The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (244 page)

“But Archduke Charles is Catholic while Aunt Sophie and Aunt Figgy are Protestants—as am I,” said Caroline, absent-mindedly kicking at meridians to twist herself left, right, left, right, peering first to one side, then the other, of the Isthmus of Panama.

“It is hardly unheard-of for Persons of Quality to change their
religion,” the Jesuit said. “Especially if they are intellectually active, and are presented with compelling arguments. As I am taking up residence here in Berlin, I shall look forward to exchanging views with your royal highness on such matters in coming years, as you grow in wisdom and maturity.”

“We needn’t wait,” Caroline said helpfully. “I can explain it to you now. Dr. Leibniz has taught me all about religion.”

“Oh, has he now?” Father von Mixnitz asked uneasily.

“Yes, he has. Now tell me, Father, are you one of those Catholics who still refuses to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun?”

Father von Mixnitz swallowed his tongue and then hacked it back up. “Highness, I believe in what Dr. Leibniz was saying just a minute ago, namely, that it is all
relative.
”

“That’s not
exactly
what I said,” Leibniz protested.

“Do you believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, Father?” Caroline asked.

“How could I be a Catholic if I did not, Highness?”

“This is not how we do birthday parties in Poland,” commented Wladyslaw, ladling himself another cup of wine.

“Hush! I am enjoying it greatly,” Sophie returned.

“What if you ate it and then you got sick and threw up? When it came out, would it be Jesus’s flesh and blood? Or would it de-transubstantiate on the way out, and become bread and wine again?”

“Such solemn questions do not comport with the frothy imaginings of an eighteen-year-old girl,” said Father von Mixnitz, who had gone all red in the face and was biting the words off one at a time, as if his tongue were a trip-hammer in a mill.

“Here’s to frothy imaginings!” said Queen Sophie Charlotte, raising her glass with a beautiful smile; but her eyes were like those of a falcon tracking a mink as she watched Father von Mixnitz take his leave and stalk out of the room.

“What else do you see in the empty places, besides the ships of quicksilver and of fire?” asked Dr. Krupa.

“I see the very first ship sailing into the Tsar’s new city of St. Petersburg. It is a
Dutch
ship, I phant’sy. And in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ships of the Dutch and of the English sailing to war against the French and the Spanish…” but suddenly her sparkler fizzled out. A groan of sympathy ran through her audience. “Now I can see
nothing
!” she complained.

“The future is a mystery,” Sophie said.

Sophie Charlotte’s smile had been forced and fragile the last few minutes. “At least she got to use the thing as it was intended for a few minutes,” she said to Leibniz.

“What do you mean, Majesty?”

“I mean,
innocently,
as a wonder to marvel at—and
not
as a Visual Aid for choosing her husband.”

“She can learn all she needs to know of husband-choosing from you, Majesty,” Leibniz answered. Those words led to a brief sweet moment between the savant and Sophie Charlotte—which was cut short by Frederick William, who came running in to shield himself behind his mother’s skirts. George August had ascended to one of the library catwalks with a big fire-stick he had plucked from a sand-bucket. Copying his pose directly from the fresco above, he drew back and aimed it at his cousin just like Jupiter readying a thunderbolt.

Leibniz excused himself so that Sophie Charlotte could scold her son. As he passed beneath the globe he saw Princess Caroline’s shoes flashing out first to one side, then the other, as she reciprocated to and fro, first towards George August, then towards Frederick William. She was singing a little nursery rhyme she had picked up from her English tutor: “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe…catch a suitor by the toe…to England or Prussia shall I go…to be made high or be laid low…eeny, meeny, miney, moe.”

SUKKOTH
1701

“C
ARAMBA!”
EXCLAIMED
D
IEGO DE
F
ONSECA,
“a
cucaracha
has fallen onto the
tortillas
of my wife!”

