The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Ferdinand gave a wry smile. “Having read the good Signore Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, and his treatise of government, I merely wonder if The Prince is not a model for how they plan to govern all Italy. That would make them ‘Prince’s Men.’”

  Mantenucci snorted, under his breath, and pushed fingers through hair too short to ruffle. It shone like iron in the morning light through the gauze curtains.

  We must make an odd picture. Opera writer, police chief, and King!

  “We’ll be lucky if they’re only after Italy, Majesty.” The Commendatore drained his Turkish coffee at a gulp. “Now. I’ve been able to piece together their talk of the Devil. They speak in the way the old Hebrews and Muslims do—he’s an Adversary, a Tester, to make sure that men are kept as moral as God intends ’em. That’s what the ‘Prince of this World’ was to do originally: test men to see they’d be strong, like metal in the forging. But the God who created us left, and the world was left in the Tester’s hands.”

  Conrad made to speak.

  Mantenucci held up an arresting finger. “As a Prince’s Man—I have to say the Tester’s hands are tied. The Adversary can’t change the way the universe is set up: God laid down universal laws, as strong as Time and as steady as bedrock. The Prince of this World might be able to mark every sparrow which falls, but he can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  Under the man’s iron-dark brows, a light sparked.

  “That’s where the Prince’s Men come in. They see themselves as acting for him. Man has free will.”

  “As if an all-knowing God could create true free will—!” Conrad stopped himself, seeing it was plainly not the time for that discussion.

  Enrico Mantenucci waved it off sternly. “Man’s free will is the one exception to those universal laws. What are miracles, but mankind’s free will requesting God to make an exception to the laws of Creation?”

  “Commendatore, you do realise that’s not a rhetorical question?”

  “Gentlemen!”

  Mantenucci inclined his head to the King. “As Prince’s Men, we see there are tiny chinks in the universal Law. However they come there. Miracles. So. What do we choose to do?”

  Conrad closed his eyes against the bright stimulus of the wall maps, and rested his chin on his joined hands. “As a Prince’s Man, I choose… to exploit that in some way?”

  He opened his eyes to find the grizzled police chief looking almost mischievous.

  Mantenucci said, “Absolutely. Miracles are made by the Prince of this World, to help Mankind. But also suppose…”

  Conrad allowed himself to follow the internal logic of Mantenucci’s proposition. “—Suppose that it can go both ways. That mankind can help the Prince of this World…?”

  It spread itself out instantly in his mind, like a logic problem a tutor might present, or any difficulty in solving how an opera might finish.

  “—Help the Prince. By doing…something that he can’t do for himself. By bringing about a miracle?—An opera miracle?”

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily and Enrico Mantenucci exchanged glances, expressions between smug and rueful.

  “I have every confidence in my atheist pyromaniac,” Ferdinand said.

  Mantenucci barked a laugh. “O, very well, sir. Grant you that one.”

  He leaned an elbow on the map desk and turned back to Conrad. Seen with the morning light full on him, Conrad thought him closer to fifty-five than forty-five, but he was full of a contained fierce energy.

  “That’s it exactly.” Mantenucci visibly dropped his stance as Devil’s advocate. “According to everything our spies have gathered, the Prince’s Men need to request—or create—a miracle, to bring about a change that the ‘Prince of this World’ can’t.”

  Conrad thumbed his right eye-socket. The merest spectre of pain haunted him as he sifted the flood of information. “If there’s a real danger, won’t it come from this conspiracy and how much political and religious unrest they might stir up?”

  Enrico Mantenucci looked mildly affronted. “A ‘real danger’?”

  “Apologies. My secular assumptions coming to the fore.”

  Ferdinand drained his cup and set it down. “You’re an atheist, Conrad Scalese, in a world where God is only too prone to granting religious miracles in church, and secular miracles when opera reaches its sublime heights of passion. You don’t deny they can occur, and I’m grateful—I can talk with you freely about the nature of the Church, and the danger of the Prince’s Men, alike, without you fleeing in horror. I know you’ll remain impartial towards every matter of theology, if only because you have no use for theology as an explanation.”

