, he realised.

  “Are you hurt?” He was not sure which part of the Conte di Argente he had stumbled over. His leg?

  Conrad groped closer, supporting himself on the fallen pillar. At first glance the other man didn’t look physically damaged.