They walked on in silence for a few minutes. When the trees were almost upon them, James reached across and put his arm across Tony’s chest, stopping him.
“You don’t have to go in there with me if you don’t want to,” he said.
Tony swallowed through a dry throat. Nothing could be seen through the canopy. The branches rustled and blew in the winds that scoured the mountainside this far up, but nothing supernatural seemed to be occurring. “What’s in there?” he asked.
“They’re long gone,” his father replied. “We’re too late. So there’s no danger, but…it might not be something you want to see, son. If you want to stay outside until I return, I understand. You’ll be safe. I promise.”
He looked again. No danger, his father had said. And much as not be something you want to see was giving him the willies, the alternative of staying here alone and waiting for his Da to come back was scarcely less attractive. He had visions of night descending upon him, his wait stretching into hours…who knew what horrors lurked up here.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. And so in they went.
The smell was the first tipoff. The flies were the second.
The bodies were arranged in an unbroken circle. He counted eight of them. Feet met head met feet. They were naked. They were dead.
They were human.
In the centre of the circle, an altar of sorts had been constructed; a cairn of stones with ashes atop the pile, remnants of a fire that had burned until recently.
Eyes. Dead bodies should have closed eyes. Eyes closed. That was how it was in the cowboys, in the gangster movies. Closed eyes. If you got shot it always went the same way – a bit of a clutch at the stomach and a stagger about the place, maybe a collapse and a few minutes to say your last words. Then one final twist…and you died, with your eyes closed.
Three of the bodies were women. He could see their breasts. The first pairs of naked breasts he had ever seen. Mickey McTiernan, his best mate, had talked long into the night some nights about how great it was going to be when they first set eyes dead his mind broke in with a scream, dead eyes, dead and open and staring and empty eyes on a real pair of tits and not a crumpled page of some French dodgy magazine that had seen so many circuits of the playground and so many previous owners you felt like handling it with salad tongs.
Here they were. Pale, white and fetid. Covered in flies…
He threw up. He threw up so many times it felt like he would never stop throwing up, as if he would grow old and die and still be dry-retching, hunched over on this little patch of Ireland covered in his puke, his father standing over him saying nothing.
Strength came back to him only slowly, his body afraid to embrace movement too quickly. He got to his feet on newborn legs, his father supporting his rise, and still he couldn’t break his gaze from a pair of dead eyes. This pair belonged to a young fella – no older looking than his cousin Tommy. They looked into him, accusingly, hating him for having life.
His mind, unable to cope, saw the bodies unfolding from their perfect circle and rising jerkily to life, arms outstretched, the flies teeming off them in a great cloud, coming for him-
He wrenched himself free of his father and he fled, backwards from where he’d come, through the brief canopy of trees that ringed that terrible awful place of death and back out into the Mournes where his childhood, though unknown to him at the time, had just ended.
The sunny afternoon perished in the time it had taken him to recover; as his arms and legs pumped, the terrible realisation that he had indeed lost some hours to his stomach’s inability to process the sights he’d seen. Darkness was falling, and falling fast. Panic was biting him over and over again now, sinking its fangs so deep inside him that all he could do was run, run, run; he was capable of nothing more cerebral than that.
He had to run and run until he couldn’t run any more and he feared he would collapse exhausted to the ground and that, that was when he knew they would get him, they would find him, they would descend upon him as inevitable as the sun sinking into the horizon and make him into one of those lifeless husks they had left in that place.
Knowing this, even then all he could do was keep running, bounding over depressions and leaping over streams. It was a run without semblance of dignity or form, motivated purely by terror. He arrowed down the slope with nothing cluttering his mind save the clear and pressing need to put a lifetime’s worth of distance between him and that little clearing within the trees where Tommy’s dead doppelganger lay, furious at him for being alive.
Something impacted his legs. At this speed, he couldn’t compensate for it. He screamed as the world tilted horizontal, the scream interrupted as the ground knocked the wind from his lungs. He curled up and kicked out, legs flailing again and again. So they hadn’t decided to wait until he collapsed from exhaustion. They had chased him after all and run him down, and any minute he would feel-
“TONY!”
It was his father’s voice. His legs weren’t listening, and they connected anyway. He heard an oooofff, and then his name, repeated again and again. With a force of will, he uncurled his top half from the ball he’d made by tucking his head in under his arms and looked up to see his father standing above him, chest heaving with the effort of chasing him down, trying to fend off his son’s attacks.
“Daddy,” was all he could say, and without seeming to pass through the intervening space he was up and in his father’s arms as if he were a baby again, hugging himself into his father’s chest and sobbing.
“It’s okay…Tony, it’s okay…I’m so sorry…”
They stayed this way for some time until Tony regained enough of his self-consciousness to separate himself from his father once more. He was still breathing heavily, from the shock and from the race down the mountainside. His father gave him a rueful look.
“You’ll make the running team in your school yet,” he said.
Tony tried to smile at the weak joke, but couldn’t. He had to ask. “Why, Da?”
