The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “Leonora—!” He choked off a cry.

  A glance at Tullio and Paolo let him know he was not wrong; he had seen her.

  “King must think she can help.” Tullio shrugged.

  Paolo, severe, corrected: “Taking her in to see what she’s done.”

  Oars dipped and rose, water flashing in the sun. She was out of sight before he could see if she was well.

  Conrad leaned one arm on the rail and let the breeze cool his face. He ignored conversation around him, where all attention was fixed on Napoli. He saw the boat ground on the shore, and the small group vanish into the city.

  An hour passed.

  Time went past slowly enough to make him envy the sailors at their tasks—though he knew he’d bitterly regret any life that forced him up masts and yards, to furl and unfurl sails. Pain bit again. No use offering himself for menial tasks to take his mind off what might be happening in Naples, since few enough tasks can be done literally single-handed.

  He was turning his right hand for inspection when Tullio came up to lean on the rail beside him. Creased palm, fingers still stained with ink even after scrambling through Pozzuoli, capable manipulative fingers…

  “Anything?”

  “Man at the top of the big mast says they went to the palace.”

  “Look!” Conrad’s focus abruptly shifted. The dark motion beyond Tullio’s head became the lifting and scooping of oars, and the dark blob the ship’s boat returning from the silent city.

  Sling or not, he managed to elbow his way through the idlers waiting at the side of the ship, and hold his position there while the men came back on board.

  Seeing a familiar profile, he shoved forward.

  Alvarez’s men hurried Leonora away before she could even look around.

  King Ferdinand came aboard with agility. He shrugged his shoulders, brushing the wide lapels of his coat as if he could brush Naples away with the dust.

  “We sent out scouting parties. Their reports are conclusive.”

  Ferdinand spoke generally, gazing around at aides, sailors, the survivors from the opera company. By his grave expression, the emergency had him still in the frame of mind to speak openly to any man of the Two Sicilies, rather than with the reserve of a king.

  “The Returned Dead may have gone back into the storm after the god spoke through them—but they evidently didn’t go away. There are hundreds, thousands, of them… If there are any living survivors, they’ve fled; likely out into the countryside. There’s no living man, woman, or child to be found.”

  Ferdinand rubbed absently at his dust-red eyes—and dropped his hand, his expression abruptly pained.

  “Naples is a city of the Returned Dead.”

  CHAPTER 59

  The Apollon ran south through the Straits of Messina, and south and west, around island-Sicily, rather than directly past Stromboli and the Aeolian Islands.

  “Weather’s still unsettled,” Tullio Rossi muttered, leaning unprovoked on the ship’s rail beside Conrad, as they passed through the Straits.

  Conrad stared out at land and sea for a long time before he identified the strangeness. “It’s wider…”

  “They say that wave was something to see.”

  Conrad tried to comprehend that, while he and his compatriots fled fire, a great flood of water had undercut both sides of this channel, widening it out in minutes.

  The notorious current didn’t seem less strong.

  A distant yellow stone line of buildings fronted the sea, under sullen and black-sloped Ætna. Conrad wondered aloud, “Think we’ll make port at Catania?”

  “The King wants to set up at Palermo too much. Don’t worry, padrone.” The big man looked embarrassed. “Your family are all right, I’m sure.”

  It was a niggling pain, somewhere inside, that Conrad was content to wait for a communication from Zio Baltazar telling him his mother Agnese was well. After all this, I don’t want to be nagged for money I certainly haven’t got! Even when I get paid for L’Altezza’s libretto.

  Worrying about that enabled him to ignore the fang of pain chewing on his left hand.

  The Apollon sailed on. The King of the Two Sicilies wished to aid his stricken country, shipboard rumour said—and since Naples is a city of the dead, to move his capital to island-Sicily, in the north of the island, at Palermo.

  Day and night and day.

  Conrad did not see Leonora.

  Attempting to bribe his way past the door of the first mate’s cabin failed. Even bribery with the request that he merely be allowed to talk to her through the barred door.

