The Black Opera (78 page)

He glanced back once, at the San Carlo's roof, cracked open like an egg.

In numb realisation, he thought,
Whatever we created—it's gone
.

With all the irony of a fourth Act reversal, Conrad's betraying body eased. He felt his muscles unlock from frozen spasm. A warmth of relief spread through his nerves, and left a sluggishness behind.

Vaffanculo! Why now? Why not before?

A gust of hot wind met him as they ran out into the open space of the great square.

Conrad clamped his handkerchief to his mouth. He heard Isaura wheeze, trying to breathe in the choking air.
And I hoped it might be better close to the water!

Paolo abandoned his side, pounding forward across the unpaved earth.

Conrad's heart jumped in his chest.

He raked the bedraggled, bright group of people with an instantaneously-encompassing gaze—Sandrine, green and gold costume covered in ash, handing something over to Paolo—an instrument-case, he saw—and JohnJack in close discussion with Brigida Lorenzani and Velluti. Brigida's plump face shone purple with exertion. At her shoulder—
wonders!
—the Conte di Argente.

Roberto caught his eye. Under his neat but dusty beard, his lips moved in a small cynical smile.

Yes, I thought you'd run
, Conrad mentally admitted.
Yes, I thought you'd be with Nora by now, no matter what
—

It was actually good to see Roberto, Conrad realised, dumbfounded.
I suppose I'm—well—glad he's not dead.

He was dimly aware of Giambattista Velluti, babbling apologies for his truncated performance. Seeing Brigida, JohnJack, Sandrine, and Velluti—Conrad found he couldn't help but look around for Lorenzo and Estella.

His eyes stung, and not with the ash.

With the skill learned on battlefields, he pushed the thoughts aside, mopped his streaming eyes, and looked up.

And up.

Now he was clear of the buildings, he could see clear across to the volcano—or as clear as the ash allowed. He could not now see the top of the eruption cloud over Naples. It was over his head, for all they must be seven miles from its base. The black column had visible spikes of lightning shattering back and forth across it. And the crown—

Miles above him—miles above whatever heights the French aeronauts had reached in their balloon-flights—the black and violet cloud mushroomed out.

Red lightning flashed in its depths.

Smoke and ash thundered up from Vesuvius, still climbing, still shaking the earth and the sea like a terrier shakes a rat—

Nothing much of Naples beyond this piazza was visible. He could just see through the white ash-fog, to men and women screaming through the streets, pulling their children and wagons containing their lives behind them.

Conrad felt his palms sting. He realised his nails had bitten into the skin.

He stared back at the root of the huge black column, ash and smoke and fire still rising, darkening the afternoon sky. Soft whiteness sleeted down on the waves.

Air rasped in his throat, smelling of stone. His ribs felt heavy. He took a hand away from his mouth, and saw blood and ash on his knuckles.

“Corrado! Paolo found you!”

Ferdinand strode across the square in a thunder of bright uniforms: his personal guard of riflemen. The singers let him have precedence.

“I was afraid you'd died in there, Conrad.”

“Is it safe for you to be out here, sir? I'm told I'm responsible for this, and you hired me.”

“You, responsible?
Oh
—after the Teatro Nuovo…”

Ferdinand looked amused, for a moment, as Conrad had hoped he might.

The weight of desolation came back into his expression. The King of the Two Sicilies glanced around. “Some of my bell-tower spies might be able to find me if they can see me…”

Conrad had an idea he knew exactly what the King thought.
We've lost Naples, and we don't even have the consolation of beating the Prince's Men…

Paolo popped up beside him, instrument case clutched to her chest.
Alfredo's!
he realised. Conrad brushed dust off the case of their father's violin. He rested his arm around Paolo's shoulders.

The thought that insinuated itself into the shock of the last hour made its way into speech, without him having to think about it.

“Sir—do you think the Prince's Men
have
won what they want?”

Nothing but darkness rose in the east. Ferdinand turned his head to look west, towards the afternoon sun, and Pozzuoli, and the Burning Fields. The golden light showed every crease in the skin around his eyes; far too many for a man not yet thirty-five.

“Conrad, after
this
—” Ferdinand squinted at the desolation, where the houses of Naples ran out towards the Posillipo road. The sun made something beautiful of the ash-cloud sleeting down.

“But I expected worse.” Conrad didn't know the truth of it until he said it aloud. “Yes, this is bad—it's the end of the city of Naples, like Pompeii, but…”

Conrad gazed west, in the direction of the Campi Flegrei.

No eruptions there.

“Have
we
won?” he suggested cautiously. “Because of us, is this all the black opera could do?”

“‘All' is hardly the word,” the King snapped.

Like the first silence of snow, ash flattened the distant roar of the eruption plume. Naples emitted no sound at all except human voices, and collapsing and burning buildings.

“I expected worse,” Conrad repeated. “When Nora said she was going to call up the Prince of this World…”

Roberto gave his old sneer. “I assure you, if you had won, you would know about it! As for ‘gods'…”

Another quake of the ground made Conrad almost lose his footing. Something deep in his gut insisted the earth
should not
move. He tried to ignore that primitive part of him that spilled fear all through his body. “Have
neither of us
succeeded, then?”

