Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

  “What are we here for?”

  She stood behind him. He could feel her breath on his neck. It was strange because she didn’t smell like any woman he’d ever known; there wasn’t a hint of perfume or anti-perspirant or any of the myriad other scents women absorb. Strange, because despite this she seemed to exude…well, for want of a better word, femininity. He felt his muscles tense.

  “Relax,” she said softly, which didn’t help. “Look.”

  She moved him, gently, pivoted him as if he were on a turntable. Time seemed to zip forward slightly; the sun licked across the sky and for a moment, an eye blink of time, the skies darkened, and then back came the sun again and things were much as before; the sun and the sea and the sand-

  -and the ships.

  They lined the beach. Some had already landed. Some were coming in. He could see more on the horizon, arrowing through the waves with little apparent difficulty. People were spilling out of them as they reached the sands; already something approaching two hundred were crowding around one another, forming little groups here and there. He could see a fire sputter into life around one group.

  “Vikings?” he vocalised his first thought.

  “You can do better than that, Danny,” she admonished him.

  He could. These weren’t Vikings. She’d said this place had existed a millennia and a half before Ballycastle had been founded, that place had a castle nearby, so it had to be pretty fuckin old, surely? Medieval times? So that made their current time period…what? Around the year 0, if not before? Vikings hadn’t existed that far back. This was Roman times. But the ships he was seeing now weren’t Roman ships.

  “They’re my people,” she said, seeming to sense that he wasn’t going to come up with the answer. “The Tuatha De Danann. This is our landing on Irish soil. As far as such things can be reckoned, the year is 247 BC.”

  He squinted to get a better look. Admittedly he was a few hundred feet distant and thus he couldn’t make out things in any great detail, but as far as he could see, the people he was looking at now were just that - people. They milled and they chatted and they slapped each other on the back. The ones who had started the fire were walking over to a larger ship that had just successfully beached and helping its crew unload a big cooking pot onto the sands. A huge cheer went up as they manoeuvred it into place above the flaming logs of the fire.

  “You don’t look very Elvish,” he said doubtfully.

  She laughed, and leaned forward, placing her chin squarely on his right shoulder. He had a sudden absurd flash of Long John Silver and his parrot sitting there, except instead of a smelly bird squawking pieces of eight, it was a beautiful woman’s face. No comparison really. He glanced across at her nervously but she kept staring straight ahead at the beach scene, which seemed to be getting busier and busier with each passing moment. Was that sadness in her face?

  “I wanted to show you this,” she said softly. “To show you myths are more than just stories.”

  “Yeah,” he replied softly, thinking back over the last few days. “I’ve sorta gathered that.”

  When she talked, her chin moved against his shoulder; it was ticklish in a maddening way, but he made no move to duck out from being her human support post. “These were my people, Danny. My family and my friends and my whole world. We didn’t see ourselves as Gods. We didn’t even see magic as magic. Do you understand? It simply was. That was how the world worked. No-one thought of it as strange any more than you think of making a telephone call as strange.”

  “Magic…” he said, and though he was clearly standing here and all the impossibilities that entailed, the word still had so many connotations with crappy magicians on TV. Card tricks and shitty illusions. Paul Daniels. David Copperfield...

  Now she did remove her head, and a part of him missed that weight there. She looked at him with searching eyes. “Do you know how electricity works?” she asked him.

  He blinked. “What? Well…aye, I mean…it’s…it’s mmm…it’s like a…like a thing that happens when mmm…two charges build up, like a positive and a negative and…” he searched back for GCSE Science classes desperately, “you can do it with lemons and wires…”

  She quirked an eyebrow. “So if I was to let you dander over there to that beach, if I left you here in 247 BC, and I visited you in ten years from now, you’d have made strides to producing electricity in that time?”

  “No,” he admitted, but feeling very defensive about this line of questioning for some reason, he felt compelled to add, “this place is too far back, like. There’s nothin to work with, probably. Tools I mean.”

