Magonia(13)

Jason snorts.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t read the Annals.”
“I’ve read them.” I lie, because maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. I cough, part fake. I don’t know why I’d even try to lie to Jason. When someone hangs out with you every day since you were five, they pretty much know what you’ve read, and they definitely know when you’re emergency-skimming internet synopses beneath the kitchen table.
The Annals of Ulster are Irish histories, according to the wikis.
“No one’s read the Annals of Ulster. But I studied the relevant sections today. Mass hallucinations. About seven forty-eight AD, there’s this: ‘Ships with their crews were seen in the air.’ Does that ring any bells? Anything at all?”
Nope, nothing. He goes into his favorite mode, fast-talking, clipped words, robot boy.
“Basics. Not the Annals, but part of the same story. Eight thirty or so AD. France.” He grand-gesture sketches out the date and place in the air with his hand, subtitling his documentary. “This Archbishop of Lyons reports four messed-up people in his town, three guys, one woman, insisting they fell out of the sky. Fell from ships. In. The. Sky. Are you hearing me?”
I’m hearing him. So hearing. I pretend I’m not.
“The bishop goes to a public meeting where these four are in the stocks—”
I interrupt.
“Do not tell me you’re doing the universal hand gesture for ‘in the stocks,’ because that doesn’t exist, no matter how hard you just tried to make it a thing.”
He has the grace to blush and remove his hands (and the precariously tilting bowl of éclair filling) from “dude trapped in the stocks” position.
“—and getting screamed at for being crop thieves. They’ve been dumb enough to claim they’ve been stealing crops from earth using little sky-launch boats. The people in the town agree with the idea that they’re crop thieves, because, duh, they’re having harvest problems anyway.”
I am so annoyed at the randomness of Jason Kerwin. He’s a mutant memorizer. He has no apologies for that, and never has.
“MAGONIA, they say—all of them. We fell out of Magonia. People in town start to freak out.”
Jason whisks the filling so hard some of it splatters on the fridge.
“Then what?” I ask.

“Yeah, so I can’t remember if the Magonians ultimately got hanged for being witches, or if they got run out of town, but I doubt it was a fantastic outcome for them, given that they’d already said they didn’t belong on earth and wanted to go home with all the village’s corn.”
“Jason,” I say eventually. “You are Not Relevant.”
“All I’m saying is, if you’re hallucinating, you’re hallucinating in an old tradition,” he says. “Congratulations on the quality of your visions. Want more Magonia?”
“Nope,” I say. “I want chocolate.”
I can’t believe I didn’t know everything about this Magonia stuff already. It’s totally my kind of thing.
“Maganwetar. That’s Old High German for ‘whirlwind.’”
“Jason,” I say.
“Calm down. I don’t speak Old High German,” he says.
“You’d better not,” I tell him. “Because that would be a big lie. The secret learning of Old High German without me.”
There’s no shaming him.
“Some people think that’s where the word Magonia comes from. If you’re from Magonia, then, you live in a whirlwind. That’s what Jacob Grimm says, the same guy who wrote the fairy tales. He also says that it might refer to magicians, like magoi, Greek, hence Magonia would mean ‘Land of Magicians.’ I prefer whirlwind. Plus, a land of magicians would be boring, because the whole point of magic is that not everyone can do it. Otherwise it’s just normal life. It’d be, basically, Land of Mechanics.”
I’m head down in my phone. There. Some archbishop named Agobard grumbling about how the people in his town believed hail and lightning were made by storm-makers in the sky.
“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. . . .”
I look up from my phone. “So Magonians are crop thieves?”
Jason is smug. “I don’t care about crop circles, but you know how the UFO people are. Are you at Gervase of Tilbury yet?”
No. I’m scrolling through reams of Irish history. Things about anchors being thrown from cloud ships.
“I’m in Annals of Ulster now,” I say and sigh, because of course he doesn’t have just one reference. Even his text messages come with footnotes.
“Gervase tells a story about how a whole bunch of people come out of church one day. They see an anchor drop out of the clouds and get stuck in a rock in front of the church. A moment later, a sailor comes swimming through the air, and down the anchor rope, trying to untangle it. How awesome, please, is that?”