Roberto Capiraso chewed his lip. The man gazed towards the unseen Burning Fields, as if he did not stand in a city of fleeing thousands, with an opera company around him, and the King of the Two Sicilies glaring to demand an answer.

Conrad blinked dust from his eyes, wincing as an arc of afternoon light slashed through the eruption cloud. The sun in his eyes triggered realisation.

“It's still afternoon—not much past three, by the Sun—” Conrad met Roberto's dark gaze, and saw confirmation there. “The black opera's still playing! Aren't they? They haven't
reached
the end!”

“Assume that Leonora began at much the same time as the San Carlo—” Roberto finally nodded. “They can't yet be beyond the start of Act Three.”

“Why are we debating this?” Ferdinand demanded.

“We can still stop her!”
Conrad was not aware, until he found himself staring the angry monarch down, how desperate and determined he felt that—whatever it was Nora did—it should be stopped.

Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily glared at Conrad; at the aides and theatre crew surrounding them.
“I
want to know why Enrico and Alvarez haven't blown them to shreds, yet!”

This burning city has been Ferdinand's responsibility since he came to the age of reason. Conrad bit back a snarl.

“They may be dead,” he said gently. He suppressed the hacking cough that ash wanted to produce. “Sir, I understand that you'd prefer arrest, or military action, but—we know that, for some reason, that's already failed. What I'm thinking… We still don't know what the black opera might do. But we
do
know where they are. Or Enrico and the Colonel wouldn't have disappeared.”

He pieced it together slowly and carefully, looking around at JohnJack and the others as he did.

“The black opera may do nothing—but we think it's done this.” He gestured at the great plume of liquid rock that blasted into the sky. The admission was bitter on his tongue. “They did it to Tambora, in Indonesia. But they haven't done
more
. Not yet.”

Ferdinand rubbed his hand over his face, looking puzzled, and leaving a trail of grey ash across his skin.

Conrad spoke carefully. “The San Carlo's gone. But the opera—the
operas
—aren't over. If they're still singing
Reconquista
…”

Ferdinand glanced over his shoulder, at the cloud-shrouded chaos of Naples. “There are no other houses—”

“No, Sir,” Conrad interrupted.
“You
want to break up the black opera and arrest the members of the Prince's Men—if that's possible, then all well and good. If not—we have four of the best voices in Italy here. So let's go to the Burning Fields. If we couldn't out-sing them at the San Carlo—let's go to the Flavian Amphitheatre and out-sing them there.”

Conrad met Ferdinand's gaze, and understood the man's rigid pallor.

I'm frightened for me and a handful of others. He's frightened for every person in the Two Sicilies.

The King ignored the exploding rocks that shattered in heat and ash, breaking the windows of the Bourbon-Sicily palace. “This—you prepared for this. You had the Count, here, transpose the voice parts…”

“I didn't prepare for this, exactly. I thought there'd be trouble, and that—” The faces of Estella and Lorenzo shone clear in his mind's eye. “—And that there might be casualties.”

Ferdinand glanced over at the bedraggled singers, costumes dropping pins and strips of fabric, tawdry in the outdoor air. Conrad felt as if he were on the verge of a cavalry attack; all nerves, excitement, fear, and exhilaration.

Casually, even insolently, Conrad called over to the group of singers, chorus, and musicians that had collected around them on the piazza. “He says, will we go sing
il Principe
into the dirt?”

Some of the answers were in thick Neapolitan, some were in the pure Italian of Tuscany. JohnJack said it best:

“Fuck
, yes!”

Paolo almost danced from one foot to the other. “We were having a
success!
You heard them, sire! Right up to the minute we started seeing a version of Pliny the Younger, the audience was in South America with Hernan Cortez and the Aztecs. We've lost the stage. We've lost most of the instruments—but
they'll
be playing the same music. So long as we have voices, we still stand a chance.
Catso!
It doesn't matter if it's a concert performance so long as we
sing!”

Ferdinand's gaze turned distant with calculation. “I'll send messengers for ship's marines, sailors, and the rest of our own riflemen, we'll collect up any other members of
L'Altezza
, and go down to the royal quay and aboard the
Roberto Guiscardo
to Pozzuoli. That'll be far quicker than any roads to the
Anfiteatro
.”

Conrad remembered the morning as if it were centuries ago.
That's right. He sent a patrol down to Pozzuoli
.

The officer in charge of the King's yacht would have ordered it to return, in case the King should have need of it.

Conrad faced about to take a head-count of singers and crew. It was some minutes before he had a group collected.

“Follow me!” the King called. He broke out coughing himself, and strode off through the ash-fog

Conrad followed Ferdinand around the end of the Palazzo Reale complex of
buildings, and down a private road, busy with shepherding members of the company. Halfway down the once-white marble steps that led to the King's private dock, he realised:

Didn't they find Adriano Castiello-Salvati here?

Something bumped his arm. He glanced up to find it was Ferdinand, shading his eyes with both hands, staring out at the ash-darkened Bay beyond the King's Dock.

The dock was bare.

It had occurred to Conrad not long after he began the libretto—in fact, while he was in prison—that in the event of the Prince's Men having a genuine ability, the central administration of the Sicilies would have to be evacuated.