  Conrad filled his small coffee cup again, and slipped sugar into the thick black liquid. “I hardly know if I’m being accused or complimented!”

  Mantenucci chuckled. “Take it as whichever pleases you!”

  Conrad faced the King, where Ferdinand sat against a background of blue, green, and gold. “Sire—It’s hardly every opera, or every Mass, that produces a miracle. Suppose these Prince’s Men manage to burn down a few buildings like the Teatro Nuovo? There are some that would cause disruption, I suppose; this Palace, or the Duomo—”

  Ferdinand lifted his hand. “We would survive that. Their opera miracle is reported to be on a much larger scale.”

  The map gallery fell so silent that Conrad could hear the wind outside the sash-window panes, and a maid singing as she crossed the public square, two floors below.

  “Sire—what exactly is this miracle intended to do?”

  Enrico Mantenucci looked to his King. “You’re authorising him to be told secret state information?”

  “Oh, I think we can trust our atheist’s oath…” Ferdinand’s playfulness dissolved as he turned a grave expression on Conrad. “I’m sorry to burden you.”

  The King of the Two Sicilies leaned forward, folding his arms as if he shielded himself from the cold.

  “Conrad, do you remember the Year Without a Summer?”

  Conrad failed to suppress an involuntary shiver.

  “I remember… I don’t think I saw a clear sky after the end of the war, not for fourteen months. It rained every day. I remember trudging home after being discharged, through fields of drowned seedling crops—”

  —Tullio Rossi hulking at Conrad’s heels, bitching the more as his wounds mended, his rifle never off his shoulder and never unloaded—

  Men scrabbled to make a living, after the devastation of troops marching through cities, and killing each other on fields forever afterwards difficult to put to the plough. Even a handful of quarter-ripened corn could be cause for a bloody scuffle. The sky turned overcast and stayed that way, day after day. As the year went on, cloud and mist thickened, with often little enough to tell the day from the night except a searing aurora of red and green guttering down in the west.

  “Spring never properly came.” Conrad spoke soberly. “It snowed the July after we fought the Emperor. The peasants ate grass. Every morning in the city there were corpses in the road, frozen overnight.”

  He remembered the bodies clearly, although he put effort into forgetting them. Elbows and knee-joints so much wider than the shrunk curved thighs and withered biceps…

  Every step of the way from the North back to the Sicilies, he pictured his mother and sister too poor to do more than end up open-eyed under the rebellious sky.

  Enrico Mantenucci observed grimly, “They say a civilisation is only ever three failed harvests from barbarism.”

  “I believe it, given the effect of just one failure on my kingdom, and in the rest of Italy, and Europe…” Ferdinand unconsciously mirrored Conrad, rubbing at his forehead.

  Eventually the clouds parted. The sun reappeared, and the earth turned warm enough the following spring for corn to send up tentative green stalks. It is not so many years in the past. Conrad unambiguously recalled the craving for a full stomach that goes with a constant subsistence-level diet.

  “They say it snowed in
America all that summer…”

  Conrad pulled himself out of the past with difficulty, swallowing down his hot cup of coffee to anchor himself in the present. The chairs were placed closest to the wall maps of Italy and southern France, Austria and Turkey; all lands touched by that blight.

  That time is over: I’m here.

  And Ferdinand is speaking of the Year Without a Summer because—

  Conrad felt his mind lock up.

  Because the opera miracle is on a larger scale—

  Silence caught in Conrad’s throat like dust.

  He managed, finally, to speak.

  “Something of that scale—that was an opera miracle?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Conrad shook his head, not in disbelief but in rejection. “No man who lived through that could want to see it again. Surely?”

  “This would be far better explained by Adriano.” Ferdinand shifted on his chair. “We can’t delay now. If you have questions that Enrico or I can’t answer, we must hope Adriano arrives before you leave, or that you can meet him later.”

  “It’s not as if he can just leave at any time without suspicion, sire. They’ll be watching him as a matter of course.”

