The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Tullio swore obscenely. “The dead don’t Return twice!”

  “Ghosts don’t turn lava back into stone!”

  Conrad tried to choke down the heart that again threatened to fill up his throat, and wondered, quite idly, if he might drop dead of an attack before he knew what was truly happening here.

  Roberto’s voice sounded sudden and grim. “It can’t be her. She’s moving.”

  That was astonishing enough that Conrad registered Sandrine, Paolo, and Tullio all turn to look at the man as he did.

  “When she came back—she was cold, at first,” Roberto said. “Cold. Cold like marble outside in winter. She couldn’t have moved around, then! It took her months to become warm—”

  Until she ended up warmer than the human beings who haven’t once died, Conrad filled in.

  “If this was her,” Roberto said fiercely, “she wouldn’t be walking!”

  Contrast made the slice of falling light look blue-white, against the sifting ash and the lowering eruption cloud. Conrad slitted his eyes against it—

  “Look, there.”

  He realised that what boiled up from where she trod was not white ash, but steam. Steam, rising to whirl about her in cyclonic disturbance.

  Her wordless singing soared in the anthem that closed L’Altezza azteca’s second act, and Reconquista’s Act Three.

  “I understand!” he exclaimed.

  Roberto and Tullio gave him identical glares. Paolo’s strong, thin arms tightened around him.

  She chirped, exasperated, into his ear. “What do you understand!”

  Her coldness turns the lava into cold basalt beneath her feet.

  “She’s giving her cold into the lava.” Conrad felt himself willing to bet any number of experiments would support his instantaneous hypothesis.

  Roberto snarled. “What do you mean, ‘giving her cold’?”

  “Fire is—movement. Heat is movement. Heraclitus said it. Atoms in movement. I don’t know what death is—”

  Momentarily, his situation returned to him in belly-churning reality: trapped between lava flows that are closing together, and merging. He swayed on the unsteady earth.

  “—But I suppose death is the utter antithesis of movement.”

  The objectivity came from the part of him that always observed, always took notes; is always the observing poet’s eye.

  “Cold is the opposite of fire. If she was as cold as you said, Roberto, when she first came back, then she would be if she came back a second time.”

  “The dead don’t come back a second time!”

  Conrad pointed to the blazing white figure haloed in sun and steam.

  “That is Nora.”

  He stared into the murk and light. He searched out her face. A moment later he met her gaze, and fell back against Paolo before he could catch his balance.

  “Corrado, what is it?”

  How to explain that meeting the eye of another living being can sent a charge of Galvanic energy from spine to belly to cock?

  Conrad shivered at the trauma, even as he sought out her eyes again.

  The slight figure held out a hand, beckoned sharply, and—all Leonora!—stamped her foot on the newly-formed basalt.

  The motion sent spikes of frost across the black stone.

  “She’s come to lead us out.”

  Conrad heard a baritone echo of his voice as he spoke, over the surprise of the dead and the living.

  The injured Roberto Capiraso hooded his eyes. Whatever she’s come back for—the first thing she intends is to lead us over the lava.”

  The temporary opening in the clouds knit closed. Ragged edges merged together overhead, closing off the last of the day’s light that they were likely to see, Conrad thought. Vesuvius’s darkness infiltrated the sky and the air. Men and women formed up in a confused column.

  Her naked body glowed like a beacon pearl.

  “What aria did you come back for this time?” Roberto Capiraso snapped.

  He was likely in considerable pain from the cracked bones in his lower legs. Conrad knew the viciousness in his voice had nothing to do with that particular injury.

  “I don’t care if I never sing. I had to come back.”

  The low, female rasp cut through the noise of shouting, explosions, eruptions, and the hiss of hot lava where it met low-lying water. “You’re going to die if you stay here.”

  The cold came off her in waves. Conrad could have told with his eyes closed that he faced her. She was the antithesis of the searing lava.

  The cold of the grave! he thought, and almost giggled.

