The Black Opera (91 page)

The Dead surveyed him. He caught a smile—Luigi's, he noted, seeming almost individual.

“I know what has been seen,” the voices said. “Thick lava moves slowly, sticks in the stone throats of volcanoes, and they erupt. Make molten stone thinner, and no blockages occur. Lava will seep out onto the land, but that will be all. And—this I can do.”

“Wait a short time,” the voice that was not the Prince of the World added. “Until it's safe to leave.”

Conrad leaned forward, hands on his knees, head hanging down. He drew in air slowly.

A waterfall of questions flowed towards the Returned Dead, every man present keen to question it—them—before it was time to leave. Entreaties and queries came from all sides.

Thousands of voices produced a sound like a long roll of summer thunder, oddly distinct against the noise of the eruption.

“Look at her!” Roberto Capiraso tilted his head towards Leonora, where she spoke with the officers of the Prince's Men. “She's making it up, now, as she goes along!”

We are the two men who know her best in the world
—

“You're right,” Conrad said.

The Count shrugged. “Well—I suppose, so would I, if I had that gang of jackals at my heels!”

Diverted, unable to hide amusement, Conrad said, “Actually, I think you do.”

Capiraso made to speak, stopped, and folded his arms decisively.

The flood of questions continued.
Why is the universe cruel? Am I damned? Is my wife, my husband, cheating on me? How do I avoid Hell? What is the secret of happiness? Is there a purpose to our existence?

A boy, no more than twelve, narrowed his eyes and demanded, “Are you the god that created the world?”

Voices rolled like thunder.

“The beginning is hidden in fire and aether. In the time of dreams, creation was by beast-headed men, and ancient pantheons. Now that dreams are fading, you know of more time than I do, but the beginning is still hidden.”

“What?” Tullio said blankly.

“I think it means geological time.” Conrad snorted. “It's
not
God, whatever it is—and they shouldn't treat it as if it had those kind of answers. It's not a deity. It's—the Library of Alexandria!”

He heard Canon-Regular Viscardo bellowing up at the ash-coloured mass of men and women.

“Are you a demon?”

The unified voice came back: “Yes and no.”

Ferdinand leaned over to speak to Conrad. “Look—her advisors are bewildered! They haven't got what they expected.”

“I wonder what they
have
got, sir.”

“I was hoping, as our resident atheist, you might be able to tell me.”

Conrad shook his head.

“I might have a better question,” he said.

It was easy to concentrate on the face of Luigi, and ignore how many other voices might speak if he spoke.

“How far back into the past do you remember?”

An outraged Viscardo snapped, “Six thousand and six years of humankind, that's the most that will be possible!”

Niccolo di Galdi looked contemptuously at Conrad. “Even your prehistoric-lizard-discovering Dr Buckland can find no old human remains, as Darwin avers there
must
be. Even his ‘Red Lady of Paviland' is only ancient enough to have lived when our Roman Empire ruled over Britain!”

Luigi smiled. Multiple voices spoke with him. “Those bones were not the skeleton of a lady, but of a young man—we dyed his bones with red ochre and we laid his body in a cave for burial because we loved him, three and thirty thousand years ago.”

A deeper silence fell.

“I remember leaving the forests for the plains, and I remember the first artists marking with that same ochre on the walls of caverns… We can count easily back half a million years—though we looked and walked differently then, but we felt the same. I remember when we grew weary of the hunt, and put seeds in the ground for harvest, and being in those places, built cities—villages, you would call them now. But that was only yesterday; ten thousand years ago.”

Conrad found himself dazzled at the vision of deep time.

“There,” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily said mildly. “Proof that the Prince's Men are wrong. The one true God would remember Creation, as would the Fallen Angel Lucifer; therefore this manifestation is no kind of Deity at all.”

“Heretic!” The apostate Canon-Regular glared at his king. “It's proof, on the contrary, that the Prince's Men are correct—the one true Creator-God has evidently departed from the world, and this is the Prince who has been left in charge to oversee the human race.”

King Ferdinand looked quizzically back at Conrad.

“It isn't
proof
of anything,” Conrad remarked. He added, “But if it was an indication of anything at all, it would be that the Deity is a creation of man, rather than the other way around. Its knowledge only goes back to when man was beginning to be a conscious animal.”

“Heretic!” Viscardo hissed. “Darwinist!”

“If two sides are calling me heretic, I have to be doing something right,” Conrad muttered.

Conrad looked at the faces of the Returned Dead, meeting their eyes. He found himself wondering what it might be like if human minds could be joined, in the way that human voices are joined in
musicodramma
, and if they might in the same way create something that is beyond themselves.

Someone towards the back of the Prince's Men was still quietly singing. Conrad caught
“Quel'anima—”
“That soul—”

“Oh, I understand!” he exclaimed. “It comes down to music, of course. And Aldini's work on Galvanic forces…”

“Yes.” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily sounded impatient—and intrigued. “It does?”

“I was thinking of M. Bichat,” Conrad said.

