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arrive so soon?”
    Morada knew the answer to the last question. Though ordinarily they would know months or at least weeks in advance of the arrival of a royal Commissioner, this time they were given only four days’ warning. The Viceroy and the Crown hoped to catch the citizens of Potosí off guard.
    The Alcalde held up both his hands until he could again be heard. “To welcome the King’s emissary, we will have two weeks of celebration.” The city was world famous for the extravagance and beauty of its festivities—banquets, masked balls, bullfights, processions. Everyone in the plaza prayed they would be able to mount a welcome lavish enough to turn the head of Visitador Nestares. Or he would certainly ruin them.
    Morada grasped the hilt of his sword and, feigning a complete absence of emotion, strode inside.
    A HARQUEBUS SHOT’s distance away, in the corner of the square beyond the massive whitewashed granite hulk of the Mint, which more than the cathedral dominated the aspect of the city, Father Junipero Pimentel watched from in front of the rose-colored stone monastery where he lived—the Compañia de Jesus. The slight, tense Jesuit understood the exclamations of the crowd both in lilting, excited Spanish and in worried, staccato Aymara.
    They talked only of silver. They craved it like a drug. Eventhe Indians. This great city existed only because of the ore torn from the hellish mountain with the blood of God’s poorest creatures, brought to the mills across the canal where more forced laborers extracted the silver, which was then carried under guard here to the Mint. Behind these four-foot-thick walls, the silver was formed into ingots or stamped into irregular coins marked with the coat of arms of the King of Spain: reales, pieces of eight, the pirates called them.
    Llamas and mules carried one-fifth of the coins, the tribute due King Philip, over the Andes to the coast, where they were loaded onto galleons and shipped to Panama. Thence across the isthmus to the Ca rib be an, and on to Spain. That is, if English or Dutch pirates did not take the ships on their way.
    A hundred years ago, Indians and Spaniards both got rich from the mines. Some wealthy citizens of this city were descended from those first, fortunate Indians. But Spanish greed had triumphed. Now, armed soldiers walked the roof of the Mint to ensure that no silver went into the pockets of the workers, who more likely than not would die in the course of their labors. The conscripted, more like slaves than workers, walked under guard to Potosí in columns from villages hundreds of miles away, where their relatives played funeral marches for them as they left. Conventional wisdom said that without their forced labor—the mita, as the system of recruitment was called—Potosí would fall; and without Potosí, Perú would fall; and without Perú, Spain would fall; and without Spain, the Catholic Church would fall. Protestants would rule the world. A terrifying thought. Would God allow such a calamity? Or was this theory just a sanctimonious rationalization to support greed that wanted cheap labor?
    The people of Potosí were capable both of passionate devotion to the Holy Mother Church and of enormous greed. They competed in their devotion and especially in their extravagance. Don Jerónimo Andrade dressed himself and his bodyguard ofeighteen in capes so laden with silver embroidery that they could barely walk. Don Juan Sarmiento once gave a party for three hundred that lasted the entire forty days from Easter until Ascension Thursday. Don Bartolomé Alameda trumped them all when he paid ten thousand pesos, the price of a hacienda in Spain, for a single fresh fig.
    They tolerated violence, mayhem, drunkenness, and debauchery. Every day, irritable young men fought duels over the most trivial points of honor. Murders and rapes were constant occurrences. Yet Potosinos had built some of the most beautiful churches in Christendom. They gave dowries to poor