City of Fools (Revision)

After workshopping and conferencing this piece, I got enough of a picture of what needed to be done, and I present to you the revision of The City of Fools!

City of Fools

By Emily Rose Mangino Johnson, "The Storyteller"

This is

Where heroes

And cowards

Part ways . . .

Take the road less traveled by

Leave the City of Fools

~~Nightwish "Seven Days to the Wolves

“We will die defending our city,” they said. “we have built it up, and we will not leave it to fall. We shall arm them all, from the least to the greatest. The child, the mother, the king, the drunkard, all shall die with sword in hand!”
Cheers. Applause. Mothers standing, children in their arms, trying to express their willingness to fight amidst the deafening approval. The nobility, the heroism. One thing that could never be said of this city is that it was a city of cowards. They were not a people to let others fight their fights, die their deaths. There was no sending others out to defend them. A Troy of Hectors, not of Parises.
Two million, seven hundred thousand men, at least. All marching toward our beloved city. How long had we lived here, a proud city unattached to any expanding kingdom? How many hundreds of years had we defended our home against the powerful? How many had died for our cause? We had clashed with countless armies and kept our freedom, had paid dearly for the land on which we stood. We’d lived in peace for only a few score years. The beginning of a new, unending age of peace, we had thought, and had lived in the memory of our heroic lore and did not prepare for another onslaught. Swords had been hung on walls as signs of past deeds, not kept at the hip. Tales of war and great deeds were told, but never practiced. And we were happy living in the shadow of our lore. And was it so wrong to be at peace? A few score years we had not had lived in fear of attack, a few score years of prosperity. The peace for which we had fought for centuries had lasted so short a time. Long enough only that only the elderly had seen war. The beginning of a new age of peace? Rather, the beginning of the end; now—
We had seven thousand, at most. An indefensible city. Broken walls, no stores, no water. No moat, no narrow causeways. No time.
It was a situation ripe for glory. If we failed, we would go down like the Charge of the Light Brigade. A doomed but heroic fight. Eternal remembrance for the fallen. And if we won, we would be a legend for the ages. A battle far riskier, more hopeless than any in our history, any history—a battle won. Songs would be written about us, songs that would last through the centuries, the millennia, even. The Battle of the Hornburg times a hundred, a people of courage and honor who let nothing stop them. And if we ran? We might be remembered too. As cowards, filthy yellow-bellied cowards. To this city of Hectors, that was not an option.
There was fear, yes. They faced death now. Such fear, in the eyes of many. Children, clutching their mother’s skirts. Men, eyes hollow, arms around their wives. Still cheering. They would die either way, they knew. They may as well die heroically.

I sat in the back. Through the legs of those around, I could see a few more sitting. Not cheering. Not clapping. Not many. The speaker waved everyone back to their seats, smiling and afraid. “Let every armourer in the city go to work now! We will beat plowshares into swords for this final battle.” A voice afraid but triumphant. This was a brave man. “Let all bear arms in defense of our flag!”
And then I stood up. I had not been raised a coward, and though I might run from battle, I would not run from this last confrontation. A lifetime’s education in the ways of courage and honor could not be forgotten in a day. “May I speak?” My voice emotionless, face grave. They would not know what I thought until I spoke the horrible words.
“Yes.”
And then I faced the assembly and I had to speak. “I will not fight.”
Chilling silence. Confusion.
“Then what, will you stand and let them take you down at the forefront? It is courageous, but hardly useful.” They could not imagine running. Only fighting and silent, meaningless sacrifice.
“No. I will run.”
I had expected the reaction, though I had not meant to put it as bluntly as that. The screams of anger, the boos. Deafening disapproval. The speaker shook in horror and let the assembly rage, rage at the cowardly infidel, the yellow-bellied traitor, who stood before them.
But then, would it have been any different if I had explained? What could I say to them? What if I had tried to explain to them? Common sense demanded that we leave our homeland and run. But men of honor did not speak the language of logic. To run would be to cover our courageous history in shame, to tarnish the honor of every hero who had fallen for the cities sake. Could you, in minutes, convince a man to lay down everything he believed in? To lay aside honor and take up their ultimate sin—my ultimate sin. With what eloquence could I explain the logic of fear to men of honor? And when it came down to it, I could not deny that I was afraid. Afraid, and I did not see a piece of land as worth dying for. Logic and fear. Powerful and useless. Just because I had turned away did not mean others would.
“You will run? Leave the city to burn? Coward. Traitor!”
“Coward! You abandon your honor? Your pride?”
“Even if you run, they’ll catch up to you eventually. Wouldn’t you rather die nobly than as a dog with a tail between his legs?”
A few still sat, my fellow apostates. A few hundred here. More, probably, in the crowds pressing outside. Nine hundred, one thousand, all together, I estimated. Enough to start a city. I turned to leave.
“If you insist on dying, I will give meaning to your death. Die holding them back and give the cowards time to escape. And yes. I will leave the city to burn. It will burn whether I am there or not. I would rather it burn when I am not.”

By the time I left the amphitheater, word of mouth had spread news of my cowardice to every area of the crowd outside. The crowd stretched for miles, most of the city gathered to hear their sentence of foolish, honorable death. A narrow path had been roped off, meant to release those within at the meetings end; now, my path of shame. Cold stares, raging insults, the hatred and horror of millions directed at me. I had walked half the distance in silence, avoiding the bitter glares of old friends, before I realized I had followers. Maybe one hundred cowards followed me, of those who had also sat, unwilling to die. All eyes averted in identical shame. Some, I knew, still sat in equal shame within the amphitheater—more afraid to live a coward than to die a hero.
I returned home only briefly to gather what little I could bring in my flight. I had no farewells and no apologies that I could make now. I had no reason to stay in the city, no wish to meet those who had doomed themselves to death. The brave were at their forges, and the only ones I saw as I left were those who also fled, joining us on the path to the mountains one by one, eyes defiant and ashamed and bitter, heads bowed, unwilling to reveal themselves even to their fellow cowards. Perhaps six hundred—no more than seven—straggling away from the city. I did not speak or persuade, did not dare face the brave again, did not need to speak to others: my cowardice had but opened the gate for other cowards. I had convinced no one but those already longing for escape.
The city of fools burned without us. We huddled in the crevices of the mountains, watching as the approaching army blackened the land beyond the city, and overwhelmed it. We heard the faint sounds of chaos and death and victory, metal on metal, screams, battle-cries. A last few joined us, bloody and afraid, fleeing at last what we had fled first. They stood apart, in a shame stronger then our own, their fall from honor greater, the shadow of their comrades’ deaths in their eyes. We saw the first flames light, flick from house to house, bringing down stone and wood and flesh: the last victory of the city of fools, the destruction of their own before it could be another’s. Grey ash fell like snow, marking us each with the memory of the dead we had forsaken. And we watched, choking on the smoke that rose from the ruins, as the victors pitched their tents in deadly triumph, and we stayed hidden, too exhausted by our own cowardice to flee further than we had already.
We mourned from the hills behind for seven months, all through the spring and summer. A month for every thousand who had died in body or spirit. Fasted, prayed, cried. Cold, hungry, heartbroken. Mothers for their children, children for their mothers. After seven months, we began to build. After seven years, each of the four hundred houses was built and painted brightly, each with a black doorframe. Each of the thousand we had gathered and created wore a black ribbon. We, the cowards, mourned forever for the fools.