The Black Opera (97 page)

Ten steps and he bit through his lower lip in a second place, blood flooding down over his neck-cloth and coat. Twenty steps and he screamed, not sure if he had thrust his hand into a fire, or into the jagged metal jaws of a man-trap, spring snapping it shut through his flesh and blood.

He shouted over Roberto's back at Paolo for her to ignore him when he screamed.

He took good care not to look down at his hand in Nora's.

“Talk?” he got out. He refused to say
Take my mind off this
.

The boiling steam framed her face, hair blasted back towards the winding line of walkers by the wind off the lava. She looked over her shoulder; then walked at an angle, so that she could study him. He found himself staring at those gentiancoloured eyes which are her facet of the world's beauty.

“Corrado… Really, why? Why volunteer for this?”

He might have said something laying claim to heroism. He struggled with something more subtle and difficult—the truth of what made him step forward.

“You were in Naples,” he said, “six weeks ago.”

“Yes,” Nora said cautiously.

“And—rehearsing? The dress rehearsals for
Reconquista
?”

She turned forward again, so that she could lead the cavalcade forward.

Her voice sounded warm. “That's a good guess on your part, Corrado.”

“It's not a guess.” He didn't let her implicit question prompt him. “You knew I was in Naples.”

“…Yes?” She might have been frowning. In a clipped, hasty tone, she added, “I had no intention of seeking you out,”

Conrad narrowed his eyes as the steam lapsed, giving glimpses of the eruption cloud that shut out all but the far western sky. The lowering sun caught him in the face.

“Do you know what hemicrania is?”

“Headaches
?” She sounded utterly bemused.

Conrad felt the tension in Tullio's grip on his arm, and the low conversations from JohnJack and the other singers; from the King, the soldiers, the rest. He thought,
It's no bad thing if she's frustrated enough that she's only thinking of me. She doesn't need to think about the responsibility of all this—not while it's going well
.

“More than a headache. I've had the migraine since before the war ended. I went to some doctor-friends of Monsieur Bichat, in Paris.”

A swirl of hail and grit caught him in the face, just as he glanced back at Isaura.
He lowered his head, bulling forward into the wind, trusting Nora's grip on his hand.

He regained a grip on Roberto's slumped weight, and his pace on the uneven frozen basalt, but when he looked up, the world was lost in thick fog and steam.

“Storms,” he said. “If you listen to Signor Aldini's followers, storms of Galvanic energy in the brain, similar to
grand mal
.”

“Corrado—
what
are you talking about? And why now?”

He smiled to himself at her fierce curiosity and frustration.
That's all Nora
.

“The last time before this that I had a bad attack of hemicrania, it was the morning after
Il terrore di Parigi
made a stunning success. Everyone thought it was a hangover. I thought—well, exhaustion can provoke old wounds to act up. But later, I thought,
Il terrore
was a success; people talk about the prima donna Fanny Tacchinardi, and the composer Persiani, and some of them even about the librettist Conrad Scalese…”

Like a cat that has had a string trailed in front of it for far too long, Leonora pounced. “What has this to do with you volunteering to be my link to these others!”

She unconsciously closed her hand as frustration overtook her. Conrad winced as if an engineered metal tool gripped his left hand.

He shifted Roberto's boneless body more securely over his shoulder.

“You were in Naples when
Il terrore
played. You knew I was there too. You thought of me. And I woke up in the morning with a score in my head that was of no opera I ever knew.”

Conrad hummed under his breath the opening of Nora's aria. He heard her make a noise of speechless surprise.

“I'd never heard it sung, no one played it to me—I never even got to read it in the score; Roberto vanished off with
Reconquista
to ransack it for himself. And when I heard you sing—that was it. I recognised every note.”

Ridged lava swayed under his boots. She turned, arm outstretched, light-footed; waiting for him to re-join her.

“What does it mean?”

“There's a connection between us.” He stated it flatly, too frightened that she would reject the idea. “Down deep, in the same place the ‘Emergent God' exists. You and I, we're connected…”

The wind wailed between rocks, and the scrub and bushes away off in the distance; the lava spat as hail and warm melted rain hit the roiling surface; the basalt ‘islands' creaked under the weight of people who screamed to each other, over the sound of the distant eruption—but all of it sounded like silence to him, facing her lack of response.

“If it's important,” he muttered. “Likely not. I've had
weeks
of hearing how you came back from death for Roberto Conte de Argente…”

Surprisingly, Nora grinned back at him. It was the authentic orphanage-brat expression.

“You fight like brothers!”

Conrad muttered a protest. A rumble of semi-conscious bad language came from his shoulders, where the Conte di Argente slumped.

Nora glanced back. Her Delft-violet eyes had an unusually serious expression behind the teasing. “What do you expect?”

Almost absently, she checked the line behind them. She used a soft voice barely audible over slashing rain and snow, the hiss of lava, explosions of distant lava bombs, and men shouting to each other as they organised themselves in their dozens with extreme urgency.

“You and Roberto, you're clearly connected.”

Conrad muttered a mild protest.

“You're connected through me,” Leonora said simply. “You and him, and vice versa; me to Roberto, me to you. So deep a connection that even my
music
went to you? As soon as you said it, it sounded… right.”

Conrad would have shrugged were it not for the weight of the mercifully-unconscious man across his shoulders. “Maybe it doesn't mean what I thought. Yes, we're connected—”

“Through the Emergent God:
yes
!” She slowed her forward pace, looking up over her shoulder into his face. “The emergent mind of all of us! I knew we had a connection, but this—our connection goes so deep that you and I can
find
each other, through millions and millions of people!”