  Roberto demanded, “Why would you care if he or I should die? What plans have we interrupted this time?”

  She looked from him to Roberto, and from the Count back to Conrad. There was a desperation in her face.

  “I suppose,” Roberto said slowly, despite the chaos around them, “that neither of us will ever know if you’re telling the truth. Lying perfectly was how you survived growing up.”

  She stamped her foot.

  Under her bare sole, the earth turned black, solid, and frosted over with crystals of ice.

  “I just want you both to live!”

  In the periphery of his vision, he could see Roberto’s white, sweat-stained face. The Count watched his late wife too.

  Leonora stood up straight. Every pretence dropped away from her.

  The lava slowed, stopped, and congealed where she stood.

  “I can lead you,” she said. “The first to follow me will take my hand—I have to have human contact as well, while I’m still touching death, to follow the direction of life. Form a chain, take hands—use belts and kerchiefs, to make yourselves secure. Otherwise you’ll get lost in the storm.”

  Conrad looked idly at her face, that he had not ever thought to see again in motion. Her skin still breathed off cold.

  He mused aloud. “The further you get from that state of non-existence, the less you’ll be able to cool the lava. So we don’t have long.”

  She gave one short apologetic nod. By the end of that first year in Venice, they had rubbed through sufficient of a young marriage’s difficulties that many things went without words. This was one, he realised.

  “Nora…” Roberto’s voice lost its acid edge. It occurred to Conrad that she and Roberto were likely working through the same difficulties, at the same time.

  He could see plainly that the column of soldiers and San Carlo people would need to be led. With ash, dust, rain and hail swirling in thick as gruel, trying to follow Leonora blindly through the worsening visibility would result only in half of them stepping into safety, and the rest lost to the lava-flow.

  He wondered what it would feel like to take Leonora’s hand, now. If any human could take her hand without irrevocable damage. Her body must be beyond freezing. Cold so intense will burn. Especially, it will burn other flesh.

  “Which of us?” he said aloud, without meaning to.

  Roberto scowled, puzzled.

  Conrad explained, “Nora will have to lead. Then…”

  Leonora bit at her lip, and said nothing.

  Neither of us can ask her to condemn the other.

  Conrad caught Tullio’s eye. He bent down, drove his shoulder into the Count of Argente’s belly, and pulled the composer’s arm over his shoulder. With Tullio steadying him, he stood up with a phenomenal effort and a grunt, and balanced himself under the weight.

  The Count di Argente hung with his legs straight down, his body over Conrad’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

  It left him unable to get free, but didn’t stop his abrupt, frustrated cursing.

  “I’ll do it,” Conrad said steadily. “Tullio, Paolo; see that everybody’s ready.”

  He said nothing while they and Sandrine were gone, or while a column formed on the shrinking patch of earth.

  He held Nora’s gaze, watching her bright eyes and unbound hair.

  She sang, intensely, under her breath; only just audible. He neverth
eless recognised it—Queen Isabella’s first aria on meeting King Muhammed. Her words spoke of triumph, but the voice spoke of love denied.

  Meeting her eyes, he found himself suddenly thinking, She needs a lover who will love what she is, or she will mourn still when Naples is a city of brick and iron, far far in the future.

  Before he could fully realise the thought, Tullio shouldered through the fog, heavy grip locked around Paolo’s wrist.

  “We’re ready!”

  Conrad reached up and put his right arm around Roberto Capiraso’s body, clamping the man down on his shoulder in a tight grip. He felt Tullio pull the sleeves of his coat and shirt down, and Tullio’s broad hand reached up and wrapped around his forearm, flesh to flesh.

  Conrad very clearly and decisively held out his left hand to Leonora.

  “Corrado—why?”

  He looked down at her pale hand, cold coming off the skin in skeins of fog. Fear twisted in his guts.

  “I’m not afraid. It’s something I can do—so I will.”

  He bit through his lip when her twice-cold flesh enclosed his.

