Slavery

Slavery has almost always existed in one form or another. Even my country, the united States of America, was begun by people who were originally indentured servants. They chose to become slaves for a short time in order to pay for their voyage to this continent. I would say that slavery is not always a bad thing, however there are many people who have and do take advantage of the slaves.

Mark recorded some appalling events in his journal that he saw happen, but I will be limiting how much of that information is used in this story.

If you want to learn more about the ills of slavery, there is an account in Harriet Beecher Stowe's book “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” [Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Amazon.com]

Some of the history of slavery under Mallqu (an egotistical tyrant who expected to always be the king) will be covered in a future chapter.

Language

The language spoken by these people seems to be a variant of Quechua. I am not a linguist, but have adopted the common method of rendering the words with Spanish letters.

This has been a fun endeavor as neither of my friends have learned how to write Quechua. They even disagree occasionally about the correct way to say some words. That would be somewhat easier to correct if there weren't so many dialects of the language.

If you happen to speak Quechua, I sincerely hope you can forgive me for seemingly butchering your language.

Gold, Silver, Copper

David and Mark have mentioned the money that they used. Apart from inflation it seems that all of the coins were the same weight. They could be told apart by color and size due to the differences in the metals they were made of. Each coin was also imprinted with a symbol for its value on one side, and with the face of Mallqu on the other. They were not pure, but originally contained about 5% of other metals to make them more durable.

David said that 1 gold coin was worth 16 silvers, and that 1 silver was worth 12 coppers. This is a little different from the official ratios in our world, but he said it was easy to remember after a little use.

He has told me that the treasury would melt down the coins from taxes, add other metals and then mold new coins. It was a dirty trick that allowed the government to spend more than it received, but soon the gold coins are only half made of gold.

As the people discovered this treachery, they tried to pay their taxes with coins that had the least amount of gold. Soon only a quarter of the metal in some coins was gold and new laws were created that required merchants on penalty of death to accept the coins regardless of the amount of gold in them.

It seems that the Roman government figured out how to do this also before their empire fell. Our word "inflation" comes from this -- making the amount of money grow by changing the value of each coin (or "bill"), which is murder to any savings account.

This process nearly crushed the currency later in the story, but for the sake of simplicity I'm not going to delve very far into the economics.

If you would like more information on this topic, I recommend a very engaging introduction written by Richard Maybury called “Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?” [Bluestocking Press]