The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  He pulled down the cloth at the man’s neck, uncovering a red-black puncture in the pallid flesh above the collar-bone.

  A stiletto lay discarded a yard off, in the bent grass. Blood ran like water down the blade.

  Done only a short time ago—and I’ll bet he didn’t do this to himself—

  The man twitched. His features showed grey as pumice ash in the weak sunlight; cheeks hollowed, eyes bruised in their sockets. But not quite dead.

  Ferdinand arrived with Paolo-Isaura, at a low run; and ducked down into the scrub beside them. Conrad couldn’t help seizing his sister by the arm.

  “It’s Corazza. I recognise him. It’s Cardinal Corazza. He’s the head of the Inquisition in Naples. He exorcised our Papa.”

  Paolo’s other hand took hold of his and squeezed.

  “He’s been stabbed,” Conrad added, collecting himself and speaking to Ferdinand.

  The King knelt down beside the older man. “Gabriele?”

  Corazza’s old man’s eyes had been bright as candles when he exorcised Alfredo Scalese. Now they looked sunk in, and blue as if he had cataracts.

  “They killed my dogs.”

  He muttered it barely audibly. Conrad couldn’t tell if he recognised the King.

  “My best mastiffs. Not a boar in Campania could come close to them. They hung up all my dogs. Hung them on pitchforks driven into my door.”

  Bubbling blood ran out of his mouth, down his cheek, and onto the pumice-ash and moss.

  “Rest.” Ferdinand caught the eye of one of his aides. “Do we have army surgeons with us? Must I send him back to the Apollon?”

  The Cardinal choked.

  His once-red cheeks glowed pale with blood-loss. Conrad scuttled back, his sleeves sprayed with fine dots of blood.

  The old man’s hand closed lightly over Ferdinand’s. “They said, next time it would be Renato and Cesare. If I didn’t co-operate in every way. It was no harm. Truly. Just to use the palace. Storage. I was doing no harm.”

  “Renato and Cesare?” Conrad murmured.

  “His nephews.” Tullio, as a man who collected gossip, didn’t need to specify any potentially closer relationship.

  “I thought they might have been more dogs…”

  Tullio ignored that, his frown thoughtful. “Why did they knife him? He might have lived through it—he nearly has. Why not shoot him?”

  The Cardinal said something that Conrad could not decipher, and very slowly the blood stopped pouring into his sodden robes.

  Ferdinand closed the old man’s eyes with a wet, red hand.

  He straightened up with a grunt. “Wrap him in a cloak, here. We’ll take him back for burial afterwards.”

  If we don’t, it’ll be because we’re in need of graves.

  Paolo’s nostrils flared as the King strode back towards the head of the line, as if she continued to smell blood above the stink of sulphur.

  Conrad stood, and gave her his hand to help her up. “I’ll never know if he was warned that Alfredo couldn’t keep his mouth shut for long, even about il Principe. Whether disposing of my father was just a priestly duty, or an order.”

  Isaura said nothing.

  Tullio caught his balance on rough mud and buried bricks. “Looks like he wasn’t a Prince’s Man by choice.”

  Paolo’s voice went up into an outraged yelp. “There’s always a choice!”

  Conrad exchanged a glance with Tullio over her head, and read the same knowledge in the other man’s face—that some decisions are in no way choices, and any man who loves gives hostages to the wicked of the world.

  “Seems the Prince’s Men didn’t trust him not to run to the King.” Tullio wiped his sleeve across his mouth and spat grey ash into the knee-high grass. “Better watch your footing, Corrado; don’t know how many more men they’ll have got rid of today!”

  A tremor ran through the grass and scrub, the new leaves of a mountain ash swaying. Conrad kept his balance superbly.

  It was not easy to read the landscape here. An ambusher’s paradise. Bushes, and the ash-fall, hid the distance. Uneven earth and grass made the ground untrustworthy.

  His pistol was still in his coat pocket; a reassuring weight. He examined it carefully on the march, checking under the frizzen to see that the powder hadn’t fallen out during the San Carlo’s collapse. It was still there. Ought I to call that a miracle? he wondered cynically, as he replaced the flint-lock pistol in his pocket.

