The Black Opera (95 page)

Paolo's hand tugged on his sleeve.

“Corrado! What's that?”

Conrad turned in the direction of Pozzuoli again, following Paolo's prompting.

“—Minchia!”

Ice-cold rain slashed down into his face.

Conrad instantly threw his arm up to protect himself. Bitter rain stung his exposed hand.

No! Not rain—hail—!

“Hail?” he said aloud, in complete disbelief.

Tullio yelped and clapped his hand to his eye.

A hailstone stung Conrad's cheek and bounced, falling white to the dusty earth.

He saw a second one hit the lava and die with almost no time for a hiss.

A blast of air from above kicked up steam, ashes and dust. Conrad had to cover his face with his hands and blink furiously.

He straightened, and found himself bending forward into the wind. A slap of cold air in his face alerted him—a cloud of hail slashed down, and turned into rain as it came close to the lava.

Rain fell warm across his face, sending filthy black trickles of ash down to soak into his shirt.

Paolo's grip on his arm closed until it hurt. She pointed with her free hand. “What
is
that!”

Ahead, where the wide stream of lava coiled down the Burning Fields towards the sea, Conrad glimpsed ice-cold air
pushing
down from above.

He blinked, disbelieving.

The wind roared, too loud to make himself heard. He caught Paolo's hand in turn and dragged her down to kneel beside the Conte di Argente and Tullio, in hail-soaked grass and scrub.

Heat blasted into his face—but cold wind was on the tail of it, cold enough to be icy. He sheltered his face with both hands and managed to look up.

A blade of light cut down from the spreading eruption cloud, over his head.

The lightning-filled pillar still thundered up from Vesuvius. It rose a half-dozen miles into the air, flattened out, and began to spread everywhere over Campania.

Everywhere except here
, Conrad realised.

Ice-white light blasted in from the west—from clouds that roiled and broke up and showed the faintest snatch of blue sky.

Not blazing blue-white, he discovered, while tears ran down his cheeks. Only the white-gold of an ordinary late spring afternoon.

He let himself think the water from his tear-ducts only cleared them from ash and dust, and did not mean he responded to the sight of natural light by weeping like a child.

By his shoulder, the Conte di Argente surreptitiously dragged a sleeve across his own cheeks.

Sandrine gasped.

“Yes, it's sunlight,” Conrad muttered, bemused at the smoking cold rain that fell with it. “We're not going to see much of that when the clouds close in—”

“Corrado!”
The mezzo pointed.

He broke off, silenced.

Twenty yards ahead, a figure appeared, framed in the fleeting light. Appeared out of a fog of steam and hailstones and
cold
—

On the flowing molten lava.

The heat from the earth made the air shimmer, but Conrad was certain the moment he saw her.

For a number of moments, his voice wouldn't function—lost to disbelief, wonder, fury, love, and a desire to both shake and kiss the approaching figure.

She is walking, naked and barefoot, over the streaming lava.

“Leonora!”

W
ith her hair loosened and falling unbound, long enough that it curled against the backs of her knees, she might have been some Greek goddess in sculpture. But a sculpture that would inhabit the secret museum, given that the long slope of her thighs and the quick curve of breast and nipple were quite uncovered.

He fell down onto his knees, on the rough turf. His legs wouldn't hold him up.

The flow of lava crisped scrub and bushes black, at the edge of the molten river. The heat that rose over it swirled ashes into towering clouds. For the last quarter-hour, he had stood before an open furnace door. No place to turn away from it—turning from the one ahead only left him seared by the one behind. The faster the lava ebbed up onto the surface of the
Campi Ardenti
, the closer the land they stood on came to being an island at the confluence of two lava rivers. Inside an hour, the flow would join up; there would be only lava.

Conrad swayed, on his knees, the cold wind blasting into his face. Rain slashed down. Warm at first, and—the nearer the figure came—the colder it became. Conrad blinked away hail and melting snow.

Wind struck down from above. The frozen air blasted away from her. Away from her no matter what direction one looked.

Roberto's grip startled him. The injured man had hold of Conrad's shirt, struggling to hold himself sitting upright.

His expression was open and utterly defenceless. “You see her
too?”

Conrad's heart beat once, as if it were some large foreign object that lodged in his throat. His pulse shook him down to his fingertips. He knelt with his gaze fixed on the roiling treacle-flow of the lava.

“…I see her.”

“But the Dead don't return twice!” Roberto whispered.

Conrad echoed him, speaking in same moment: “The Returned Dead do not return a second time…”

“But she has,” Conrad finished. He leaned his weight against Roberto's shoulder for a moment. The other man didn't move away. “That's her. I
know
it's—”

“I
know it's her. I thought I was hallucinating her…”

“It's Nora.”

Freezing air and light blasted in from high above, sucking out heat everywhere. A hiss and pop confused Conrad, until he saw hail-stones hitting the surface of the lava.

His shirt flapped in the cold gale.

He wiped his hair out of his face, as the wind blew it there, staring fixedly at the magma.