Moseh had seen it before de Fonseca had, and had jumped to his feet even before the initial
Caramba!
had echoed off the far wall of the prison’s courtyard. As he reached over the table, the beads of his colossal rosary—walnut-shells strung on a cowhide thong—whacked the rim of a honey-filled serving-crock. His arm shot free of its sleeve, revealing a ladder of welts and scars, some fresher than others. His shoulder-joint rumbled and popped like a barrel rolling over cobblestones. Most of the men at the table felt twinges of sympathetic pain in their own shoulders, and inhaled sharply. Moseh’s ingratiating smile hardened into a scary grimace, but he got a grip on Señora de Fonseca’s tortilla-plate and pulled it clear. “Allow me to fetch some fresh ones…”

Diego de Fonseca glanced sidelong at his wife, who had tilted her head back, reducing her chin count to a mere three, and was glaring at the net-work of vines above the table, which was vibrant with six-legged life. The Director, who was not a thin specimen either, leaned slightly towards Moseh and said, “That is most Christian of you…but we prefer our
tortillas
made with rich lard, and in fact have never seen them made with olive oil before—”

“I could send out an Indian, Señor Director—”

“Don’t bother, we are satiated. Besides—”

“I was just about to say it!” Jack put in. “Besides, you and the
Señora get to go
home
tonight!”

Diego de Fonseca adjusted the set of his jaw slightly, and favored Jack with the same look his wife had aimed at the cockroach moments earlier. Fortunately, Señora de Fonseca’s attention had been drifting: “Over
there,
you pay such attention to
cleanliness,
” she observed, casting a look down an adjacent gallery, where several prisoners were sweeping the paving-stones with bundles of willow-branches. “Yet you lay out your feast with nothing to protect you from the sky, save this miserable thatching of infested vines.”

“I gather from your tone that you are
bemused
by our
ineptitude
where a señora less imbued with Christian charity would be
angry
at our
rudeness,
” Moseh said.

“Quite! Why, those fellows with the willow-branches are not so much
sweeping
the pavement as
spanking
it!”

“Those are from that batch of Jewish monks we arrested at the Dominican monastery three years ago,” said Diego.

From any other Inquisition prison warden, this might have sounded judgmental—even condemnatory. But Diego de Fonseca presided over what was widely held to be the mellowest and most easy-going Inquisition prison in the whole Spanish Empire, and he said it in mild conversational tones. Then he popped a honey-dipped pastry into his mouth.

“That explains it!” said Moseh. “Those Dominicans are so rich, each monk hires half a dozen Indians as housekeepers, and consequently they know nothing of the
domestick
arts.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Say, Brother Christopher! Brother Peter! Brother Diaz! There are
ladies
present! Try to move some dirt as long as you are sweeping the courtyard, will you?”

The three monks straightened up and glared at Moseh, then bent their backs again and began scraping dust across the stones. Clouds of volcanic ash built up and rose around their knees.

“As for this wretched covering, I can only beg you pardon, señora,” continued Moseh. “We like to lie out in this place and recuperate after a question-and-answer session with the Inquisitor, and so we have been training the vines to grow thus, to shade us from the mid-afternoon sun.”

“Then you need to give them manure, for I can clearly see stars coming out through the gaps.”

To which the obvious response was
Manure!? We get no shortage of that from the priests, and give all of it back to the Inquisitor,
but before Jack could say it, Moseh silenced him with a look, and said: “Insofar as the vines cover us, we thank Lord Jesus, and insofar as they don’t, we are reminded that in the end we are all dependent on the protection of
God in Heaven.”

The feast had been brought in by the prisoners’ families and laid out on a long deal table at the edge of the prison courtyard, under a makeshift awning of bougainvilleas. It was a lot of harvest-time food: particularly squashes, baked with Caribbean sugar, cinnamon from Manila, and an infinity of beans. Jack had taken a liking to mushy food since losing most of his teeth crossing the Pacific. Up in Guanajuato he’d hired an Indian to make him a new set out of gold and carven boar’s tusks, but this accessory had been mislaid, somewhere along the line, after he and Moseh had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition. He guessed that some
familiar
or
alguacil
was chewing his pork with Jack’s teeth at this very moment, probably just over the wall in the dormitories of the
Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición
.

