Chapter 52: Bread and Fire
ULF
By the second hour of morning there were nine thousand people packed between the granary wall and the Mud Gate, and not one of them was shouting. That was the part that frightened me. A shouting crowd wants something. A quiet one has finished wanting and started deciding.
Bread had gone from three coppers to nineteen in eleven days, and some clerk had chalked the new price on the granary door as though writing a thing down settles it.
Marsh climbed the cooper's roof to reach me, which at his age and his width was its own kind of statement.
"Coin," he said, before he'd got his wind. "Today. In my hand, not in a promise."
"You've never asked me for money in your life."
"I've never watched a granary with two hundred spears round it either." He wiped his face. "There's forty men down there who'd walk out of this square if I told them to, and they'd take their families, and that's four hundred bodies out of the press. They'll do it for bread. They won't do it for your name any more. Your name got Hobb put on a rope."
"I struck Hobb off."
"You struck him off after." Marsh looked down at the heads below us, all that hair, all those shoulders, packed until the square had no ground in it. "Cash today, or when this is done there's no book, no runners, nothing. I'll not spend what's left of my people holding a door for a man at the Keep."
Criston Cole came down Fishmonger Street a quarter-hour later with the Gold Cloaks in a column of fours and the order rolled in his gauntlet.
I met him at the fountain. He didn't dismount.
"Clear the square," he said. "By dusk. Those are the words."
"Nine thousand people, Ser Criston. Two hundred spears. You know the arithmetic of that better than I do."
"I know that a crown obeyed once is a crown that doesn't have to be obeyed again in a month with ten times the blood." He looked at the granary, at the roofs, at the mouth of the Mud Gate where the wall went dark. "I have Ser Bryce holding the gate. It stays shut. If it opens, the Hook empties into here and I have twenty thousand instead of nine."
"Open it and they drain out."
"Open it and every hungry man in three quarters comes in the other way." He shifted his reins. "You took a traitor's fingers off my hands at the Antlers and told me a broken man lies. Perhaps. I'm not taking counsel from you in a street."
That was fair. It was the thing about him nobody in the Keep understood, that he was almost always fair and it almost never helped.
"Then don't take counsel," I said. "Give me until the fourth hour and don't move your line until then."
"And what happens at the fourth hour?"
"They eat."
I had two thousand and sixty dragons in the world. Eleven years of it, some earned on Corlys Velaryon's ships and most of it not earned at all, sat in a strongbox under the third stair of a house on Gin Alley that nobody had ever thought worth robbing. I sent four boys running before Cole had turned his horse.
By noon I had bought every loaf, every barrel of salt fish, every sack of barley meal and every wheel of hard cheese within a mile of the Mud Gate, at the seller's price, without arguing once, which is the fastest way to buy anything and the most expensive. The bakers on Pig Alley wanted double for the second batch and I paid it. A fishmonger who had known me since I was twelve wanted triple and I paid that too, and he couldn't look at me while he took it.
Then I gave the whole of it to Marsh, and Marsh gave it to his own people, and not one Gold Cloak's hand touched a loaf.
HELAENA
She came out of the Iron Gate at the third hour with four of the Queensguard and eleven baskets, and she hadn't asked anyone whether she might.
The baskets held ninety-six loaves from the Keep's own ovens. Helaena had counted them herself in the kitchen while the master cook explained, twice, that ninety-six wasn't a number that meant anything against a square. She had said she knew, and had gone on counting.
The crowd opened around her like water and closed again behind her. Ser Rickard put a hand on her elbow at the edge of it and she took her elbow back.
She gave the first loaf to a woman with a child on her hip and a burn scar down one forearm. The second to a man who wept and was ashamed of it. The eleventh to a girl who snatched it and ran, and Ser Rickard started after her, and Helaena said, "No. She's right to run," and he stopped.
Somewhere behind the fountain a man shouted that the Hightowers were feeding the city ninety loaves and eating swan. Someone else spat, and it landed on her sleeve, and she looked at the mark on the silk with interest rather than horror, as though it were paint she hadn't mixed before.
"Your Grace." Rickard had his back to her and his hand on his hilt. "Inside. Now."
"They can see me," she said.
"That is the difficulty."
"That is the whole of it." She gave out the eighty-first loaf. Her hands were shaking and had been since the second basket. "If they can see me they have not yet decided I am a rumour. Do you know what they do to rumours?"
He didn't answer, and she hadn't expected him to, and she stayed until every basket was straw.
ULF
Cole moved his line at the fourth hour, exactly as he'd said, and the food came through Cobbler's Square at the fourth hour too, and I hadn't thought hard enough about what a crowd does when it is pushed from behind and pulled from the front at once.
Nine thousand people went for the Mud Gate.
It is not a wide gate. Two leaves, iron-shod oak, and Bryce Waters holding them with sixteen men and an order he had every right to keep. The press hit the leaves and drove them shut with the bodies of the people trying to get through, which is what a crowd always does to itself, and the screaming started in the middle where nobody could see anything at all.
I went over the heads of them, three roofs and a dropped landing, and came down inside the gate arch.
"Open it," I said.
"I can't," Bryce said, and he meant it, and his face was the colour of a fish belly.
"Then stand aside and let me be the one who did it."
I got my shoulder under the right-hand leaf and drove it back a yard against nine thousand people, and then I made myself as heavy as I have ever made myself, ten tons of a man in a doorway, and stopped.
The paving cracked under my boots. Both heels sank until the stone came up past my ankles. The leaf ground into my shoulder and stayed where it was, and the river of them went past me on both sides, out into the Hook, out into air, and it went on going past for a very long time while I held a door open in front of half the city and every one of them looked at me while they ran.
That is what it cost. Not the gold.
When the pressure came off I let go and my legs wouldn't hold me and Bryce caught my arm, which I will remember about him.
There were nineteen dead on the stones. Two of them were mine.
Hobb was face down against the left-hand leaf with his arms still up. Fourteen years old, struck off a list nine days ago by my own hand, and he had come to the square because Marsh's people were handing out fish and he had always been quick with a message. The girl beside him was Nel, who was nine, who had run the length of Gin Alley for me twice a week for a copper and a lie about how important it was.
I carried her out because she was the smaller one and I could only carry one at a time.
Cole found me in the gateway with her against my chest. He looked at her for a while before he looked at me.
"Nineteen," he said. "It would have been eight hundred." He said it flatly, as a report, without any comfort in it. "I'll be telling the prince tonight that you bought a mob with your own coin and fed it out of a tavern keeper's hands while the Crown stood in a line with spears. That is what happened. I'll not dress it."
"No," I said. "Don't."
Marsh's common room went silent when I put her down on the long table by the window, and it stayed silent while I straightened her arms, and it was full of people who had known me since I was a boy with no boots and nothing to sell.
Not one of them looked up.