The Black Opera (96 page)

Her coldness turns the lava into cold basalt beneath her feet
.

“She's giving her cold into the lava.” Conrad felt himself willing to bet any number of experiments would support his instantaneous hypothesis.

Roberto snarled. “What do you mean, ‘giving her cold'?”

“Fire is—movement. Heat is movement. Heraclitus said it. Atoms in movement. I don't know what death is—”

Momentarily, his situation returned to him in belly-churning reality:
trapped between lava flows that are closing together, and merging
. He swayed on the unsteady earth.

“—But I suppose death is the utter antithesis of movement.”

The objectivity came from the part of him that always observed, always took notes; is always the observing poet's eye.

“Cold is the opposite of fire. If she was as cold as you said, Roberto, when she first came back, then she would be if she came back a second time.”

“The dead don't come back a second time!”

Conrad pointed to the blazing white figure haloed in sun and steam.

“That
is
Nora
.”

He stared into the murk and light. He searched out her face. A moment later he met her gaze, and fell back against Paolo before he could catch his balance.

“Corrado, what is it?”

How to explain that meeting the eye of another living being can sent a charge of Galvanic energy from spine to belly to cock?

Conrad shivered at the trauma, even as he sought out her eyes again.

The slight figure held out a hand, beckoned sharply, and—
all Leonora!
—stamped her foot on the newly-formed basalt.

The motion sent spikes of frost across the black stone.

“She's come to lead us out.”

Conrad heard a baritone echo of his voice as he spoke, over the surprise of the dead and the living.

The injured Roberto Capiraso hooded his eyes. Whatever she's come back for—the first thing she intends is to lead us over the lava.”

The temporary opening in the clouds knit closed. Ragged edges merged together overhead, closing off the last of the day's light that they were likely to
see, Conrad thought. Vesuvius's darkness infiltrated the sky and the air. Men and women formed up in a confused column.

Her naked body glowed like a beacon pearl.

“What aria did you come back for
this
time?” Roberto Capiraso snapped.

He was likely in considerable pain from the cracked bones in his lower legs. Conrad knew the viciousness in his voice had nothing to do with that particular injury.

“I don't care if I
never
sing. I had to come back.”

The low, female rasp cut through the noise of shouting, explosions, eruptions, and the hiss of hot lava where it met low-lying water. “You're going to die if you stay here.”

The cold came off her in waves. Conrad could have told with his eyes closed that he faced her. She was the antithesis of the searing lava.

The cold of the grave!
he thought, and almost giggled.

Roberto demanded, “Why would you care if he or I should die? What plans have we interrupted this time?”

She looked from him to Roberto, and from the Count back to Conrad. There was a desperation in her face.

“I suppose,” Roberto said slowly, despite the chaos around them, “that neither of us will ever know if you're telling the truth. Lying perfectly was how you survived growing up.”

She stamped her foot.

Under her bare sole, the earth turned black, solid, and frosted over with crystals of ice.

“I just want you both to live!”

In the periphery of his vision, he could see Roberto's white, sweat-stained face. The Count watched his late wife too.

Leonora stood up straight. Every pretence dropped away from her.

The lava slowed, stopped, and congealed where she stood.

“I can lead you,” she said. “The first to follow me will take my hand—I have to have human contact as well, while I'm still touching death, to follow the direction of life. Form a chain, take hands—use belts and kerchiefs, to make yourselves secure. Otherwise you'll get lost in the storm.”

Conrad looked idly at her face, that he had not ever thought to see again in motion. Her skin still breathed off cold.

He mused aloud. “The further you get from that state of non-existence, the less you'll be able to cool the lava. So we don't have long.”

She gave one short apologetic nod. By the end of that first year in Venice, they had rubbed through sufficient of a young marriage's difficulties that many things
went without words. This was one, he realised.

“Nora…” Roberto's voice lost its acid edge. It occurred to Conrad that she and Roberto were likely working through the same difficulties, at the same time.

He could see plainly that the column of soldiers and San Carlo people would need to be led. With ash, dust, rain and hail swirling in thick as gruel, trying to follow Leonora blindly through the worsening visibility would result only in half of them stepping into safety, and the rest lost to the lava-flow.

He wondered what it would feel like to take Leonora's hand, now. If any human could take her hand without irrevocable damage. Her body must be beyond freezing. Cold so intense will burn. Especially, it will burn other flesh.

“Which of us?” he said aloud, without meaning to.

Roberto scowled, puzzled.

Conrad explained, “Nora will have to lead. Then…”

Leonora bit at her lip, and said nothing.

Neither of us can ask her to condemn the other
.

Conrad caught Tullio's eye. He bent down, drove his shoulder into the Count of Argente's belly, and pulled the composer's arm over his shoulder. With Tullio steadying him, he stood up with a phenomenal effort and a grunt, and balanced himself under the weight.

The Count di Argente hung with his legs straight down, his body over Conrad's shoulders in a fireman's carry.

It left him unable to get free, but didn't stop his abrupt, frustrated cursing.

“I'll do it,” Conrad said steadily. “Tullio, Paolo; see that everybody's ready.”

He said nothing while they and Sandrine were gone, or while a column formed on the shrinking patch of earth.

He held Nora's gaze, watching her bright eyes and unbound hair.

She sang, intensely, under her breath; only just audible. He nevertheless recognised it—Queen Isabella's first aria on meeting King Muhammed. Her words spoke of triumph, but the voice spoke of love denied.

Meeting her eyes, he found himself suddenly thinking,
She needs a lover who will love what she is, or she will mourn still when Naples is a city of brick and iron, far far in the future.

Before he could fully realise the thought, Tullio shouldered through the fog, heavy grip locked around Paolo's wrist.

“We're ready!”

Conrad reached up and put his right arm around Roberto Capiraso's body, clamping the man down on his shoulder in a tight grip. He felt Tullio pull the sleeves of his coat and shirt down, and Tullio's broad hand reached up and wrapped around his forearm, flesh to flesh.

Conrad very clearly and decisively held out his left hand to Leonora.

“Corrado—why?”

He looked down at her pale hand, cold coming off the skin in skeins of fog. Fear twisted in his guts.

“I'm not afraid. It's something I can do—so I will.”

He bit through his lip when her twice-cold flesh enclosed his.

The earth was hot under his boots. Leonora's step called up solidified rock—cold rock, under her feet, forming temporary “islands.”

The first step onto lava was a terror to him, his balls crawling up into his belly at the knowledge of the heat beneath.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tullio reassuringly tighten his grip on Paulo-Isaura's hand, and Isaura grab Brigida's plump fingers; JohnJack, behind Brigida, holding her other hand—and Sandrine's—and so on for all the opera company, the King, the King's riflemen, and those of the Prince's Men taken prisoner.

The temperature of the surrounding lava could have blackened all of them to charcoal within seconds. Under Conrad's feet, the congealed rock is a shield.

If he would remember anything, Conrad thought, it would be this:

The living human body of Roberto Capiraso gripped under his right arm, feeling the slick sweat of pain as his fractured leg-bones shifted clumsily.

Leonora's fingers closed on his left hand like iron machinery, pulling him forward.

The pain of it over-rode everything, even wondering if this would work, and whether he was about to step directly into molten rock.

His foot came down on frozen lava. He staggered forward, and her hand held his, as desperately as he gripped hers.

His warm and sweating human hand—the fingers and palm of his left hand scorched instantly by the cold of Leonora's flesh.

How else would her step bridge the lava-flow with instantly cooled rock? Miracles come with, if not a price, their own internal logic. And Conrad had been, for that very reason, careful to make sure that which hand it was that he offered into her world of miracles.