by Mary Gentle
He lowered the scope.
“It goes out through both main entrances, or would do if they weren’t blocked by earth. One at each end. It splits the place in two. I’d say the Prince’s Men have been using those access stairs, up on the far side—see?” Conrad took a clear breath. “If they want to attack us, they either have to cross that gap, or else circle round and fight through the way we just came in. They won’t do that.”
Tullio cocked an eyebrow. “Because they’ve won?”
“They might think they’ve won.” Conrad felt energy boil in his veins. “They haven’t. They—”
Movement behind interrupted him.
Brigida Lorenzani left the scrub and bushes and stepped down from the lip of the earth-bank, with a delicate precision, for all her roundness and short stature. If her cloak and helm were lost, she still had a rag of skirt and the shining steel of a breastplate.
“Are you thinking we’ll sing here, Signore Corrado?” She halted beside him, gazing down at the singers of the black opera. She put her hands on her hips, supporting the steel armour, and kept it turned towards the enemy.
Conrad caught Ferdinand’s eye.
The King inclined his head.
“I think we must,” Conrad confirmed. “They’re too busy creating their ‘miracle’—let’s give them something to worry about!”
A smile quirked the corner of her mouth, giving her roguish laugh-lines. “The rest of them sent me out first because I was best protected! I can’t blame them. Now let all those brave men follow me…”
She fanned her fingers in a little wave, speaking loud enough for JohnJack and the castrato, above, to hear her. A moment later they emerged from the brush and saplings, scrambling down to stand beside her; Sandrine shuffling along behind in boots far too big.
“Cazzo!” Sandrine exclaimed in a whisper. “I never felt so naked in my life!”
Conrad didn’t own to chills up his spine. He suspected he didn’t need to.
He found himself speaking before he realised that he would, spurred by the look in JohnJack Spinelli’s red-rimmed eyes.
“It seems they were so anxious their singers not be shot down—that they can’t touch us, yet. They can’t shoot us. That gives us a chance.”
A passage of recitative tinkled across the auditorium.
Paolo glanced up, caught his gaze—and seemed to realise instantly what he was leading up to.
“They’ll hurt you!” Her clenched fingers locked on the cloth of his coat; grey eyes, so like his own, glaring.
Some instinct made him confident.
“Paolo, listen. The Prince’s Men—they won’t risk anything interrupting them now. If they fight with us, there goes their audiences’ attention, and bang! their miracle’s gone. Believe me, they want more out of this than air free of ash, and firearms that don’t work!”
Paolo-Isaura’s fingernails dug into his arm, through coat and shirt.
“Corradino, by the same reasoning—they can’t let us sing.”
Tullio rested a large hand on Isaura’s shoulder, but looked at Conrad as he spoke. “Just because they can’t shoot at us doesn’t mean they can’t overpower us.”
“They just can’t do it quietly enough not to provoke an interruption.”
Conrad glanced away, discovering Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily listening quietly beside him.
“We don’t have long, Corrado.”
“No, sir. I believe I’m right. We only have minutes, now—less than a quarter-hour. I don’t think they can reach us in that time, if they try. I think we can act before they do.”
Conrad took a breath.
“We need to know if the singers will be safe, down on this side of the arena. Paolo, wait with the company up here. I won’t risk the principal singers, or what chorus we have, or anyone necessary to L’Altezza azteca.”
She clearly couldn’t speak.
“You conduct us.” Conrad stiffened his back, disregarding his aching bruises, and the throb of migraine not yet fully gone. “Take what advice Roberto can give you in the next few minutes. When I signal, bring everyone down as fast as you can.”
He moved before he could be stopped, shaking off Paolo-Isaura’s loosened grip. He walked down three of the steps between the tiers of seating before he heard her stifled cry.
Treading down the access stairs, step after step, he almost felt the walls of the arena rising around him, as if he descended into a well.
It was absurd, given how large the Flavian Amphitheatre was. He wondered if what constricted his throat was terror.
Or if it’s the thought that, any moment now, I might see Nora.
