The Black Opera (98 page)

“It's been obvious what she wanted ever since she left Venice. Go back to her, Corrado, and then maybe we can all get some peace!”

Conrad tensed his shoulders to throw the man to the basalt earth, splinted legs or not—and froze as someone else flashed into movement.

Of all of them, Nora had a hand free. It swung white in the sudden gloom, made Conrad flinch—

The yowl at his back let him know he wasn't the target.

A muffled guffaw came from Tullio, behind, explaining over his shoulder to Isaura. “She smacked his ear!”

“Damnation, that hurt!”

“Serves you right, Superbo!” Leonora's eyes flashed, catching the glint of western light as she faced around the way they were going, and hurriedly moved off. “You were awake and
listening
to this but you weren't
hearing
it!”

She gave another yank on Conrad's hand; he added his own snarled curses to the tirade.

“I'm sorry!” She shone a tired smile at him. “We have to hurry now. I don't know how much more cold I have in me. Pass it back down the line to move faster!”

Conrad let her set the pace, leading, and adjusted himself to Tullio's shifting grasp on his arm. The Conte di Argente still lay over Conrad's shoulders, but he could feel the muscles were tense.

“Were
you conscious for all of that?” Conrad rumbled, under the exchange of shouts down the line.

“Mostly.”

“And you couldn't have kept your mouth shut for one more minute? I wanted to hear what she had to say!”

A muffled laugh went through the prone body. “I dare say you do, since it was you she was making up to…”

Under the apparent spite—and how many other times, in the past, has this been true?—the Count's voice carried a teasing reassurance.

Despite the growing pain from his hand, he found himself with a wry smile.

The line of scrub came closer, blackened and flickering with little flames where the lava rolled over it, black currents delineated by soot elsewhere—and, here, black ice-flows of basalt jostling at the bank, rocking as the line of people approaches closer to the shore.

“Here
!”

Nora Sposito stopped on the edge of the lava stream.

“Stay still.” Her brow creased as she studied him. “Only a short time. Very short. Hold on, Corradino.”

The rising steam and smoke got into Conrad's lungs. Despite the effort to hold himself still, he all but choked, shaking. Pain flared in his hand and up his arm. He tried to straighten his body—and could not, with Roberto's weight on it.

Nora's toes pressed on the last lip of basalt.

She reached around past Conrad with her free hand.

He didn't understand what she did until Tullio passed him. He realised Nora was shepherding the long tail of people past them—like a gigantic grande chain in the ballroom—and off the hissing, spitting, white-sparking earth.

A fang of pain bit nerves that ran up the underside of his left arm, into his neck, and made his whole spine spasm, and the muscles lock tight.

Over the lava flow. The others passed by: man and woman, singer and soldier; Sandrine and Ferdinand and Paolo-Isaura; each stepping off the lava flow at Pozzuoli's first uncovered streets.

He concentrated on that, not on the pain that—dangerously—is numbed to nothing in his left hand.

Weight lifted. He made an inept grab, and then realised someone had prized Roberto Capiraso from his shoulders.

Another man caught Conrad as he fell forward—

He sprawled flat, face-down on the hot earth. One of his boots smoked, and scalded his foot. He felt himself finally dragged far enough from the lava stream to land on earth cool enough not to be part of the volcanic stream.

He looked behind as he fell. He saw Leonora step off the lava onto the rocks.

The flow of molten basalt sprang up gold and red and searing as she left it. Her first two or three footsteps scorched the grass.

He guessed that, by the time they came to examine her, she would have exchanged her unearthly chill for the almost equally unearthly warmth of the Returned Dead.

Returned Dead twice.

Only then did he looked down and let himself see a hand whitened in places, and blackened in others, by her sub-arctic touch.

It doesn't look so bad. But then neither does frostbite
.

Who will she go to first?

He hated himself for his doubt of himself, and his doubt of her. The pain in his hand seared far worse than such injuries seemed to justify.

Before he or Roberto Capiraso could be moved, the gloriously-unselfconscious naked woman stepped between them, whispering something inaudible, and
reached out at one and the same time to catch Conrad's shoulder and Roberto's forearm.