  The earth was hot under his boots. Leonora’s step called up solidified rock—cold rock, under her feet, forming temporary “islands.”

  The first step onto lava was a terror to him, his balls crawling up into his belly at the knowledge of the heat beneath.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tullio reassuringly tighten his grip on Paulo-Isaura’s hand, and Isaura grab Brigida’s plump fingers; JohnJack, behind Brigida, holding her other hand—and Sandrine’s—and so on for all the opera company, the King, the King’s riflemen, and those of the Prince’s Men taken prisoner.

  The temperature of the surrounding lava could have blackened all of them to charcoal within seconds. Under Conrad’s feet, the congealed rock is a shield.

  If he would remember anything, Conrad thought, it would be this:

  The living human body of Roberto Capiraso gripped under his right arm, feeling the slick sweat of pain as his fractured leg-bones shifted clumsily.

  Leonora’s fingers closed on his left hand like iron machinery, pulling him forward.

  The pain of it over-rode everything, even wondering if this would work, and whether he was about to step directly into molten rock.

  His foot came down on frozen lava. He staggered forward, and her hand held his, as desperately as he gripped hers.

  His warm and sweating human hand—the fingers and palm of his left hand scorched instantly by the cold of Leonora’s flesh.

  How else would her step bridge the lava-flow with instantly cooled rock? Miracles come with, if not a price, their own internal logic. And Conrad had been, for that very reason, careful to make sure that which hand it was that he offered into her world of miracles.

  Ten steps and he bit through his lower lip in a second place, blood flooding down over his neck-cloth and coat. Twenty steps and he screamed, not sure if he had thrust his hand into a fire, or into the jagged metal jaws of a man-trap, spring snapping it shut through his flesh and blood.

  He shouted over Roberto’s back at Paolo for her to ignore him when he screamed.

  He took good care not to look down at his hand in Nora’s.

  “Talk?” he got out. He refused to say Take my mind off this.

  The boiling steam framed her face, hair blasted back towards the winding line of walkers by the wind off the lava. She looked over her shoulder; then walked at an angle, so that she could study him. He found himself staring at those gentiancoloured eyes which are her facet of the world’s beauty.

  “Corrado… Really, why? Why volunteer for this?”

  He might have said something laying claim to heroism. He struggled with something more subtle and difficult—the truth of what made him step forward.

  “You were in Naples,” he said, “six weeks ago.”

  “Yes,” Nora said cautiously.

  “And—rehearsing? The dress rehearsals for Reconquista?”

  She turned forward again, so that she could lead the cavalcade forward.

  Her voice sounded warm. “That’s a good guess on your part, Corrado.”

  “It’s not a guess.” He didn’t let her implicit question prompt him. “You knew I was in Naples.”

  “…Yes?” She might have been frowning. In a clipped, hasty tone, she added, “I had no intention of seeking you out,”

  Conrad narrowed his eyes as the steam lapsed, giving glimpses of the eruption cloud that shut out all but the far western sky. The lowering sun caught him in the face.

  “Do you know what hemicrania is?”

  “Headaches?” She sounded utterly bemused.

  Conrad felt the tension in Tullio’s grip on his arm, and the low conversations from JohnJack and the other singers; from the King, the soldiers, the rest. He thought, It’s no bad thing if she’s frustrated enough that she’s only thinking of me. She doesn’t need to think about the responsibility of all this—not while it’s going well.

  “More than a headache. I’ve had the migraine since before the war ended. I went to some doctor-friends of Monsieur Bichat, in Paris.”

  A swirl of hail and grit caught him in the face, just as he glanced back at Isaura. He lowered his head, bulling forward into the wind, trusting Nora’s grip on his hand.

  He regained a grip on Roberto’s slumped weight, and his pace on the uneven frozen basalt, but when he looked up, the world was lost in thick fog and steam.

  “Storms,” he said. “If you listen to Signor Aldini’s followers, storms of Galvanic energy in the brain, similar to grand mal.”

