The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

“You’re authorising him to be told secret state information?”
    â€œOh, I think we can trust our atheist’s oath…” Ferdinand’s playfulness dissolved as he turned a grave expression on Conrad. “I’m sorry to burden you.”
    The King of the Two Sicilies leaned forward, folding his arms as if he shielded himself from the cold.
    â€œConrad, do you remember the Year Without a Summer?”
    Conrad failed to suppress an involuntary shiver.
    â€œI remember… I don’t think I saw a clear sky after the end of the war, not for fourteen months . It rained every day. I remember trudging home after being discharged, through fields of drowned seedling crops—”
    â€”Tullio Rossi hulking at Conrad’s heels, bitching the more as his wounds mended, his rifle never off his shoulder and never unloaded —
    Men scrabbled to make a living, after the devastation of troops marching through cities, and killing each other on fields forever afterwards difficult to put to the plough. Even a handful of quarter-ripened corn could be cause for a bloody scuffle. The sky turned overcast and stayed that way, day after day. As the year went on, cloud and mist thickened, with often little enough to tell the day from the night except a searing aurora of red and green guttering down in the west.
    â€œSpring never properly came.” Conrad spoke soberly. “It snowed the July after we fought the Emperor. The peasants ate grass. Every morning in the city there were corpses in the road, frozen overnight.”
    He remembered the bodies clearly, although he put effort into forgetting them. Elbows and knee-joints so much wider than the shrunk curved thighs and withered biceps…
    Every step of the way from the North back to the Sicilies, he pictured his mother and sister too poor to do more than end up open-eyed under the rebellious sky.
    Enrico Mantenucci observed grimly, “They say a civilisation is only ever three failed harvests from barbarism.”
    â€œI believe it, given the effect of just one failure on my kingdom, and in the rest of Italy, and Europe…” Ferdinand unconsciously mirrored Conrad, rubbing at his forehead.
    Eventually the clouds parted. The sun reappeared, and the earth turned warm enough the following spring for corn to send up tentative green stalks. It is not so many years in the past. Conrad unambiguously recalled the craving for a full stomach that goes with a constant subsistence-level diet.
    â€œThey say it snowed in America all that summer…”
    Conrad pulled himself out of the past with difficulty, swallowing down his hot cup of coffee to anchor himself in the present. The chairs were placed closest to the wall maps of Italy and southern France, Austria and Turkey; all lands touched by that blight.
    That time is over: I’m here .
    And Ferdinand is speaking of the Year Without a Summer because—
    Conrad felt his mind lock up.
    Because the opera miracle is on a larger scale —
    Silence caught in Conrad’s throat like dust.
    He managed, finally, to speak.
    â€œSomething of that scale— that was an opera miracle?”

CHAPTER 7
    C onrad shook his head, not in disbelief but in rejection. “No man who lived through that could want to see it again. Surely?”
    â€œThis would be far better explained by Adriano.” Ferdinand shifted on his chair. “We can’t delay now. If you have questions that Enrico or I can’t answer, we must hope Adriano arrives before you leave, or that you can meet him later.”
    â€œIt’s not as if he can just leave at any time without suspicion, sire. They’ll be watching him as a matter of course.”
    Conrad, listening to Mantenucci, became aware of Ferdinand’s gaze on him.
    Without alteration of his bland, slightly-worried expression, Ferdinand remarked, “We have our own spies and agents—some of them honourable men, whose names would