“That place was a rath,” James said, glancing back up the slope. Darkness had almost fallen in earnest now and the trees were rapidly draining of colour to become inky silhouettes against the dusk skies above. “One of their places, son. Remember the leylines I told ye about? Well, a rath occurs where a lot of them crisscross one other. By sacrificing, they keep the power flowin. But…” he sucked in a breath, and Tony could see for the first time that his father too seemed deeply affected by what they’d stumbled across up there, “…Jesus Christ, I’ve never seen eight before. I’ve never seen them arranged in a circle like that before.”
Tony ached for home. Ached to be sat at their wee wooden dinner table in their wee kitchen and be smelling his Ma’s stew and complaining loudly about what a lot of oul shite Gunsmoke was. Rather than be stuck here on a hillside halfway up fuck knew where talking about what eight dead people meant. He knew what it meant. It meant the world was fucked up beyond anything he’d ever suspected. But he asked anyway.
“What does it mean?”
“They’re planning something, is what it means,” his father replied grimly. He nodded to Tony. “Trying to start something. Something really fuckin big. Come on. We have to go, son. Time to go home.”
“What…what about…what about the…” he heard himself ask, much to his own surprise, because he could have sworn that the first hint of heading back to that blessedly familiar squat little box of the Triumph would have had him a faint dust trail on the horizon.
“I’ll make a call when we get back.”
They walked in silence. Shadows moved in the dark, but in every case it proved to be only a rabbit or a mouse out foraging. The downward slope slowly levelled out to level and, after scaling the metal gate he dimly remembered from a lifetime ago, grass gave way to asphalt once more soon after.
As the Triumph wound its way through the country lanes, Belfast coming closer with every bend and with it the sights and smells of home, he watched the countryside
blur past outside that thin pane of glass and knew the world would never be the same again.
“You don’t have to follow me, son.”
The words were spoken softly. He’d thought his father considered him asleep; apparently not. He turned to look at him and James Morrigan spared his son a quick glance over before going back to the business at hand of navigating the winding country lanes. “It’s a lot to take in. A lot to deal with. Maybe too much. You’re only fourteen for fucks sake. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you…”
Dead eyes. Dead eyes staring at him. Why am I dead? And he realised, they weren’t angry at him for being alive; they were angry at him for not stopping their deaths in the first place.
“I’m with you,” he said. “We have to stop them, Da. It’s like you said. We have a purpose. That’s more than can be said for a lot of people.”
James smiled and nodded, and Tony imagined for a moment he could see – no. His Da had only ever cried once, and that had been at Granda Joe’s funeral when he’d been only little.
Granda Joe. Had he been a Morrigan too? He supposed so. Had he taken James as a boy out somewhere and broken him into this world as he’d just been? Had he told him the story of the prophecy.
He blinked. The prophecy…
“Dad…why did you say about being sure the prophecy didn’t apply to me? And hoping it wasn’t my son?” he asked.
James shifted in his seat. “You don’t forget much, do ye,” he said. “Because, son…the part of the prophecy that says he’d have to endure more than any of us…includes losing their Da. Not seeing him for ten years. And believe me, son, that’s just for starters. Whoever it is, he’ll have to go through hell…and I’m not talkin figures of speech here. I’m talking about things that would make what we saw back there on the mountain look tame.”
The Triumph wound on for some time as Tony tried to find the strength to reply, and found that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He knew only that he would try help his Da stop whatever it was they were planning. Perhaps it was the first reflowering of the arrogance of youth after the system shock of seeing those corpses, but he permitted himself a moment of confidence.
After all, this wasn’t ancient times. This was 1968.
What could they possibly do that would be so terrible?
**
Co. Wexford, Ireland, 43 AD
“Bres.”
Bres stepped forward and threw open his arms and let loose with a fulsome and hearty laugh. He was a handsome fucker, Danny had to concede that much. If he’d been about in modern times he’d have expected to see him coming out of a pool shaded in blue and advertising aftershave.
On behalf of all men who’d never been given the once-over by a lust-struck female (however drunk) even once, Danny had no hesitation in commencing an immense dislike of this dickhead.
“The Morrigan!” Bres boomed. “Upon my life! This is a blessed day indeed that I should uncover the greatest of our wandering number through sheer good fortune!”
Standing there, still covered in dirt and grime and spattered Formorian blood, the contrast between the Morrigan and her Tuatha brethren couldn’t have possibly been starker. She looked much more like the filthy, shellshocked humans in whose company she stood. The villagers themselves remained huddled together.
None of them looked on the Tuatha with the sort of regard you’d associate with rescued people appreciating their new saviours. The children shivered violently against the parents or adults that had survived the Formorian ambush. The adults watched the Tuatha warily, their eyes flicking between Bres and the Morrigan.
Could they even understand what Bres was saying? After all, it was surely only thanks to the older Morrigan’s presence that he had a clue what was going on in the exchanges thus far.
“Fortune, Bres?” the Morrigan replied, forming her words slowly and deliberately. “Was that how you found me?”
Bres looked so astonished you’d have thought he’d had just been told antlers had sprouted from his testicles. “Of course!” he said. “We had heard rumours of a rogue band of Formorians roaming the coast, descending upon human settlements and butchering them. As King of the Tuatha and as Regent of the Formorians, I could not permit this to continue.”