  “Oh,” she nodded, “gotcha now, yeah. So when, then? 1700s? If I dropped you there, you could change history and become the inventor of the electric light bulb?”

  “Maybe…

  “Could you?”

  “No.”

  Having worked him into a corner where he had to supply the answer she’d been seeking the whole time, she nodded, now satisfied.

  Having this sort of conversation made him suddenly achingly nostalgic for Ellie.

  “But you have electricity all over the place, don’t you?” she said. “You want a light or want a bit of toast or to switch on your PC, what do you do?”

  “Alright,” he said, “I see what you’re-”

  “You flick a switch,” she completed, triumphantly. “You flick a switch and boom - on it comes. You haven’t a notion what’s going on behind those wires. All you care is that it works. You desire light, and you flick a switch, and there is light. You want food heated, you put it inside an empty metal box,press buttons,it makes a noise and the food comes out, boiling hot. Take my hand-”

  He did so, and they were amongst the beach people as soon his fingers touched hers. For a moment he thought he was about to be hit with another head-shattering side-effect of the transportation, but since they’d only moved a few hundred feet all he experienced was a slight dizziness that passed in an instant.

  “They can’t see or hear us,” she said, answering his unspoken question. He was mostly relieved at this; only mostly because he was disappointed that for the first time in his life he was by far the most fashionable person in a large crowd and he was going to be the only person who knew it.

  The large cauldron that had caused such a ripple of cheering to pass amongst the settlers was only a few feet away. Ghosts they may have been, or ghosts of a sort anyway, but Danny could feel the heat radiating from it. It was huge, and black, and well-worn, and a man and a woman holding large wooden sharpened stakes were stirring its contents intently.

  “What’s-”

  “Watch,” she cut him off.

  He watched as the crowd gathered at the cauldron, some individually, some in pairs or groups, all holding empty containers of some sort; some big, some small. All were then filled with some foodstuff or other and he imagined at first that the cauldron contained soup or a stew; it was only when a young woman walked up and received a bowlful of green grapes that he first twigged something was pretty special about this cauldron. It delivered something different to every person who approached, and in every instance it seemed to be giving the person exactly what they’d wanted; everyone was walking away from it with a happy smile on their face as they began to tuck in to the meal.

  The Morrigan was looking at the girl who’d received the rather meagre portion of grapes with a sour expression on her face.

  “Ériu,” she said, looking faintly nauseous. Catching Danny’s expression, she rolled her eyes and when she spoke, it was in a voice not her own, a higher and more musical voice that was more obviously girly. “Oh I dunno how you eat all those meat and vegetables! I know you’re sort of one of the lads, Morrigan, but aren’t you even a little worried about your figure?”

  She made a face. “And they end up naming the country after her?” she said in disgust. “Pah!”

  A commotion began, just as Danny was about to make a comment on this oddly humanising development. Shouts rang
out, and a group split from the general feasting to jog to a just-arriving boat. The Morrigan was watching all of this silently. Danny thought about asking, but then decided, wisely, to simply stand and bear witness.

  He saw them lift the corpse from the boat. He had no idea how long the boats had been on the water, or where the Tuatha had come from, but it had been long enough for the body to begin to decompose. A woman wailed in despair. The corpse was a man, and his body was covered as best they could manage. The smell of festering flesh on the boat must have been incredible, and Danny wondered why they simply hadn’t heaved him overboard…surely in times like this, that sort of harsh act was a necessary part of life?

  But there was no harshness here. Only calm action. The man’s body was heaved upward onto the shoulders of six men, who carried him aloft like pallbearers without a coffin. Danny moved aside to let them pass, but when he saw their destination it took the Morrigan to take a few steps forward and clamp her cool hands around his arm to stop him.

  “No!” he said. “Jesus Christ, they can’t put him in there! That’s cannibalism-!”

