An Audience at the Cumberlisheen Regional Historical Society, 19th August 2018, 4:12pm

I ruled as far as the eye could see, providing you didn’t stand on any hills. From my people’s ringfort above the confluence of waters, I succored my beloved subjects and scourged my—

“Oh mom, look at this! Gross!”

Listen here, kid. Like you’ll look any better after two millennia, presuming you survive that long. I’m one of the lucky ones, you know. Actually, I prefer to think of myself as divinely chosen, spared from shifting tectonic plates and oxygen-rich environments to serve greater purposes. In some respects, I’m more powerful than your superheroes, even if my muscle tissue has atrophied and I’m trapped under glass, displayed with iron tools I never even saw whilst I lived. You’re referring to me, aren’t you? I can’t exactly turn my head here.

“Is that a real person?”

Yes, reading is a stretch for you people. The plaque on my display case defines me as “Linfield Man—Bog Body, c. 2^nd century BCE,” but I’m so much more than mere labels. For one, cast your eye on my full, lustrous hair. Two thousand years buried in rotting sphagnum moss turned it crimson; I’d say it’s one of the few upgrades to my condition. Moreover, I was a king, and you can’t take that sort of thing away. A “minor” king according to this august institution, but how would they know? You think my people interred me with all of my hammered gold bracelets as the gods demanded, or pocketed some for themselves? Devoutly worshipping Dagda, my leathery a—

“But why did they kill him?”

You children don’t appreciate the philosophical advances of my descendants. You think I wouldn’t have scribbled down a law or two if I’d a written language? Something like “thou shalt not snuff the king if the barley doesn’t come in” would’ve been lovely. A sacrifice to the water gods, I’ve got the defensive wounds to prove it, and I still have the stakes used to pin me to the bottom of the bog keeping me company in here. But those treasonous bastards got theirs—they forgot that sacrificing your king to the spirits turns him into a spirit, and I turned off the rain for years. Years! At least a year. Or I think I did; I practically radiated hate from the bottom of that bog.

“But why would they hurt their friend?”

Ha! Friend. Pray to your gods that your friends never strip you naked and drag a dull blade across your neck. That they never follow a supercilious priest who diligently served your regal father through lean years but jumped at the first chance to scapegoat you, and that your faithful subjects never get it into their skulls that they’d prefer to keep the tribute you demanded from their barren fields. It’s then that your royal furs are torn from your inviolable carcass, all your bits exposed as you bleed out at the edge of a bog, your dear friends’ eyes finally seeing your too-mortal body as they approach for the finishing blow.

“So he’s not as old as the deer?”

No, I’m not as old as the Dagda-damned elk. Had you listened to your mother earlier, you’d know that big idiot was found underneath me. A purely ancillary discovery! I was in the bog because my people deliberately placed me there; that hoofed ignoramus sank into the pre-bog mud five thousand years earlier looking for a drink. And now everyone wants to see a brainless animal instead of an honest-to-goodness king.

“Can we see the deer again?”

The Irish elk is also known as megaloceros giganteus, according to the staff who know at least two more languages than you or me, and to whose idle chat I owe all of my knowledge about the current nation that arose around my bog. And the Irish elk drives me as insane as one can be in a glass-and-polished-wood, climate-controlled case. He’s all browned bones and antlers on a pedestal at the entrance, whilst I crumble back here with my golden skin and one open eye that you could see if you weren’t asking your mother asinine questions. Look at my unpilfered bracelets, at least, if you won’t take a straight-on look at one of your betters.

“Well, can we go to the gift shop?”

Bored, eh? Your mother looks like one of my new kingdom’s guests who read every word of every sign. What, she takes pictures of them, too? Sure, I almost pity you, walking around and gawking at me and breathing. I bet you’ll never raid villages at sword-point or receive tributes of oats from the grumbling unanointed.

“I have to pee.”

Wait! Not yet! Maybe I can give you a wink with my good eye. I’ve spent 57 years back above ground failing to get a response from these withered extremities, but lately, if I concentrate, I can almost feel—

“Mom! Mom! His eye fell off! It’s right there!”

It’s come to this, then. Ah, to be one of my treacherous farming clan, gone gracefully into the afterlife without a trace. Yes, yes, go with your mother and inform a docent; maybe they’ll wedge it back into the socket, or perhaps it’ll get its own display case. At best, I’ll get a new layer of dust on the one pane of my little world that I can see through. Or could; that eyeball is iris-down.

When I’m alone here, it’s almost like I’m back in the bog. The loneliness of the first few centuries would’ve killed me if I weren’t already dead. You feel what little warmth trickles through the surface as each planting season returns. Eventually you feel the tremors of your progeny’s progeny’s machinery as they invent it and destroy it and rebuild it. But in this other loneliness, where you’re exposed to the hoi polloi, you start to forgive those who were delighted to shut your mouth and keep the meager fruit of their fields, and you begin to value the brief attention of a common—

“Whoa, come look at this guy’s dick!”

Oh, fuck off.