His feet took him down each step with a jolt, the seed of hemicrania stirring in his spine every time his heel hit the stones.
Closer to the arena floor, he walked on steps cleaned down to the brick or concrete. The floor of the amphitheatre was dotted with the mouths of shafts, and with fallen fluted columns, rolled aside against the bottom tier of seating, away from the audience of Prince’s Men.
His steps slowed without him willing it.
Down here, it was clear eight metres was a conservative estimate of how wide the central collapsed passage was.
They won’t even try to cross that, Conrad reassured himself. How far would you fall into darkness, and what would you hit at the bottom?
Slowly, not looking back, Conrad raised his arm and gave the signal for them to follow him down.
CHAPTER 52
Ten heartbeats. Twenty—agitated heartbeats though they are, he can still count them—and nothing happens. Nothing except the soldiers and singers and King Ferdinand reaching the arena floor. The Prince’s Men see us. But we’re not worth breaking this fragile, breath-holding truce for.
“Musicians up on the third tier, there. It looks the least crumbled. Choir in front of the bottom tier; principals on the arena floor. Can everybody see Paolo conduct?”
“I’ll get it sorted,” Paolo grinned, one hand on the oboe player’s elbow.
Nothing but empty air between the Prince’s Men and the singers and musicians of The Aztec Princess.
“Are they going to let us do this?” He spoke aloud, not aware of Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily beside him.
“And I thought you were convinced by your own argument, Corrado…”
The King clasped his hands behind his back, not stooping or shrinking away from the several hundred men of il Principe on the auditorium’s far side. He stood like any officer Conrad had ever seen, when it came to stand-up-and-shoot at close range of the enemy.
Nothing broke the uneasy truce, not even a shout of surprise.
“They were expecting us,” Conrad realised. “Nora will have warned them—that someone might come, at least.”
Sound suddenly burst on Conrad’s ears, making him shy like a nervous horse. The plaintive call of horns and flutes, and the low rumble of a drum—all instruments that might be easily transported—mixed with the sound of a dozen voices, spiralling up into a stretta that Conrad recognised from Roberto’s scribbled score.
With the outside world shrouded by ash, falling silent as snow, every sound was emphasised. Conrad heard voices ring out, soaring up in a stunning duet.
“We’re coming up to the end of the penultimate scene of Act Four,” Roberto Capiraso said, in all of il Superbo’s pedantic tones.
Conrad noted the sweat sticking volcanic ash to his forehead. He glanced around, curiously. The tiers of seating were still high after having suffered two thousand years of wind, rain, and depredating peasants. Every few yards, on every level, a passage opened back to the rim of the coliseum, so that patrons could enter there, and more easily walk to their seats. A glint of metal let Conrad’s eyes adjust to what he was looking for.
Figures low to the ground, crouched behind the edges of those arches. Just visible in the darkness. Very difficult targets.
They do have men with guns. Gamekeepers, hunters, peasants from their own estates—and I’d guess there’s m
ore than a hundred of them that I can see just from here…
“Firearms won’t be subject to the miracle forever,” Ferdinand murmured, under the sound of their own singers testing voices on a line here and there. “We’re in an exposed position—we need to defeat them. And then, we have no idea at what point in the performance their ‘black miracle’ is planned to happen. Signore Conte, you speak on the basis that it is during the finale, but I suspect Madame Leonora did not tell her husband everything.”
Conrad just managed not to observe how that was the understatement of several decades. Seeing Roberto’s expression robbed him of the desire to make jokes.
Familiar faces in filthy torn costumes—the singers walked out into the arena, until they took up the places familiar from the San Carlo stage, but here, only yards from the collapsed underground way. Conrad saw that ash had darkened their faces like actors playing devils in the carnival. They swear and make the sign against witchcraft every time the ground shakes. But they are still singers.
Conrad spoke so quietly that Ferdinand leaned in to hear him. “Sir, we don’t have much of an orchestra—but I’ve heard Sandrine and Velluti sing a capella. The acoustics should be good, given what this place was created for. Sound does carry—so let’s sing against them, the way you intended, sire.”
Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily looked up at the daylight sky, rapidly obscured by obsidian-coloured clouds.
“Not quite the way I intended,” he said. “But yes. Tell them—sing.”
Conrad found Velluti approaching him. “Giambattisa—is this sufficient for you to do what you can?”
Velluti wiped black ash from his face and swore in Neapolitan dialect, surprisingly fluently. “You know if I sing her part of it, my voice will be wrecked forever! Scalese, you would have no one else to blame but yourself if I resign!”
Conrad heard in his mind the dead Estella Belucci. If I sing it as it demands to be done, I’ll burst a blood-vessel and drop dead on the stage!
He seized on the conditional. “But you won’t resign? Not with a chance to match yourself against—”
Velluti glanced across at the singers of the Prince’s Men, and a light came into his eyes.
“That fessa? Signore, the castrato is the classical voice, it will never be bettered!”
Sandrine Furino ripped a torn swathe of lace free from the hem of her snake-coloured robe. “The one time in my life I would have been grateful for a britches role…! We’re ready, Corrado.”
“Ready,” JohnJack echoed.
Conrad could overheard one of the captains telling Ferdinand, Sir, at least sit in with the soldiers or the choir, where you don’t stand out as a temptation to sharpshooters! but he knew what the end of that would be.
Ferdinand gave an absent nod.
“Stop her,” Count Roberto hissed, ignoring the King’s aides and everyone else. “Or she’ll wake the Divine and Living God of this world—and we’ll be here alive for His wrath.”
Conrad could have said plenty about the God of the Prince’s Men. He found himself frowning over a quite different problem.
“Paolo.” He waited until his sister emerged from among the musicians and chorus, and stepped aside with her. “I know what you want—so tell me what you think. We don’t have enough musicians on our side. Roberto could conduct this last scene of L’Altezza. Only you can play first violin. But I won’t ask it—”
The corner of her mouth pulled up.
“I wonder if Papa would approve of his violin being played to get rid of holy miracles?”
“Of course not—there’s no money in it.”
She snickered. “I’ll talk to the musicians; you tell il Superbo.”
Conrad gave the composer no chance to disagree, passing the suggestion on to Ferdinand, and letting the King make it an order.
“We’re ready, sir,” Conrad said, two minutes and twenty seconds later. “The stretta of this scene. Then we’re into the last scene of all.”
Ferdinand raised his kerchief in what was evidently a signal, and brought it down sharply. Conrad saw JohnJack, two chorus tenors, a flautist bringing his instrument to his lips…
Paolo-Isaura stood up, her back to the tiers of seats. She put her bow to the violin that Alfredo Scalese had somehow never pawned. Conrad, to whom her face was visible, thought he had never seen her look so happy.
“She thrives on this!” he muttered, he thought too quietly to be overheard but Tullio shot him a knowing look.
“Of course she does. The same way she loves tweaking the world’s nose by how she dresses.”
There was no condemnation in the big man’s voice. If anything, Conrad thought, Tullio Rossi looked as if he were jealous. Or at any rate, if he craved the same kind of life.
“Have you asked her yet?”
“Hush,” Tullio said gravely. “They’re singing.”
JohnJack stepped forward first, walking right up to the edge where the roof of the lower floors had fallen in. Conrad saw him inflate his chest, and pick up the melody with a few soft notes. The music Roberto had composed both as Isabella of Castile’s soliloquy to God as she plans the death of her husband, and as Lord-General Chimalli’s madness while he is haunted by the ghost of his dead king. But the words—JohnJack brought his head up with the words of L’Altezza azteca’s Act Four, not what the members of the black opera were singing.
My words.
“We have a damn pitiful chorus!” Conrad whispered, beside the King—and found himself gripped above the elbow, and propelled just as he was, no costume, into the back line of the nervously-grouped men of the chorus.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know the words!” Ferdinand snapped under his breath. “And you have a perfectly serviceable drawing-room tenor—use it!”
