The Black Opera (90 page)

Conrad cast an eye up at the cumulus-cloud-and-lightning darkness of Vesuvius. “Or that could be a very mundane good guess.”

Luigi's face has that alert light that means he's enjoying an argument—any argument, for the sake of an argument—

Conrad looked around.

—and that expression appears to have spread to others of the Returned Dead.

Of course it has! They may have come back from the Dead, but first and foremost, they're from Naples!

The gaze of tens of thousands of dead eyes was nonetheless unnerving. Conrad said, “Suppose you
do
turn out to be knowledgeable and powerful—and for all I know, loving!—does that make you a deity? Or does that make you just a very powerful and old phenomenon?”

Leonora appeared in his field of vision. She stood on the opposite side of the chasm, a few feet back from the edge.

If she seemed to address the Returned Dead on the north-western side of the amphitheatre now, Conrad felt the burning of her attention on him like sunlight.

“This shall be settled.” Leonora sounded grim. She stretched out her arms to the tiers of Dead. “Tell us. Are you the Prince of this World?”

“No.”

Conrad barely caught the simple sound before it was gone.

No?

Did they say—?

Leonora, her own voice steady, demanded,
“Tell us
. Have you broken the rule of the Creator-God? And cured the world's pain?”

“No.” The syllable fell into a waiting utter silence. “No.”

They stared at each other, the Dead in unison and Leonora Contessa di Argente.

Conrad only looked at Nora. Her chin rose perhaps a quarter of an inch. Nothing but that, and the tightening of the skin at the corners of her eyes, told him how she took her utter failure.

“How could you do this to us!”

The voice was not one of the Returned Dead. Conrad recognised Enrico Mantenucci's accent.

“We are good men!” The police commandatore held out his hands. “Our hands are covered in blood for you!”

Leonora had the ability to make even the most ridiculous opera costume look like clothes: Conrad had noted it in Venezia. Now she walked around the arena, surveying both the Returned Dead and the Prince's Men, and she moved as if the gilded leather sandals and embroidered blue and gold robe of Queen Isabella were perfectly normal to wear, in the location of a Roman ruin, during the eruption of a volcano.

Roberto, beside Conrad, said, “She's beautiful.”

His voice was choked by more than ash.

“She walks as if we were safe, here.” Conrad recalled being shown a layer of yard-deep volcanic ash cement beneath the foundations of the Angevin Old Palace, that showed Vesuvius had certainly not been idle for all its centuries, and had reached as far as Naples at least once before.

She turned her head, surveying the ranks of the dead, dusty in their glorious return to the world of the living. Conrad saw she didn't fix on any one face when she asked her questions.

“Some things are beyond your powers,” she speculated aloud, as if she wanted
the voice of thousand to confirm it.

“They are.”

“And you have no solution for the pain of the world.”

“It's written into the construction of the universe,” the voices said, and Conrad could not help looking at the one face he knew.

Luigi Esposito seemed to have as little individuality as a singer in a choir.

“Written heart-deep,” the voices in unison said. “So that everything is either predator or prey; predator on what is below it, and prey for what is above. Disease preys on your children only so it can breed, as you do. Faults and mistakes and happenstance are embedded into the world, since in this world they are the only way to bring about change. If there were a God, to alter that—to do it, they would have to destroy the universe and begin again.”

“You think I wouldn't ask it?” Leonora muttered under her breath, as argumentative as Conrad had ever heard her. “You're the god we
have
—what's your justification for the existence of pain?”

“Pain is a consequence. Pain is a protection. Pain is the thread that runs through all life, plant to animal.”

Conrad said, frustratedly, “It's not that it won't answer. It's that we don't know the right questions to ask. Or we don't have the knowledge to
understand
what the answers mean.”

He wanted to step forward and put his arm around Leonora, as he always used to; leaving the choice to her of whether she accepted the touch or moved away. That he couldn't reach her…

The voices said, “I don't have the power to end all the world.”

Leonora snapped, “And you can't bring about a solace for the pain of it? Create a reward for us, after our suffering here? Give us the afterlife that the churches promise, so that what we've endured here will cease to matter?”

Conrad thought his heart stopped. Just the idea that all the tenuous dreams of the loved dead alive again, an eternity in a world of beauty and no pain, had been for a moment in reach… His throat closed up so that, when he cleared it, the noise came out closer to a sob.

He thought there was a slight intake of breath, magnified through thousands of throats, as if the voice felt an emotion all too human, like regret.

“If I could do it, I would,” the voice said, “but that's beyond me. The world has a billion of you, and I am strong in their strength, but it's not enough for me to create worlds for each of you after you go through the process of death. I focus all that I am to infuse a vital spirit into those few of you who need to Return. There's nothing else I am powerful enough to do.”

Leonora took a number of swift paces across the rock-starred earth, not
tripping, her blue and gold robe whipping around her ankles as she turned.

“So you can't mend this world?”

“No
.”

“And you can't make enough of an afterlife for us, to forget how much pain and grief and suffering we go through here?”

“No.”

“Then—” Leonora straightened, surveying the rising ranks of dusty figures. “Then what
can
you do?
Vaffanculo!
What fucking good
are
you?”

The pause lasted long enough for Conrad to feel the stone amphitheatre floor shake under his feet with the first quiverings of an earthquake, and hear the distant explosions of rock-bombs plummeting down onto the Burning Fields.

