The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  All in all it seemed advisable to get clear of settled areas as quickly as possible, so Jack, Moseh, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba payed very little attention to all of the Roadside Attractions that so fascinated Edmund de Ath, and bent all efforts to putting miles between t
hem and the City. Only food was worth slowing down for, as when a miniature deer appeared at the edge of a copse or they happened upon a large tree whose branches were crowded with turkeys. Then sudden loud noises, clouds of smoke, and roadside butchery.

  “Your ransom cost us a fortune,” Danny remarked, “but as luck would have it, we have several.”

  “Have you been making new deals during our absence,” Moseh said nervously, “or only making deliveries on the old?”

  “We sold all the mercury for sixpence a ton,” Jimmy answered sharply, “and spent that on whiskey and prostitutes.”

  Silence, then, for a mile or two. Then Moseh tried again, patiently: “As I am still part owner of the quicksilver, I am entitled to know how much has been delivered, how much committed, and how much held back.”

  “Before we came on the scene, the King of Spain’s men were gouging the mine-owners to the tune of three hundred pieces of eight per hundred-weight of quicksilver,” Danny reminded him, “and when we began selling it for two hundred, the Spaniards dropped the price to one hundred, which is nearer its natural market-price. At the time you and Dad were arrested by that Inquisition, we were takin’ a breather from sellin’ of it, waitin’ for the price to stiffen up a bit.”

  Jimmy continued, “When Danny and Tomba and I came back from the Cape of Currents with a mule-train of quicksilver, and learned you’d been arrested, the price was still no higher than a hundred twenty-five, and so we contented ourselves making good on the deliveries you’d arranged, Moseh, and hidin’ the proceeds in various locations ’tween here and Vera Cruz. But lately we’ve had nothin’ to occupy ourselves, and the price has crept up to one-sixty—”

  “Near two hundred in Zacatecas,” Tomba put in.

  “And so we’ve been strikin’ some deals of our own, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It is perfect,” Moseh said. Three sombreros swiveled in his direction, looking for sarcasm, but Moseh was sincere: “Without delay, I want to liquidate my assets.”

  “Or since we are speaking of quicksilver, solidify ’em,” Jack said.

  “Very well, I want to take my share of the Plan, in the form of silver, or better yet gold, and strike out for the north with them.” He looked back over his shoulder at the crowd of red Xs shuffling along in their wake. “Lately these Spaniards have conquered a new territory up beyond the pissant ditch known as the Rio Grande, which they style New Mexico. It can’t possibly be worse than Old. Word has it that six hundred cavalry are garrisoned in that territory, and each one is paid five hundred pieces of eight a year, but most of that ends up in the coffers of the governor, who sells those soldiers food and other necessaries at outrageous prices. That is upwards of three hundred thousand pieces of eight a year! I am going to go up and sell them victuals at a fair price, and while I’m at it, I’m going to convert every Indian I see to Judaism.”

  “Er, if half of what they say of those Comanches is true,” said Danny, “’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em and prate about religion.”

  “Or any subject,” said Tomba.

  “Truth be told, ’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em at all,” said Jimmy.

  “That is enough!” Jack said. “Moseh has cashed out of one Plan to invest in another, and naturally the new one needs a little refinement…he’ll have plenty of time to make improvements on the ride north.”

  AFTER A FEW DAYS they rode up out of the Valley and into mountains that were much less inhabited. Other than pockets of wretched Indians who’d been chased up out of the lowlands by the Spaniards, the only folk who lived up here were miners. The mines were old, deep, and famous, and surrounded by adobe houses and churches. Most of the workers were forced labor, and most were Indians. In many ways the landscape was like that of the Harz Mountains, with schlock-heaps all over the place, and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss-up as to whether the Harz with its icy wind and leaden skies was a bleaker landscape than this sunburnt place where nothing grew except cactus. Moseh’s ruminations were bleaker yet: “They’ve been turning the land inside out for almost two hundred years, and here are the bones and guts strewn about…I’m reminded of the Expulsion in 1492. Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. They rode down roads strewn with the bodies of the ones who’d gone before them—friends and relatives who’d been waylaid by bandits and eviscerated, on a rumor that they swallowed gold and diamonds to smuggle them out of the country. These Spaniards are giving a like treatment to this country, and getting the Indians who used to own it to do the dirty work for them.”

