Baelon had already suspected as much.
He asked, “What happened to the dog?”
Catto replied calmly, “Someone caught it and took it to a soup kitchen in Flea Bottom to be eaten.”
It was nothing worth making a fuss over.
He had caught cats and dogs himself before and traded them at the soup kitchen for brown soup.
Catto was not sad.
He had lost far too much over the course of his life.
His wife, two sons, and a daughter.
What was one more dog?
What was there to be upset about?
Why had he rambled on for so long over something like this?
He had lost plenty, but he still had plenty left.
He had even managed to snatch the dog’s pelt back!
Catto!
He cursed himself inwardly.
You fool!
Here you are talking about things no one cares to hear!
You finally got a chance to speak with the Prince, and this is how you waste it!
Then he heard the Prince sigh.
Baelon was not very good at comforting people.
He said, “I’m sorry your dog died. You must be grieving.”
“I don’t know how to help you. Nothing can replace the place that dog held in your heart.”
Baelon thought the words were utterly useless pleasantries.
Catto thought, What a kind, naive Prince.
What a perfect opportunity.
He could pretend to be heartbroken and ask the Prince for a few silver stags!
If he begged the Prince for help, perhaps the generous Prince might even reward him with a few gold dragons.
Then he would never have to cut reeds again!
But when he raised his head, he found himself looking into a pair of eyes filled with pity.
Catto suddenly remembered something.
“I forgot to give that dog a name.”
An ugly face was reflected in those violet eyes.
Catto stared blankly as he reached up and touched his wet cheeks.
Only then did he realize, belatedly, that at some point tears had begun streaming down his face.
Ah.
When had that happened?
…
For a long time, Baelon had been wary of the people of King’s Landing.
After all, these were people who, once roused to riot, could storm the Dragonpit and slay dragons. Get faster updates on g.com.
At one end, they were perfectly capable of pelting some “great emperor destined for the history books” with dung; at the other, they were just as capable of hounding Rhaenyra out of King’s Landing.
But after dealing with them face-to-face, Baelon realized they were not nearly as formidable as he had imagined.
Baelon held out a hand to Ser Uther.
Ser Uther immediately understood and pulled out his coin purse.
Baelon ignored the few silver stags inside and instead took out five copper stars.
He took Catto’s hand, dry and cracked like parched earth, and placed the five copper stars in his palm.
“You have the right to grieve, Catto.”
“I am buying seven days of your time. For those seven days, you need not work. You may let yourself grieve as much as you need.”
Baelon felt pity for him, but almost immediately another thought occurred to him.
Listening to the sorrows of the poor and offering them comfort was supposed to be the Church’s duty.
The Church had failed them.
And that failure was an opportunity for him.
He would have to be careful.
One careless step could bring the fire down on his own head.
Still, that was hardly a problem.
Targaryens had always been far more resistant to heat and flame than ordinary people.
Baelon said, “If you have nowhere else to speak of your grief, come to the Red Keep. I will arrange for someone to receive you.”
Catto closed both hands around the five copper stars.
He said nothing.
He simply stood there and wept.
Baelon had no idea how to comfort him, and at some point the entire crowd had fallen silent as well.
A moment later, Baelon waved a hand.
A knight stepped forward, helped the old man away, and seated him by the roadside.
Baelon turned and placed one foot on the carriage step when a voice suddenly called out behind him.
“Prince!”
Baelon looked back.
A sturdy middle-aged woman held a swaddled infant high in her arms and pleaded, “Please, grant this child a name!”
Baelon: …
He was hopeless at naming people.
The only names that came to mind were common ones like Aegon, Aemon, Aemond, and Aerion.
House Targaryen had always reused the same handful of names.
Surely he could not give some random child one of the names commonly used by House Targaryen.
Wait.
Why not?!
Baelon approached, and the woman extended her sturdy arms, carefully holding the infant out toward him.
He noticed that the baby’s swaddling cloth was actually made of brownish-yellow linen.
“Was he born at the public maternity clinic?”
The woman held the infant securely in both arms, her round face breaking into a hearty smile.
“He was, Prince!”
Baelon nodded.
Glass had existed in this world for a long time, so distilling alcohol was not particularly difficult.
As for puerperal fever, the demon that had killed countless women in childbirth, eighty percent of cases could be prevented simply by having midwives soak their hands in high-proof alcohol before delivering a child and maintaining proper disinfection afterward.
But alcohol could not simply be handed out freely without restriction.
Given the backward state of medicine in this world, Baelon was also afraid that some fool might pour alcohol directly onto a pregnant woman’s privates and end up doing more harm than good.
So he instituted a controlled rationing system.
At Baelon’s request, Viserys eventually agreed to the proposal.
With Viserys’s support, a public maternity clinic jointly funded by the royal family, the Church, and the Maesters soon rose in King’s Landing.
Baelon supplied the alcohol holy water free of charge.
Every pregnant woman in King’s Landing, rich or poor, could receive alcohol for childbirth without paying a penny.
With the Church’s endorsement, deliveries handled by Maesters and trained midwives, and the near-miraculous fact that the public maternity clinic had almost never seen a case of puerperal fever, people quickly came to trust it.
In addition, after giving birth and registering the child, a mother could receive a woolen towel and an egg free of charge.
Baelon was hardly short of money, but to encourage donations, he melted down a ceremonial golden ship and scraped the gilding from his carriage.
Then, before everyone, he declared that all that gold would be turned into eggs and end up in the bellies of pregnant women.
The High Septon of the Starry Sept in Oldtown publicly praised him as “Baelon the Merciful.”
The Mother had inspired his compassion, and the Crone had bestowed wisdom upon him.
He also proclaimed alcohol to be holy water.
After a few minor setbacks, the program settled into place.
For nearly two years now, babies born in King’s Landing had been swaddled in cloth sewn from those woolen towels.
Unfortunately, even after two years of development, the public maternity clinic could only cover King’s Landing.
Its reach had yet to extend across the entire Crownlands.
That was why Baelon was genuinely surprised when, for the first time in quite a while, he saw a baby wrapped in linen.
He truly was surprised.
Someone actually dared to embezzle from one of his programs right under his nose in King’s Landing?!
Over the past six years, he had spent a fortune gradually maintaining sixty-two knights.
A full suit of armor for every man, along with three horses each.
From time to time, he even checked on how well they were eating and sleeping.
He had certainly not spent all that money feeding these men so they could sit around doing nothing!
Baelon had already made up his mind.
If the woman said she had not received the towel and egg, he would immediately order his men to storm the maternity clinic’s supply room and beat everyone they found inside.
The woman burst into booming laughter.
“Prince, we received them! We received them!”
“After my daughter was finished with the towel, she even sold it and bought several eggs to help herself recover!”
“Good.”
“So it’s a boy.”
Baelon smiled faintly.
“Then call him Baelon.”
He would simply give the child his own name.
Baelon was hardly a rare name to begin with.
In fact, he was rather looking forward to the day when King’s Landing was full of Baelons.