The bastard was lying through his teeth. Danny’s fists itched and he found himself wishing very much he could corporealise himself right here and now and plant a big one right in the spoofing bastard’s mouth.
Bres frowned. So did the younger Morrigan. Their heads turned toward where Danny stood-
-and the older Morrigan’s hand settled softly on his shoulder, as gently as an autumn leaf fluttering to the ground.
The moment passed. Bres and the Morrigan went back to staring at each other.
“Don’t,” the older Morrigan whispered in his ear. She was close again, closer than she’d been since that initial vision of the beach landings, and again he felt a tickle of pleasure wind through his nervous system.
“I thought this was just a vision…”
“Not quite,” was all she would say in response.
“But-“
“Sssh…”
He obeyed, wondering as he did so how much of him had an actual say in complying with her command.
“Regent of the Formorians?” the younger Morrigan was saying.
“Much has changed since you have been gone.”
“And much,” she replied acidly, “has stayed the same.”
“But not you,” he countered. “You have changed, Morrigan…” and he gestured with an arm to the two children she still shielded behind her. Children who, unlike the remainder of the villagers, did not seem to be regarding the Tuatha with fear written in their faces, but rather with awe. “You have changed. Goddess of War! Harbinger of Death! Living Weapon! Wielder of the Spear of Destiny!”
He paused. His words echoed off the mud huts of the humble village in which they stood, and Danny got the impression that even if the humans couldn’t understand what he was saying, they were getting the gist of it – particularly after witnessing her distinctly inhuman performance against Skull Ring.
“Now, look at you,” he said. “Washerwoman? Wife? Mother? Tell me, Morrigan, Eternal Harbinger of Doom, Triple Warrior Goddess…do you make a good vegetable broth?”
The rest of the Tuatha dissolved into laughter at this.
Danny exhaled. “Please let me smack that bastard,” he said softly.
“Very bad idea,” her voice whispered back, though he could detect an undercurrent of amusement, and, unless he was reading too much into it, a certain level of gratitude.
“I have accepted this life,” her younger counterpart clipped. Danny could tell she had burned very brightly at the laughter directed at her, from warriors who once would have counted her their unquestioned superior. Their idol.
“Have you?” Bres shot back. “You seem to have retained your Tuatha abilities, for all your acceptance of humanity, Morrigan! Or does every human woman possess the power to kill a Formorian warlord?!”
“You might be surprised.”
Her eyes were blazing now with fury and Danny thought for a long moment she was about to leap, to strike at Bres. He wondered how the other Tuatha would react if that happened, and saw the younger Morrigan’s eyes flit for the briefest of moments to the warrior party herself. She was wondering the same thing. Her attention turned to the terrified huddle of humans. If the warriors didn’t react well, what for them? They wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Indeed,” Bres returned, looking at the ragtag bunch of humans with undisguised contempt.
“What,” she said, each word a conscious effort, “do you want, Bres?”
“Want?” he frowned that perfect forehead of his and it produced nary a crease, to Danny’s annoyance. “Morrigan, I want nothing. I have found you by happy chance, and I would not presume to give you an order, though I may be your King…”
“No,” she said quietly, “you are not my King.”<
br />
Bres stiffened. His warriors did the same. Danny felt his pulse quicken. The atmosphere had darkened, thickened; he saw the warriors shift their stance from fairly relaxed and at ease to one of battle readiness. Hands went to sword hilts, tightened around spears. Shields were lifted.
Amongst the watching humans, women held children tightly and the men on the outside of the rough circle pressed further inward, drawing the circle closer together. The Morrigan didn’t miss any of this of course, but neither did she react.
“You are correct,” Bres said, to Danny’s surprise. “Since you chose to leave us, I cannot claim to be. That is a shame, Morrigan. I will not deny that I want you to return to us. We face trials ahead; the soothsayers are certain of it. You are the mightiest of us.”
“I will not return.”
“Then you will have to give up your powers. That is our law. You know it must be done.”
Her shoulders slumped at this, but the light of defiance in her eyes remained. “I will,” she replied firmly. “I will renounce them. I will live as a human. I have a life here.”
“A happy one?”
“Yes,” she shot back. “Yes, a happy one. I wash clothes and I make soup and I do not rush off to war and kill thirty men with one stroke. I do not have sex with our generals on the eve of battle to ensure our victories. I have sex with my husband for no other reason than I want to feel him above me, inside me, and I want to fall asleep on him when we are done and be content in that moment. I never knew that as the Tuatha War Goddess.”
“Humans have no magic.”
“Yes they do,” she said softly. “Oh yes, they do.”
Danny found to his utter amazement that at some point during the last few moments, without fuss or drama, he had started crying. Hot tears rolled unbidden down his face and he was perversely glad to be immaterial and ghostlike; he had never cried in public before, but by God he was doing so now.
The longing for his little boy, his Luke, and his Ellie, which had seemed pressing before, was now so raw, so primal that he simply couldn’t stop the tears from coming.
Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 16