The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Intrusive hands settled over his eyes, from behind.

  Before he could pull away, the fingers of the right hand landed with peculiar accuracy over the exact area of puffy flesh that hurt.

  “God afflicts you.”

  Conrad recognised the Canon-Regular’s dry voice close beside his ear. The touch felt harmless.

  And that might easily change.

  Temporise—placate him—

  No! Conrad thought.

  No, I’m in their hands, I’m handcuffed, che cazzo!; they’re going to interrogate me whatever I do or say. And—

  Too many memories, too fast, flash past, from the mountains of the north, where in that freezing, gritty, mud-locked campaign they had often occasion to question peasants and supposed enemy spies.

  —And I will break, because any man who’s not a fanatic does. And some fanatics do, too.

  But they will have to break me first.

  Conrad snorted at the Dominican he could not see. “I have an affliction? Yes. I doubt it’s from a deity!”

  “Of course you doubt. You’re an atheist. But… He may also intend that you be fit for interrogation by his Eminence Cardinal Corazza…” The last sounded like a self-addressed question.

  Conrad weighed up the certain pain of trying to fight free. The injury the men might do him for resisting this arrest.

  Who can I appeal to? I have no powerful patron if Domenico Barjaba’s left—

  An abrupt movement wrenched pain through his skull and spine.

  Hands dragged at him—lifted him, he realised through the shattering hemicrania; or rather, lifted his head and shoulders off the floor.

  He was suddenly immobile, released from the worst of their grip. Gravity pulled his head, neck, and shoulders back against something upright, warm and cloth-covered.

  The Canon-Regular’s chest.

  The man knelt behind him, Conrad realised, supporting his semi-supine body.

  “Don’t you need the Host?” Conrad provoked, hoping to get the man away from him without physical struggle. “Blessed wine? Holy water? Some sort of Church paraphernalia for throwing out demons—”

  Dry palms covered both his eyes. “All there needs to be is Faith.”

  “And I don’t have any!”

  The man hummed under his breath. A vibration went through Conrad’s body, shivering the pain into splinters of glass.

  All Conrad’s attention focused on his involuntary closeness to the man behind him; he didn’t register the exact moment when he realised that he could spare attention for something beyond his body’s blinding pain.

  Pain that subsided.

  The last of the hemicrania burned out of his vision. A sodden, thick sensation permeated his head. The hangover from hemicrania is worse than that from drink. But I welcome it, every time, he thought dizzily. It means the pain is gone.

  “There.” The Canon-Regular’s hands moved away. “Merciful is God, who will even heal an atheist sinner.”

  Conrad blinked against the suddenly bright and painless world. Overturned table—rucked-up rugs—scattered books—sheets of paper, marked with the prints of sandals—

  The line of his vision left him staring up, at the one undisturbed object on the mantle over the fireplace.

  “Or—it’s twenty minutes by the clock since my servant gave me laudanum. And that’s how long it takes to work.”

  The Canon pushed Conrad upright.

  It caused no pain. The relief was an intense pleasure. Conrad sat with his head supported in his hands for a moment, glad almost to tears.

  Moving with care, he lifted his head from his hands—to discover Canon Viscardo, kneeling, smiling at him.

  It was a disconcerting expression on the knife-sharp features.

  “You have Faith,” the Canon announced. “Somewhere, deep down.” Irritated, Conrad realised he was afraid again. He abandoned his usual reticence. “If there’s any man I hate, it’s one who claims to know more about the inside of my mind than I do!”

  A smug expression settled on Viscardo’s features. It suited him better than the smile.

  “My son. You don’t resist the idea so strongly unless, in your heart, you still have Faith. You’re just fighting against realising it.”

  I am almost too angry to breathe, Conrad realised. Because I’ve had this said to me so many times.

  “Canon-Regular, you’re so violent against the idea of atheism because, deep down, you know it’s true—you’re just fighting against that realisation.”

  “That’s completely different!”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “Understand me—!” Viscardo’s lean face twisted. He reached forward to quickly for avoidance. Conrad flinched, despite himself, cuffed hands lifting in a useless attempt at protection.

  The sallow hand flashed past his vision, settled against his scalp, and knotted in a handful of hair.