Each mouth moving in unison with the next, the Returned Dead gave voice again: loud enough to be heard by all.

“I can tell you the truth.”

The silence was intense enough that Conrad heard the sulphur pools bubbling beyond the walls of the Flavian amphitheatre.

“What?” Leonora said flatly. “You can what?”

“I can tell you the truth, as we know it. If I don't know, I will tell you so. No riddles, no prophecies, no revelations. Ask, and if I can answer, I will.”

The idea of such an opportunity had Conrad frozen, dumb.

Not God… but if it had the knowledge of something we'd call godlike?

“If you have no afterlife, is there a god that does? Do we have souls? Do they end in Paradise? Or twittering like ghosts in a world of grey? If our idea of god is wrong, what about the others—have you knowledge of Buddha, or the Muslim god, or the god of the Protestants?”

He became aware he was gesturing wildly, and willed his hands to his sides. Questions tumbled out:

“Why are we the only species that's evolved to think? Are we the only species that's evolved to think? If pain is the deity teaching the world, what is it teaching the mastiff or the donkey, when they're beaten daily? Why are men such fools? Why are men such geniuses?”

A beat of silence filled the ash-shrouded world.

Leonora, almost absently, said, “Why were there so many subjects willing to be your mouthpiece?”

Lips moved in unison. “That I can speak through them is convenient for me. But they returned because they each consider that, given the manner of their sudden deaths, they have unfinished business on the face of the Earth. They may be speaking for me now, but they're still the people of Naples, and they want their children, their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and cousins and
god-parents; they want everything that you ripped from them with the eruption of the mountain.”

Leonora's pacing abruptly stopped. She didn't pale—for all he knew, Conrad thought, she couldn't—but she looked abruptly as if she were fifty years old. “I… I didn't… I meant…”

“You did,” the unison voices said. “You took them out of their lives, to give you a channel to the God who made the world. They're Neapolitan, and stubborn, so more came back than you planned for. I think they plan to stay.”

A voice from the side of the stage area, irritated, said, “Why waste your time speaking with what's obviously a demon sent to mislead mankind? You—”

Leonora didn't address the man—one of the clerics of the Prince's Men, Conrad saw. She turned on her heel and gazed up at the ranked dead. “Did any of them find a heaven waiting when they died?”

“No.”

It's one thing to be an atheist by rational conviction and experience. It's quite another, Conrad thought, to hear
all
the dead themselves tell you that the heaven of which your parents, tutors, priests, and friends spoke so definitely
isn't there
.

Or at least, is not in the memory of those who have died.

Or seem to have died.

We know so very little, and each answer inevitably opens up more questions!

He missed the officers of the Prince's Men interrupting Leonora and her response to them. A touch against his upper arm proved to be Isaura, eyes dark, looking in her spoiled evening dress like a refugee on the return from Moscow, or a particularly debauched evening out.

“Corrado, what will you ask?”

“I—”
have no idea
, he had been about to complete, when his thoughts took over his mouth.

He turned to the dusty people on foot or sitting on the ruined stone stands.

“Why are there ghosts, if there's no Heaven to be banned from, or no Hell to go to?”

To his surprise, he was answered; thousands of different mouths moving with the same sounds.

“Some of the dead come back in bodies. Some come back only in minds. Through my focus, they form themselves as they wish. Or some, perhaps, as they feel they're obliged to.”

It would have been possible to ask which group Alfredo belonged to, he knew. Conrad deliberately let the opportunity pass. There was nothing about his father that he had not had answered by the man's actions in life.

He noted Leonora stood back and let him continue.

Conrad said, “Are we capable of creating a god?”

Movement caught his eye, off to one side, where the stones of the Anfiteatro's stands crumbled, sliding in a cascade of dust down to the floor. A roll of heat came off the crack that opened, and he smelled the unmistakable scent of lava.

“God-like? Perhaps. A god in the sense that people mean the word? No.”

Conrad couldn't tell whether he was disappointed or relieved.

Was I asking because I wanted there to be a supernatural power for each of us?
Or because I was afraid that the Prince's Men, if it could be done, would have no compunction in doing it?

His gaze took in Luka Viscardo, among the Dominicans in the yet-living part of the audience.

And I suppose Signore Viscardo wouldn't hesitate to make doubly sure his god existed, and wasn't being impersonated by a devil or demon or heretic deity?

Or am I doing him a disservice?

Leonora broke off from her discussions with her fellow Prince's Men and strode back across the stage area. This time Roberto stepped forward, as if he would intercept her; their gazes crossed like swords.

Conrad pulled him back by the arm, until he stood in the same group with Tullio, Isaura, and the King.

“She has no idea what to do!” the Count whispered, sounding furious—with himself, Conrad thought, and not with Nora.

“I do.”

Conrad felt as if his head cleared. He nodded to his sister, and touched Tullio's arm as he passed; acknowledgements, more than anything else, that he was glad to have them with him today.

Five yards back from the stands, he cocked his head and looked up at them, rank on rank of Returned Dead, right up to the skyline.

“Excuse me.” Conrad let what determination he had cut through the interruptions by the Prince's Men. Heads turned to look at him, all as one.

“I have a question,” Conrad said. “Can you control the eruptions of Vesuvius and the Burning Fields? Ætna and the others too, maybe, but, selfish as it sounds, here in particular. Is there anything you can to do to stop the volcanic eruptions before all of the Phlegraen Peninsula and Naples goes up?”