“Consider your apologies accepted, and your flattery disregarded,” said Señora de Fonseca. “But a lady who attends a social function in a prison, organized by men—hereticks and infidels at that!—does not expect that the niceties will be observed. That is why every man seeks a wife, no?”

There followed a long silence, which quickly became embarrassing to those hereticks and infidels, and then stretched out to a point where it seemed likely to become fatal. Finally Jack kicked Salamón Ruiz under the table. Salamón had been rocking back and forth on his bench and muttering something. When Jack’s boot impacted on his shin he opened his eyes and shouted, “Oy!”

Then, amid sharp inhalations from all around the table, stretched it out thus:
“Oigo misa!”

“You are going to Mass!?” said Diego de Fonseca, perplexed.

“Misa de matrimonio,”
said Salamón, and then finally remembered to unclasp his hands and grope for the hand of his supposed
novia,
this evening’s nominal guest of honor, Isabel Machado, who was seated on his right. He had never seen the girl before, and for a moment Jack was afraid he was going to grab the wrong woman’s hand. “In my
head,
you know, I was going to Mass on my wedding day.”

“Well, keep your hands out of your lap when you’re doing it please!” Jack returned. The comment was not well received by the warden’s wife, but Moseh plastered it over by rising to his feet and hoisting his chocolate-cup into the air: “To Isabel and Sanchez,
*
whose betrothal we celebrate tonight, may the Inquisitor be merciful to Sanchez, may the
auto da fé
be of the non-violent sort, and may their marriage be long and prosperous.”

That toast led to others, which continued in chocolatey volleys until the Cathedral bells rang vespers. Then the dinner broke up as the prisoners and their guests got to their feet and began to walk in a long uneven procession around the perimeter of the courtyard.

“To walk around thus after eating is a custom up north,” Jack heard Moseh explaining to Señora de Fonseca.

“In Nuevo Leon? But that place was settled by Jews!”

“No, thank God, I meant the new mining country: Guanajuato, Zacatecas…”

She shuddered. “Brr, it is a land of Vagabonds and Desperadoes…”

“But pure-blooded Christians all. And after a big meal they always march around the town square seven times.”

“Why seven?”

“Five times for the Five Wounds of Christ,” Jack blurted out, “and three for the three persons of the Trinity.”

“But five and three make
eight
!” observed Señor de Fonseca, now becoming interested.

Moseh now literally stepped in between Jack and the Fonsecas and continued, “All right, I did not wish to bore you with all of the details, but really the tradition is this:
formerly
they would go eight times around, turning always to the right. Then they would reverse direction and march around four times, one for each of the four gospels, turning to the left. Then reverse again and three additional times to the right, one for each of the crosses on Calvary. But then some Jesuit came along and pointed out that five and three, take away four, add three, make seven all together, and so why not simply go around seven times and leave it at that? Of course he was not taken seriously until they got a new priest up there, who had gout in one foot, and did not like so much walking. A letter was sent to the Vatican. Twenty years later the answer came back that the Jesuit’s arithmetick had been examined, and determined to be sound. By that time the gouty priest had died of a fever. But his replacement was in no position to argue sums with the Pope, and so the tradition was established anyway.”

Visibly exhausted, Moseh now lapsed into silence, as did the Fonsecas, who had been driven into a profound stupor. Not until several orbits of the courtyard had been tallied up did anyone speak again.

“Damn all this dust!” said Diego de Fonseca, waving a flabby hand before his face. The monks who had been sweeping earlier were now shaking their branches in the air, releasing clouds of Popocatepetl ash.

“I heard unfamiliar screaming today,” Jack remarked. “Sounded as if someone was being given the
strappado,
but I didn’t recognize his voice.”

“It is a
Belgian
priest, supposedly with
heretickal
leanings—they brought him up from Acapulco,” said the warden. “I believe he is a material witness in
your
case.”

