The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Conrad tried to shrug free. Failed.

  The movement sparked a fire in his left hand. It seared him so badly that tears leaked out of his eyes. The stench grew greater. He dry-heaved.

  Roberto’s dark, bearded face loomed and receded in a swinging lantern’s light. Conrad had no idea why the man frowned. His blunt fingers dug into Conrad’s muscles.

  “Listen to me!”

  Another—foreign—voice said, “It’s no good, he can’t understand you!”

  “He can!” Roberto’s expression hardened. “Conrad, listen! We—Your friends have waited as long as they can. If the surgeon doesn’t operate, you’ll die.” He hesitated, and added harshly, “Your hand is gangrenous.”

  Conrad found a voice. He was surprised at how weak it sounded, beneath the sound of straining wood and hemp. “I would have thought you’d be happy enough to see me die of gangrene.”

  The other man flinched.

  “I’m not that ungrateful. You saved my life.” Roberto sounded extremely ungracious.

  Before Conrad could get out a rejoinder that might have amounted to Damn your life! the composer added, in an embarrassed mutter:

  “I suppose I would regret it if L’Altezza azteca was the last opera on which we co-operated.”

  Oddly and dizzily touched, Conrad admitted, “I suppose I would, too.”

  “Then be sensible enough not to die of this!”

  Conrad bit down on his lip and winced. He must have been doing that before, when he was unconscious. His lower lip was scraped bloody. “Are they proposing to cut my hand off?”

  “The damaged tissue. It’ll poison you. You can smell it yourself.” Dark eyes blinked. “You, surgeon! Let him see it.—Of all the times when we could have needed a god and a miracle…”

  It wasn’t clear if the last was spoken in jest or seriously.

  One of the Frenchmen setting out instruments walked over and stripped the bandages from Conrad’s left hand. The immediate increase of stink made him retch.

  His hand lay on his chest, where they had propped his arm, but he couldn’t feel most of it. What was not agonising was numb.

  His thumb still looked human. His hand and first finger were swollen, waxy white and purple-black, under the swinging light.

  The three lesser fingers were blown up like German blood sausages. Here, the worse stink rose. The flesh on the back of them was a dry, blood-blister black. The inside curve of the fingers shone wet and brown, swollen and split. Wet, like some creased and furled vegetable matter; no longer looking anything like human flesh.

  He couldn’t move his hand, to hide the vision. He turned his head to one side.

  Roberto Capiraso flushed in the swinging lantern light. It was possible to see—past the aristocratic hauteur so long a part of his expression that it might have been grafted on—that he was not only concerned, but had been willing to sound clumsy and inept if it meant he could convince one stubborn librettist not to lose his life over this injury.

  “Has prayer been tried?” Conrad managed to sound sarcastic.

  “Certainly not by me.” A degree of sardonic humour entered Roberto’s voice.

  “God doesn’t listen to men like me; nor does that demon we raised at the amphitheatre. Your hand won’t wait. Drink down the brandy, and I’ll make them find you a leather belt to bite on.”

  The frigate must sail in a better sea: the wooden cots hung at identical shallow angles from the vertical. Calm enough for surgery.

  Conrad’s stomach turned over, sick from his chest to his belly with fear.

  It means losing part of myself. I may die. If I die and return, that won’t give me an amputated hand back…

  A man—a surgeon?—shouted something towards the ship’s apothecary-boys.

  “Leonora?” Conrad demanded.

  “They won’t tell me! And she’s my—” Capiraso swallowed the word. “Before they banned your obstreperous servant from here, he said she’s in the first mate’s cabin. Under strict arrest.”

  I want to see her.

  Conrad knew before he asked that it was not possible.

  He shuddered on the hard pallet. A swimming feeling in his head and the way his thoughts misted out at the edges decided him. He forced his mind to focus.

  No false hope. I’ll lose the hand for good. Men haven’t always been healed—healed themselves—in the past. No reason to think they will in the future.

  “Roberto.”

  The man’s head instantly turned. “You’re sure?”