  “Corrado—what are you talking about? And why now?”

  He smiled to himself at her fierce curiosity and frustration. That’s all Nora.

  “The last time before this that I had a bad attack of hemicrania, it was the morning after Il terrore di Parigi made a stunning success. Everyone thought it was a hangover. I thought—well, exhaustion can provoke old wounds to act up. But later, I thought, Il terrore was a success; people talk about the prima donna Fanny Tacchinardi, and the composer Persiani, and some of them even about the librettist Conrad Scalese…”

  Like a cat that has had a string trailed in front of it for far too long, Leonora pounced. “What has this to do with you volunteering to be my link to these others!”

  She unconsciously closed her hand as frustration overtook her. Conrad winced as if an engineered metal tool gripped his left hand.

  He shifted Roberto’s boneless body more securely over his shoulder.

  “You were in Naples when Il terrore played. You knew I was there too. You thought of me. And I woke up in the morning with a score in my head that was of no opera I ever knew.”

  Conrad hummed under his breath the opening of Nora’s aria. He heard her make a noise of speechless surprise.

  “I’d never heard it sung, no one played it to me—I never even got to read it in the score; Roberto vanished off with Reconquista to ransack it for himself. And when I heard you sing—that was it. I recognised every note.”

  Ridged lava swayed under his boots. She turned, arm outstretched, light-footed; waiting for him to re-join her.

  “What does it mean?”

  “There’s a connection between us.” He stated it flatly, too frightened that she would reject the idea. “Down deep, in the same place the ‘Emergent God’ exists. You and I, we’re connected…”

  The wind wailed between rocks, and the scrub and bushes away off in the distance; the lava spat as hail and warm melted rain hit the roiling surface; the basalt ‘islands’ creaked under the weight of people who screamed to each other, over the sound of the distant eruption—but all of it sounded like silence to him, facing her lack of response.

  “If it’s important,” he muttered. “Likely not. I’ve had weeks of hearing how you came back from death for Roberto Conte de Argente…”

  Surprisingly, Nora grinned back at him. It was the authentic orphanage-brat expression.

  “You fight like b
rothers!”

  Conrad muttered a protest. A rumble of semi-conscious bad language came from his shoulders, where the Conte di Argente slumped.

  Nora glanced back. Her Delft-violet eyes had an unusually serious expression behind the teasing. “What do you expect?”

  Almost absently, she checked the line behind them. She used a soft voice barely audible over slashing rain and snow, the hiss of lava, explosions of distant lava bombs, and men shouting to each other as they organised themselves in their dozens with extreme urgency.

  “You and Roberto, you’re clearly connected.”

  Conrad muttered a mild protest.

  “You’re connected through me,” Leonora said simply. “You and him, and vice versa; me to Roberto, me to you. So deep a connection that even my music went to you? As soon as you said it, it sounded… right.”

  Conrad would have shrugged were it not for the weight of the mercifully-unconscious man across his shoulders. “Maybe it doesn’t mean what I thought. Yes, we’re connected—”

  “Through the Emergent God: yes!” She slowed her forward pace, looking up over her shoulder into his face. “The emergent mind of all of us! I knew we had a connection, but this—our connection goes so deep that you and I can find each other, through millions and millions of people!”

  It stopped his thoughts in their tracks. He found himself with his mouth open to speak, and no idea what to say. After a moment, he said, “Having almost come to think the connection might be frivolous… But I’m wrong, aren’t I? It’s not frivolous for us.”

  Nora’s smile dazzled against the brilliance of light and air sucked down by her chill. The wind blew from her into Conrad’s face, lashing him with the wet tips of her long hair. He found himself breathless.

  “You have a connection to him, too.” He laboured across the rough lava, pulled back and forth by Tullio’s grip from behind, and Nora’s beyond-cold hand. He still couldn’t help but sound resentful of Roberto. “You came back from death in giving birth, for him.”