  They walked up a shallow rising slope, Conrad realised, as he returned his attention to the ground.

  At the top, we might finally get a sight of the Amphitheatre—!

  Tension made his steps quicker. He passed the King—conferring with his aides and officers—and ducked down, cautiously approaching the brow of the slope, where it was screened by bushes.

  He parted leaves and thin branches carefully, eeling his way into them. In case we need to see and not be seen—

  Grass and earth gave way under his foot—gave way completely, pitching him into emptiness.

  His stomach jolted. He skidded downhill and forward, grabbing at the saplings and bushes; gravity ripping his hands free of them.

  He plummeted helplessly forward—and fell into the vast depth of the Flavian Amphitheatre.

  CHAPTER 51

  He threw his arms up to protect his head and fell face-down on concrete.

  He slammed into something that was not level. Pain blasted him at knee, thigh, rib, and shoulder.

  He rolled.

  Throwing out his hands halted his fall—

  He lay face down on steps, he realised. Face down and head down, too—the great oval of the Flavian Amphitheatre opening out beneath him.

  He noted in a fraction of a heartbeat that the far, eastern, side of the Anfiteatro was what he would expect from Rome—rows of brick arches in a curved wall, the sky showing through, and on the inside, facing him, tier upon tier of stone steps for seating, with access stairs between them.

  The ground behind him was level with this topmost tier of the amphitheatre seating.

  It took his stunned mind a long minute to process it.

  This side of the Flavian Amphitheatre has been excavated. Recently.

  Who’d notice yet more archaeologists and tomb-robbers, digging up more relics than Ferdinand has in Naples’ secret museum? No one. No one at all. It’s not suspicious.

  It just means that the Anfiteatro, which I vaguely recall I painted as only a few rows of seating and a part of the arena, has now been dug out to be a full working amphitheatre—

  Conrad inched up onto aching elbows. The arena floor was divided on the long axis by a dark path or ditch. On the far side of that, a slew of people in costume milled around.

  On the lowest front tier of the far side, musicians sat. Scenery looked minimal. A hundred or so men and women made a scant blot of an audience, halfway up the further side.

  “Is this the black opera?”

  There were other men in the arena besides singers. Conrad picked one out of the crowd, urgently pointing up—at him. The attitude was unmistakable; any soldier can read it in their stances. Intruders!

  He yanked his pistol out of his pocket, lifted it, barely sighting, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Conrad lowered the flint-lock weapon. He got up onto his knees, knowing he presented a larger target, but needing to work on the gun—

  Powder under the frizzen plate, charge in order, no reason why the weapon should not discharge.

  He raised it again, shifting his body side-on to the men far below in the arena. Shooting down at an angle, at this range, made him uneasy for his aim. He took the closest man as a target and gently squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  “What?”

  Pulling the trigger again got the same result.

  He looked up from his pistol, only then realising that no shot had been fired from below.

  Two or three men waved their arms in urgent talk; Conrad could see that
. The noise of a stretta—that, up here, came to him without difficulty—concealed if they shouted. One walked forward.

  He stopped at the edge of the black line that crossed the arena floor from the north-west to the south-eastern main entrances.

  It took Conrad a long moment to realise that it was a gap in the earth.

  A collapsed underground passage?

  It must be deep, Conrad realised. They made no attempt to scramble across it. The distance down was deceptive: it might have been ten feet across, or twenty.

  None of the Prince’s Men below raised a weapon.

  Without bothering to aim, Conrad pulled the trigger again.

  Click.

  “Signore Corrado—” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily pushed through the bushes and saplings, two tiers above, sounding highly impatient. “—Oh.”

  Conrad slowly and painfully stood up, as men from the Apollon and Ferdinand’s own Rifles began to filter down from the bank of earth above onto the highest tier of seating.

  They stared, each of one them.

  Conrad kept his eye on the King.

  “The black opera, sir,” he said, unnecessarily.

  Perhaps I just need to say it.

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily gaped like a peasant.