  “I don’t want to rot by inches.” Conrad suppressed the reflex to vomit that surged in his stomach.

  Roberto Capiraso hammered on the side of the wooden cot. “Brandy, here!”

  “See if they have laudanum.” He made knowledge of what the drug could do a block for fear.

  A feeling for the integrity of his body still shuddered in his belly.

  He took a last refuge in mockery. “Do me one favour, Roberto. Make sure they take the correct hand…”

  The Count snorted. With a startling frank honesty, he said, “You can trust me.”

  If there weren’t words to describe the absolute intensity of song and music, there were still less words adequate to pain. He bit through the leather belt, though it was folded over twice. The surgeon’s voice rambled on above him—explaining the operation to his assistants?—and he lost all knowledge of the world.

  Only pain remained. Pain: as if he were smashed up against the world’s ultimate reality.

  He did not pray.

  He did beg.

  The surgeon understood his mixture of Neapolitan, High German, and Parisian French.

  “Herr Sertürner’s recently-discovered and much-lauded drug, morphine!” the Frenchman proudly announced. “You’ll find that we in the Emperor’s navy are scientifically advanced—”

  “Thank God for science!”

  Conrad succumbed to the drug while ignoring the deep laughter of the Conte di Argente.

  It did not precisely ease the pain, but it put him into a distant and preoccupied state where he could still feel it, but he didn’t care.

  “You sure you want to look at it?” Tullio—who, reinstated, had taken over the bandaging of Conrad’s left hand—shot him a concerned glare.

  “Yes, I’m sure!” Conrad snapped.

  The Conte di Argente muttered something in his sleep, shifted in his wooden cot, and groaned unconsciously. He must have accidentally moved his lower legs—both wrapped in the albumen-stiffened bandages which the French surgeon thought appropriate for, respectively, a clean break and a slight fracture.

  Conrad waited a moment but Roberto didn’t wake.

  His bandages coming off pained him.

  “I… can feel it again. That’s good, yes?”

  Tullio nodded. He unwrapped the dry inner bandages.

  Conrad found himself staring at a crab’s claw.

  His stomach turned over. He spat on the planks.

  A look back at his hand confirmed that the black blisters and waxy skin had diminished, mostly giving way to healthy-coloured skin. His thumb looked almost uninjured.

  The first finger missed its top joint. Shortened, without a nail, and topped by bloody sewn flaps, it looked hideous.

  The three remaining fingers were not even stumps, taken back to the knuckle at the palm. Sealed over with snipped and folded skin, gruesomely red-black where stitches were healing—No less hideous, he thought.

  The lowest joint of the little finger was gone. The knuckle too; leaving him deeply cut into down the outside of the hand, large parts of the palm gone.

  “Says he saved as much as he could.”

  “Wrap it up.” Had it been possible, Conrad would have run from the grotesque object as far as he could. The knowledge that he must carry this around with him…

  “Saw worse in the war.” Tullio expertly swayed with the frigate’s motion as he bandaged up the half-hand, and re-tied Conrad’s sling. “Not that that’s any consolation. Ex
cept… you were right to choose the one you did.”

  Tullio finished. He scratched through his growing-out, cropped hair. Conrad had a problem identifying the other man’s expression—and realised, startled, that it was admiration.

  Conrad found that ironic enough to almost make him burst out laughing.

  Except if I do, I’ll never stop.

  “I couldn’t have been that… cold.” Tullio shook his head. “Haul somebody out safe because you’re in the right spot at the right minute, yeah. Doesn’t take any thought. But choosing like that…”

  He smiled, crookedly.

  “I’d started to forget what you were like in the war, padrone. And you were the one who chose to walk in and pull me out of a building on fire. So, suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. Just seen you do too much scribbling, that’s all.”

  Conrad couldn’t prevent himself muttering, “‘Scribbling’ is all I’m going to do now.”

  “Corrado.” Tullio punched him lightly on the other shoulder. “You can walk. You can see. That puts you two up on the people we saw the day after the battle at Maida. You can write, you can conduct, you can fuck a woman—or if you can’t, you got one hand to wank off with, at least!”

