The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  She turned her head back and forth continually, now, checking the staggering line of people on the basalt behind, and the distance across the lava to a line of scrub and brush, yellow with sulphur. Abruptly, her attention apparently ahead on twenty feet of frozen basalt, she said scornfully, “That’s not why we’re close!”

  “But how could it not be that!” Conrad flexed his abused shoulders under the bearded man’s limp weight. “You came back! From the dead!”

  Her scornful look mutated into pity, and then both expressions vanished into a deep, unusual seriousness. Conrad thought it resembled the one time he’d seen her genuinely cry.

  “When I tell you, believe me.” She stared ahead, apparently not needing to look where her bare feet came down delicately on cold rock. Her voice sounded low. “Something important happened between Roberto and myself. Not over the year in Venice, no. But later, in the time we’ve had together—I came to trust him.”

  “No!” Conrad protested. The word sent a spray of blood from his bitten lip. “Nora, you don’t—you can’t—trust people!”

  “Trust.” Her quick glance back at him showed swimming eyes.

  “But the orphanage!”

  Conrad couldn’t say more. She lived with one eye open, he knew. Orphanages don’t bring out the best in people. Not the children, cruel as all children can be, who fight for that one extra meal—fight, even if the cost of it is a hand up the skirt, or worse; and the independent life of a whore begins to look attractive, because at least you get to choose who fucks you.

  He automatically moved his foot to avoid twisting his ankle as a large rock fragment shifted.

  “How?” He couldn’t find a plainer way to ask. “How did he make you trust him?”

  “The same way he made you do it.” Her voice shimmered with amusement. “you found out that he can be proud, insufferable; vindictive, even; but if he makes a promise, he keeps it, and if there are two choices about what to do, he’ll pick the one that matches his morals.”

  The last six weeks flashed in front of Conrad’s inner vision. Yes, he is Il Superbo, he didn’t get that name by accident. But, yes—there are moments writing the score together when the Count has forgotten his claim to landed estates and ancient titles and rolled up his sleeves to work in il mondo teatrale.

  “He made me come to him for money.” Conrad gripped the weighty body with his right arm. “He made me beg, and then he turned me down, the bastard. But… I think, now, if I hadn’t been able to work in the debtor’s prison, he would have got me out. For the sake of getting the opera done.”

  Nora sounded warmly amused. “Forgetting, as he often did this past month, exactly which opera he was supposed to be supporting… Brothers.”

  Grit and wet pebbles slid under the soles of his boots. Conrad felt Tullio’s grip on his arm almost slip—poised himself between one step and the next—and Tullio’s fingers dug hard into Conrad’s muscles again.

  Conrad stubbornly muttered, “You and Roberto don’t have a fraternal relationship.”

  “Neither will you and I.” She glanced over her shoulder and looked satisfied by his must-be-startled expression.

  “You don’t need to compete. I came back from my first death for Roberto. As for Signore Conrad Scalese—you just told me, we’re connected through the minds of all men. This, that, and the other thing. It’s not important, Conrad. How many times I found my way back from death—not important to me.”

  She lifted her free hand, forestalling his inchoate protest.

  “The girl from the orphanage in Castelfranco Veneto trusts both of you. It didn’t happen in a day, or weeks. When you tell me we have a bond through the Emergent God, Conrad, you’re only confirming something I’ve felt, deep down, for years.” An ugly expression of threat appeared. “I left you alive, when I might have let the other Prince’s Men dispose of you. They argued for it. It would be safer.”

  She was clearly in the recent past, Conrad saw; her look common to singers who are independent businesswomen, or noblemen who turn against their social class. He didn’t like the ugly express, and not, he realised, because it might once have been a threat to him.

  “I don’t like to see you look afraid,” he said. “I don’t like it when you do feel afraid. I want to make things better for you.”

  “And now you see why I trust both of you.”

  It might have been the wind dashing steam in her face, but Conrad thought, from the roughness in her throat, that thickness in her speech came from tears.

