The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “Do we know what size force we’ll be facing? My people aren’t soldiers.”

  “Nor should they be.” Ferdinand glanced around the ash-ruined town. “The Prince’s Men expect any attack in force to come from the direction of Naples. Their forces are concentrated at Posillipo, and north of there.”

  “That’s very specific.” Conrad found he didn’t care about the etiquette of questioning a king.

  Ferdinand gave him a look both practical and ashamed. “One of the pickets was informative when tortured. Several of his compatriots confirmed what he said. I believe, if we have luck, we can get close up to the Anfiteatro before the Prince’s Men realise we’re here.”

  “And then?” It came out as a demand.

  I’ve never had to care for civilians before, in war; I’ve always been with other soldiers.

  Ferdinand said sympathetically, “That, we’ll discuss as we go. We have limited time—very limited.”

  Conrad started off to gather up the opera people, and turned back. “Can we be sure they don’t have enough men to cover their rear, and the road from Pozzuoli across to Posillipo?”

  “I would like to think I’d be notified of so many armed men in my kingdom. Sufficient bribes in suitable places, however…” Ferdinand’s gaze sharpened. “No, I have no certain information on that. Without word back from Enrico or Fabrizio—we’re going into this completely blind.”

  They began to walk in ghostly quiet; everything muffled, not by snow, but by settling wet cement.

  “We’re walking across to the Anfiteatro,” Conrad advised the opera group. “It’s just as well we don’t have horses, they’d break their legs on this ground. We can’t go fast in any case. Everyone will be able to keep up.”

  He deliberately didn’t look at Brigida, but he saw in the corner of his vision how Sandrine hugged the fat woman.

  The track—that, to be fair, had been a better road beforehand—crossed what seemed like moorland and wild scrub. The steaming yellow pools of Solfatara were fountains, in the distance; Conrad had no desire to approach the sulphur more closely. He glanced up and down the line, checking that all the cast members of L’Altezza azteca and the workers at the San Carlo were present.

  “Act Three, scene nine,” Roberto Capiraso muttered, the surrounding silence forcing him to keep his tone low. “Or if I’m wrong, they’ve just started Act Four.”

  It would have been easy to ask Ferdinand or one of his aides how long it took to walk from the port of Pozzuoli to the Flavian Amphitheatre—the latter so close to the coast that it was only just out of range of the Apollon’s guns. Conrad didn’t ask.

  All the while I don’t know it’s impossible, I can believe we’ll reach the Amphitheatre in time to disrupt the end of Il Reconquista d’amore.

  We’ll get there, even if it’s only in time to applaud their finale.

  He was afraid of the lava. What little he saw of it, though, nosing up through broken ground, seemed to move infinitely slow. Heat glimmered over the earth. He could feel it a surprising distance away.

  He walked with Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily past congealing dirty ash. Vesuvius continued to pump cubic tons of material up into the rising column. Every sound was muffled here, behind the hills that lay between them and Naples.

  Scouts came in every so often, some wounded. Conrad sat down when the forward movement abated, sitting with his head in his hands, in inches of volcanic ash. He couldn’t help rubbing at his chest. Breathing deeply didn’t get him any more air. The stifling remnants of hemicrania refused to go away.

  He untied the handkerchief over his mouth, and took off his long neck-cloth. Soaking the linen in a murky puddle, he shook the long cloth out and wrapped that over his mouth instead.

  The kerchief he tied around his head, covering his right eye. A search in his pockets discovered a second square of linen. He dampened and folded that, doubled and re-doubled, and tucked the pad under his blindfold, over the throbbing eye.

  The reduction in light eased a degree of the hemicrania’s disorientation.

  Ferdinand dropped down in a crouch beside him, Roberto a pace or two behind. The King waited with apparent patience until Conrad finished tying a knot in the cloth.

  “The Count tells me we can’t out-sing them,” Ferdinand said bluntly. “Not with only four principals.”