  “—You belong to the Holy Office now.” The Canon-Regular showed strong, broad teeth.

  Water ran unexpectedly from Conrad’s eyes. He didn’t cry out. Viscardo’s fist pulled his head forward and down. The pain forced him into a ridiculous, bent over, position. He stared at the floor between his knees, from a matter of inches away. Chest compressed against his thighs, he grunted out inarticulate protests.

  “Atheism is one of man’s corrupt philosophies.” Above, the priest’s voice changed, suddenly suffused with a kind of humble simplicity. “Faith leads us to God, the true God, that sacrificed His son—His son—so that we would be forgiven. Not because we deserve it, but through His mercy. You would deny the human race any dignity!”

  Cold iron touched the skin of Conrad’s neck. Hands gripped his arms and shoulders, professionally immobilising. Viscardo’s scalp-pulling increased; he felt hairs tear free, and water ran involuntarily from his eyes. Conrad tried to twist free, and the weight and hard solidity of metal fitted around his neck, under his chin—

  The lock of a steel collar snapped closed.

  Cuffs and shackles are one thing. Human prisoners are subject to those. But dogs are collared and chained—!

  A hand thrust him to one side.

  Conrad caught himself and sat, jarred but free of physical pain.

  The hemicrania, now that he was not experiencing it, slipped out of his memory as severe pain always does. Knowing that fact was no consolation.

  Boiling with rage and shame, he snapped back at Viscardo. “‘Dignity’? Knowledge is dignity! That’s what you’d deny us. You’d rather we go to your god in our thousands from malarial fevers in Naples, say, than have one Natural Philosopher use observation and experiment!”

  The Canon-Regular snarled. “So, what, you’ll follow in the footsteps of that abomination Galvani, and his nephew Aldini the shame of Italy? Eviscerating frogs and stealing bodies from fresh graves?”

  “I hate to disappoint you, but most of science isn’t half so exciting as that.”

  Viscardo appeared likely to die of apoplexy, if his complexion was anything to go by.

  Conrad pulled at the collar’s animal touch. He shuddered, and forced himself to specifically human discourse:

  “I did see Signore Aldini perform his ‘Galvanic reanimation,’ when I was in London. Aldini did it with wires, and zinc and copper plates, and certainly the eyes of executed murderers opened, and their muscles jerked and twitched like Galvani’s frogs before them. But whether this means his theory of ‘animal electrical fluid’ causing life is correct, I can’t say. There are sciences that are in their infancy; you can’t expect everything to be known as yet.”

  “Seeking immortality—twitching severed limbs—creatures in the Arctic!” the Do minican Canon-Regular muttered, quickly and quietly enough that Conrad was not sure he caught the words correctly. “Infant science, indeed! It should have been aborted! Along with that Shelley bitch!”

  Viscardo got to his feet, staring down with an expression best suited to an entomologist. It was a considerable psychological disadvan
tage not being on his feet, Conrad thought. I know I’m a few inches taller than he is.

  “Signore Scalese, I would be false to the robes of my Order if I allowed you to walk around free. You are a dangerous plausible man, and the sooner your words are taken out of the public ear, the better.”

  “That’s exactly my opinion of you!”

  Words are shimmering, enticing structures, and Conrad has built such structures in the past. Perhaps for this reason, his belief in them always has reservations.

  He choked on bitter laughter. “I may write operas, but I don’t pretend they’re anything but stories. Theology is just a matter of the mind getting drunk on the power of words!”

  Viscardo seemed caught by that, gazing down from between shining black wings of hair. “Not words, signore. The reality of the power behind the words, that we strain to express… Because how can short-lived mortal beings ever really understand the omnipotent God who is, was, and shall be?”

  “Now he’s the omnipotent deity who can’t be understood. A minute ago he was the father mourning the son he sacrificed. If I ask how he can be both incomprehensible and human at the same time, you’ll tell me it’s a mystery, right?”

  “What’s a mystery to me,” Luka Viscardo said tensely, “is how you have the Luciferan pride to think you understand everything about the universe, and can therefore tell me I’m wrong!”