  The sergeant in charge of the soldiers of Colonel Alvarez was sympathetic. “We’d like to do it, signore. We wish we might do it for the hero of the Campi Flegrei. But you understand, it’s duty.”

  “‘Hero’?” Conrad shook his head, stunned, and walked off, leaning against the slant of the ship. Hero! All I want is to speak to Nora!

  He found himself turning it over and over in his mind.

  This is not the woman I opened my heart to in Venice. Even without what has happened to her, how could it be? Five years gone: we are both different. She’s… I don’t know what she is. But I love her with her potential realised: all fire and ice and sword-blades.

  I can’t have her; she’ll choose Roberto.

  Her arrest was strict enough that he temporarily gave up his attempts.

  What does this imply for her future?

  He might have been given his own quarters below decks, but comfort and some odd feeling—that surely could not be any kind of loyalty—kept him in the makeshift sickbay that was Captain Bernard’s cabin, with the Conte di Argente.

  The Count’s arrest was strict. Conrad still had visitors. Each allowed in by ones and twos, but visitors nonetheless.

  JohnJack Spinelli came with an extra ration of crackers, and leaned against Conrad’s cot making “single-handed” jokes until Conrad threw him out, pleased to have got that initial hump over with.

  Sandrine offered her protests about her plight having to live below decks, “at close quarters with all those common sailors,” but confessed that Paolo had hung up a curtain to cut the “opera” section of the lower deck off at least from curious stares, if not from flirtation… Scurrilous company gossip followed.

  Paolo-Isaura came with Tullio and a wordless, but beaming, Giambattista Velluti. Apparently all the officers and half the crew wanted to hear his story of what happened in the Anfiteatro, and needing Isaura to translate his whispers into her broken French only made it more effective.

  “Oh, yes, brother,” Paolo-Isaura said innocently. “I’m told we have to congratulate you on your new-found belief in God…”

  “My what?”

  Tullio snickered. By the look of him, he was not the source of any rumours.

  That’ll be Count Roberto that’s flapped his mouth off, Conrad mused grumly. Since he was the only other person here apart from the surgeon. He must have said something while I was asleep.

  Paolo cast her eyes up to the heavens (or, in this case, the underside of the frigate’s deck) and murmured, “‘Thank God for science’…”

  Conrad managed to summon a lofty dignity. “I was using the term in the cultural, secular sense of the word.”

  Even Giambattista Velluti joined in the jeers in response to that.

  “All right, I was out of my head with brandy and laudanum!” Conrad very carefully folded his arms, and sulked his way through an afternoon of teasing.

  They haven’t abandoned me.

  He dared not look when the lob-lolly boy changed the bandages. He kept his head turned away, and at those times read what remained of his cut and de-boned hand in Roberto Capiraso’s horrified gaze.

  Conrad met with Ferdinand again only briefly, the King congratulating him on surviving surgery.

  Now that it looks like the Apollon and all of us will survive… there’ll be arrest, judgement, and punishment of the King’s enemies.

  Conrad could not have
imagined, before, that it would give him a moment’s concern.

  The two wooden cradles swung to an identical angle as the frigate heeled over, running west before tacking north again.

  Roberto Capiraso’s voice held no apparent emotion. “I suppose it will be a matter of prison.”

  “You deserve it.”

  The bearded man lay back flat, his expression a curious mix of resignation and frustration. “I know. I don’t deny it.”

  A laugh bubbled out of Conrad before he could stop it.

  The Conte di Argente glared—and then heaved a sigh. “What is it now, poet?”

  “You can talk!” The most recent dose of morphine loosened Conrad’s tongue, but didn’t move him to speak anything but his true opinion. “You out-poet the poets, Superbo! All for love… All for her…”

  If the man had not been injured and in pain, Conrad wouldn’t have seen the flinch, or watched the muscles of Capiraso’s jaw tighten.

  That hit home.

  The Count said bitterly, “I have half a mind to get out of this thing and find her—”

  “—If you want to be on crutches the rest of your life.”

  The man cursed like a dockside lazzaroni.