  Conrad caught Roberto’s gaze, over the King’s head, and tried to convey that he, had he thought such a thing, would not have troubled the King with it. “There’s been a misunderstanding, sir. It’s not a matter of singing louder, or even more technically correct, or whether we don’t have singers for all the parts.”

  Ferdinand gave him a blank look, surprisingly plain for a ruler of two kingdoms.

  “Talk to Sandrine, and Velluti, and Paolo.” Conrad put his hand over the damp cloth and pressed it against his eye. “It’s a question of whose opera it is.”

  The other two men exchanged looks.

  “But if you don’t sing better,” Ferdinand began, helplessly.

  Tullio and Paolo joined the group, Tullio silent, and Paolo respectfully addressing the King.

  “It’s what I was saying back at the piazza, sire. They’re playing the same music that we would.”

  She gestured to Roberto, as if she forgot her enmity towards the composer.

  “The scores for Altezza and Reconquista are almost the same, yes?”

  “Almost, but the final score of Altezza is far superior.”

  Paolo waved him to silence.

  “Sir, Corrado and I were talking, about if it came to us, and if we had to sing ‘against’ the black opera directly… It isn’t a matter of competition. The audience doesn’t score one performance better than another!… The heart of it has to be ours. If our singing, our interpretation of the score, is better than the Prince’s Men—then when we arrive at the Flavian Amphitheatre and sing, our performance overcomes theirs. Whoever Leonora’s got in the Amphitheatre to listen to her—her audience becomes our audience.”

  The King stood docile as one of his aides attempted, unsuccessfully, to clean off the royal clothes. “How can you be sure it will work that way?”

  Paolo shot an appealing look to Conrad.

  He stepped in to field Ferdinand’s blunt question.

  “The Prince’s Men want this work for their own purposes, but we just want it to be opera. If the Prince’s Men are singing Reconquista’s score, and we’re singing Altezza’s score, then, essentially, we’re singing the same opera. Words and scenes differ—yes, and the meaning—but the sound…”

  Conrad stood, wet neck-cloth pulled down, finding himself gesturing firmly.

  “Depending on whether we’re the ones who move the audience more—our singers become the principals. The two operas are one, and the black opera singers will become comprimarios and accompanists to our primo uomo and prima donna.”

  Ferdinand let out a small rasping chuckle.

  Conrad bowed his head, acknowledging that. “Theoretically, sire, at that point their miracle is taken out of their hands—and because we don’t want it, it won’t happen.”

  “Conrad… I do like the way you think. Myself, I can’t help but think of the Prince’s Men and their black opera as evil, as an affront against God… That stops me from seeing what’s obvious to an atheist mind—that we can ‘kidnap’ their miracle for our own purposes.”

  Ferdinand nodded, with no hesitation or vacillation.

  “My scouts have brought back reports—the roads ahead do appear empty. I don’t like to say it, but you need to move your people faster. We need to be inside the Anfiteatro before the Prince’s Men know we’re coming.”

  Conrad wiped wet hands down his dusty coat, and glanced back at the singers. Determined to finish it, he spoke to Ferdinand in an undertone.

  “The problem is… Sir, it could work both ways. They could co-opt us. If the bulk of their listeners are swayed by Nora, rather than us, then our—energy, if you like—our vital Galvanic power… t
hat would becomes hers. We’d end up helping the black opera’s miracle, rather than stopping it.”

  CHAPTER 50

  “And then there’s the other fucking question,” Tullio muttered under his breath. “Where is this fucking amphitheatre?”

  Conrad leaned down, massaging a cramp in his calf. “Up ahead—The Old Guard’s scouts—”

  “They can’t find their buttons to open their britches to piss!”

  The broad-shouldered man leaned against the side of a dip in the ground that might have been where a road passed, decades before. He ignored the mud and ash on his greatcoat.

  “Ground’s not safe. Never mind all the shafts opening up all over the place, and the mines—There’s great cracks in the earth over by Solfatara. Me and one of Alvarez’s men swung out to take a look when we passed it. Are you sure we’re not lost?”

  Conrad felt all the irony of coming so far and being stopped by the terrain itself. “I think we’re not lost.”