“You can't bring yourselves to believe that a woman can love two men equally. I've had to face the
truth
to escape death, and I know! It was only a heartbeat, but I had time to see what a fool I've been. What I abandoned. What I was
too afraid to want
. Why do you think I could never choose between you? I don't want to be made to choose! I
won't
choose! I love both of you.
I came back for both of you
. Believe me!”

She whispered again, as Conrad slipped into rising unconsciousness, this time clearly enough that he heard it.

“Both of you. Always. Both.”

“The ship!” The King's voice was urgent. “Every man to the
Apollon
, quickly!”

Drained utterly, Conrad heard the sounds as if through distant fog.

His eyes might have been open or shut. He thought he saw Tullio Rossi's greatcoat settled over a naked Leonora.

He had not recovered from the feeling that he had been exsanguinated by the time they reached the harbour. They boarded the French frigate
Apollon
. The ship's rigging was white: covered in a pale layer of ash. The vessel heeled over as it cut across the waves, past the ancient fort guarding Pozzuoli. Conrad, boosted over on to the deck with every other man in that last traumatic rush, sprawled on holy-stoned planks, until two or three of Alvarez's riflemen picked him up.

Blood ran down his chin again as he bit his lip against the pain.

They would have taken him below, but he rammed his other elbow in one man's ribs, and swore at the other, and he and Roberto ended up jammed into a corner by the wheelhouse, out of the way of the sailors, who ran across the deck in apparent confusion, raising what little sail the King evidently trusted on the mast.

Fever filled his head, slowing his reactions and leaving him staring in wonder at quite natural things, while the astounding passed him by. He felt dizzy. Conrad felt as if they inched away from the great eruption column of Vesuvius, no matter how fast the sleek ship sailed out into the Bay, on course for the middle of the Tyrrhenean sea.

He realised that he could still hear Nora singing.

She was by the mast, a military cloak bundled over her naked body, her hands clutching wood and rope. She sang at the full power of her voice.

Just as Conrad managed to wonder
Why?
the
Apollon
lifted and fell down the long slope of a vast tsunami.

Water came crashing into the Gulf of Naples, stirred up by undersea volcanic detonations, he realised.

They rode it out—every man who could, pinned to the port rail, straining to see what damage the tsunami might do to the land.

There was no way of seeing, through the murk and coil of ash, smoke, and spray, but Conrad couldn't blame them for looking. He kept his own gaze on the southern sky, knowing he could not see from here if Stromboli, Vulcano, and Ætna have also erupted.

The last thing he coherently heard was Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily, worried about Palermo as well as Naples. He couldn't understand what answer the ship's master made. Leonora's now-hoarse singing filled his head and then faded away.

The heat of his hand swelled up like a tide, filling all his mind. He jolted back to awareness, recognising the faces over him but not able to put names to them. Something cold as ice and wet pressed against his left hand.

It was the last stress; he fell into the oncoming numbness with something approaching welcome.

H
e saw nothing except hallucination, trapped in the memory of fire and the pain of his frost-burns. Worse,
hemicrania
gripped him in an iron clamp.

Among excruciating shouts and crashes came the familiar bellow of Tullio Rossi.

“There
isn't
no other place to put them! Unless you want them below decks in the butcher's shop—surgeon's station, beg his pardon. The Emperor won't have them down there kicking the bucket. Clear out the captain's cabin!”

At
them
, he struggled for consciousness, but failed to disperse the fog on his drained mind.

If his mind—his
spirit
, for want of a better word—felt like a guttering candle-flame, his material body was only too present.

Held motionless, curled up around his hand, he begged under his breath that the physical pain should cease, knowing he addressed his pleas into a void.

It was on Conrad's lips to say
God help me
. He wondered dizzily if wishes counted as prayer—if wishing desperately that the world had returned to what it was so the Emergent God might heal his hand amounted to a prayer, and a betrayal of his principles through fear.

Is the mind that emerged from the human race still…“awake”… enough to hear? How easy it would be to call wishes, prayers; call it God!

He kept silent.

Time passed.