  Conrad snorted. He managed to struggle up onto his knees. “I don’t need to know everything to know that a logical contradiction is a logical contradiction!”

  “There’s your belief—the primacy of human reason. I think… that you were right, signore. You don’t have Faith. Your reason blinds you to it. I pity you more than I can say. And it makes me furious to admit that a man is beyond saving!—but, to be saved, you’d have to let go of that human reason, and humbly turn to God. And you never will. Complete the binding.”

  Light glittered darkly from something coiled and slung over another of the Dominican’s arms. The heavy burden crashed to the floor. Sunlight reflected from the metal links of a chain.

  The reality of it—here in this room where he is used to the sunlight reflecting off the polished wood of his desk, while he wrestles with metre and rhyme and plot—curdled Conrad’s stomach.

  He wrenched, but failed to break their grip on him. The priests moved with practised, mundane precision. One of the taller Dominicans bent over and threaded the steel chain through the hasps of the cuffs, that had worked up under the wrists of his coat; and the shackles around his ankles; and—while another two of them held Conrad motionless—through the hasp of the collar around his neck.

  Straining, Conrad gritted out, “Is this what the Church authorises for innocent men!”

  Canon Viscardo took the free ends of the chain from his junior priest with a nod. He opened his other hand, and Conrad saw he had a single open link: shining steel as thick as his little finger. The Canon’s dark eyes seemed more intent than it required as he threaded the ends of the chain over the open link, and closed his hand around it.

  Without looking away from the steel, Viscardo spoke. “You’re not innocent, Scalese.”

  “Is that decided, then!”

  “I was at the Teatro Nuovo last night for your blasphemy. ‘La morte di Dio’! The death of God!”

  “What do you expect in an opera set in the Enlightenment!”

  A capella singing filled the lodgings, suddenly; the Dominicans beginning at some unseen signal. Loud and beautiful: “Dominus Deus—King of Heaven—”

  Recognition made Conrad choke. That is Signore Rossini’s ‘Little Mass’!

  And, no matter how he claims he wrote it as Church music, this part is exactly the same tenor cabaletta that I heard at La Scala, Milan. I suppose it was too good to lose…

  Canon Viscardo opened his fist. The sunlight that filtered in through the drawing-room windows gleamed back from the steel link—now sealed into a closed oval ring.

  Momentarily, it was unimportant that the binding was complete—an unbroken chain, running through the hasps of his cuffs, shackles, and collar, so that he might be chained to a post like a dog or horse or bull. Conrad stared, hypnotised, at the seamless surface of that final link.

  Nothing visible to prove it had ever been open.

  Unbroken, too, to the touch of his bruised fingers.

  Is it some metallurgist’s trick? Or some conjuror’s distraction and switch?

  The Canon-Regular smiled with equal amounts of frustration, smugness and venom.

  Hands under Conrad’s arms hauled him bodily up. One muscled Dominican friar steadied him on his feet.

  Conrad glanced at that man, just as the friar exchanged looks with a younger, pale-haired Dominican. Both men focused on Luka Viscardo, and for the briefest moment, Conrad saw a wary concern on their faces. And—shame?

  So they don’t all consider him godly… He seems an unpleasant man, full of spite; I suppose he might be exactly the same if he worked for the most revolutionary of societies desiring Atheism and Liberty.

  Viscardo, short of breath from the singing, gasped, “When God desires you bound, you’re bound beyond the power of man to escape.”

  The barrier between his thoughts and his mouth had vanished, Conrad discovered. “A blacksmith and a file, or two minutes with a cold chisel, and I think I could prove you wrong!”

  A snort came from Tullio’s direction.

  One friend in the room, at least!

  “God is not mocked, Signore Scalese. But there: even daily miracles won’t convince an atheist of your calibre, will they? What’s your excuse for disbelieving in this?”

  Conrad wrenched his shoulders free of the friars’ grip. He shook the chain, sliding his thumb over the cold tempered metal. “You call it a miracle as if that explains it! If something is against the apparent natural laws of science and philosophy, it’s no use hiding it under the name of ‘miracle’—you need to examine it, see what really causes it!”

  “You have the truth there in your hand! How much more plain could it be? I ask God to bind the wicked, and He binds you. Holy Mother! can’t you see what’s in front of you?”