Conrad picked up the choral melody, and fitted his own voice in as a background body to support the other singers.
The chorus that had come with them were not all professionals; some came from Naples’ many church choirs, one or two—as Roberto no doubt noted—from drawing-rooms. Some from the comic opera houses, where the singing was in Neapolitan dialect. And a handful who merely followed opera with the obsessiveness of devotees, and—possessing a voice—were pleased to have the self-discipline to be sufficiently good to pass the audition, and spend their evenings at the back of the stage, singing. As opposed to the front, where they might hurl criticism, cheers, and bad fruit with incisive critical insight.
I may not be so out of place after all, Conrad decided, between a butcher from the Vomero district, and one of Luigi’s off-duty police officers.
Opera is a great engine, Conrad felt, as he always did; reminded of nothing more than those great cathedrals of work in the northern parts of Inghilterra, where looms replaced pews, and a man could not hear himself speak for the rattle of shuttles.
One voice rose over the rest, searching, yearning upwards; soaring in sheer coloratura bass genius.
JohnJack! Conrad lost the rhythm of his breathing, too anxiously following the bass’s brilliance.
Over on the arena’s far side, the end of the aria had been scored as a duet for soprano and tenor, Leonora’s voice climbing high into the ash-scented air.
The villain’s Mad Scene went on, held in JohnJack’s hand, stolen from the singers of Il Reconquista d’amore.
The Principe’s tenor, spurred by an evident threat, strained and managed a creditable chest-note C.
JohnJack’s gloriously resonant voice swelled out to take in the upper tiers of the Anfiteatro, without any apparent effort, and then sank down again, all in one breath—only to soar again. Mezza voce, the heart of bel canto.
Conrad wiped his cheeks hastily with the back of his hand.
Leonora, and a bass he recognised from the Paris Opera, sang as Reconquista’s Queen Isabella and the Muslim King of Granada—sang of the loss of the greatest age of Spain, when Christian, Muslim, and Jew alike lived and thrived there, and how the fall of Granada would wrench them from each other,
as surely as it split its people into warring factions.
Their tenor broke in, singing in the new fashion, voice now soaring like a trumpet, nothing on earth like the power of nine high C chest notes in a row—
Power against intensity, Conrad thought, nursing his own head-voice C-note as much as he might, knowing there was no use attempting to put emphasis behind the sound. Not unless I want it to crack, right here.
The two scores fell out of synchronisation. The lover’s trio quarrel in Spain rose towards climax, each voice yearning toward the other. A few yards ahead of Conrad, Spinelli rose from his pose on one knee, where he had ended the aria with his head on his breast. He rose up with a surge, meeting the music that—Conrad could see—Isaura conducted in strict time, ignoring the momentary cacophony.
The end of the penultimate scene was scored, not as an aria, but as a cabaletta. Energy surged out of the orchestra as they switched gears, and Conrad found himself at the back of the male chorus as they surged forward—the army meeting their leader. JohnJack swung around, skinny tall body believably impressive in a breastplate and scarlet cloak, and sent his own voice out to meet them:
“‘Shame held me down, but by your faith I am risen;
“‘Let us rise up, all, and save the Principessa—’”
With Brigida and Lorenzo dead, both the high soprano and the tenor are missing; Velluti and JohnJack sing their transposition of it, and—inspired—Brigida’s mezzo transposes down to make the necessary higher notes.
Conrad caught at Ferdinand’s arm. He whispered, under the glorious sound, “We know the black opera doesn’t need more of an audience than they had at Tambora. We need an audience. And we’ve got it.”
Ferdinand craned his head. Conrad could tell the moment when he caught sight of the soldiers taken prisoner—some of Alvarez’s men barracking the Prince’s singers as if they were in the Teatro Nuovo on a Saturday night, and others applauding JohnJack, even with tied hands.
“Soldiers! If they can’t find one kind of trouble, they’ll find another!”
JohnJack came to the reprise of the aria, and joined his voice to the others, a bass deep enough to seem responsible for the shaking ground.
