Bally the Fool: The Mob

There was a crowd, or what counted as a crowd, these days. Almost thirty people.

They had tried their best. That fact alone made Bally more angry than anything else he had heard the entire evening. He watched as the small group of peasants sauntered their way up the hill towards the castle gates, waving their three torches and two pitchforks. A scythe was there too, which was a nice touch, but all in all, their heart wasn’t really in it.

The soldier at the gate was quite young, young enough that he likely had never seen an angry group of peasants before. He hopped from foot to foot as the rabble shouted at him, demanding he move aside.

As Bally approached, he noticed the terrified man in the middle of the group, his hands tied and his collar gripped by any number of firm hands.

Bally felt his heart boil.

“What are you doing?”

The crowd stopped shouting. The guard turned to look at the tiny fool where he stood. The mob looked at each other with bemused expressions, waiting for someone to explain.

Finally, a man stepped forward. “Who are you?”

“Oh, nevermind who I am,” Bally hissed. “What sort of nonsense is this?”

“It’s a sacrifice,” the man said, slowly, as if Bally were some precotious child who didn’t know when to stop asking questions with obvious answers — especially ones that he didn’t know the answer to. “Burn him at the stake in the castle courtyard. Have to do it.”

“Do you?” Bally sniffed, looking the rag-tag group up and down. “What for?”

“Well, it’s this Spot, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, only it’s not going away. Just getting bigger, they say.”

“Do they?”

“Yeah, an’ someone has to do something, so we’re going to do it.”

“And that’s a sacrifice.”

“Aye,” the man smiled the self-satisfied smile of a man with meaningful purpose. “Going to sacrifice him, so the Spot goes away.”

“And that’ll do it?” Bally crossed his arms, staring the man hard in the face. “You killing this man will make the Spot just poof away?”

“Well, not poof,” the man admitted. “Might take a while. Might take a few.”

“A few days?”

The man blushed. “A few sacrifices.”

“That’s true,” a voice piped up from the throng of peasants. “Had a bad leg, and I had to rub the poultice on it for seven nights before it felt better.”

“Seven,” Bally nodded. “I see. Very good. Seven. And you plan on killing someone every month until things just magically get better?”

“Look, just who do you think you are?” another voice piped up. “You’re not the Duke, or the sherrif, or anyone else important. Who are you to tell us what we can or cannot do?”

“Well who do I have to be?” Bally snapped. “You’re going to up and kill someone for no good reason!”

“We have a perfectly suitable reason, thank you,” the man in front sniffed. “One we would be perfectly fine in discussing if you would show us a bit of courtousy in return.”

Bally heaved a sigh. “I’m Bally.”

“Bally who?”

“No thanks,” Bally said, reflexively. “There’s quite enough already.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “Ah! He’s the Duke’s fool!”

Cursing himself for his glib tongue, Bally scrossed his arms and leveled a steely gaze at the snickering crowd. “Never mind that now. Look, just…just let him alone and go back home, alright? You’re not helping matters.”

“Look, mister…Bally was it?” The man licked his lips and gave a weak gesture to the air around him. “I realize this may look, rather silly to a fool…”

“Doesn’t it just!” Bally snapped.

“But you have to understand,” the man gave a weak smile, “We’ve lived this way for thousands of years. My father and his father and —”

“Hang your fathers!”

“Well,” the man’s smile faded, “My own father was hanged for stealing a sheaf of wheat some ten years ago, so, that’s quite a painful thing you just said to me.”

“What are you all doing?”

“Just what I’m telling you,” the man continued. “Look, whether he’s responsible or not, we have to kill someone, or else the Spot will keep growing and that’s simply unsustainable. Besides, we’ve already killed quite a few people already.”

“You did?” Bally blinked.

“Yes. For unrelated crimes, I think, but retroactively it’s all part of the same cultural shift, you see. The thing is, we can’t just stop.”

“Why in hellsteeth not?”

The man was patient, calm, and maddingly fair. “Well, doing nothing won’t help, will it?”

“Neither will this!” Bally shrieked, tearing his cap off his head and tearing at his hair.

“Okay, so what will help, then?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well,” the man shrugged, “then you don’t know this won’t help, do you.”

“I’m pretty certain!”

“So’s my old uncle,” a voice from the mob spoke up. “He says there’s nothing better than a good sacrifice for stopping some world-ending disaster.”

“He’s wrong.”

“Well, he certainly didn’t seem wrong. He’s got a good strong voice, too.”

Bally closed his mouth, and waited. He waited for a good long time while everyone else patiently allowed him to collect his words so he didn’t devolve into a fit of screaming.

At last he spoke again. “People have been dying for generations, now. They’ve died of age, of illness, of famine, of war, of a hundred thousand reasons, and not one of those deaths have stopped the Spot. We need to try something else.”

“Okay then,” the man said, sticking the shaft of his pitchfork into the earth. “You tell us what else is there to do.”

Bally whirled on the man, eyes flashing. “Do you mean that?”

“Mean…mean what?”

“Do you want me to tell you? I mean really tell you?”

“I mean…I suppose I was being rhetorical —”

“Because if you want me to tell you, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell all of you what to do. Oh, and I can sound certain, make no mistake. I can speak with the breath of a thousand furnaces, and tell you exactly what will happen if you don’t do what I tell you. I can describe the bruses and cuts down to the tiniest detail! I can do it all for you! I’ll tell you where to stand, what to say, how to think, how to feel, I’ll give you jobs, give you spouses, take things from other people and tell you they’re in a different country. I’ll like certain songs and fill the air with them. The books I hate you’ll never hear a whisper of. I’ll take your children to work in the fields and die in foreign countries. I’ll chose which among you is doing good, and which deserve the chop. I’ll tell you how to pray, when to pray, and don’t you dare worry about whom you’ll pray to! And every night you’ll look up at the tallest spire of my palace and feel grateful. Is that what you want?”

There was no answer forthcoming. Bally grit his teeth. “No? No takers? Then don’t you fucking dare place your responsibilities on me. I’m telling you the truth. You are killing us. As sure as if you sharpened the knives yourselves. If you don’t do something about it, do something different…then…”

They all waited patiently for Bally to tell them what would happen.

“By all the gods,” Bally huffed, “Can’t you all just try talking to each other? Can’t you just ask each other? Talk and debate and decide! Why do I need to tell you everything?”

“Well, you are shouting. It just sounds like…you know…you know what to do next.”

“I don’t!”

“Then why are you shouting?”

Bally took a deep breath. Why was he shouting? What could they do? What did he want them to do? Was there anything worth doing anymore? He shook his head at the crowd and shrugged. They looked back at him with eyes filled with…disappointment?

For a brief moment, he wondered who exactly he was shouting at. The Mob? The gormless guard who stood there, not making a move to rescue the doomed sacrifice? The Duke sitting in his feast-hall? The monk who drank away the hours he had left? The sage who toiled away at solutions without problems? The young girl who knew only what she had been tought? Which one was the fool, really?

“Go home,” he said, turning around and walking back to the castle doors. “Just…just go home.”

He didn’t want to wait and see if they listened.