  Conrad had no idea, now it came to it, why he should be warning Il Superbo of anything.

  Because of her, Conrad reflected. Because I understand him, and I can’t help but sympathise, even with my rival.

  The surgeon made his rounds then, inspecting both men with a dour confidence in his own ability that Conrad found cheering.

  Conrad caught sight of uniformed, armed men beyond the door.

  “They must think I’m improving,” Roberto grunted. “I’m under the strictest possible arrest.”

  The Apollon came into the north-west facing harbour of Palermo early in the morning, bows seeming hardly to disturb limpid water. March brought out green scrub and grasses on the great grey crags that cupped the city. The southern light, and the heat that soothed his skin, made Conrad physically at ease for the first time since the Burning Fields.

  As they came into the curve of the bay, he looked beyond the town. Blue-grey haze went up into the heavens.

  The grey-blue cloud gave way, halfway up the sky, to stark rock.

  It was not a cloud—was, in fact, the higher foothills of Ætna, on the far side of the island; whose white snow and eruption-blackened peak stood out precise and distinct. High enough that he must tilt his head back to take it in, even this number of miles away…

  “Coming, Corrado?” Tullio reached down to the ship’s boat, where they had been rowed into Palermo’s keyhole-shaped medieval dock. His mouth twisted wryly. “Shall I give you a hand?”

  “Fuck you, Tullio…” Conrad caught the ex-sergeant’s left hand with his right, and let himself be heaved up onto the ancient stones, feeling marginally less embarrassed at being crippled.

  Palermo, between its granite hills, thick with palm trees, camellias, and every other flower, welcomed him instantly in. He was dazzled by the city whose arches spoke of the Moors, churches of the Normans, and mosaics of the Byzantine Empire to which the island briefly belonged. He was smelling scent-laden air before he realised, and the cooking of rice with saffron—listening to a thousand competing voices as he stumbled through the crowds.

  “I’m here!” Paolo-Isaura slid in beside him, smart in borrowed French navy uniform. She helped Tullio shut him off from the shoving groups—it seemed every man and woman of island-Sicily wanted news—of Naples, of mainland Sicily, of their relatives in Campania, of the likelihood of ships landing with provisions—

  Tullio and Paolo manoeuvred deftly. Conrad realised they followed behind the litter in which the King had ordered the Conte di Argente transported, using that as shelter too.

  He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the opera company trailing behind, spreading out. Sandrine Furino stopped to give her account of the Burning Fields—crowds gathering—and Brigida Lorenzani translated the whisper of Giambattista Velluti…

  “They’ll be a while,” Tullio commented. “Might as well see where we’re sleeping.”

  Paolo, a ship’s bag of belongings over one shoulder, and Alfredo Scalese’s violin in its case under that arm, linked her free hand around Conrad’s elbow. She sounded worried. “Are we under house arrest, too?”

  Conrad frowned, looking up the hill, past the Duomo, at the faded golden stone of the Palazzo dei Normanni—evidently their destination.

  “I don’t think so. They will want us to answer questions.”

  It was a week before he finished repeating, ad nauseum, what he had seen, heard, and said.

  A week without ever seeing Leonora Capiraso, Contessa di Argente.

  He asked to see Leonora. He was refused.

  He demanded. He was refused again.

  Conrad found himself in modest rooms in the Palazzo dei Normanni, along with Tullio, Paolo (who continued dressing as Paolo), JohnJack, Sandrine and Velluti; those dozen bedraggled chorus singers and musicians who had followed him across the frozen lava; the Conte di Argente, and—presumably—the Contessa.

  “Good God!” Paolo-Isaura exclaimed, on her way out. “Not another inquiry…!”

  The King of the Two Sicilies convened a board—a number of boards—before which the witnesses of the eruption and the events at the Flavian Amphitheatre were called to give evidence.

  Something to keep my mind off this part-hand as it heals, Conrad told himself sternly.

  A week from the day they docked, he slumped into a chair on the balcony that overlooked an inner courtyard of the palace. Built first by Palermo’s Emir, and then by Roger the Norman, the palazzo’s fretted wood and pointed arches were lost on Conrad, for all they might make a wonderful backdrop for an opera.