Roberto Capiraso wiped his mouth, and Conrad saw the man's beard white with frost.

The film of moisture on his eyes dried and Conrad finally blinked.

No, this will be gone if I blink—!

He realised he was gripping Roberto's shoulder, in turn. The solidity of the wet coat cloth was a link to the reality of the world.

“She's still there.” He heard his own voice strained and croaking. “Roberto, tell me what I'm looking at.”

The fire of the lava reflected in the man's dark eyes. Almost too quiet to be heard, under the hiss of lava and roar of Vesuvius's eruption, Roberto Conte di Argente breathed out, “Leonora…”

The heat made her seemingly-black figure dance and shatter and come together again. She came closer, across the black and orange swirls of the lava currents. Liquid superheated stone fell away from her feet and ankles like the
waves of the sea.

“When it said, ‘I cannot give back what has already returned'—She must
already
have come back…”

Lava fell away from her naked-as-marble feet, as if it were water. Twenty metres now, in the shaking heat and hissing cold that surround the human figure. Conrad saw her place her foot down for her next step—

Through the glimmering air, he saw the molten lava turn black under her foot.

Turn black—

Turn into islands of solid stone
, he abruptly understood. Parts of the flow cooled down enough to go from liquid to frozen basalt.

He couldn't take his eyes off the figure in front of him. She was close enough for him to see her expression—close enough that every detail of her naked rangy body and little full breasts was visible, and he tried not to attend to that.
Of all the unsuitable times to want to lay with a woman—!

Not “a woman.”
It's Nora
.

He blinked rain out of his eyes where it dripped from his hair. He knotted his fingers tightly into the shoulder and collar of Roberto's coat, and the Count's left hand gripped his wrist in an iron vice.
One of us is holding the other up. I just wonder which it is.

Roberto looked as if he had forgotten the fractured bones of his shin and ankle; forgotten everything but the apparition in the snow and smoke. “Is this
your
miracle?”

“No. Is it yours? No—” Conrad interrupted himself. “If anything it's her miracle.”

“Why
is she…”

Conrad voiced his fear. “To say goodbye? To one of us? To both of us?”

He feared that.

Feared she might be an apparition, as Alfredo Scalese had been; not Returned from death in the body, but merely an echo of the past.

The blasting wind whipped around her as she stepped closer, lashing her hair into a Medusa-whip. Too far yet to see her face, but she carries herself like Nora, Conrad thought. Shoulders back, head high, unashamed.

Somewhere above the mushrooming ceiling of the eruption-cloud, it's still late afternoon above the Bay of Naples. A serration of light ripped down, cut by wind and cold, and terminated at her figure—Leonora Capiraso, Contessa di Argente; Leonora D'Arienzo; Nora Sposito of Castelveneto orphanage…

She came closer. The islands of black around her grew larger. Cold whispered on the air; ash-fall yellowing the air like snow.

Roberto's hand unconsciously closed around his wrist, digging in, beginning
bruises. “That can't be.”

Conrad narrowed his eyes against superheated air, so that he could bear to follow her footsteps.

Each time her high-arched narrow foot came down, basalt grew blacker and more solid under her. A few more yards and she walked on a bridge of stone—one that slowly disintegrated in her wake, basalt melted back into the coiling lava flow.

“She's singing.” Roberto Capiraso brushed white from his beard and moustache.

“She
is
singing…” Conrad did not dare speak loudly. Not and break the thread of sound that whispered over moorland and lava stream, and called up islands of stone under her feet.

He beckoned fiercely, without looking behind him.

Tullio thudded down beside him, shading his eyes against the light that fell down the rising column of air. A second thud, and a chin-point digging into his other shoulder, let him know Paolo fell on her knees behind him, her arms around his body.

Tullio swore obscenely. “The dead don't Return twice!”

“Ghosts don't turn lava back into stone!”

Conrad tried to choke down the heart that again threatened to fill up his throat, and wondered, quite idly, if he might drop dead of an attack before he knew what was truly happening here.

Roberto's voice sounded sudden and grim. “It can't be her. She's moving.”

That was astonishing enough that Conrad registered Sandrine, Paolo, and Tullio all turn to look at the man as he did.

“When she came back—she was cold, at first,” Roberto said.
“Cold
. Cold like marble outside in winter. She couldn't have moved around, then! It took her months to become warm—”

Until she ended up warmer than the human beings who haven't once died
, Conrad filled in.

“If this was her,” Roberto said fiercely, “she wouldn't be
walking!”

Contrast made the slice of falling light look blue-white, against the sifting ash and the lowering eruption cloud. Conrad slitted his eyes against it—

“Look, there.”

He realised that what boiled up from where she trod was not white ash, but steam. Steam, rising to whirl about her in cyclonic disturbance.

Her wordless singing soared in the anthem that closed
L'Altezza azteca
's second act, and
Reconquista
's Act Three.

“I understand!” he exclaimed.

Roberto and Tullio gave him identical glares. Paolo's strong, thin arms tightened around him.

She chirped, exasperated, into his ear.
“What
do you understand!”