  “The coca has worn off, I see—this might be a good time to think harder about your new Plan,” said Jack.

  As they worked north into Guanajuato, the mines became newer, shallower, more slapdash—typically these were owned by individual prospectors. More and more, the workers were free men. But this country had been settled long enough that some towns had been built, churches erected, and families moved in. It was in one of those towns—which a generation earlier had marked the absolute northern boundary of civilization—that they paused for a day to make a grand reckoning.

  Starting from that night in the Gulf of Cadiz when they’d sacked the ex-Viceroy’s treasure-brig, Moseh had kept, in his mind, a ledger-book of all that the Cabal had gained and lost. At certain times, as when they’d fallen into the hands of Queen Kottakkal, whole pages had been torn out and thrown away. Some of the Cabal had died, others had joined in late, some had taken their shares out in intangibles, such as Gabriel Goto, who only wanted to see Japan. Some of the Cabal’s value was in Minerva, which, God willing, would continue generating revenues, other was in the quicksilver-hoard that they’d brought across the Pacific. This had been split into two batches, one for New Spain and one for Peru; the former had already been liquidated, the latter might have been sold for greater or lesser amounts of money that, now, might or might not be on the bottom of the Straits of Magellan. Whatever the current Bottom Line might be, part was owed to Queen Kottakkal and part to Electress Sophie of Hanover. But Moseh worked through all of these complications, committing it to paper so that Jack could show it to van Hoek later, and patiently explaining the difficult bits until Jack agreed.

  This reckoning stretched over three days, and in the end Moseh was reduced to bringing in a sack of dried beans and making piles of them on the table, shoving them from place to place to demonstrate to Jack where the money had gone. A great many beans ended up on the floor, representing what they’d simply lost. But when Moseh was finished, an impressive pile of beans still remained on the table, and when Moseh told him that each bean amounted to a hundred pieces of eight, Jack had to admit that the Plan Moseh had proposed to him long ago in Algiers had been a pretty good one after all.

  Jimmy and Danny and Tomba meanwhile ventured out into certain desolate places and recovered enough silver pigs to pay Moseh what was due him. Lacking banks, they had deposited their assets in holes in the ground, carefully hidden.

  On the fifth of January 1702, then, Moseh and a score of others donned their sanbenitos and dunce-caps and formed a mule-train on the edge of this little adobe town, and set out for New Mexico. Jack rode with them until they were well out of sight of the bell-tower beside the town’s church. There, every man except Jack stripped off his sanbenito and his cap, and they made a bonfire of them by the roadside. Jack shook every man’s hand, but he embraced Moseh, and with tears washing the dust from his face, issued several ludicrous promises, e.g., that after he’d bought himself an earldom in England he’d come out to New Mexico for a social call. The parting lasted for a long time, which only made it worse when Moseh finally climbed astride his mule and hauled on one rein and got it pointed north. Jack stood there for an hour or so, making sure the sanbenitos were thoroughly burnt to ashes, and watching the dust-trail of the mule-train swirl up into a blue sky: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and…

&n
bsp; “Quicksilver to silver,” he said, turning towards the town. “Then Jack to London.”

  “AS FAR AS I CAN DISCERN, all that remains here is to collect the final remnants of what was cached around Cabo Corrientes, make certain deliveries, and get the pigs down to Vera Cruz, where we’ll await Minerva,” said Edmund de Ath that evening, as they sat in front of the cantina availing themselves of the liquor of the maguey.

  “It is not so easy as you make it sound,” Jimmy growled.

  “On the contrary, I think it is much too difficult for a man of my limited capacities,” said de Ath. “Here, I’ll be an impediment. In Vera Cruz, on the other hand, there is much I could be doing to smooth the way for us, when Minerva, God willing, arrives.”

  “Get thee to Vera Cruz, then,” Jack suggested.

  “I am interested to see the place,” said de Ath. “Properly it is called New Vera Cruz. The old city was burnt to the ground, almost twenty years ago, by the notorious and terrible outlaw called El Desamparado…”