It stopped his thoughts in their tracks. He found himself with his mouth open to speak, and no idea what to say. After a moment, he said, “Having almost come to think the connection might be frivolous… But I'm wrong, aren't I? It's not frivolous for us.”

Nora's smile dazzled against the brilliance of light and air sucked down by her chill. The wind blew from her into Conrad's face, lashing him with the wet tips of her long hair. He found himself breathless.

“You have a connection to him, too.” He laboured across the rough lava, pulled back and forth by Tullio's grip from behind, and Nora's beyond-cold hand. He still couldn't help but sound resentful of Roberto. “You came back from death in giving birth, for him.”

She turned her head back and forth continually, now, checking the staggering line of people on the basalt behind, and the distance across the lava to a line of scrub and brush, yellow with sulphur. Abruptly, her attention apparently ahead
on twenty feet of frozen basalt, she said scornfully,
“That's
not why we're close!”

“But how could it not be that!” Conrad flexed his abused shoulders under the bearded man's limp weight. “You came back! From the dead!”

Her scornful look mutated into pity, and then both expressions vanished into a deep, unusual seriousness. Conrad thought it resembled the one time he'd seen her genuinely cry.

“When I tell you, believe me.” She stared ahead, apparently not needing to look where her bare feet came down delicately on cold rock. Her voice sounded low. “Something important happened between Roberto and myself. Not over the year in Venice, no. But later, in the time we've had together—I came to trust him.”

“No!” Conrad protested. The word sent a spray of blood from his bitten lip. “Nora, you don't—you
can't
—trust people!”

“Trust
.” Her quick glance back at him showed swimming eyes.

“But the orphanage!”

Conrad couldn't say more. She lived with one eye open, he knew. Orphanages don't bring out the best in people. Not the children, cruel as all children can be, who fight for that one extra meal—fight, even if the cost of it is a hand up the skirt, or worse; and the independent life of a whore begins to look attractive, because at least you get to choose who fucks you.

He automatically moved his foot to avoid twisting his ankle as a large rock fragment shifted.

“How?” He couldn't find a plainer way to ask. “How did he make you trust him?”

“The same way he
made
you do it.” Her voice shimmered with amusement. “you found out that he can be proud, insufferable; vindictive, even; but if he makes a promise, he keeps it, and if there are two choices about what to do, he'll pick the one that matches his morals.”

The last six weeks flashed in front of Conrad's inner vision. Yes, he is Il Superbo, he didn't get that name by accident. But, yes—there are moments writing the score together when the Count has forgotten his claim to landed estates and ancient titles and rolled up his sleeves to work in
il mondo teatrale
.

“He made me come to him for money.” Conrad gripped the weighty body with his right arm. “He made me beg, and then he turned me down, the bastard. But… I think, now, if I hadn't been able to work in the debtor's prison, he would have got me out. For the sake of getting the opera done.”

Nora sounded warmly amused. “Forgetting, as he often did this past month, exactly
which
opera he was supposed to be supporting… Brothers.”

Grit and wet pebbles slid under the soles of his boots. Conrad felt Tullio's grip
on his arm almost slip—poised himself between one step and the next—and Tullio's fingers dug hard into Conrad's muscles again.

Conrad stubbornly muttered,
“You
and Roberto don't have a fraternal relationship.”

“Neither will you and I.” She glanced over her shoulder and looked satisfied by his must-be-startled expression.

“You don't
need
to compete. I came back from my first death for Roberto. As for Signore Conrad Scalese—you just told me, we're connected through the minds of all men. This, that, and the other thing. It's not important, Conrad. How many times I found my way back from death—not important to me.”

She lifted her free hand, forestalling his inchoate protest.

“The girl from the orphanage in Castelfranco Veneto trusts both of you. It didn't happen in a day, or weeks. When you tell me we have a bond through the Emergent God, Conrad, you're only confirming something I've
felt
, deep down, for years.” An ugly expression of threat appeared. “I left you alive, when I might have let the other Prince's Men dispose of you. They argued for it. It would be safer.”

She was clearly in the recent past, Conrad saw; her look common to singers who are independent businesswomen, or noblemen who turn against their social class. He didn't like the ugly express, and not, he realised, because it might once have been a threat to him.

“I don't like to see you look afraid,” he said. “I don't like it when you
do
feel afraid. I want to make things better for you.”

“And now you see why I trust both of you.”

It might have been the wind dashing steam in her face, but Conrad thought, from the roughness in her throat, that thickness in her speech came from tears.

“No one but me has been dead twice! Dead once, yes—all you have to think of is light, movement,
warmth
, and how badly you want them. But the second time! When you recognise that cruel cold and the rest it promises you can have—there's one moment, one short moment. You have to know yourself really well to get out of there. You have to know, deep down, in an instant, what you
truly
need and want.”

The pull on his agonised hand eased. She'd paused to let the strung-out line of people on the basalt bridge catch up.

“No one but me has died
twice
. And as I was dying, in the lava—I had just enough time there to know I've been a fool. To know what I abandoned when I left Venice—”

A groggy voice behind Conrad's right ear slurred, “Tell the silly bitch she can
have
you!”

Conrad spluttered, “What!”

The Count's voice rumbled through his bones, Conrad found, as the man answered.