The Black Opera (76 page)

“You don't know which side I'm on,” Roberto Capiraso muttered, in a voice that didn't carry beyond the two of them. “Whether I want
L'Altezza
to work, or
Il Reconquista. I
don't know which side I'm on—”

“Hers.” Conrad pushed past the fiery discomfort to murmur. “Nora. If she turned nun tomorrow, you'd be applying to be one of the Holy Father's Cardinals the day after.”

Roberto's lips twisted. He seemed not to know if he were amused or outraged.

A score of armour-clad men swept off stage, Velluti at their head; passing Conrad and the composer as if they hadn't seen them—which, in the dark between the flats, they very well might not. Fifteen feet away from the audience's sight-line, they began to struggle into the leopard-kilts and obsidian spears of the Princess Tayanna's guard.

Applause for their previous singing swept up over Conrad like a wave up shingle. He had to close his eyes and put his hands over his ears. Pain whited out the world.

Breathing raggedly, he uncovered his ears.

Beside him, Roberto Capiraso looked utterly bleak.

“Scalese—I don't know what could happen if Nora succeeds in ‘raising the Prince of the World,' ‘changing the mind of God,' whatever she meant by that. I can't help thinking she'll be a lot safer if she
doesn't
.”

Roberto's eyes glinted in reflected light.

“I find myself hoping that the King will capture her. That would be kinder than the Prince's Men, if they decide that she's failed them.”

I'd like to reassure you
, Conrad found himself feeling, to his own surprise. His thoughts were as slow as mud.
To say: “a company of expert riflemen are on the Burning Fields, along with Commendatore Mantenucci and the police; they'll have her safe as a prisoner—”

But then I'd have to tell you what Luigi said. That no message has come back from them, yet.

“I hope Ferdinand's men
do
have her.” It was all Conrad could manage, through pain and confusion.

Movement snagged his eye.

From this angle in the wings he could just see Isaura, beyond the tin cones shading the candles on the music stands. Paolo-Isaura shook back her short, shaggy hair; white cravat and dark blue coat setting off her pale face perfectly. He made out the profiles of violinists and oboists, all turned towards her; the stage's candle-light reflected in the percussionist's cymbals, and glimmering on the coils of French horns. Each man—and they were all men—looked to Paolo for guidance.

If they knew she was Isaura
—

How dare any man think less of my sister because she's not my brother?

She raised her baton.

The light made water gather and run down Conrad's face. He clapped a hand over his sensitised eyes. The orchestra stuck up a melody of winding complexities for the woodwind—the first bars of which they had messed up for weeks now—and performed it flawlessly.

Every ligament and tendon stiff with pain, body held perfectly still against the agony of movement, Conrad still found his mind prompting him with the exact score.
We're coming up on the other extended trio: JohnJack, Lorenzo, and Estella.

Very carefully, he took his hands from his face. He saw, through wet eyelashes, the converging brilliant figures of the conspiring apprentice priest and seduced Lord General, and the eavesdropping Amazon slave-girl. Only a dozen yards away on stage, where dust lifted up from between the boards at every step—and, at the same time, half a world and five hundred years distant.

A sound too loud to be heard splintered the air.

Something blazing and thick with black smoke smashed down from the ceiling of the auditorium. It vaporised the legendary chandelier of the Teatro San Carlo.

The missile exploded against the far wall of opera boxes. All the space inside the auditorium shuddered, with the shock and violence of artillery-shot. Men and women in fine clothing spilled out of the opera boxes, into the empty air—falling—

Clothes, and the curtains of the boxes, caught fire.

Flame leaped up the tiers of seating, up to the galleries exposed to the air—

Conrad seized at his head, pain blazing along every suture of his skull. Human sound cut the smoky air, ripping into him. The squeal of benches forced across floors—the pounding thud of feet pushing past their neighbour—voices going up in shrieks, shouts—

As if every one of three thousand men and women struggle, shove
, fights
for the exits
—

Plaster sheeted down. Splintered wood bounced down and hit the stage. Internal and external pain met.

The stage floor shook under Conrad's feet,
lifting
him. Floorboards flipped up over joists. He threw out his arms instinctively, catapulted forward—

Plummeting into agony, on his back, half-off the front edge of the stage—

High over his head, the domed roof of the Teatro San Carlo opened in a lethal flower of marble, brick, and rubble.

E
verything under Conrad jolted and unsteadily vibrated. A grinding sensation reverberated in his bones.

Darkness slammed down.

Conrad clawed, enveloped thickly. Something blinded him; robbed him of air. He thrashed with unconstrained violence. Encumbrance, and the pain of migraine, sent him into true panic.

—
Sudden light
.

The sear and crack of lightning iced the world with white.

Conrad rolled out of entangling, choking cloth.

He dropped a foot or so onto his back, hitting wooden planks with his shoulder-blades and the back of his skull. The blast of pain seared so strongly that he bit his tongue, and spat red, swearing blasphemously.

Dazzled, the sensation of touch told him the cloth in his hands is velvet.

—Is the blue stage curtain that collapsed when the house shook
.