  The road crossed what might have been another path. Ferdinand and his officers halted, gestures becoming vehement, arguing.

  The opera singers and musicians flopped down on ash-grey turf, grateful for the smallest respite. Conrad dropped down beside Sandrine—who had acquired army boots, he noted, and a greatcoat that she wore over her royal robe. JohnJack wore the Lord General’s faux bronze breastplate and appeared to be in conversation with Brigida about it—the fat woman in Amazon steel breastplate, over her rags. Towering a head over her, Giambattista Velluti sat in the exotic white robes that Cortez wore in the Aztec court. Velluti’s dark gamin features showed strain at plodding through volcanic ash, the earth shaking under them.

  Plodding to where? Conrad wondered. Tullio’s right.

  He pictured of Rome’s Coliseum. Another Flavian Amphitheatre. The towering curve of brick arches against the sky. A blue sky, not like this threatening black one, but still…

  “If we’re anywhere close, shouldn’t we see it by now?” Tullio demanded.

  The groaning earth would cover the sound of singing, Conrad guessed, unless they were on top of it. But still, one shouldn’t be able to miss a whole amphitheatre!

  Conrad got to his feet, wincing at minor injuries. “I’m going to talk to the King.”

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily knelt in a clump of scrub, in urgent conversation with the commander of the Apollon’s marines, the Major in charge of the King’s Rifles, and the French squad from the Tyrant’s own Guard.

  Conrad covered his face with his hands, for a moment, risking removing the damp kerchief from his eye. The world was much brighter when he opened his eyes.

  He took several brisk steps.

  His chest didn’t hurt, he realised.

  The sensation of air moving easily in his lungs astonished him.

  I hadn’t realised how much it was hurting until it’s no longer here. “Corrado?” JohnJack called.

  His tone brought Conrad back the few yards between them at a run.

  He stopped dead.

  Both Spinelli’s and Isaura’s open mouths breathed out something grey.

  Sandrine’s lips, just parted, exhaled a flow of black dust. Particles almost fine enough to be a gas…

  But they were dust, Conrad knew; dust from the pillar that thundered over the hills ahead of them, filling every inch of the air with minute splinters of volcanic glass.

  He followed the swirl and flow of ash between their lips. Saw Velluti with his hand to his throat, and his mouth as wide as if he expanded a note to be heard through all of an auditorium—

  Brigida sat, chest heaving, tears running down her cheeks.

  Tears of relief, Conrad realised. At being able to breathe.

  Dust and pumice-stone and volcanic ash all drifted out into the air, removing themselves from lungs. Wisps of grey dust exhaled, impossibly, into clean air… Everyone Conrad could see had faces of wonder and joy, expanding their chests, breathing in and then out, as if to prove to themselves that they could. Singers, musicians, sergeants, riflemen…

  Conrad licked his own lips, and found his teeth and the interior of his mouth gritty.

  All fear left him for the moment, replaced by heightened sensation. Ribs expanding freely, air moving through his lungs… He coughed out the very last of the clogging obstruction, and saw it dissolve into clear air.

  Air, on the Campi Flegrei, that should not be so free of volcanic detritus.

  “We just—breathed it out,” Conrad said wonderingly. He hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course! They need to sing—and how could they without some kind of ‘miracle’?”

  Ferdinand stepped briskly up, his own movement increased. “Conrad, you know what this is?”

  “I can guess!” He stifled his excited pleasure, in case he should offend the Sicilian monarch by seizing his hands and dancing. He settled for a broad smile. “I should have assumed this would happen.”

  Ferdinand looked puzzled. “How could you possibly know—and what is this?”

  “You told me, when Tambora erupted, the ship had to be close while they sang? We tried, out on the Bay, just now, but the air was full of volcanic dust; the singers would have ripped their lungs to pieces. This had to have happened at Tambora, and it has to happen here—the Prince’s Men have to have clear air to sing.”

  Ferdinand turned his head, gazing around at the soldiers and singers, catching the last wisps of grey dust as lungs breathed them out.