  Conrad would have interrupted, but choked instead.

  “So stop looking like the world ended—before I show us both up by kicking your arse across the deck. You can get a glove made with wooden fingers in it. Or you can just let people see what you did. You imbecile hero!”

  Conrad took a breath—and another, deep inhalation—and felt his heated rage defused by Tullio’s entirely serious, affectionate gaze.

  “I’m not a hero.” Anger gone, left grief and resentment behind. But neither of those were to do with Tullio Rossi, he thought, and could be withstood until he and Tullio could get drunk together, and talk the matter out to exhaustion.

  “Trust you to beat up the cripple,” Conrad grumbled.

  “I find it’s safer. Able-bodied men might beat me up.”

  The ex-soldier’s remark was entirely separate from his warm smile.

  Running feet thumped on the boards above his head. Conrad startled. He tried to guess, from shouts and hauled, creaking ropes, what might be happening. “Tullio?”

  The ex-soldier leaned outside for a moment, speaking to the guards at the doorway.

  “We’re back in sight of Naples!” he burst out. “Finally! A whole fucking week upside down in a storm; thought we’d never make it.”

  Conrad beckoned Tullio over, not leaving him an option of refusal. “I’m not the one under arrest! Help me up on deck!”

  The sling on his left arm unbalanced him. He did not need to add, I’m not steady yet. That was obvious enough fighting up companionways and steps.

  The outer world burst on him in a flurry of white canvas, fresh wind, blue sky, men working at the sails, and a green and blackened land beyond.

  The peak of Vesuvius touched the sky from here, seen from the level of the sea. Even its green foothills towered. Conrad squinted against the blue sky, and made out great scars of black and grey ash on the south-east slopes.

  The waters that had been blue and limpid were grey.

  Conrad made his way cautiously towards the bows, where he should be more out of the way, and shaded his eyes with his right hand. Paolo-Isaura came over. She looked with concern at his sling.

  “At least you’re not off your head now.” She jammed an unexpectedly-gentle elbow in his ribs.

  “You can tell?” Conrad absently stared ahead, at the glowing pale stone of Napoli’s buildings. Too far yet to see detail, and yet damage was apparent.

  “Looks like it mostly hit the city itself…” Tullio said no more as they closed on the port.

  All sails brailed up, the frigate glided on through the Bay of Naples, silent but for the groaning of rope and wood. Every man not occupied with the sails or the steering stood about on the deck, getting in the sailors’ way. Conrad saw Ferdinand with a crowd of his officers and aides, Fabrizio Alvarez awkwardly unsafe on crutches.

  “There aren’t any boats coming out.” Conrad went to shade his eyes with his left hand, bit back a swear-word, and switched to his right hand. “Not one.”

  Tullio said, “If the day’s come when bum-boats don’t come out to rook ship’s crews of their pay, we have reached the Apocalypse!”

  “No pilot’s boat,” Paolo added anxiously.

  If they’re not sending a pilot out, something is very wrong.

  There were no ships moored in the harbour, either, Conrad saw. No commercial ships with their sails going up to take them to Marseilles or Cyprus or Gibraltar.

  A smart man in the blue coat and white breeches of the Emperor’s navy passed behind him, where he stood at the rail—Conrad recognised him as the dark-haired, soaked man who had been berated by the surgeon. Officers followed him. The man bowed to Ferdinand and his entourage, a few yards further towards the prow.

  “We have not been officially introduced, as yet, the weather preventing. Sébastien Bernard, captain of the Apollon.”

  The King wore a grey military cloak, his head bare, and the wind blew through his short-cropped brown hair. His attention was all on Naples; the rest of the world might evidently not exist. “Can we come closer in without a pilot?”

  “I have men who know the waters, yes, sire.”

  “Come close enough to launch a boat.”

  Smartly efficient seamen moved to obey almost before Captain Bernard ordered.

  Conrad narrowed his eyes against wind and spray. The long shore of the Bay of Naples was silent and still. Wavelets lapped.

