The Black Opera (77 page)

His dead face was undamaged.

Lorenzo!

Conrad thought dazedly,
Leave aside the chest-voice high C and Lorenzo Bonfigli was probably the weakest singer among our principals
. But he was generous when he sang; he never minded the person with him looking good. I never in six weeks heard anyone speak badly of him.

Conrad clamped down on his sensitivities and knelt—swaying—to examine the body. He checked for a heartbeat and wiped the man's face. A touch to his naked eyeball got no result.

It was a relief to find that Lorenzo wasn't breathing.
What in God's name could anyone do with him if he was still alive?

Diego's medieval armour was visible under Mazatl's white robe, but it hadn't saved him.

Someone should take care of his body, but I can't move him
.

Conrad climbed to his feet, not sure if he or the building swayed.

And… he won't be the only one
.

I need to get out of here before all the roof falls in.

Two yards away, at what must be the very back of the stage area, the church-choir tenor who sang in the chorus of Aztec citizens lay with his head smashed open. Conrad pushed himself back up onto his feet. Texture warned him—he glanced back, and down.

He had one heel on Michele Angelotti's yellow curls.

Angelotti's body's head flopped back when he touched it, neck broken.

He balanced upright on the juddering stage, and saw Estella Belucci on her back. Still on her stage mark. A fine layer of yellow grit covered the mark, the stage, and Estella.

Surely
one's
alive
. Conrad picked his way across the shuddering planks.

Her hand felt warm. Her stage make-up was covered in a layer of fine white ash.

So were her open eyes.

His hand came out bloody from under the back of her head. Her skull felt like shattered eggshells in a bag.

Something creaked above him—the sound of wood under strain.

He released Estella and straightened up.

It cracked and let go.

Conrad flung himself forward. Rafters thundered down from the theatre roof. He fell into a backstage corridor and sprinted for the doors.

Knocking one aside, that was half off its hinges, he tripped and pitched full-length on the ground.

The impact stunned him. He rolled forward. The ground trembled under his raw palms. He got up onto his knees.

“Corradino!”

A body hit him. He registered a soprano squeal; solid weight.

“Paolo?
—We have to get out of the building!”

Her frantic hands dragged him up onto his feet, still clinging to his coat. “I thought you were
dead!
Where have you been?—We
are
outside! It's no better!”

Conrad grabbed her shoulders—
for support
, he admitted, only to himself. Her blue tail-coat and breeches were uniformly dusty white. So was her hair, and her face, except where blood had run down her cheek and dried. He clutched at her. No obvious wound—

He evidently
had
tumbled out through the San Carlo's stage doors, into the yard at the back.

But it might as well be indoors!

A pale yellow-white ceiling swirled overhead. No sun, no clouds, no blue sky. The buildings close to the Teatro stood shrouded as if by snow.

Those that stood.

Continuous tremors shook grey snow from tree branches, windowsills, balconies.

The world looked at if it lay shrouded not in snow, but in drift upon drift of Pozzuoli's concrete. The road, under the bombardment of thousands of small rocks, might as well have been a stream-bed, black and steaming as if a dragon laired under it.

The thought of underground fire, of Pozzuoli, gave him an instant answer.

He seized Isaura's wrist as she raised her hand to her face.

She gave him a look of utter confusion.

“I saw this through the King's microscope.” Conrad coughed. “He has samples from the Pompeii eruption.
Don't rub your eyes
. It isn't ash from a fire, the way you'd think of it. It's splintered glass.”

“Oh Dio!”

He didn't release her hand; the grip was familial and comforting.

The hiss and whoosh of artillery made him duck, pulling Isaura down with him.

The explosion landed too far away to be seen in these streets of high buildings, but he felt it.

Belatedly, he realised,
Not artillery. The volcano. Rocks
.

“Estella and Lorenzo are dead.” He scrutinised Isaura's face, feeling in her hair to discover where she bled. “And Michele Angelotti. And—I forget his name, the chorus tenor who came from San Gennaro's.”

She could not be more white and shocked. She gripped both his hands. “Corrado, come with me.”

“Where—?”

“Away from these buildings!” Paolo-Isaura pulled him towards the street. “It's not safe anywhere in the streets! Buildings are collapsing! I've told anyone else I found to meet right out in the middle of the piazza. Away from everything.”

A riderless horse galloped past the San Carlo. Conrad caught sight of a team of coach horses dragging an over-turned coach. Down the street, another team pulled the shattered remains of a barouche; something trapped under it that looked like a bundle of old clothes.

Shouting and screaming filled the air: women, men, and children. Ash-fall flattened every sound.

“How long since—?”

His sister muttered, “Vesuvius? I don't know—”

He no longer listened.

He staggered out into the wide piazza, away from the Teatro San Carlo and the Palace.

That will let me
see
.

“No, wait!” Paolo-Isaura clung to his arm, almost too heavy to be dragged, thin though she looked. “We have to hide you—”

Conrad felt a sweat of cold fear on his neck, behind his ears, down his spine.

He had reason to be aware of every yard of the seven miles or so that separated Vesuvius's vast crater from the city. Twice that distance away at Cape Misenum, in the first century AD, Pliny had only been aware of a faint plume of smoke. Here…

He couldn't look away from the eruption cloud, black and purple, shot all through with lightning, and appallingly
solid
. As if someone had turned a powerful hose of earth on, and pointed it into the sky, and let it blast
straight up
…

He couldn't look at the
top
of the eruption cloud without tipping his head back far enough for his neck to crick, and his vertebrae to spurt pain across his neck, skull, and eye-sockets. Mesmerised, he stared up at the towering stream of cloud, ash and rock that jetted up towards the sky. Great cumulus clouds of ash rolled straight up out of the summit. The sun shone down on the black clouds
and cast shadows of the eruption plume on the slopes.