Conrad broke out in a sudden, painful, coughing laugh.
“Fuck—!”

Scenery flats leaned crazily overhead. Ceiling and floor shook and jolted, in a series of violent knocks. The stage stood up broken—boards tilted crazily up—trapdoor entrances gaping blackly to the cellars. Sprawled bodies lay among rubble. Fleeing figures ran crazily here and there, screaming.

Pain filled his vision with black sparkles.

Noise stampeded past him. Men making for the exit? Fire and black ash leaped up drapes, scenery, a woman's long skirts. A boot landed squarely on his chest.

A choked-off scream took all his breath.

Squinting, he found he could see no more than ten or fifteen feet in any direction. A yellow-grey haze filled the opera house.

Is it fire?

Is something wrong with my eyes?

Everything hurt. Every part of his body.

But everything hurt
before.

There was no blood.

As well as the hemicrania, his head and back felt physically bruised, as if beaten with clubs.

Conrad rubbed at his eye-sockets savagely, until tears ran and cleared dust out
of his eyes.

Weak sunlight drifted in through the hole in the theatre's roof.

In the vast open air, where there should be song and music, something pale and grey sifted down.

In England, where it snows more often than here, they have long sunset winter twilights. Such a change from the latitudes where the sun drops into darkness in a matter of minutes. This light is exactly like such a twilight, on a day when it has snowed, and most things are lost in grey, but a few colours are resolvable.

Snow falls white, but, when thick, makes the air look yellow with its fall.
This, that falls now, might be snow… or smoke…

Not a fault of the eye:
something
occupied the air. But—he managed to get up onto his knees—not smoke either. The gusts of smoke from the burning were black.

I can smell something… something
else
. No idea what—no, I do know!

A child, in Catania, scrambling up the moorland far enough to catch the taint of it on the wind. Sulphur, and lava, and a flat chemical tang. The smell of volcanic activity.

Conrad caught grey foam on his palm, feeling it dusty and warm—and it was ash, he realised.

Vesuvius
.

The ability to form thoughts returned to him along with the access to memory.
Vesuvius
.

Is this…

He reached automatically for the emotional atmosphere of
musicodramma
and it was shattered.

Whatever
L'Altezza azteca
was doing—is gone
.

Is this the Prince's Men's victory?

Vaffanculo!
It must be!
They
can't have been stopped, or the eruption wouldn't be happening!

Part of him demanded:
How much time since—this—happened?
The rest of his mind obsessively chanted:
We lost, they won, we lost, they won
—

Distant screams came from the upper tiers of boxes.

Brick and rafters exploded into the air.

The floorboards under him thrummed like a harp. A dissonant crash raised clouds of dust; black rocks sprayed across the floor.

Conrad staggered onto his feet. Tremors lost him his balance. He fell to his knees, swung himself violently back up into a square-set crouch—

I have to get out!

A swirl of air—no, sea-wind—blew inside the desolate building, clearing the
haze far enough that Conrad could see from the stage to the exits.

The further wall still burned. If there were people there, Conrad could not see them.

I'm not shaking
.

It's the earth that's shaking!

Something partially collapsed, behind him, in the deep backstage. Clouds of dust and ash pushed out into the air.

Conrad crawled out from under the remains of the velvet and stood up. A quake shook him.

He found that he was facing that part of the auditorium that housed the orchestra.

It was buried under rubble, planks, and the end of an avalanche of bricks stretching up to the first floor boxes. Dust swirled over it, and flickering fires.

His mind still moving like syrup in winter, Conrad only came up with…
Isaura?

“Isaura!
Paolo!”

For all his force, his voice didn't penetrate the ash cloud wrapped around him. He choked, his mouth dry and dusty.

“Isaura!”

Nothing.

He would have thrown himself on Roberto to strangle him, but the other man was not there.

The building shuddered.

Conrad staggered one step towards the auditorium, and froze.

He dared not cross that open space under the uncertain roof.

Stay away from the fire; go out the back way!

He turned.

Pain slopped around in him like water in a bucket. All he could do was clench his jaw and push himself onwards.

The broken stage shuddered under him.

He became conscious of distant roaring, like the looms in English manufactories. The boards trembled under his feet.

He lurched forward, in a zigzag to-and-fro, like a man on deck in a hard sea. He tripped flat onto more swags of the fallen stage curtain.

His shins hurt where he'd fallen over some concealed obstacle.

Michele Angelotti's magnificent step-pyramid, he realised. Fallen now. It must have come within feet of crushing him where he originally stood.

He knelt up, hauled up the thick dusty velvet, and realised he was staring across the stage—what
had
been the stage—at one end of a diagonally-fallen
roof-beam. The other end still perched somewhere up in the rafters, who knows how precariously perched.

Under the fallen beam lay the body of a slight man in an Aztec robe and bronze head-dress, half-hidden by the cubit-thick wood. The roof-beam smashed down, one end of it embedded into his hip and chest. His white robe was sopping red. Bone showed under broken metal armour, and pink guts spilled out of body-cavity.