  “Tambora,” the King repeated. He slowly nodded. “The Prince’s Men must have made it part of their miracle, that this happen. Haven’t they been singing since we started in the San Carlo? They must have sung first of all for this to happen.”

  Conrad felt his ribs ache. Now he could breathe freely, he felt the bruises from the wreck of the Teatro San Carlo. It was worth it, he decided.

  “Sir,” he put in, as the King turned away to start the march again. “If they made being able to sing a part of their ‘black miracle’—what else might they have done?”

  Ferdinand evidently did consider it. A small, amused, ironic smile tilted his lips.

  “Or, Signore Corrado, we could just march on and see what pleasant surprises they have for us?”

  Which is as kind a way as I’ve come across of saying “We’ll have to shut up and put up with it…”

  The King moved off. JohnJack’s hand closed over Conrad’s shoulder.

  “The air’s clear enough for the Prince’s Men to sing.” Spinelli sounded triumphant. “Corrado—if they can sing, so can we.”

  “Yes.” Conrad looked down the column. He gazed from the man with the oboe to a woman who sang mezzo in the choir; counted twenty in all, including principal singers, and all with the same expression of determination that JohnJack wore.

  I’m used to soldiers being brave—when they’re not being cowards—but I hadn’t thought to expect it from civilians. Tullio’s right: I am an idiot.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Spinelli managed a mocking, soldierly salute. “Yes sir!”

  Paolo stumbled up as they moved off. Conrad steadied her by her elbow.

  “What are we left with?” he murmured.

  The young woman shrugged a filthy shoulder and grinned. “A prevalence of winds and the smaller horns. Drums, cymbals, and piano—no chance!”

  “We’ll think of it as a small concert performance. The Prince’s Men will have brought the orchestra,” Conrad got out, with a grave humour he saw they appreciated.

  “I’ll get it sorted.” Paolo grinned.

  The rough moorland of the Burning Fields grew more erratic as they trudged on. The road became a mere track, occasional ruts from cart-wheels visible. Conrad watched the undergrowth—scrubby rowan-trees hiding much of whatever was in the distance. There was no visible lava now. He scraped his hand against what he thought was a bush, and stopped to pull some of the ivy off it.

  It was a low, moss-covered stone wall.

  “We must be close…” He lifted his hea
d and gazed around, searching for the rising tiers of brick arches that make up a Flavian amphitheatre.

  The eruption plume, now close on fourteen miles distant, dominated the sky. Conrad momentarily lifted his head from where he was putting his feet, studying how the column of fire and smoke rose up and flattened out, slanted smears of black sifting down from it. Volcanic ash falling like rain.

  “There are more of these walls.” Tullio pulled more ivy away. “Would this be a part of the amphitheatre?”

  Conrad saw they had dropped behind the singers. He quickened his pace, Tullio with him; deftly avoiding other low walls.

  “Maybe it’s a part of the tunnels that the ancients had, to flood and drain the amphitheatre for naval battles?”

  “I doubt it—if that had been excavated, it would have been noticed.” Conrad pushed through a clump of scrub, palm trees, and newly-leafed rowan.

  He caught both feet on an obstacle and pitched over on his face.

  Tullio made a high-pitched wheezing sound, fist pressed to his sternum. “Holes in the ground would be noticed, oh yes!”

  Tullio didn’t seem inclined to stop laughing. Conrad knelt up, and tore away ash-greyed creepers. Enough of this particular ancient brick wall remained that one could see it had once had a doorway in it.

  A man’s feet stuck out of the vegetation-filled gap that had once been a door.

  “Corrado?” Tullio’s low laughter abruptly stopped. “That’s a body!”

  Conrad tore ash-piled greenery down. He found himself looking at scarlet cloth; and into the face of an elderly man, sprawled on his back.

  “Blessed Mother!” Paolo gasped.

  “Get the King!” Conrad leaned forward and put his hand on the supine man’s chest, and took it away bloody. Blood soaked the scarlet robe and white linen.