In spite of these difficulties, during the month of November, men rammed a length of gauze down Jack’s throat into his stomach and then poured water down it until his abdomen swelled up, and it felt as if gunpowder were burning inside of him, filling his guts with smoke and fire. Edmund de Ath was tied to a table and thongs tightened round various parts of his body until the skin burst under the pressure.
But Moseh went into the torture-chamber and came out half an hour later looking rather all right-fine, in fact-so unruffled, really, that it made Jack want to share some pain with him, when he sauntered over and joined Jack and Edmund de Ath under the patchy shade of the vines. “I confessed,” he announced.
“To being a heretick!?”
“To having money,” Moseh said.
“I didn’t know that you’d been accused of that.”
“But when you are in the hands of the Holy Office you never know. You just have to figure it out, through silent meditation, and give them the confession that they want. I’ve been ever so slow. But finally it came to me the other day-”
“Through silent meditation?”
“No, I’m afraid it was a bit more mundane. Diego de Fonseca came to my cell and asked me for a loan.”
“Hmmm-I knew he was meagerly compensated, but that he is begging from his own prisoners comes as news to me,” said Edmund de Ath.
“The alguaciles brought you straight to this prison from Acapulco-you never had to buy anything in Mexico City,” Jack said. “We came here once or twice selling quicksilver to the owners of mines. Food is cheap enough, which explains why there are so many Vagabonds in the suburbs. But the scarcity of all other goods, and the over-supply of silver, make this an expensive place to be respectable.”
Moseh nodded. “I talked to many old Jews in New Amsterdam and Curacao who told me that in the old days the Inquisition supported itself by confiscating goods from Jews. But here in Mexico they did their job so well that they’ve run out of Jews-they’ve been reduced to stealing the occasional burro from some mestizo who took the Lord’s name in vain. So finally I had what you might call a little Enlightenment of my own, and I understood what the Inquisitor really wanted. I confessed to nothing except having a lot of silver, and offered to make due penance for this crime on the morning of the auto da fe. With that my ordeal-our ordeal-was over and done with.”
DECEMBER 1701
NOT SHOWING UP FOR AN auto da fe was regarded as a Bad Idea everywhere in the Spanish Empire, and especially in Mexico City. Every scrap of land in the town was owned by the Church, and the Holy Surveyors of Rome had (or so Jack phant’sied) come out here and planted Trinitarian transits on the land that had been miraculously reclaimed from Lake Texcoco and hung holy plumb-bobs made of saints’ skulls and stretched cords of spun angels’ hair, driven crucifixes into the ground at strategickal Vertices, and platted the land into quadrilaterals, each one butted snugly against the next; angels might slip through the interstices, but never Indians nor Vagabonds. These parcels had been entrusted to various religious Orders, viz. Carmelites, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Benedictines, et cetera, each of which had lost no time in erecting a high stone wall around its property-line to shield it from the intrigues and supposed heresies of the neighboring Orders. This accomplished, they had got to work filling in the middle with churches, chapels, and dormitories. The buildings sank into the soft ground almost as quickly as they were built, which made the place seem much beyond its true age of about a hundred and eighty years. At any rate there was no place to live in Mexico City that was not controlled by one Order or another, and consequently no way not to show up for an auto da fe without its being noticed by someone who’d be apt to take it the wrong way.
In spite of-or on second thought, maybe because of-their tendency to live cloistered behind high walls, the men and women of these diverse Orders loved nothing better than to dress up in peculiar clothing and parade through the streets of the city, bearing religious effigies or fragments of saints’ anatomies. When Jack had been abroad in this city as a free man, these never-ending processions had been an absolute menace, and an impediment to commerce. Sometimes one procession would collide with another at a street-corner and monks would come to blows over which Order had precedence. An auto da fe was one of the few occasions significant enough to get every single nun from the city’s twenty-two convents and every friar from its twenty-nine monasteries all processing at one time, in more or less the same direction. So all of them were present.
Of course Vagabonds always found a way to exist. Around here they seemed to dwell outside the walls, which was where important people liked them to stay. Not ten years earlier, they had gathered in the zocalo in sufficient numbers to burn the Viceroy’s palace down. Since that event, Count Montezuma had tended to get a little jumpy whenever rabble gathered near his dwelling in large numbers; his rebuilt palace had high walls with plenty of loop-holes for broadcasting grapeshot into any inconvenient crowds. The Vagabonds, criollos, the mountain-dwelling Indian peons, the desperadoes from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an auto da fe was one of them. Of course they had no formal place in the procession of processions that wound its way through the streets to the zocalo, but cheerfully insinuated themselves among and between the nuns and monks, the three-or four-hundred-strong staff of the Cathedral, the asesors, fiscals, alquaciles, and familiares of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and diverse priests, friars, nuns, oidors, and fiscals who happened to be passing through en route to or from Manila or Lima. Despite the now well-known fact that the new French King of Spain had snubbed the auto da fe of Madrid, all of the King’s representatives in Mexico City turned out: the Viceroy and all his household and courtiers, the various ranks and hierarchies of civil servants, the officers of foot and of horse in their ostrich plumes and polished helmets, and as many of the garrison’s soldiers as could be spared from guarding the five gates and innumerable walls of this City.
Jack and Moseh had made it their business to know about the men who ran the Mint, and so as they and the other prisoners were marched out into the zocalo and made to stand in ranks before the grandstands that had been erected there, Jack was able to pick them out easily. The Apartador, the head of the Mint, was a Spanish count who had bought the office from the previous King for a hundred thousand pieces of eight, which was a bargain. He was there with his wife and daughter, all wearing the finest clothing Jack had seen since his last trip to Shahjahanabad (Jack, as a king, had been obliged to show up for the annual ceremony at which the Great Mogul sat crosslegged on one pan of an enormous scale, and silver and gold were heaped up on the opposite pan by his diverse omerahs, king, courtiers, and foreign emissaries until the jewel-covered crossbar finally went into motion and became level, leaving the Mogul suspended on his pan, balanced by his annual revenue, and modestly accepting the applause and gun-salutes of his subjects; on that occasion, Jack had done his part by heaving a big sack of coins onto the pan-taxes collected by Surendranath in the few wretched bazaars of Jack’s domain-at least half of which had been pieces of eight minted decades earlier under the direction of some predecessor of this Count who was now peering down at Jack from the highest bench of the grandstand). Arrayed below him and his family were those Treasurers not currently on duty (Moseh had estimated these earned fifty to sixty thousand pieces of eight annually), the Assayers and Founders (some fifteen thousand annually), and farther down, in humble but still very good clothing, a plethora of Cutters, Clerks, Under-clerks, Alcaldes, and various ranks of Guards; close to the very bottom, numerous Foremen and Brazajereros who stoked the fires, and finally the brawny young criollo men who actually struck metal with metal and turned disks of silver into pieces of eight: the Coiners.