  “No one but me has been dead twice! Dead once, yes—all you have to think of is light, movement, warmth, and how badly you want them. But the second time! When you recognise that cruel cold and the rest it promises you can have—there’s one moment, one short moment. You have to know yourself really well to get out of there. You have to know, deep down, in an instant, what you truly need and want.”

  The pull on his agonised hand eased. She’d paused to let the strung-out line of people on the basalt bridge catch up.

  “No one but me has died twice. And as I was dying, in the lava—I had just enough time there to know I’ve been a fool. To know what I abandoned when I left Venice—”

  A groggy voice behind Conrad’s right ear slurred, “Tell the silly bitch she can have you!”

  Conrad spluttered, “What!”

  The Count’s voice rumbled through his bones, Conrad found, as the man answered.

  “It’s been obvious what she wanted ever since she left Venice. Go back to her, Corrado, and then maybe we can all get some peace!”

  Conrad tensed his shoulders to throw the man to the basalt earth, splinted legs or not—and froze as someone else flashed into movement.

  Of all of them, Nora had a hand free. It swung white in the sudden gloom, made Conrad flinch—

  The yowl at his back let him know he wasn’t the target.

  A muffled guffaw came from Tullio, behind, explaining over his shoulder to Isaura. “She smacked his ear!”

  “Damnation, that hurt!”

  “Serves you right, Superbo!” Leonora’s eyes flashed, catching the glint of western light as she faced around the way they were going, and hurriedly moved off. “You were awake and listening to this but you weren’t hearing it!”

  She gave another yank on Conrad’s hand; he added his own snarled curses to the tirade.

  “I’m sorry!” She shone a tired smile at him. “We have to hurry now. I don’t know how much more cold I have in me. Pass it back down the line to move faster!”

  Conrad let her set the pace, leading, and adjusted himself to Tullio’s shifting grasp on his arm. The Conte di Argente still lay over Conrad’s shoulders, but he could feel the muscles were tense.

  “Were you conscious for all of that?” Conrad rumbled, under the exchange of shouts down the line.

  “Mostly.”

  “And you couldn’t have kept your mouth shut for one more minute? I wanted to hear what she had to say!”

  A muffled laugh went through the prone body. “I dare say you do, since it was you she was making up to…”

  Under the apparent spite—and how many other times, in the past, has this been true?—the Count’s voice carried a teasing reassurance.

  Despite the growing pain from his hand, he found himself with a wry smile.

  The line of scrub came closer, blackened and flickering with little flames where the lava rolled over it, black currents delineated by soot elsewhere—and, here, black ice-flows of basalt jostling at the bank, rocking as the line of people approaches closer to the shore.

  “Here!”

  Nora Sposito stopped on the edge of the lava stream.

  “Stay still.” Her brow creased as she studied him. “Only a short time. Very short. Hold on, Corradino.”

  The rising steam and smoke got into Conrad’s lungs. Despite the effort to hold himself still, he all but choked, shaking. Pain flared in his hand and up his arm. He tried to straighten his body—and could not, with Roberto’s
weight on it.

  Nora’s toes pressed on the last lip of basalt.

  She reached around past Conrad with her free hand.

  He didn’t understand what she did until Tullio passed him. He realised Nora was shepherding the long tail of people past them—like a gigantic grande chain in the ballroom—and off the hissing, spitting, white-sparking earth.

  A fang of pain bit nerves that ran up the underside of his left arm, into his neck, and made his whole spine spasm, and the muscles lock tight.

  Over the lava flow. The others passed by: man and woman, singer and soldier; Sandrine and Ferdinand and Paolo-Isaura; each stepping off the lava flow at Pozzuoli’s first uncovered streets.

  He concentrated on that, not on the pain that—dangerously—is numbed to nothing in his left hand.

  Weight lifted. He made an inept grab, and then realised someone had prized Roberto Capiraso from his shoulders.