  “Watch.” he was told.

  Dumb with horror, he complied. They were going to put him into the cauldron; the same vessel that everyone was getting their free magical meal from. Was this how they paid for its bottomless resources? With the blood of their own? Or worse, were the food offerings actually recycled in some sick way from the dead? Was this Soylent Green, 247 BC?

  The body was placed in the cauldron. The dead man’s family had arrived; everyone here spoke a tongue that Danny couldn’t begin to decipher, but he didn’t need command of words to see grief when he saw it…although for people who’d just seen their dead husband/father dumped into a foodstore, they looked rather matter-of-fact about it.

  And then the dead man got up, and roared. And the crowd roared right along with him, including the Morrigan still holding Danny’s arm, a primal holler of joy and defiance of death that made the hairs on his neck stand up.

  “The Dagda’s Cauldron,” the Morrigan said. “One of the four Treasures of the Tuatha, brought from Murias, the island of commoners. Where I was born, although my youth was spent here, in Ireland, my true home. I didn’t know it at this time, of course…”

  She wasn’t looking at Danny, but past him, at the circle of relatives who now took turns embracing the resurrected man. At a little girl no more than seven years old, who took a running jump right into his arms and held him so tightly that the man, laughing as he was spun around by the force of her jump, eventually had to extract her from him limb by limb.

  “Okay. I get the electricity thing. I do. Really. But for fucks sake. You didn’t think the dead coming back to life was anything special?” Danny said, his voice sounding distant.

  She shook her head. “Oh no. I thought it was special. I thought it was very special.”

  “Who is he?” Danny asked, already guessing the identity of the child.

  “My third father,” she said, watching the little girl, her expression unreadable. “Great-grandfather you would call him. Nuada.”

  Danny flashed immediately. “He owns the sword. The silver one that remakes memories.”

  “The second of the four treasures,” the Morrigan confirmed. “Yes.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” Danny asked again. Being around this much happiness, this much joy, and being as substantial as a phantom amidst it all was beginning to grate on his nerves. “I just wa - need to get my little boy back.”

  The Morrigan walked to him, tall and proud and terrible to behold, and for a moment he could see why her aspect had taken the shape of the crow; like her avian counterpart, she was capable of making it seem as if death itself were wrapped around her. “You wanted to know,” she reminded him, her words harsh. “Consider this the first lesson. This - all of this - was how it began. One thousand of us arriving at a new land in hopes of a new life for ourselves. It reads so easily as the beginning of a myth. I wanted you to see us for yourself. We were real. As real as you, and those you care about.”

  The little girl and the resurrected man walked away down the beach together. After a few steps on the sand the man scooped the little girl up, her almost-black hair whipping in the sea breeze, until she sat squarely on his shoulders, giggling as he ran full tilt to greet the boats yet to beach.

  The girl with the grapes watched them go. Watched them with hooded eyes.

  “Time for the next lesson,” the Morrigan said, and reached out to cup his cheek. Unprepared, he tried to jerk away, but too late; with a single brush of her touch, the beach and everything around them fell away into nothingness.

  **

  Events spun past him as though he were tethered to time only by a loose cord which the Morrigan would jerk, dragging him behind her, skipping him through the decades like a stone skimming across the waves.

  The Tuatha worked quickly to spread out from their initial beachhead. They had brought the tools of their civilisation with them in their flotilla of boats and they were not shy of a day’s work. Woods fell to their axes and villages grew up, at first around the North Antrim coast, and then as the years passed, further South.

  “We had heard tales of them back home,” the Morrigan said. He could no longer see her; she was only words on the temporal winds, but when she spoke it seemed to anchor him in the stream and he clung to her voice, fearful of being swept away and lost.

  “Them?” he asked, and then saw for himself.

