Chapter 22: King's Landing
The fleet made port at King's Landing in the late morning, and the smell hit before the gangplanks were down.
It was the particular smell of a city built where a river met the sea — salt water and river mud layered over decades of accumulated human occupation.
Fish guts, tallow, horse dung, cheap ale going sour in the heat, and underneath all of it the particular rot of wooden docks that had been wet and dry and wet again more times than anyone had counted. Henry had grown up in White Harbor,
which had its own version of this smell, but White Harbor was a northern city with cold air that kept things from getting too far out of hand. King's Landing had no such constraint. The summer heat did what summer heat does to a city of half a million people pressed together inside stone walls.
The Mud Gate stood open to receive them — the River Gate by its formal name, the Mud Gate by every other name anyone used, because the wooden doors had been stained black by decades of tidal damp and the stone steps below them were permanently slick. Above the gate, beneath layers of mottled red paint, you could still make out the ghost of Targaryen dragon carvings in the lintel — scales and claws, worn almost to nothing, stripped of whatever dignity they'd once had.
A detachment of the City Watch stood in two rows beneath the arch. Gold cloaks, iron helms, mail coifs, blunt-tipped spears that they used with casual authority to shove back anyone who crowded the entrance. The black mud on their boots was thick enough to add an inch to their height. The people of King's Landing called them the Gold Cloaks to their faces and the Muddy Feet behind their backs, and looking at the boots, Henry thought the second name was more accurate.
Through the gate, the city swallowed them whole.
Fishmonger's Square was exactly what it advertised — loud, crowded, smelling aggressively of its primary product, and completely indifferent to the passage of armed men through its center. A woman leaned from an upper window and emptied a bucket of grey water into the street without looking first. The splash scattered half a dozen people and produced a range of responses from creative profanity to helpless laughter. Farmers shouted the virtues of their produce at anyone within earshot. A carter and a porter were involved in a dispute that had progressed beyond words to shoving.
When the crowd caught sight of Maewyn's banner — white field, Red Lion — a change moved through the nearest people. Eyes turned. Expressions tightened. Not hostility exactly, but something close to it, or close to the memory of hostility.
They were confusing it with the Lannister golden lion. Henry had expected this and kept moving.
The confusion was understandable, even if the history behind it was uglier than most people in that square knew in its full detail. At the end of Robert's Rebellion, after the Trident and Rhaegar's death, when the outcome was no longer in question, Tywin Lannister had brought the Westerlands army to King's Landing's gates under the banner of loyalty to the crown he'd spent the entire war watching from a safe distance. Grand Maester Pycelle had argued for opening the gates. The gates had opened. What came through them had spent the next several hours making the city wish they hadn't.
The soldiers who'd sacked King's Landing had worn the golden lion. The bodies that Tywin had presented to Robert afterward — Elia Martell and her children, wrapped in Lannister red and laid at the foot of the Iron Throne — had been delivered by men in Lannister colors.
King's Landing remembered. Cities always do. Henry's red lion wasn't Tywin's golden one, but to someone in Fishmonger's Square who'd been a child during the sack, one lion looked very much like another.
Henry signaled his men to acquire two wagons near the fish market. The chests of gold dragons were loaded carefully, secured, and covered. He wasn't interested in advertising the contents through the city streets.
They crossed Fishmonger's Square and turned onto the Muddy Way, which was busy in the manner of a main thoroughfare in a city that never quite stopped moving. Gold Cloaks worked the crowd with their spear shafts, driving people back from the procession's path with the particular efficiency of men who do this many times each day. At the base of the walls, in the permanent shade that never got warm, children sat in groups — hollow-eyed, thin-handed, watching the passing weapons and armor with the focused attention of people assessing what the world has and what they're not going to get.
Henry looked at them and kept moving, making a mental note he filed alongside several other mental notes about King's Landing.
The Street of Steel wound upward from there, climbing Visenya's Hill in long switchbacks. Smiths worked their forges shirtless on both sides of the road, the hammer-noise constant and overlapping, sparks landing on the stone and dying. Freeriders crowded the weapon stalls, testing mail with their fingers, arguing prices. Old merchants had wagons of battlefield salvage lined up along the curb, shouting the provenance of rusted swords and bent helms with the particular optimism of men who have long since stopped believing what they're saying but haven't found a better approach.
The higher they climbed, the quieter and cleaner it became. Stone buildings replacing wood ones. More Gold Cloaks on patrol. Minor nobles and wealthy merchants living here, people with enough coin to buy distance from the noise below. Henry spoke quietly to two of his men and sent them ahead to ask about available properties.
The Red Keep appeared above them as they crested the hill — pale red stone on a high promontory, towers rising into the sky, walls sheer enough that the cliff beneath them seemed like an afterthought rather than a foundation. The castle that Aegon the Conqueror had built on Aegon's High Hill, where he'd landed his dragons and decided this was where the new kingdom would be governed from. It looked like what it was — the seat of a continental empire, designed to be seen from a very long way away.
They came down the slope toward the outer gate.
A Kingsguard was on duty — white cloak, white armor, longsword, a plain helm that left his face mostly visible. Pale grey eyes that moved over the approaching party with the flat assessment of a man looking at cargo to be inspected rather than people to be greeted.
Henry had been briefed on the Kingsguard enough to put a name to that face. He dismounted and stepped forward. "Ser Mandon Moore. I'm Henry Reyne, Lord of the Bay of Crabs, newly invested by King Robert. I'm here to take possession of my seat — Iron Fist Keep is currently under royal stewardship. I have the King's letter."
Maewyn produced the parchment — rolled, sealed with the Baratheon stag in black wax — and held it out. Mandon Moore took it with the same expression he'd had since they arrived, which was to say none at all. He broke the seal, read through it at a pace that suggested he was reading every word rather than skimming, and looked up.
"Rest in the city tonight." His voice was as flat as his expression. "The Lord Hand will complete the transfer with you tomorrow."
"It's not yet mid-afternoon," Henry said. "Is the Lord Hand unavailable?"
"Rest in the city tonight. The Lord Hand will complete the transfer with you tomorrow."
The same words, the same tone, the same eyes. Henry looked at Ser Mandon Moore for a moment and concluded that further conversation was unlikely to produce different results. He gave a small nod and turned back to his men.
Corlen materialized at his elbow with the particular alertness of a man who has been waiting for this moment. "My lord, I know King's Landing well. The Street of Silk has good inns — reasonable prices, decent beds, close to everything—"
"The Street of Silk," one of the sailors behind him said, with great skepticism. "Since when does the Street of Silk have inns? Corlen, you want to visit the Peach. Just say you want to visit the Peach."
"I want a comfortable inn for our lord and his household," Corlen said, with dignity. "The fact that I happen to have acquaintances in that part of the city is entirely coincidental."
"Acquaintances," someone repeated. "Is that what we're calling them."
Henry shook his head and started walking back down the hill, the wagon wheels grinding on the stone behind him.
"Find us somewhere with clean beds and a private room for the gold," he said. "Everything else, I don't need to know about."
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