“My friends,” Danton repeated, as the murmur of the crowd died away. “Some of you know me. Some of you have no doubt heard my name in the paper. To those who are strangers, I will begin by saying that I am Danton Aurenne, and a little bit about why I have been compelled to speak.”
“Compelled” was a nice touch, Raesinia thought, as the speech rolled onward. She’d written it, apart from a few of the more technical flourishes, but seeing it in her own hand on an ink-splattered page and hearing it ring out across a mob of thousands in the middle of the Triumph were very different matters. Raesinia’s heart beat faster as Danton picked up the pace. He seemed to have an instinctive feel for the material-God knows he doesn’t understand it-and gradually let his slow, measured delivery take on more emotion and power as he went along.
Banking, he said, was an old and honorable tradition. There had been bankers in Vordan as long as there had been a Vordan, helping people through bad times with loans, providing safe haven for surpluses in good years, showing restraint and compassion to debtors whose luck had gone sour. Danton’s father-an imaginary figure, of course-had instructed him in that way of doing business, and when he’d come to manhood he’d fully intended to follow that ideal.
When Danton paused, the whole square was hushed, as though everyone present were holding their breath at once.
“But things are different now, aren’t they?” he said.
An incoherent mass of shouts and cheers answered him, until he cut it off with a gesture. Then he explained just how things were different. The bankers had changed, and the banks had changed with them. They were foreigners now, outside the community of which they had once been pillars. Interested only in how much profit-how much of the sweat and toil of good, honest people-they could drain out of Vordan entirely. Parasites, sucking the lifeblood of a country like a gang of swamp-bound leeches. The bankers and the tax farmers-Raesinia was proud of how she’d slipped that conflation in-were to blame for all the ills of Vordan. If not for them, there would be work for everyone. Bread would be an eagle a loaf again.
“One eagle!” someone shouted, and it quickly became a chant. “One eagle and the Deputies-General! One eagle and the Deputies-General!”
“The Deputies-General,” Danton mused, as though it had just been suggested to him.
It would be the answer. Representatives of the people, working together in confraternity to solve the people’s problems, under the august blessing of the Crown. But it wouldn’t happen unless they made it happen.
“But,” Danton said, “we must hit them where it stings. ‘Burn down the banks,’ they tell me. ‘Burn down the Exchange.’ But what’s the use in that? The workers in the bank are Vordanai like you or me, and they’d be thrown out of work. The farmers who sell their food on the Exchange are Vordanai, like you or me. The Armsmen are Vordanai. Would you force them to arrest their own brothers? No. Our enemies are not things, not mere assemblies of iron and stone, vaults and marble floors. Our enemies are ideas.
“So, what can we do?”
He reached inside his coat and drew out a slip of paper. When he unfolded it, gilt lettering flashed in the sun.
“This is a bill on the Second Pennysworth Bank. It represents a promise to pay the bearer one hundred eagles. A promise-that’s all a bank really is, in the end. Promises.” He held the paper out at arm’s length, between two fingers, as though it were a stinking dead fish. “So we can do this.”
His other hand emerged from his coat pocket holding a match. He struck it on the stone of the column, and it flared brilliantly for a moment, provoking an intake of breath from the crowd. Danton held it to the corner of the bill, and it grudgingly took fire, curling up toward his fingers and gouting thick black smoke.
“This is what their promises are worth, when all is said and done,” Danton said. As the flames licked toward his fingers, he let the bill fall, blazing as it drifted to the stone. “And we have to make them see it, too.”
He turned his back on the still-burning bill and walked off the rostrum. Faro would be waiting for him on the steps, ready to hustle him out of the square. In the meantime, the crowd waited in stunned silence for a few long moments, not quite realizing that the speech was over. Then, as if on cue, it erupted in a single voice, a throaty combination of a roar of triumph and a scream of rage.
At the center of the tight-packed mob were the vagrants from the Third. They’d waited patiently for Danton to appear, but now that he was done, they were eager to receive their promised reward. They began to shove their way through the crowd in a body, headed east, for the bridges that connected the Island with the Exchange. The rest of the crowd parted to let them pass, then filled in behind them, dragged onward by curiosity and the power of Danton’s voice. It was like a comet falling to earth, with the vagrants at the head and everyone else as the trailing, blazing tail, aimed directly at the Vordan headquarters of the Second Pennysworth Bank.
“My word,” Sarton said, looking down from the balcony. “There m. . m. . must be a thousand carriages down there.”
Faro, uncharacteristically, had thought ahead and reserved a balcony suite in the Grand, one of Vordan’s finest hotels. It overlooked the Exchange and happened to have an excellent view of the granite-and-marble facade of the Second Pennysworth Bank. So Raesinia, leaning on the balcony rail, had a box seat at the grand spectacle of one of mankind’s classic debacles: a run on the bank.
The Exchange was actually larger than Farus’ Triumph, but not nearly as impressive. It was simply a large, open, irregular space, dirt-floored and rutted with cart tracks. On a normal day it would have been scattered with clusters of men seated at tables or behind portable desks, with flags fluttering behind them on little poles like the pennantry of medieval jousters. Other men milled around them, running from one station to another, shouting incomprehensibly and receiving shouts or hand signals in return. Cora had explained it to Raesinia, once: each station was a gathering of those interested in buying or selling a particular thing or class of thing, with the seated men representing the large, established firms and the ones who shuttled back and forth their prospective customers. Hundreds of millions of eagles changed hands here daily, in some ethereal way that involved nothing so concrete as a handshake. A shout, a thumbs-up, or a nod of the head was enough to start a chain reaction that, hundreds of miles away, might cause a ship to be loaded with goods and sent off around the world.
And Vordan was only a distant third among the great commercial cities, Cora said. The Bourse in Hamvelt was bigger, and the mighty Common Market of Viadre was large enough to swallow them both together with room to spare. Cora talked about the Common Market of Viadre in the same dreamy way that a priest might discuss the kingdom of heaven.
Today, though, all that had been roughly overturned, the tables knocked aside, the traders driven away by the mob. The banks ringed the periphery of the Exchange, their templelike construction seeking to impress a sense of their permanence and majesty by sheer force of architecture. The Second Pennysworth was one of the newest among these, a Borelgai transplant, and its building was the grandest of all. A queue-if something so disorderly could be dignified with the name-stretched from its doors and wound out into the Exchange, until it lost its identity and dissolved into a sea of pushing, shouting men.
Carriages were normally banned from the Exchange, but today none of the rules seemed to apply. They had begun to arrive not long after Danton’s speech, and as the hours passed the trickle had become a flood. Moreover, the vehicles that turned up had been getting grander and grander, sporting coats of arms and liveried footmen, until it seemed that half the nobility of Vordan was crammed into the market.