  The King’s surgeon changed the bandages on his hand. Conrad preferred to look away when that happened.

  “They still won’t let me see Leonora,” he growled, when the man had gone.

  “They won’t let anyone see the Contessa.” Tullio sat down beside him, carrying two glasses of wine, and passed the second one over. “You want to join the syndicate on Paolo and the boards?”

  It was a worthy attempt to distract him. Conrad allowed it. With the di Galdis gone, he might have a little more income to play with; his original creditors would presumably be willing to go back to their old arrangements.

  “Put me in for five soldi. On her continuing to get through every one of these testimonies without them guessing she’s not a boy.” Conrad found a cause for sly humour. “Anyone who suspects it certainly won’t mention it—a woman couldn’t conduct an orchestra, especially not in an opera house…”

  Tullio gave him a grin for the mock outrage.

  Isaura joined them at the inner balcony an hour later, cravat untied and waistcoat unbuttoned. There was nothing about her torso specifically female. Conrad supposed that she bound her breasts, like the heroines of adventures tales; certainly it was not a thing to ask one’s sister.

  “I did overhear, today,” Paolo-Isaura dropped into the conversation, as they sat gazing out at the Aeolian Sea. “Leonora’s still giving her testimony, but it’s all done on her own, and only with one or two very secret boards of advisors. They don’t even allow il Superbo in on all of them. I saw him when I was coming back.”

  “Moping around like a wet weekend,” Tullio said, opening another bottle of the wine. “Like the padrone here. You and il Conte make a good pair, Corrado.”

  Conrad pondered the responses that vaffanculo! might get, and chose to remain sullenly silent.

  The following morning a page arrived to tell him he was called to the rooms which Ferdinand had chosen for his private office.

  Conrad made his bow in the tall, sun-shadowed chamber before he realised that another chair was occupied besides the King’s.

  Roberto, Conte di Argente, did not rise as etiquette demanded.

  It was not one of the Palace’s gilded chairs he occupied, Conrad noted, but a wheeled i
nvalid-chair. The chair supported his stiffly-bandaged, outstretched legs. One of the servants leaned a pair of padded crutches against the wall.

  Roberto gave Conrad a reluctant nod, and said nothing.

  “Signore Scalese.” The King of the Two Sicilies wore the regimental uniform of his royal guards, golden epaulettes on the shoulders of his blue coat, gold frogging across the breast. The Order of the Golden Fleece hung bright in the spotless linen at his throat.

  He seems very distant from the man struggling through the crevasses of the Burning Fields, with ash-clogged boots and torn breeches, Conrad thought. He would have greeted that man without hesitation. This distant pale-featured man, he momentarily had no words for.

  “Corrado!” Ferdinand stood up from the vast desk piled all over with the papers attendant on commanding the kingdom, especially in this extremity. He beckoned Conrad further into the chamber. “Come and speak with me for a moment.”

  Tension left Conrad’s shoulders at the lack of ceremony. “Sir.”

  All the windows and shutters of the room had been flung open. The morning was early enough to be fresh. Pots of cacti and palms shaded the balconies. Ferdinand drew him out onto one balcony.

  It overlooked a fountain, in another courtyard, throwing light back up to the Sun. The view of Palermo’s roofs was beautiful, but irrelevant, Conrad realised. We’re out of earshot of the Conte di Argente.

  “Another board of inquiry, sir?”

  Ferdinand gave his mild, compelling smile. “We’re near to concluding our business. I plan to give my final judgement this morning. I wished to speak with you first.”

  Panic located itself under his sternum, and churned in his stomach. This soon? Leonora…!

  “As for yourself…” Gazing at the bright falling fountain-water, Ferdinand continued. “I had wondered if you might want to take on Adriano Castiello-Salvati’s role.”

  “Me? Sir,” Conrad added belatedly.

  He couldn’t bring himself to say No! look what happened to Castiello-Salvati!