  Conrad, listening to Mantenucci, became aware of Ferdinand’s gaze on him.

  Without alteration of his bland, slightly-worried expression, Ferdinand remarked, “We have our own spies and agents—some of them honourable men, whose names would be blackened if they got out, since they appear to be dedicated to the cause of our enemies.”

  “A double agent has a thankless task.” Conrad refrained from adding what had become obvious in the war: trusted by neither side, and killed off by either pretty quickly. It must have been obvious in his expression.

  Ferdinand leaned back, the shifting sunlight blazing ultramarine across the rich cloth of his uniform jacket, catching his white breeches and cavalry boots. He said quietly, “I have only one spy who’s grown to a power in the inner ranks of the Prince’s Men. He’s called ‘Adriano,’ since it’s one of his many baptismal names, and there are plenty of men similarly called. It’s from him I have most of my information—there would have been no warning, otherwise.”

  The King’s eyes were momentarily blank with reflected light. Conrad felt a sudden cold in his belly, and recognised it. The morning of battle, before the first exchange of shots.

  Enrico Mantenucci leaned forward. “Signore Adriano was by luck present at the beginning of this particular conspiracy. He finally succeeded in infiltrating the heart of the Prince’s Men a few years ago.”

  “And that was not by luck.” Ferdinand smiled. “When I met him, Adriano was already skilled in looking a fool and being a very clever man. He said it put him at an advantage when people underestimated him. I knew him first as a junior member of the Diplomatic Corps, dealing with the Emperor of the North. I tracked him through a nest of his superiors, in fact, so that I could meet the man who was actually keeping the Two Sicilies from the Emperor’s influence—by a mixture of distraction, subterfuge, and a highly-intelligent mind that could think on his feet.”

  The King’s mind was clearly not on the painted wall maps. His gaze focused miles and years away.

  “Had you been privileged to watch Adriano’s diplomatic dances with the Emperor… He has a fool’s face, beautiful as a woman’s, with black hair and the most remarkable blue eyes—If he had been a woman, you could only have called it flirting. And then he dropped that manner completely when he infiltrated the Prince’s Men. They were impressed by dangerous men, so he kept that aspect of himself to the fore. At my request, he has allowed himself to be drawn deeper and deeper into their affairs. Adriano used to be regarded by society as a dilettante. After much contact with the Prince’s Men and their associates—I suppose there are very few now who don’t think him some kind of criminal.”

  Mantenucci nodded silent agreement.

  “Adriano has never complained to me about the loss of his public reputation,” Ferdinand said. “I’ve never condemned what he has to do to maintain his position. How can I, when I demand the information he can bring?”

  Conrad caught the King’s deliberate glance.

  This is also a warning to me. Whatever reputation I end up with, I can never tell anyone the truth.

  Conrad swallowed down another hot coffee. He dared to serve both Mantenucci and the King from the pot, while Ferdinand’s mood remained so abstracted. The Commendatore nodded silent agreement not to call the servants.

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily stood.

  Chairs scraped as Conrad barely managed to follow Mantenucci, rising as protocol demanded.

  The King started off down the map gallery with a measured pace, speaking into the silence.

  “A number of years ago, Adriano made contact with the inner circle of the Prince’s Men. He passed invaluable intelligence to me… When it came out that a covert journey was being planned, supposedly to the Dutch East Indies, I authorised him to travel as a high-ranking member of the conspiracy. Their exact destination was not known, but by then Adriano had a theory about what they intended to do.”

  Ferdinand stopped. He put his finger against the painted wall. Conrad craned his neck to look at the vast crescent of island-chains running on a slant from the desert browns of Australia, green New Guinea, up to Malaysia and the China coast. Indonesia.

  “He was taken to a ship, that immediately set sail for the Far East. He was accompanied by six men and two women, all of whom were only known to him by false names. Their leader was one Signore Matteo Ranieri. At the end of many months, they reached the vicinity of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. There they divided into groups; some to stand further off from the island, and some to go in close. Adriano tried to board the ship of those latter men and women who would be close to the island, but failed. He did discover that they were expected, when they got there, to sing.”