  Another man caught Conrad as he fell forward—

  He sprawled flat, face-down on the hot earth. One of his boots smoked, and scalded his foot. He felt himself finally dragged far enough from the lava stream to land on earth cool enough not to be part of the volcanic stream.

  He looked behind as he fell. He saw Leonora step off the lava onto the rocks.

  The flow of molten basalt sprang up gold and red and searing as she left it. Her first two or three footsteps scorched the grass.

  He guessed that, by the time they came to examine her, she would have exchanged her unearthly chill for the almost equally unearthly warmth of the Returned Dead.

  Returned Dead twice.

  Only then did he looked down and let himself see a hand whitened in places, and blackened in others, by her sub-arctic touch.

  It doesn’t look so bad. But then neither does frostbite.

  Who will she go to first?

  He hated himself for his doubt of himself, and his doubt of her. The pain in his hand seared far worse than such injuries seemed to justify.

  Before he or Roberto Capiraso could be moved, the gloriously-unselfconscious naked woman stepped between them, whispering something inaudible, and reached out at one and the same time to catch Conrad’s shoulder and Roberto’s forearm.

  “You can’t bring yourselves to believe that a woman can love two men equally. I’ve had to face the truth to escape death, and I know! It was only a heartbeat, but I had time to see what a fool I’ve been. What I abandoned. What I was too afraid to want. Why do you think I could never choose between you? I don’t want to be made to choose! I won’t choose! I love both of you. I came back for both of you. Believe me!”

  She whispered again, as Conrad slipped into rising unconsciousness, this time clearly enough that he heard it.

  “Both of you. Always. Both.”

  “The ship!” The King’s voice was urgent. “Every man to the Apollon, quickly!”

  Drained utterly, Conrad heard the sounds as if through distant fog.

  His eyes might have been open or shut. He thought he saw Tullio Rossi’s greatcoat settled over a naked Leonora.

  He had not recovered from the feeling that he had been exsanguinated by the time they reached the harbour. They boarded the French frigate Apollon. The ship’s rigging was white: covered in a pale layer of ash. The vessel heeled over as it cut across the waves, past the ancient fort guarding Pozzuoli. Conrad, boosted over on to the deck with every other man in that last traumatic rush, sprawled on holy-stoned planks, until two or three of Alvarez’s riflemen picked him up.

  Blood ran down his chin again as he bit his lip against the pain.

  They would have taken him below, but he rammed his other elbow in one man’s ribs, and swore at the other, and he and Roberto ended up jammed into a corner by the wheelhouse, out of the way of the sailors, who ran across the deck in apparent confusion, raising what little sail the King evidently trusted on the mast.

  Fever filled his head, slowing his reactions and leaving him staring in wonder at quite natural things, while the astounding passed him by. He felt dizzy. Conrad felt as if they inched away from the great eruption column of Vesuvius, no matter how fast the sleek ship sailed out into the Bay, on course for the middle of the Tyrrhenean sea.

  He realised that he could still hear Nora singing.

  She was by the mast, a military cloak bundled over her naked body, her hands clutching wood and rope. She sang at the full power of her voice.

  Just as Conrad managed to wonder Why? the Apollon lifted and fell down the long slope of a vast tsunami.

  Water came crashing into the Gulf of Naples, stirred up by undersea volcanic detonations, he realised.

  They rode it out—every man who could, pinned to the port rail, straining to see what damage the tsunami might do to the land.

  There was no way of seeing, through the murk and coil of ash, smoke, and spray, but Conrad couldn’t blame them for looking. He kept his own gaze on the southern sky, knowing he could not see from here if Stromboli, Vulcano, and Ætna have also erupted.

  The last thing he coherently heard was Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily, worried about Palermo as well as Naples. He couldn’t understand what answer the ship’s master made. Leonora’s now-hoarse singing filled his head and then faded away.

  The heat of his hand swelled up like a tide, filling all his mind. He jolted back to awareness, recognising the faces over him but not able to put names to them. Something cold as ice and wet pressed against his left hand.

