Seated near all of the Mint people were the three merchants who supplied them with most of their business. Technically any miner who came into the city with silver could have it minted, but in practice most miners sold their pigs to these few merchants who had made it their business to act as middle-men, and make sure that the Minters were duly wined, dined, coddled, and bribed at all times. They were not easy to pick out in the midst of their enormous and well-dressed families, but finally Jack caught sight of one of them looking right back at him through a spyglass. The fellow recognized Jack in the same instant, took the glass away from his eye, and made a remark to a younger man seated next to him. For to the churchmen of Mexico City, Jack and Moseh and Edmund de Ath might be foreign hereticks, but to anyone connected to the Mint they were the men who had the quicksilver, and who could modulate the flow of pieces of eight by putting more or less of it on the market.
They did not look the part of quicksilver magnates today. All three of them were wearing dunce-caps, and large sack-like yellow over-garments with giant red Xs on them, called sanbenitos. If these had been decorated with pictures of angels, devils, and flames, it would have signified that their wearers were to be burnt at the stake outside the city gates at the end of the day. The red X, on the other hand, meant only that the wearer was a Blasphemer in Recovery who would have to wear this garment whenever he ventured out of doors for the next several years. Jack had never been the sort to care about clothing, but he knew that the decorations he wore today were of high import not only to himself but to everyone connected with the Mint—which meant everyone in Mexico City, except for the hapless Inquisition, which was run out of Rome and had no way to dip its fingers into the running river of silver except by arresting and shaking down the likes of Jack and Moseh. At any rate, the fact that he and his comrades were wearing red Xs was probably influencing a market somewhere even at this very moment. And given that all news eventually reached Amsterdam, Jack now devoted half an hour or so to a little phant'sy about a blue-eyed woman sitting in a coffee-house along the Damplatz, hearing this bit of news, and connecting it to a certain Vagabond she had run around with when she was young.
He knew that his sons must be somewhere inside the city, or else his sanbenito would be decorated with pictures of flames. It took a full hour for his eyes to find them, which was not so terribly long since the auto da fé was an all-day event. The stands filled one end of the zócalo (they had been a-building for two months) and everyone in them was gleaming and glorious to some degree, whether it was the Archbishop who reigned over the ceremony from the highest and most central altar, or the coiners' wives in their best dresses. But there was an undeniable tendency for the costumes to become more drab as they got farther from the Archbishop, so the transition to the common folk standing on the pavement in their undyed homespun stuff was almost seamless. Beyond that point they only got plainer and browner as they spread around the edges of the zócalo, to the point where they almost faded away into the rough-hewn stone walls. In such a place Jack finally saw three men, two brown and one black, holding the reins of some burros. Their faces were shaded under the vast brims of their sombreros. But Jack could have recognized them from the burros alone. Those animals were still crusted with the yellow dust of the high country and the sweat of traveling through it, and each of them had smallish saddlebags sewn of the heaviest ox-hide and scored in countless places from brushes with cactus-thorns. Those were the saddlebags used to bring silver down to the mints. This morning they were hanging limp on the burros' flanks. Their contents had been transferred to the vaults of the Inquisition, where they rested safe among piles of documents listing every heresy that had ever been committed or imagined in the New World.
The ceremony was all in Latin. Sunstroke probably would have slain them all if it hadn't been December. About four hours into it, Jack noticed that Moseh was humming to himself, which was the one thing Jack would never have expected. He was tempted to bend his head close to Moseh's, but given that he was wearing a dunce-cap three feet high, the movement would have been about as subtle as dancing a tarantella on the Lord's Table. So he stood straight, along with everyone else in Mexico. To his other side Edmund de Ath was muttering some Latin phrases of his own, but rather than closing his eyes and bowing his head, he seemed to be staring straight forward into a phalanx of wealthy nuns seated below and to the left hand of the Archbishop. Jack had nothing but time, and so he looked at each nun in turn until finally he recognized Elizabeth de Obregon staring right back at him.
The auto da fé continued there until shortly after sundown and then devolved: the nuns and monks marched away in color-coded processions and the poor people staged a bread-riot. Which seemed like an interesting story, but Jack wanted no part of it. He and Moseh and Edmund de Ath made rendezvous with Jimmy and Danny and Tomba, and out of the city they went.
When finally it was safe to talk out loud, Jack said to Moseh, "Never was a Jew so happy during an auto da fé—have you been chewing those Peruvian leaves that the Spaniards are so fond of?"
"No, I was watching the sun swing low over the mountains and pondering matters astrologickal. First: This is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest in the Southern, which is good for us at both ends. Here it made the ceremonies an hour or two shorter than they might have been, and much cooler. Down Tierra del Fuego way, the weather's as balmy as it ever gets, and the days exceptionally long. If van Hoek knows what he's doing—which I think he does—he'll be venturing into the Straits of Magellan about now. Which brings me to my Second observation, namely: a new year is about to begin. It is the second year of the Eighteenth Century, and van Hoek will celebrate it (God Willing) by rounding Cape Horn, and I will celebrate it by trading this cursed sanbenito for a poncho and this dunce-cap for a sombrero and riding north, beyond the reach of the Inquisition. It is the Century of the Enlightenment—I can feel it!"
"You have been chewing leaves from Peru," Jack concluded.
THAT NIGHT THEY LODGED at an inn where they had to suspend their boots and stirrups from the ceiling in order to prevent them from being carried away and eaten by rats. They paid an outrageous price and departed before dawn, and after getting clear of certain fœtid suburbs where Vagabonds dwelt, they began the first leg of their journey north: traveling through the high Valley of Mexico. This was quite a bit more interesting to Edmund de Ath than to the others, who had seen it before. The Belgian was silent as they trudged over marshy plains gouged with the remains of failed flood-control projects, and splotched here and there with weirdly colored mineral springs. From cocoa and vanilla plantations rose gaudy churches and monasteries thrown up by Spaniards who had made ludicrous amounts of money, and in some cases half torn down by the thieves and Vagabonds who infested this country far in excess of Europe.
Moseh's ineffable Leadership Qualities had caused a whole retinue of sanbenito-and-dunce-cap-wearing crypto-Jews to fall in step behind them. They paraded through inexplicable concentrations of Negroes and Filipinos and over foamy puddles of congealed lava, past sugar-works smoking and steaming. At riverbanks they struck complicated bargains with Indians, naked except for loincloths and lines of tattooed dots on their faces, and were towed across on balsas made of planks lashed across bundles of air-filled calabashes, while other Indians back-carried the burros across fords. They steered clear of settlements or else rode through them as directly as possible, for now that they were out of the city, most of the townspeople were criollos (mixed-blood, born here) who bore a mad hostility towards Europeans. They'd have drawn much unwanted attention, and criollo boys would have been darting out and chucking stones at them, even if they hadn't been wearing sanbenitos.