  They surrounded the land on which the Tuatha had settled; somehow Danny was able to see it all spread below him, as though he were flying in some ancient airship high above the Antrim plains. And when he wanted to look closer, he found that he could zoom in as much as he desired, until he could have seen the smallest insect on a single blade of grass.

  Thousands of them. Monsters. Some with the heads of goats; some with only one giant eye set in the midst of their foreheads, reminding him irrevocably of the Greek story of the Cyclops. More yet were misshapen, with only a single arm, or a single leg growing from the midst of their torso which they balanced upon like some grotesque unicycle.

  “Formorians,” the Morrigan spat.

  They closed in a giant ring around the Tuatha’s land, and as they did so, the ground shook and rose up toward him until he found himself once more standing on a solid surface. He was in the midst of a great plain, the sea nowhere in sight. A vast ribbon of Formorians lined the horizon to the South; to the North he could see the small buildings of the Tuatha’s biggest village. And in the middle, where he and the Morrigan stood, a small party consisting of members of each side had approached each other warily.

  Danny recognised Nuada immediately, leading the contingent of his people toward his opposite numbers. He also recognised the woman standing to his right. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, as evidenced by her size, her posture, and the fact that she was carrying a spear so long and solid looking that he doubted he could have lifted an end of it, let alone make carrying the fuckin thing look so effortless. It was like a sharpened caber.

  “I was nineteen years old,” the Morrigan told him, looking at her younger self. “Full of arrogant swagger and convinced of my own immortality.”

  Danny frowned. “I thought you were immortal?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “but I was convinced of it.”

  “Is that bunch o’ grapes girl beside ye?” Danny said, spying a girl treading lightly beside the Amazonian countenance of the nineteen-year-old goddess. She was everything the girl standing beside her wasn’t; fey, blonde. He’d seen her type in the city centre all the time checking themselves out in the mirrored windows of every shop they dandered past.

  The Morrigan scowled. “Ériu. Yes.”

  She’d landed them in the right spot; Danny didn’t have to move a muscle to watch what unfolded - the Tuatha came to a halt six feet to his left, while the group from the South stopped an equal distance to his right. He found himself wishing he’d paid more attention
in Irish classes, though what help it would have been in this situation was probably up for debate.

  Jesus, these Formorians were a sight to behold. The guy in front was eight feet tall and one of the goat-headers; he looked like he’d stepped right out of a Marilyn Manson video. His arms and legs were massive; each one looked like one of those sides of beef you’d see hanging from a butcher’s hook. He was flanked to his left and right by a Cyclops and a Unicycle. Despite their various handicaps, Danny saw in the way they moved and the way they handled themselves that they were serious bastards.

  He needn’t have worried about the language barrier. When they began to speak, it was in English; the Morrigan’s doing no doubt, for his benefit. “Hail Elatha, descendent of Ham, son of Noah of the Flood,” Nuada called out, as the younger Morrigan stood proud beside him and Ériu floated around, flitting between the older man and the six or seven burly looking fellas they‘d brought along as a precaution. “I am Prince Nuada, leader of the Tuatha De Danann. I bring you greetings and tribute for the sharing of your plentiful lands.”

  Danny rolled his eyes. “Did yous all talk like that in them days?” he asked.

  The Morrigan looked back at him unblinkingly. “You have to remember these are primitive times Danny. It’ll be another two thousand years or more before we’re as eloquent as you modern people,” and her voice changed to a high-pitched nasal whine that was such an excellent approximation of a Belfast young male voice he almost choked, “here big girl, givvus a suck of yer doot will ye, yeoo! What’s the craic mucker? Sweet! That’s dead on big lad!”

  There was a contemplative silence.

  She was staring at him with a well? expression on her face. He wanted to come back with something smart, to defend his own time period, but he ended up unable to stop himself from grinning and inclining his head to accept defeat, and to his surprise he detected a tiny smile in return ghosting her lips. She nodded to the scene unfolding and was all business once more.

  “I am not Elatha,” Goat Boy was rumbling.