  Conrad, social manners abandoned, demanded, “Did he hear it?”

  “Adriano heard them rehearse. It was bel canto at its most glorious; a fragment of an opera that no man can trace. Neither he nor I have been able to find the composer. Perhaps it’s a young man just out of some Conservatoire. I doubt a known composer could disguise his style so as to be unrecognisable.”

  Enrico Mantenucci put in gruffly, “Adriano’s no singer, but he has some of it memorised, he thinks, Conrad; he’ll let you hear it on the forte-piano.”

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily reached back, without looking, and Enrico Mantenucci put his coffee cup into his hand. The King swallowed the black brew down, and with his free hand traced a course of the wall map.

  “The two ships separated… On Sumbawa there is a volcano called Mount Tambora. Tambora erupted. It was so huge an explosion they say it was heard over a thousand miles away. The eruption killed tens of thousands of the native peoples. Terrible waves devastated the nearby islands. Adriano and the surviving conspirators only stayed alive because they were aboard a ship that could reach deeper waters, and ride out the cataclysmic tidal waves. The inciting singers and their ship were lost.”

  The Mediterranean may be calm, but Conrad has experienced Atlantic rollers and the Baltic. It’s nauseatingly easy to imagine men and women swept away among the detritus of a manic sea. Who knows how truly violent a Far Eastern ocean might be?

  The gallery was quiet enough that the infinitesimal rub of skin against paint became audible. The King’s finger tracked to the next map, which was of the world, ticking off North America, Spain, France, the Slavic countries.

  “Millions of tons of pulverised rock and lava were blown into the sky. My Natural Philosophers, here, tracked the clouds that spread—well, spread as far as we had people to observe them, and further. The world had a year of refulgent sunsets. And the average temperature, recorded here and in Palermo, was several degrees lower, both winter and summer. Hence, the Year Without a Summer.”

  Ferdinand abandoned the maps, and sank back down in his chair.

  Conrad followe
d, relieved to be able to sit. He leaned his elbow heavily on the map-chest for support. A year without summer is, in reality, a year—and more—with endless winter.

  Ferdinand held up a warning hand. “My people are divided on whether that was the intention of the Prince’s Men, or whether Tambora’s eruption was what they desired, and the year 1816 an unintended consequence of their true objective. You must listen and judge for yourself.”

  Conrad couldn’t help snorting. “Sir, if that was an unintended consequence—what the hell is it they do want?”

  Conrad became abruptly aware of his tone—a faux pas bordering on lèse majesté. Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily only seemed amused.

  To hear the atheist swearing by Hell, Conrad realised.

  Ferdinand added lump after lump of brown sugar to a treacly second cup of Turkish coffee, replaced the tongs, and took a testing sip. Not changing his thoughtful expression, he said, “It’s conceivable their Sung Miracle was only intended to cause Tambora and its immediate consequences.”

  The Commendatore nodded easily, despite the tension suddenly present in the gallery. “And of course, if laying waste to a few islands in Indonesia was all they could claim—to be honest, it would be of no consequence to us.”

  Conrad glanced up. Does Mantenucci’s expression match his tone?

  Enrico’s lined face was cynically compassionate. “Men tend to their own backyards. But, unfortunately, the Prince’s Men are now in ours. There’s…reason to suppose that Mount Tambora may have been a test.”

  “A test,” Conrad echoed.

  King Ferdinand said quietly, “To see if such an eruption were possible. As Enrico suggests, so far as Europe’s concerned, Indonesia is a collection of savage islands, of no conceivable importance. If tens of thousands of people die on and around Sumbawa, that’s soon heard and sooner forgotten. It’s only by luck that we’ve discovered it has implications for us.”

  Conrad collected himself. “And those are?”

  Ferdinand rose to his feet and beckoned. “Look over here.”

  Being on his feet relieved Conrad’s need for action only a little. Approaching the wall, he was overwhelmed by blue, green, gold, and in places white, where the artists had painted cumulus clouds casting a shadow on otherwise featureless sea.