“Of
course
you were!” Tullio's mutter seemed to find an echo with both Paolo and the King.

“If you recall—” Conrad turned to the tiers of seats, making it evident he also addressed the Prince. “—Bichat said that he'd dug into the human body as far as it's possible to go.”

“Blasphemy!”

“—Thank you, Signore Viscardo. Monsieur Buchat theorised that the mind—or the soul, if you prefer to think of it that way—comes into existence
because
we're alive. Emerging out of some Galvanic force that animates the human body.”

Ferdinand cocked his eyebrow, in much the same way he had done on the terrace of the Palazzo Reale, when Conrad first met him.

“And the relevance?” he asked.

“If the Galvanic force of one body can produce a soul, a mind, then what can the force of thousands—of
millions
—produce? I wonder if what men call their God
emerges
, if you like, as a property of millions of intelligent beings alive at the same time?”

“And you think that this—” Ferdinand struggled for a term that evaded him, and said, finally, “—this
entity
, is what? An emergent God?”

In the middle of chaos, Conrad smiled.

“I like that, sir. Yes. An emergent ‘God.' It knows what we know, remembers what we remember. And remembers no further back, because we were not intelligent animals in the beginning?”

Adalrico di Galdi snorted.
“My
family were never animals!”

Conrad ignored the Prince's Man.

“Not everything it knows will be true. In fact, most of it won't. If it contains the human body of knowledge, that includes true and false theories, mistaken knowledge, myths, fiction, and misunderstood truth.”

Luka Viscardo pounced. “Mistakes! Fiction! This isn't God the Creator, or the Prince of this World—this is a beguiling demon!”

King Ferdinand waved the Canon to silence. Viscardo—out of habit, Conrad suspected—obeyed.

“And the relevance of this to
music?”
Ferdinand emphasised.

“Easy, sir. The Emergent God is susceptible to music because
we
are.”

He caught a rumble, underfoot, that died away after a long moment. Glancing up, he saw that the Returned Dead no longer all moved in the same unison.

“They're no longer a channel,” he said, thinking aloud. “Sir—I think this may be our signal. That we should leave here.”

Conrad caught movement in his peripheral vision.

He turned his head just in time to see King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies lift his hand.

In it was an English duelling pistol, made with exquisite skill to be perfectly accurate.

Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily took aim, pointing the pistol across the collapsed sunken passage, at Enrico Mantenucci's forehead.

With twenty feet between them, he squeezed the trigger.

The explosion came simultaneously to Conrad with the spatter and spray of blood. He put up his hands, uselessly, to shield himself from.

Ferdinand lowered the pistol.

Wide-eyed, the top of his forehead blown away and his open skull scooped out bloody, Mantenucci's dead body fell over backwards and fell like a sack behind the rubble.

“After all,” Ferdinand said, “guns had to come back into use at
some
point.”

His lips formed a name that might have been
Adriano
.

A signal, and the King's Rifles fell into order, covering the retreating Prince's Men—most of whom were lost among the departing Returned Dead.

Ferdinand ordered, “Now we leave.”

T
he Roman concrete felt gritty under his hands. Conrad sat on the lowest tier of the amphitheatre. His mind felt as senseless as the volcanic stone.
Do I have no feeling left—not even for an execution by a King?

He watched as the Dead of Naples returned, man by man and woman by
woman, to their own individuality.

If something ancient still looked out of some of their eyes…
Well, that's part of being Returned Dead
, he concluded.

He did not look for Nora.

The vibration of the eruption could be felt through the skin of his hands, where he rested them on the scoured stone. Or it might have been that he shook, tension relieved.

Sandrine and JohnJack and the other singers made a bright knot of laughter, some distance away across the arena. Conrad wondered briefly why he didn't join them.

“Well then, Corradino…”

Conrad blinked, and rubbed at his eye on the excuse of the dust in the air.

Luigi Esposito rebuked him. “Wash that out with water, don't rub it!”

“Yes, mother.” Conrad snorted. And could not—for the thick heaviness in his throat—say another word.

The dead police chief smoothed his gloves onto his fingers; both grey with volcanic ash. His smile was no different to when he had been living.

A little wistfully, he said, “I wonder what now, Corradino.”

Will he live as long as any Returned Dead? Or will he vanish with these ash-clouds, because they're the miracle that brought him back?

A strong shudder of the earth under Conrad's feet interrupted his attempt to put words together.

“Go to the ship.” Luigi's pale hand rested briefly on Conrad's shoulder.

His smile was little more than a crease of the under-lids of his eyes, but it warmed Conrad clear through.

The pyroclastic flow formed again in swirls and retreating waves. Only Luigi Esposito of all the vanishing Dead lagged and looked back over his shoulder. His smile was not particularly altered by the ash that smudged his flesh, being as innocently sweet and wicked as the choirboy that he had once been.

His voice came low but distinct. “Don't grieve, Corrado. We'll see each other again.”

Before Conrad could ask what he meant, the police chief was gone, lost in the dispersing crowds.