  It was the last stress; he fell into the oncoming numbness with something approaching welcome.

  CHAPTER 58

  He saw nothing except hallucination, trapped in the memory of fire and the pain of his frost-burns. Worse, hemicrania gripped him in an iron clamp.

  Among excruciating shouts and crashes came the familiar bellow of Tullio Rossi.

  “There isn’t no other place to put them! Unless you want them below decks in the butcher’s shop—surgeon’s station, beg his pardon. The Emperor won’t have them down there kicking the bucket. Clear out the captain’s cabin!”

  At them, he struggled for consciousness, but failed to disperse the fog on his drained mind.

  If his mind—his spirit, for want of a better word—felt like a guttering candle-flame, his material body was only too present.

  Held motionless, curled up around his hand, he begged under his breath that the physical pain should cease, knowing he addressed his pleas into a void.

  It was on Conrad’s lips to say God help me. He wondered dizzily if wishes counted as prayer—if wishing desperately that the world had returned to what it was so the Emergent God might heal his hand amounted to a prayer, and a betrayal of his principles through fear.

  Is the mind that emerged from the human race still…“awake”… enough to hear? How easy it would be to call wishes, prayers; call it God!

  He kept silent.

  Time passed.

  If it felt that it might be hours or days, some part of him suspected it was not more than fifteen minutes.

  The air still rang with the orders of the crew, getting the Apollon under sail.

  Without apparent interval, he found himself strapped into a narrow hanging wooden bed, close under creaking planks. It swayed in every direction.

  “Am I in my coffin?”

  If someone answered his question, he never knew.

  Pain had him like a wolf by the hand. The world flung itself about. Dimly, he realised the ship’s creaking and booming meant storm-waves. Gigantic waves, by how long it took between the crest and drop at the top of a wave, and the long slide down into the hollow.

  Wind howled loud enough to block out the world.

  Have we survived the eruption only to die in the aftermath?

  A man in a blood-stained apron jammed himself into the corner by the shuttered stern window. He harangued a dark-haired officer in a soaked woollen over-jacket, who bellowed back.

  Conrad distinguished the repeated phrases—Dread of a lee-shore—new volcanic reefs—Sardinia!—suc
h deep water sailing as the Mediterranean has to offer—!—but his mind slipped away each time he tried to process them.

  The deck heaved up and dropped down as one falls in nightmares, without end.

  He groaned, conscious only of a stink. Wooden planks creaked not far from his head—but a ship shouldn’t smell so vile, unless he was down in the orlop, among the rubbish of a hundred voyages.

  Air caught in the back of his throat, dry with volcanic gases. The odour of sulphur gas couldn’t compete with the rotten stench that threatened to turn his stomach.

  The lean of the ship spoke of it sailing swift, almost even.

  Relief softened his muscles, relaxing from their extreme contraction. He felt the sensations of his body cautiously, not sure yet if he could confidently think it.

  The hemicrania has gone. Or if not gone, eased to almost nothing.

  The corners of his eyes felt wet with gratitude for the relief.

  The absence of pain let him drift down towards deep sleep.

  “Scalese!”

  A known voice, but he couldn’t put a name to it.

  “Oh, che stronzo!—Conrad!” The sound of anger altered to an unwilling kind of desperation. Conrad felt hands shaking him by the shoulders.

  That doesn’t hurt so badly…

  He rose to wakefulness. If the hemicrania had left him, other pain remained. It was impossible to identify any one thing among the bruises, sprains and gashes.

  His eyes opened for minutes before he focused.

  The boards a few feet above must be the frigate’s deck. The ill-lit space in which he lay, a cabin. Two or three men shoved past the man who held him, voices raised. Conrad glimpsed a bloody apron by the light of a lamp.

  A surgeon.

  “Corrado! Blast you!”

  Not Tullio’s voice.

  Roberto Capiraso, Conte di Argente, lay in a hanging cot beside him. His legs seemed to be restrained. He leaned over awkwardly, shaking Conrad’s shoulder.