  “I see what you see.” Conrad held the compelling black gaze. “I see the same phenomenon—I just don’t accept that it’s accounted for by superstitions and dogma.”

  Viscardo looked away and signalled. All but two of the friars left Conrad alone as if he were contagious, and commenced packing up the documents and papers strewn across the floor.

  Conrad turned the steel links in his hands, fascinated despite himself. “If I see something that appears to contradict the current explanations of science—if I see steel become plastic at such a low temperature, and without burning my skin—then I want to set up experiments to find out why this is. It demands investigation! Not blind ‘worship.’”

  “God Himself comes nowhere into your blasphemous science. You make a false idol of your science: that it holds the incontestable truth—”

  “Incontestable! Have you read nothing that’s been published in England? Germany? France?—Davy! Berzelius! Lamarck! Darwin?—the disagreements? If a present explanation is wrong, another theory can be proposed and tested—there’s never any shame in saying ‘I don’t know.’”

  Viscardo’s eyes shone.

  Because this was a particularly stupid time to speak my mind?

  Anger won’t make him listen—but will anything?

  No one has entry to the cells under the Cardinal’s palace except the Inquisition. They answer to no law except their own. They can imprison a man for years if they choose. And they often choose.

  Conrad realised, as he stared challengingly back, why the Dominican’s gaze was so dark. His irises were a brown colour deep enough that they could barely be distinguished from the pupil.

  Like a dog’s eyes. What’s that old pun about the Dominicans? “Domini canes”—“the Dogs of the Lord.” The Hounds of God. This one’s a mastiff: he won’t let go.

 
The Canon-Regular shouldered past Conrad and gave out orders left and right. Conrad trod on the coils of steel chain, and almost fell. A bruised and dusty Tullio—on his feet now—gave Conrad a wry look.

  Conrad scooped up an armful of chains, and bundled their chill weight between his cuffed hands. “Tullio—if you get the chance, run. I don’t think I can protect you.”

  Tullio attempted a stern glare, but was interrupted.

  “Move!” Canon Viscardo’s order snapped out briskly enough to have the other Dominicans gathered in a moment, documentary evidence under their arms, and two men each to guard Conrad and Tullio. One man slammed a punch under the ex-soldier’s sternum that made him sway in their grip.

  “Let Rossi go!” Conrad scrambled for a justification of his protest. “He’s just a servant. He’s illiterate!”

  “Chosen for his illiteracy, I expect.” Viscardo looked up from a two-year-old libretto from the Paris Opera. “Because of the blasphemy he might read here. But he still has ears and eyes—at the moment—and he can tell us what he’s seen and heard you do.”

  Hands hauled Conrad out onto the main second-floor landing. He grabbed up another armful of chain and stopped himself tripping headlong down the stairs.

  Two of the Dominicans locked their clenched fists in the shoulders of his coat. A crash made him twist around and look back. A friar efficiently nailed boards across his closed door, fixing the Seal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to them.

  Is it possible this is the last time I’ll leave these rooms?

  He was unaware he had stopped dead at the top stair until the accompanying Dominicans seized him, forcing him forward and down. A cluster of robed men waited on the next landing, a tall familiar man in their midst.

  “Merda! JohnJack, I’m sorry—” Conrad started.

  The nearest priest, a Mediterranean-coloured man barely older than a boy, slammed a fist into Conrad’s kidney. Conrad gasped for air and collided with the stair-rail, supporting himself on it, breathing hard.

  JohnJack Spinelli hauled Conrad up by an elbow, despite his own cuffs. “We’ll sort it out, don’t worry.”

  Five minutes ago the stairway might have been deserted, full only of cool brown shadows and green Roman tiles, the tenement deceptively barren. Now, the muffled laughter of the two very pretty girls who lived together on the fourth floor echoed down the open stairwell, and Conrad heard a choked-off enquiry by their male guest. Half a dozen wives bundled out together, one floor above, in a cloud of dark eyes gone brilliant for scandal. An old man, who had always had time to talk to Conrad, banged his stick against the hand-rail. The high-voiced, painfully honest enquiries of small children began.