  Tension pulled against tendon and bone in his arm. He relaxed the muscles of his shoulders, and attempted to ignore the fire in what was no longer a hand, no matter how much phantom feeling assured him it was.

  Like the war, men in the surgeons’ tents, staring at their injuries in disbelief.

  After the surgeon’s tent, there were men who healed and went back into battle.

  Tacking again brought them on a slow glide past Castell dell’Ovo, apparently deserted, and along beside the blank broken wall of the Palazzo Reale.

  The view of the King’s Dock opened. The Apollon’s captain opened his spy-glass with a click, and swore under his breath. “No use sending a boat in here.”

  The dock lay under the hot sun, a hopeless shambles of broken spars and planks, mud, and small boats driven in and piled up on each other like driftwood.

  Silence pressed down, somehow more terrifying than the wreckage. Even the sailors of the Emperor stared, only the wind audible in the sails.

  “Take us into the harbour.” Ferdinand’s voice broke the quiet.

  The frigate tacked and came about, making its way back across the Bay, and rounding the promontory.

  The whole landscape opened up east and south of the city. Conrad heard Paolo swear. The raw broken top of Vesuvius stood black against the horizon, lower now. Black earth, ash, steaming rock: all stretched down from the scooped-open crater, as far as the city.

  “Here.” Tullio reappeared, nudged Conrad’s shoulder, and handed over the old army spy-glass—

  He took it back, opened it out, and handed it over again.

  Paolo-Isaura slid between Conrad and the rail. He rested the glass on her shoulder. The focus was not optimum, but with an arm in a sling, he couldn’t adjust it. Still, he picked out by the Port district, the old centre of town, and the New Palace, where the volcanic surges had rushed into the city’s buildings.

  “There are people.” He lifted his head, finding that the ship’s captain and King Ferdinand were in loud consultation over their own scopes.

  He dipped his head back to fix on the town again.

  Naples looked as crowded as it might normally be. From this position he could see there was activity from the Port District round to the Palazzo Nuovo’s stern round towers, and the shattered walls of the Palazzo Reale. Up in the city, too. Men worked—and women. A few children played. F
ewer than one might expect. And if there were old men and women, they were not visible to his eye. But Naples is not a desert!

  He took a deep glad breath of sea wind, and opened his mouth to report it.

  A murmur went through the ship’s company. It began with those in the rigging, high enough to see best. It spread. Conrad heard Alvarez speaking anxiously to the King. He didn’t take his eye from the glass.

  In the magnified circle, Conrad looked again at the city full of people. People working—shifting rubble, clearing streets, even building new stone-work. They laboured with coats and waistcoats discarded, as if they were too hot. By the progress made in clearing the detritus of the eruption, and new walls rising, the men and women of Naples had been working without sleep, all through the long nights.

  Without sleep because, even at this distance across the water, the eye picked out how they lifted chunks of stone too heavy for normal men and women.

  Their indefinable too-smooth movement called Leonora inexorably to mind. Leonora, during those times when she was not pretending to be one of the living.

  “The people who came out of the ash!” Conrad realised. “The Dead who were used for the voice of the Emergent God. I thought they would have gone…”

  Ferdinand’s voice spoke beside him. “It seems they were given a choice.”

  Conrad straightened, aware of Paolo and Tullio making respectful bows. Beyond them, the captain was overseeing the lowering of the ship’s gig into the calm water. “Sir?”

  “We may be wrong. Or there may be only a few… Can you accompany me—” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily checked himself. “My apologies. And the Count incapacitated too. Porca vacca!”

  He strode off before Conrad could formulate a response.

  Aware of his face heating scarlet, he thought, They’d have to rig a chair for me; there isn’t time.

  He wondered if he would be able to use his left hand to grip anything, after it healed. Loss surprised him. The intensity of it blinded him for a moment with shameful tears.

  The King led a number of men down into the gig. It was not until Conrad followed the progress of the last man that he realised it was a woman, in a cloak and man’s borrowed hat. Two armed soldiers from Alvarez’s company sat either side of her in the stern.