  “Don’t bother,” Conrad finished, seeing the King about to collect himself and give an order. “I believe I know what else their ‘miracle’ is doing, as well as allowing their singers to breathe.”

  The brown-haired man stepped carefully down until he stood beside Conrad, gazing down all the tiers.

  “…That’s a small enough audience. But I suppose they had a smaller one at Tambora. Corrado, what did you say?”

  “I know why they stabbed Corazza—Rather than shot him,” Conrad corrected himself soberly.

  Ferdinand apparently couldn’t take his eyes off the current central figure among the singers on the arena floor—a tenor, singing what Conrad recognised from his brief acquaintance with Il Reconquista as the aria of oath-taking by King Ferdinand of Aragon.

  The King of the Two Sicilies, at Conrad’s elbow, prompted him. “What?”

  “They don’t want to take the slightest risk of their singers being hurt.”

  Conrad held out his flint-lock weapon.

  “Try my pistol if you like, sir. I believe that—along with the clear air—they’ve used the beginning of their opera miracle to make it so that any firearms don’t work within this amphitheatre.”

  Tullio folded his arms aggressively, staring down the stone tiers. “Told you I could hear the bastards singing.”

  Conrad found the distant furnace-roar of Vesuvius more terrifying than the blast and eruption outside on the Burning Fields. But the architecture of the amphitheatre produced its effect. As if they sang in his ears, only for him, he heard now, soprano voices in unison.

  Flawlessly voicing a chorus that he ought to be hearing in bass or baritone.

  “If that chorus is in the same place, we’re halfway through Act Four.”

  “Better tell his Majesty that.”

  Lines deepened at the edges of Ferdinand’s eyes. “How long do we have, Corrado?”

  “If the scores are identical, we have only twenty minutes to the end.”

  Conrad looked away from the tiny figures—none of which was Nora, he could tell at one glance—to see Roberto Capiraso with two soldiers flanking him, all three in the blue and burgundy of Alvarez’s Rifles.

  “A few minutes difference, perhaps,” Roberto murmured. “If they conduct at that tempo, then the finale ultimo will begin in—twelve minutes.”

  Tullio rumbled, “They think they’ve won.”

  Conrad narrowed his eyes, taking in the men and women of the Prince, below. They appeared to ignore being interrupted, as much as they ignored the half of the sky now drowned in boiling cloud.

  Down on the far front row, he saw the elbow of a violinist lift. A drum let go with swift beats. It should have been inaudible this far off. It was clear enough to make the hairs stand up on his neck.

  “They think they’ll win because they’ve succeeded so far.” Ferdinand sounded grim. “It’s up to us to see that they go no further.—What’s that?”

  The odd sunlight, filtered through the ash that still fell outside the Flavian Amphitheatre, meant detail was difficult to make out. “Where?”

  “Around the edges of the arena.” Ferdinand sounded disbelieving: Those are men in Colonel Alvarez’s uniforms!”

  Conrad reached for the small spy-glass as Tullio put it into his hand. Clumsily, he focused the lenses.

  Men sat along the edge of the dividing fallen passageway, and at the base of the stone tiers. They had their wrists behind them—tied, Conrad thought—and their ankles together in front. What must be Prince’s Men paced among their prisoners.

  Conrad thought he recognised some of the faces in the Rifles’ uniforms. They had come on their off-duty days to listen to rehearsals, and make comment.

  Men in dark uniforms sitting, bound, among them were—Conrad turned the focusing wheel—from the Naples police.

  “I think we found out what happened to Colonel Alvarez’s company.” Conrad passed the spy-glass over to the King. “And Commendatore Mantenucci’s men. At a guess, I’d say there are a lot more Prince’s Men than we can see.”

  “If they could subdue a company of riflemen? Yes! They may be part of the audience.” Ferdinand spoke, telescope shifting as he studied the tiers in turn. “Ah! Adalrico di Galdi. We were right to be suspicious of the man. And there’s his son, with him, and—”

  Conrad took the glass away, after Ferdinand was silent for a whole minute.

  He focused on the audience—all of whose attention was only for the singers—and at last found the hawk-faced and silver-haired Conte di Galdi. And a number of young men with a family resemblance. And—

  “That’s Enrico Mantenucci!” Conrad said aloud.

