A knight stepped forward and suggested in a low voice, “Prince, please give the order. Let us charge through on horseback and scatter the crowd.”
Baelon: Charge horses at full speed into a crowd this dense?!
Could you pull your brain out of your heels and use it for once?
Most of the people pressing forward were fully clothed and wore shoes.
The men sported all manner of beards, but they had clearly been trimmed.
The women either wore their hair in braids or had it bound beneath headscarves.
More importantly, many people in the crowd were carrying young children.
These were not desperate commoners driven to riot.
Baelon glanced at the twenty fully armored knights gathered around him, then at the group of Gold Cloaks drawn over by the commotion.
That gave him some confidence that the packed crowd posed little threat to him.
So he decided to put on a political performance.
His acting was hardly remarkable, but his booming voice and the unsophisticated people of King’s Landing made up for it.
“Knights, do not draw your swords!”
“They have come here out of love for me. I would rather endure the crush of the crowd and a delay to my journey than see my subjects suffer for loving me!”
The words were so grand and righteous that Baelon himself nearly curled his toes hard enough to dig out another Red Keep.
The crowd, however, seemed to disagree with his assessment.
Many people had tears in their eyes.
“Prince Baelon!”
Countless hands reached toward him.
“Stop the carriage!”
The neighing of two fine horses cut through the uproar.
The crowd gradually began to settle.
Baelon raised his voice.
“Everyone, I am right here!”
“There is no need to rush. Do not push!”
“Knights, men, mothers, children, turn and look at those beside you. Look at your fellow citizens!”
The crowd instinctively looked around, and only then did they realize just how tightly packed together they were.
Faces around them were flushed red, sweat pouring from brows.
Once people became aware of their surroundings, they were pulled out of the grip of their own emotions.
“Listen to me, people of King’s Landing, and knights of Westeros.”
“The Seven teach us to show mercy to the weak!”
“In the name of Baelon Targaryen, I ask you to protect the weak and helpless. Help the elderly and the children around you to their feet!”
With his heart in his throat and no other choice, Baelon climbed down from the carriage and, under the protection of his knights, approached the front of the crowd.
He picked an old man.
The man’s wrinkled skin was mottled with age spots, his beard was gray and white, and the cracks in his palms were ingrained with dirt and grime that could no longer be washed clean.
More importantly, he wore nothing but a loose, thin linen garment.
There was nowhere on him to hide a weapon.
Baelon personally set an example, helping the blank-faced old man who had fallen to the ground back onto his feet.
The commoners of King’s Landing, now able to fill their bellies, had yet to meet the conditions for super-evolution and had not yet evolved into a King’s Landing mob. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
They looked at one another.
For a moment, they actually became calm and courteous.
Baelon committed fully to the performance and gently asked the old man, “How have you been lately?”
The old man shook his head.
“No, no, Prince!”
“I… I have nothing to be sad about.”
He managed a grin.
“You let us cut reeds to sell and grow flowers to sell. I can cut more than ninety pounds of reeds every day.”
That could earn him as much as nine pennies!
In King’s Landing, a single penny could now buy a grilled sausage, a measure of ale, or a whole apple!
He was already so old that his teeth were nearly falling out, and he lived alone.
Cutting reeds three times a week was enough for him to live quite comfortably!
A young man in the crowd called out, “Prince, I can cut a hundred and sixty pounds in a day!”
The old man thought, These young fellows, always showing off how young and strong they are!
Damn them!
Baelon immediately sensed that something was amiss.
“Something sad?”
“What happened? Perhaps you could tell me.”
Sad?
He was not sad!
The old man, Catto, felt some inexplicable force urging him on, and before he knew it, he had begun rambling.
Three years earlier, Prince Baelon had built some sort of toilet paper factory outside the city and announced that the residents of King’s Landing could cut reeds along the banks of the Blackwater Rush and exchange them for money.
No one believed it at the time!
How could such a thing be possible?!
Even the privilege of grazing animals on a Lord’s fallow land or gathering firewood in his woods had to be purchased by offering something in return.
Why would anyone let them cut reeds as they pleased and even pay them for it?!
Were they trying to trick people into performing extra forced labor?!
Not a chance!
They were citizens of King’s Landing, not those farmers outside the city who were bound to the land and forced to provide three days of unpaid labor every week.
But Catto went anyway, on the very first day.
He had no sickle, so he picked out a sharp stone to use as a blade.
The straw he slept on had already rotted away, so he planned to secretly hide a bundle of reeds and bring it home to spread across the floor.
On his way to the reed beds along the Blackwater Rush, Catto encountered more than a dozen others heading the same way.
They were either ancient men barely able to walk or half-grown children with bare feet.
A man dressed in black led them into the reed beds and explained the harvesting requirements.
“No reed flowers. Stalks only!”
“Ten pounds for one penny!”
“But you have to carry them yourselves to the collection point outside the factory. It isn’t far. Just follow the riverbank for half an… yes, half an hour, and you’ll be there.”
Catto, quiet as ever, spent the entire day slowly cutting reeds with his stone blade.
Without needing to discuss it, he joined the others and dragged his small bundle of reeds to the collection point.
It stood before a large house built of stone and brick.
Another man dressed in black was waiting there.
He pulled apart Catto’s bundled reeds and inspected them carefully, making sure there were no stones or other rubbish hidden inside.
Catto was thinking that sleeping on reed stalks with reed flowers beneath his head must be wonderfully comfortable!
Heh.
A whole day’s labor in exchange for a bed of reeds!
Then two pennies were held out before him.
Catto froze.
The man in black complained impatiently, “What are you staring at?”
“It’s only two pennies!”
“Your reeds weigh twenty-two pounds, but you didn’t remove all the reed flowers, and there’s still…”
“No, no, no!” Catto immediately came to his senses and cupped both hands together to receive the pennies.
Behind him, an old man who had looked listless and half-dead suddenly came alive.
He shoved Catto aside, carefully lifted his bundle of reeds in both hands, and hurried forward.
That day, Catto returned to King’s Landing with two pennies in his pocket.
He did not go back to Flea Bottom for brown soup.
Instead, he spent one penny on an extravagant meal: a grilled sausage, a measure of ale, and half an apple.
Catto swore upon the tongue that had tasted brown soup for years that the sausage truly contained pork!
The next day, the reed beds were much more crowded.
Even the strong young men who normally loitered idly in the streets had come.
Catto could not find the reeds he had hidden.
Someone had stolen them.
But that day he earned four pennies and found a little black dog.
The dog was small, but if he took it to the soup kitchen, he could probably exchange it for several bowls of brown soup.
Catto hesitated.
In the end, he did not take the dog to the soup kitchen in Flea Bottom.
He brought it home instead.
He was no good at naming things, so the black dog simply became known as “Nameless.”
From then on, the black dog accompanied him to the reed beds every day.
When dusk came, man and dog would head to the collection point together, one carrying a bundle of reeds on his back and the other carrying a bundle in its jaws.
After selling them, they would walk home beneath the last glow of sunset, buying two grilled sausages and two pieces of bread along the way.
And so three years gradually passed.
Catto replaced his stone blade with a sickle, and his skill at cutting reeds steadily improved.
His back bent lower with each passing year, and the bundles he could carry grew smaller and smaller.
Meanwhile, the little black dog grew into a large black dog, and the bundle of reeds strapped to its back grew larger and larger.
The reed beds along the Blackwater Rush had been growing for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, stretching farther than the eye could see.
Even without the black dog, Catto could go on cutting reeds for a long time yet.