The Black Opera (99 page)

If it felt that it might be hours or days, some part of him suspected it was not more than fifteen minutes.

The air still rang with the orders of the crew, getting the
Apollon
under sail.

Without apparent interval, he found himself strapped into a narrow hanging wooden bed, close under creaking planks. It swayed in every direction.

“Am I in my coffin?”

If someone answered his question, he never knew.

Pain had him like a wolf by the hand. The world flung itself about. Dimly, he realised the ship's creaking and booming meant storm-waves. Gigantic waves, by how long it took between the crest and drop at the top of a wave, and the long slide down into the hollow.

Wind howled loud enough to block out the world.

Have we survived the eruption only to die in the aftermath?

A man in a blood-stained apron jammed himself into the corner by the shuttered stern window. He harangued a dark-haired officer in a soaked woollen over-jacket, who bellowed back.

Conrad distinguished the repeated phrases—
Dread of a lee-shore—new volcanic reefs—Sardinia!—such deep water sailing as the Mediterranean has to offer—!
—but his mind slipped away each time he tried to process them.

The deck heaved up and dropped down as one falls in nightmares, without end.

He groaned, conscious only of a stink. Wooden planks creaked not far from his head—but a ship shouldn't smell so vile, unless he was down in the orlop, among the rubbish of a hundred voyages.

Air caught in the back of his throat, dry with volcanic gases. The odour of sulphur gas couldn't compete with the rotten stench that threatened to turn his stomach.

The lean of the ship spoke of it sailing swift, almost even.

Relief softened his muscles, relaxing from their extreme contraction. He felt the sensations of his body cautiously, not sure yet if he could confidently think it.

The hemicrania has gone. Or if not gone, eased to almost nothing
.

The corners of his eyes felt wet with gratitude for the relief.

The absence of pain let him drift down towards deep sleep.

“Scalese!”

A known voice, but he couldn't put a name to it.

“Oh,
che stronzo!
—Conrad!” The sound of anger altered to an unwilling kind of desperation. Conrad felt hands shaking him by the shoulders.

That doesn't hurt so badly…

He rose to wakefulness. If the hemicrania had left him, other pain remained. It was impossible to identify any one thing among the bruises, sprains and gashes.

His eyes opened for minutes before he focused.

The boards a few feet above must be the frigate's deck. The ill-lit space in which he lay, a cabin. Two or three men shoved past the man who held him, voices raised. Conrad glimpsed a bloody apron by the light of a lamp.

A surgeon
.

“Corrado! Blast you!”

Not Tullio's voice.

Roberto Capiraso, Conte di Argente, lay in a hanging cot beside him. His legs seemed to be restrained. He leaned over awkwardly, shaking Conrad's shoulder.

Conrad tried to shrug free. Failed.

The movement sparked a fire in his left hand. It seared him so badly that tears leaked out of his eyes. The stench grew greater. He dry-heaved.

Roberto's dark, bearded face loomed and receded in a swinging lantern's light. Conrad had no idea why the man frowned. His blunt fingers dug into Conrad's muscles.

“Listen to me!”

Another—foreign—voice said, “It's no good, he can't understand you!”

“He can!” Roberto's expression hardened. “Conrad, listen! We—Your friends have waited as long as they can. If the surgeon doesn't operate, you'll die.” He hesitated, and added harshly, “Your hand is gangrenous.”

Conrad found a voice. He was surprised at how weak it sounded, beneath the sound of straining wood and hemp. “I would have thought you'd be happy enough to see me die of gangrene.”

The other man flinched.

“I'm not that ungrateful. You saved my life.” Roberto sounded extremely ungracious.

Before Conrad could get out a rejoinder that might have amounted to
Damn your life!
the composer added, in an embarrassed mutter:

“I suppose I would regret it if
L'Altezza azteca
was the last opera on which we co-operated.”

Oddly and dizzily touched, Conrad admitted, “I suppose I would, too.”

“Then be sensible enough not to die of this!”