F
ATHER
E
DMUND DE
A
TH
was sitting in his cell staring with a kind of dull curiosity at his own arms, which were laid out on the table in front of him like lamb shanks in a butcher’s shop. They were still attached to his shoulders, but they were bloated and bluish, except around the wrists where ropes had sawn nearly to the bone. The only part of him that moved was his eyeballs, which swiveled toward the door as Jack and Moseh entered.

“You know, there was a monk in Spain who was thrown into the common jail for some petty crime, fifty or a hundred years ago,” said de Ath. He was speaking in a quiet voice. Jack and Moseh knew why: the
strappado
ripped all of the muscles around the ribs and spine, giving the victim every incentive to breathe shallowly for the next couple of weeks. Jack and Moseh came round to either side and bent close so that de Ath could get by with a mere whisper. “After a few days in the squalor of that jail, he called the jailer over and uttered certain heretickal oaths. Of course the jailer denounced him to the Inquisition without delay. Before the next sundown, this monk had been moved to the Prison of the Inquisition, where he had his own cell, clean and well-ventilated, with a chair and—ahh—a table.”

“A table’s a good thing to have,” Jack allowed, “when your arms have been pulled out of their sockets, and have nothing to support their weight save a few strands of gristle.”

“You are not really a heretick, are you, Father?” asked Moseh.

“Of course not.”

“So it follows that you believe in turning the other cheek, that the meek shall inherit the earth,
et cetera
?”

“
¿Como no?
As the Spaniards say.”

“Good—we shall hold you to it,” said Jack, raising one foot and planting it in the middle of de Ath’s chest. He grabbed one of the priest’s hands and Moseh the other. A violent shove sent the victim toppling backwards in his chair. Just as he was about to bash his head on the stone floor, Jack and Moseh jerked as hard as they could on de Ath’s arms, yanking him back up like Enoch Root’s yo-yo. A loud pop sounded from deep in each shoulder. The scream of Edmundde Ath, like the blowing of the legendary horn of Roland, could presumably
be heard several mountain ranges away. Of course it emptied his lungs, which forced him to draw a deep breath, which was so painful that he had to scream some more. But after a while this Oscillatory Phenomenon damped out and de Ath was left in the same position as before, viz. sitting bolt upright with his arms on the table. But now he was cautiously clenching and unclenching his fists, and in the light of the candles that Jack and Moseh had brought in, it seemed his flesh was becoming a pinker shade of gray.

“Pardon me while I try to come up with theologickal analogies for what you just did to me,” he said.

“You could do that until the
vacas
came back to the
hacienda,
I’m sure,” said Moseh.

“Now that we are all devout Catholics we’ll have plenty of opportunities to listen to homilies,” Jack said. “For now, only tell us what you know of the proceedings against us.”

Edmund de Ath said nothing for a long time. In Mexico, time was as plentiful as silver.

“The warden says you are a witness,” Moseh said, “but they would not torture you unless you were also a suspect.”

“That much is obvious,” agreed de Ath, “but as you know perfectly well, the Inquisition never tells a prisoner what the charges are against him, or who denounced him. They throw him in prison and tell him to confess, and leave him guessing what he’s supposed to confess
to
.”

“’Tisn’t hard for
me
to guess,” Jack said. “I’m an Englishman missing the end of his dick, which means the only question is: Jew, or Protestant?”

“I hope you’ve been wise enough to tell them you’re a Jew who was never baptized.”

“That I have. Which—assuming they
believe
me—marks me as an
infidel
. And as this Church of yours thinks it is its mission to
preach
to infidels rather than
burn
’em, I’m likely to escape with nothing worse than having to listen to a whole lot o’ preaching.”

“Your sons?”

“When the
alguaciles
came for me and Moseh, they were on a trip to Cabo Corrientes to dig up some of that buried quicksilver. No doubt they are drinking
mezcal
in some mining-town saloon about now.”