  He watched the telescope’s silent circle of colour and light. Saw the police Commendatore throw back his head and laugh at something a younger di Galdi said—at the same time as he clapped his hands together, applauding the soprano chorus.

  “He’s not a prisoner.”

  Ferdinand sounded stunned. “No, he’s not.”

  “I don’t see Fabrizio Alvarez—wait.” Conrad twisted the brass scope. “Second row of men away from that ditch in the centre of the arena. He’s bound hand and foot, like the rest.”

  He took the spy-glass away from his eye, and the figures sprang back to become miniatures.

  The King’s voice sounded low and cold.

  “That will be how Fabrizio’s company were taken prisoner. He trusted Enrico.”

  Conrad saw the tiny figure of Mantenucci applaud again. Hate washed over him, hot and vomit-smelling.

  The King’s hands clenched. “And for Fabrizio and his men to be taken by surprise—I’ll make a bet that more than one of Commendatore Mantenucci’s officers are Prince’s Men.”

  Ferdinand sucked in a breath, as if the air was impossible to take in, even without the volcano’s dust.

  “And so Fabrizio and his men are prisoners.”

  He didn’t say sacrifices. His tone implied it.

  Tullio fell into place at Conrad’s left shoulder; Paolo at his right.

  For all her thoughtful tone, Paolo’s voice shook. “They must see us!”

  “Plain as a red-headed whore in church,” Tullio agreed. His gaze studied the amphitheatre’s tiers, scraped clean of bushes.

  Conrad remembered, as a young man, seeing the few exposed tiers of seating covered in flowering shrubs, and bushes with late fruit hanging from their branches. Even the highest seats had a furry coating of grass. The floor of the arena had been home to swaying thin mountain ash trees, as well as long uncut grass.

  Now—even the edges of the pits had been cleared: brick-lined open throats, with ivy and wisteria cut back to ground level.

  Tullio glared at the deserted tiers around them. “Why bother to
clear this side of the Anfiteatro? Were they expecting more of an audience, maybe?”

  “Acoustics,” Conrad guessed.

  Isaura nodded.

  “Well, it leaves us without any damn cover, guns or not!”

  The King of the Two Sicilies gave a regretful smile. His voice held a roughness Conrad had not heard before. “They’ll have their victory in minutes. It will only take them as long as it takes to climb this side of the auditorium. They can overpower us without guns.”

  Conrad interrupted. “It’ll take more than minutes—look at that.”

  He pointed at the apparent ditch, running from one end of the arena to the other. Shadows and ash might confuse the eye, but the gap was wide—and deep.

  No comprehension dawned on Ferdinand’s face.

  “The Roman amphitheatres were full of passages and rooms underneath, for the beasts and gladiators,” Conrad said, memories coming fluently from his reading in the secret museum. “This Anfiteatro would have had a whole complex underneath, with quarters for fighters, and cages for animals, and trapdoors and pulleys that raised scenery—”

  He waved an arm, that took in the shafts dotting the surface of the arena. A brief fear—that the Prince’s Men might have excavated under the Flavian Amphitheatre too—died as he made out how they were choked with creepers and bracken and cacti.

  Ferdinand cocked his head, like an inquisitive sparrow, and Conrad thought he glimpsed the boy who had disappointed his father’s louche political court by his interest in sciences and antiquities.

  “A collapsed passage?”

  “I’d guess, the central underground access corridor.” Conrad lifted the spyglass, focusing it on the ditch that was no ditch. “The amphitheatre is bigger, of course, but from one end of the arena to the other… is, what, seventy metres? And about forty across. That means that ‘ditch,’ the gap—That could be eight metres wide at the least. And if it’s cleared all the way down, it could go down two storeys.”

  He made out sifting sunlight, gleaming on the wall furthest from him, where ancient brickwork went down into the dark. It had been split here and there by volcanic convulsions. Where the roof across it had fallen in, uncounted ages past, the edges were rough with loose dirt. Below sparse vegetation, it went down into stark blackness.