Conrad bit down on his lip and winced. He must have been doing that before, when he was unconscious. His lower lip was scraped bloody. “Are they proposing to cut my hand off?”

“The damaged tissue. It'll poison you. You can smell it yourself.” Dark eyes blinked. “You, surgeon! Let him see it.—Of all the times when we could have needed a god and a miracle…”

It wasn't clear if the last was spoken in jest or seriously.

One of the Frenchmen setting out instruments walked over and stripped the bandages from Conrad's left hand. The immediate increase of stink made him retch.

His hand lay on his chest, where they had propped his arm, but he couldn't feel most of it. What was not agonising was numb.

His thumb still looked human. His hand and first finger were swollen, waxy white and purple-black, under the swinging light.

The three lesser fingers were blown up like German blood sausages. Here, the worse stink rose. The flesh on the back of them was a dry, blood-blister black. The inside curve of the fingers shone wet and brown, swollen and split. Wet, like some creased and furled vegetable matter; no longer looking anything like human flesh.

He couldn't move his hand, to hide the vision. He turned his head to one side.

Roberto Capiraso flushed in the swinging lantern light. It was possible to see—past the aristocratic hauteur so long a part of his expression that it might have been grafted on—that he was not only concerned, but had been willing to
sound clumsy and inept if it meant he could convince one stubborn librettist not to lose his life over this injury.

“Has prayer been tried?” Conrad managed to sound sarcastic.

“Certainly not by me.” A degree of sardonic humour entered Roberto's voice.

“God doesn't listen to men like me; nor does that demon we raised at the amphitheatre. Your hand won't wait. Drink down the brandy, and I'll make them find you a leather belt to bite on.”

The frigate must sail in a better sea: the wooden cots hung at identical shallow angles from the vertical.
Calm enough for surgery
.

Conrad's stomach turned over, sick from his chest to his belly with fear.

It means losing part of myself. I may die. If I die and return, that won't give me an amputated hand back…

A man—a surgeon?—shouted something towards the ship's apothecary-boys.

“Leonora?”
Conrad demanded.

“They won't tell me! And she's my—” Capiraso swallowed the word. “Before they banned your obstreperous servant from here, he said she's in the first mate's cabin. Under strict arrest.”

I want to see her
.

Conrad knew before he asked that it was not possible.

He shuddered on the hard pallet. A swimming feeling in his head and the way his thoughts misted out at the edges decided him. He forced his mind to focus.

No false hope
. I'll lose the hand for good. Men haven't always been healed—healed themselves—in the past. No reason to think they will in the future.

“Roberto.”

The man's head instantly turned. “You're sure?”

“I don't want to rot by inches.” Conrad suppressed the reflex to vomit that surged in his stomach.

Roberto Capiraso hammered on the side of the wooden cot. “Brandy, here!”

“See if they have laudanum.” He made knowledge of what the drug could do a block for fear.

A feeling for the integrity of his body still shuddered in his belly.

He took a last refuge in mockery. “Do me one favour, Roberto. Make sure they take the correct hand…”

The Count snorted. With a startling frank honesty, he said, “You can trust me.”

If there weren't words to describe the absolute intensity of song and music, there were still less words adequate to pain. He bit through the leather belt, though it
was folded over twice. The surgeon's voice rambled on above him—explaining the operation to his assistants?—and he lost all knowledge of the world.

Only pain remained. Pain: as if he were smashed up against the world's ultimate reality.

He did not pray.

He did beg.

The surgeon understood his mixture of Neapolitan, High German, and Parisian French.

“Herr Sertürner's recently-discovered and much-lauded drug, morphine!” the Frenchman proudly announced. “You'll find that we in the Emperor's navy are scientifically advanced—”

“Thank God for science!”

Conrad succumbed to the drug while ignoring the deep laughter of the Conte di Argente.

It did not precisely ease the pain, but it put him into a distant and preoccupied state where he could still feel it, but he didn't care.