The Confusion

“If any one of us breaks, all three of us burn,” said de Ath. “If all three of us can stand our ground, then I believe they will let us go.”

“Sooner or later one of us will break,” Jack said wearily. “This Inquisition is as patient as Death. Nothing can stop it.”

“Nothing,” said de Ath, “except for the Enlightenment.”

“And what is that?” Moseh asked.

“It sounds like one of those daft Catholicisms: The Annunciation, the Epiphany, and now the Enlightenment,” Jack said.

“It is nothing of the sort. If my arms worked, I’d read you some of those letters,” said de Ath, turning his head a fraction of a degree towards some scrawled pages on the end of this table, weighed down by a Bible. “They are from brothers of mine in Europe. They tell a story-albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way-of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.”

“Very good! Well, then, all we must needs do is hold out against the strappado, the bastinado, the water-torture, and the thongs for another two hundred years or so, which ought to be plenty of time for this new way of thinking to penetrate Mexico City,” said Jack.

“Mexico City is run out of Madrid, and the Enlightenment has already stormed Madrid and taken it,” de Ath said. “The new King of Spain is a Bourbon, the grand-son of King Louis XIV of France.”

“Feh!” said Moseh.

“Eeew, him again!” said Jack. “Don’t tell me I’m to peg my hopes of freedom on Leroy!”

“Many Englishmen share your feelings, which is why a war has been started to settle the issue, but for now Philip wears the crown,” said Edmund de Ath. “Not long after his coronation he was invited to the Inquisition’s auto da fe in Madrid, and sent his regrets.”

“The King of Spain failed to turn up for an auto da fe!?” Moseh exclaimed.

“It has shaken the Holy Office to its bones. The Inquisitor of Mexico will probe us once or twice more, but beyond that he’ll not press his luck. Scoff all you like at the Enlightenment. It is already here, in this very cell, and we shall owe our survival to it.”

THE PRISON OF THE INQUISITION lay not far from the Mint where, in theory, every ounce of silver that came up out of the mines of Mexico was turned into pieces of eight. In practice, of course, somewhere between half and a quarter of Mexico’s treasure was smuggled out of the country before the King could take his fifth, but still the amount that came down into Mexico City sufficed to mint sixteen thousand pieces of eight every day. This was a large enough number to mean almost nothing to Jack. A couple of thousand an hour began to make sense to him. The booming and grinding of heavy silver-carts on the cobblestones beyond the prison walls gave a feeling of the sheer mass of metal involved.

One afternoon he was taking the air in the prison courtyard, letting the sun shine on some fresh thong-wounds that twined around his body like purple vines. It was a still and sultry day. Mexico City spread for no more than a mile in each direction and so Jack was able to hear something from every quarter: rugs being flapped out of windows; iron wheel-rims on stone pavers; whip-cracks; disputes at the Market; protesting mules, chickens, and swine; aimless chantings of diverse religious orders-the same noises as any city in Christendom, in other words, though the thin bony air of this high valley seemed to make sounds carry farther, and to favor harsh sounds over soft ones. Too, there were certain sounds unique to this country. The chief food was maize and the chief drink was chocolate, and both had to be ground between stones as the first step in their preparation, so any group of human beings in New Spain that was not positively starving to death was attended by a dim gnawing sound.