Spills of ash ran down the steep sides of the cone. Black earth sprayed up in what must be titanic quantities, to be visible in Naples itself. The solid-looking clouds rolled up in a pillar of ash, red at the base, now, and white at the very edges.

Conrad craned his head back, staring up, heart in his mouth. Lightning zagged across the rising ash-plume.

At some certain height—he could not even guess how far above the earth—the thundering pillar of ash ceased to jet upwards, and began to spread out. Tendrils of cloud reached across the sky, groping towards Naples itself. The spreading umbrella cloud would be invading villages and towns all around the slopes—but for some reason he could not take his eyes off the monster invading the coastline and sea between himself and the mountain. The shape of an umbrella pine, and its furthest reaching arms were shedding a black rain, that became a white snow where it was backed by buildings or hills. Falling ash…

The earth continually quaked and shuddered underfoot. He wrapped his arms tightly around his sister, his chin resting on the top of her head.

“We can't stay here.” Isaura's voice came muffled from his jacket.

The last remnants of snow decorated the mountain's summit, despite a late spring day below in Naples. Thunderheads of cloud rolled up from the mouth of the crater. Great bolts of lightning arced from one to the next—so loudly that he swore he could hear the lightning over every scream, sob, and shattering quake that shook the city.

Conrad felt it more in his chest and gut than heard it with his ears. He felt a twist of cold fear.
How am I supposed to protect her from this?

“We failed,” he said bleakly, hugging Paolo closer, and feeling her grip on him tighten. “This is what they wanted. Naples is their blood sacrifice.”

P
aolo took her face out of his coat. Tears left runnels in the grey ash sticking to her cheeks.

It will at least sluice the volcanic ash out of her eyes, Conrad thought. She put both hands to his coat collar and yanked it up.

He hissed, knocked her arms away automatically, and swore at the fire of
hemicrania stiffening his neck and skull with pain.

“What
are you doing!”

“We have to hide you!”

Standing under the spreading eruption plume of Vesuvius, Conrad wondered, mundanely,
Have I gone as mad as I feel?

“Hide? Me?”

He couldn't help equal sarcasm landing on each word.

“Out in the piazza, they're fighting—the men that came out of the Pit are just a mob!—some are terrified and some are furious—”

Her voice rose. She made a visibly arduous effort at control.

“Corrado, for Our Lady's sake,
don't
let anyone know you're the poet of the opera!”

Pain made him sharp.
“What?”

“I heard them talking—they're all saying it was you that made this happen!”

Conrad stared, so taken aback that he forgot to be terrified.

Paolo-Isaura gestured at the ruined Palazzo.

“They're saying that your
Terrore di Parigi
got the Teatro Nuovo struck by lightning—and now your
L'Altezza azteca
has made Vesuvius erupt!”

“But—
But!
”

“First the Teatro Nuovo and now the San Carlo—It makes
sense
to them!”

“But—! But the black opera—!”

“They don't know there's another opera!”

Irony left him temporarily speechless.

I'm
to be blamed for this—for what the Prince's Men have done—!

Paolo tugged at his cuff. “I saw some of the others get out. Keep your head down! I can get us to them without being seen.”

Conrad flinched. The volcano's eruption grew louder and more violent. A sound like artillery split the air.

Before he thought, he was crouched down behind the wall at the back of the San Carlo, Paolo held in his arms and sheltered by his body. Two—three—four explosions sounded. He tilted his head up and caught sight of a burning rock hurtling down. It buried itself somewhere streets beyond, but he felt the shock of its explosion.

“Sweet Jesus!” Paolo yelped. He looked down to see her eyes wide. She muttered, “Now it's throwing rocks at us! Let's go!”

Conrad scrambled up. He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick squeeze, and then turned his coat collar up as high as he could, his cravat pushed up over his chin.

The ash in the air smeared his fingers—would be in his hair, he realised.
I
probably look fifty if I'm a day!

No one will recognise young Signore Scalese.

“Let's go.”

“This way!” Paolo caught his hand, and pulled.

Conrad followed her, running over the rock-strewn, uneven earth towards the front of the Palazzo Reale.

His feet thumped against the stone paving. Rock-bombs detonated above him: air-bursts that made him flinch, and swear at the fire of migraine inflaming every nerve in his body. He bashed his shoulder into one running man, and almost tripped over another.

“Cor—
Brother!”
Paolo corrected herself.

Conrad pinched the wing of his nostril, and the sharp, different pain did what he hoped. His eyes watered and ran, and he blinked away tears and ash. “I'm with you.”

A skewer of pain pressed into his right eye, and made him absent from the world of fire and black smoke. He followed Paolo, her coat grey now with falling ash. He felt the continual vibration of the ground, and the rattle of falling brickwork. Skirting the edges of the crowds took him closer to the Palace, under the second-floor balcony from which the Kings of the Sicilies gave their speeches.

A decorative stone pilaster separated from the balcony and smashed down on the piazza. Conrad grabbed Isaura around the body and hurried her forward, at moments lifting her off her feet; coughing as they kicked up almost weightless ash.