Chapter 1: Depression

The crowd in the stadium were creating an intense atmosphere, the noise of fifty thousand Scotsmen cheering on their football team when they're in full flight is quite awesome, raw, almost animalistic. Saltire and Lion Rampant flags, tartan scarves were everywhere and the very rafters holding on the roof of the stadium were being tested.

One figure in the crowd was particularly vocal as Scotland bore down on the goal-mouth again; the ball was slipped inside the box into the path of the striker.

"Come Scotland get into these Norse bastards!" The figure screamed.

On the pitch the Scottish striker slammed the ball into the net and the crowd went absolutely berserk. 2-0 Scotland against Denmark. Scotland ran out eventual 3-1 winners and by the time the crowd was streaming through the gates they were singing their victory songs very happily indeed.

The highly vocal figure was now quiet as he trudged out of Hampden Stadium. He seemed to have been feeding off of the noise and atmosphere during the match but now his shoulders were slumped and there was a haunted look on his face, a fey look in his eyes.

Physically and outwardly, Scott MacDonald looked like a normal man but inside his head there were demons at work, demons that were beginning to eat away at his very sanity. Of all the thousands streaming from the stadium it's a safe bet that Scott was the only one who had actually fought against and killed Danes on many occasions.

Scott had somehow been thrown back in time to ninth century Scotland and that period was one of Scotland's bloodiest, with the twin threats of Norse and Saxon invaders on top of savage and brutal Scots lords to contend with. He had lived there for six years, establishing himself as a shrewd tactician and winning battles against both the Danes and the English. He had many memories of his time in the sub-Kingdom of Dalriada and that's what was eating him up.

On the night of the birth of his second son, Crinan, he had tried to find a quiet place to reason through the introduction of a new innovation. He had remembered how to make gunpowder but was torn about introducing its destructive qualities into ninth century Scotland. The camp where he lived, Inveraray, was in the middle of celebrating the St Andrew's day holiday and there were no quiet corners where he could find the space to think.

Pitching his original tent from the twenty first century he had at last found some quiet time, and had finally decided that he would introduce gunpowder, when whatever it was that controlled his push back in time, cruelly struck to return him to 2007 AD.

He left behind his wives, his children and the friends who had shared the battlefield with him, who had put their lives on the line to help their people and lands.

Scott was shattered, his life felt as if it had come to a juddering halt. He had trawled on-line to find evidence of his presence in the ninth century, for signs that his introduction of innovations that were far ahead of their time had changed Scotland's history. He found nothing. He had visited all of the sites where Dalriada had settlements and could find no trace of his past existence there.

He was slipping deeper and deeper into depression and couldn't find a way of halting it. His attendance at today's football match had momentarily brought back the adrenaline rush of some of it, but he realised that had been illusory, this was no substitute for what he had been through.

Turning a corner he found himself in the midst of a group of Danish supporters, obviously drunk and riotous, despite their team's defeat. There were perhaps forty of them, many wearing 'comedy' horned helmets to show they were Vikings and they were chanting in their own language. Scott found himself reaching for a non-existent sword and realised he needed to get a grip of himself. He wasn't in the ninth century, these Danes weren't intent on raping and pillaging - more's the pity, as he would gladly have taken his chances against so many if that meant he was somehow back there.

Several hours later he was nursing a beer in a Glasgow bar, his head still 'tripping' between the Scotland of 2008 AD now and of the ninth century. He stood to make his way to the toilets and found his way barred by three men in their early twenties.

"Who are you fucking looking at?" Menaced one.

Another of the men poked his finger into Scott's chest.

"Are you looking for trouble ya ugly bastard?" Said the third.

For perhaps the first time in months, Scott's mind focussed. He thought clearly and found it was strange how in modern times confrontation was typified by talk, verbal threats, pushing. It was almost like being back in the school playground where there had been a 'you start it, no you start it' kind of childish approach to starting a fight.

All this went through his mind in a split second and he had no conscious thought of what he was actually doing, but his knee rammed into the groin of the man directly in front of him, viciously smashing the man's balls up into his body. As he started to fall, Scott could clearly see the surprise on the faces of the other two and he also watched abstractly as his right arm swung upwards, his beer bottle in his hand. The bottle caught the man on the left of him on the side of his face and head, but the glass didn't break. He turned to the third man who was now backing off, his hands up in front of him, palms out in a gesture of surrender.

Scott dropped the bottle and walked quickly out of the bar, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one was following. His realised now that he was breathing heavily, but wasn't nervous, rather he felt elated. He quickly flagged a taxi and returned to his flat as quickly as he could, letting himself in and collapsing on the sofa.

"What the hell was that!" He thought to himself.

He couldn't avoid the conclusion that he had welcomed the opportunity to release some of the anger that had been building up inside of him. Neither could he fail to see that his experiences during his six years in Dalriada had made him react to situations like this with a very strong survival instinct. He was overmatched against these guys, they just weren't used to such savagery and easy adoption of violence, weren't ready for it. Not for the first time in the past few months Scott realised he had grown out of this time, he didn't belong here anymore.

He let his head fall forward until his chin rested on his chest and let his tears roll down. These were tears of frustration, of loss, of desperation.

"You owe your people more than this my Lord!" He heard a little echo in his head. These were Gabrain's words to him when he had been struggling to come to terms with the death of his first wife - Kirsty - and their little angel of a daughter - Tina. The words came back to him now.

"You need to remember you are a lord and should be setting an example. All of these people have suffered too and they deserve more from you than this."

Scott realised the words were equally apt for what he was going through now. For perhaps the first time he considered what his wives and friends were feeling about his loss rather than focussing on his own position. The words hit him hard. They combined with the feeling of alienation towards the current world he was in and forced him to some kind of decision point in his head.

"Aye Gabrain, you have the rights of it as usual. I owe people more than I'm currently giving them. Instead of wallowing in self-pity I need to set about solving the riddle of what has happened and get back to you all if I can." He said this out loud and it was if a curtain was pulled back in his head to let in the light, as if the fog of depression was at last starting to lift. Scott felt better than he had in months, focussed with a goal to work towards.

He started immediately, almost like old times he thought as he sat on the sofa with a pad of paper and a pen. He was smart, educated to degree level; he needed to start using his brains a bit better. For the past few months he had been blundering around in panic, looking everywhere but with no clear thought behind what he was doing. Now he resolved he would do better. Gabrain was right; he owed it to all of them to perform better than he had been.

He started with a 'brainstorm' of everything he knew about his push back in time and his return. He also wrote down all of the things about Dalriada he could remember. Finally he wrote down two strands of investigation - first of all figure out how the time travel worked, but secondly, think about things he might take back with him if he found a way.

When he looked at the clock he was stunned to find he had worked at this for four hours without a break. That knowledge allowed his brain to tell him his body was exhausted and he needed to rest. Despite the feeling that he couldn't afford the time to sleep, Scott knew this would be false economy - he needed rest to help him keep thinking straight - so he crawled into his bed and was quickly out like a light.

The next morning he awoke refreshed and still had the sense of focus that had settled on him when he had recalled Gabrain's words. He settled himself in front of his computer and started a more systematic search of historical records. His notes from the night before on what he remembered about Dalriada now helped him search for even the smallest thing that could be significant.

He researched education, fishing, old weapon finds even the history of available foodstuffs in Scotland. He looked into the expected life of concrete before it began to degrade. He scoured the most obscure websites for information on Scotland's nautical capabilities and he pored over ancient scrolls he pulled up from the National Archives of Scotland website, which detailed what records had been recovered throughout history.

Still he could find nothing, not a single scrap of evidence that he had been in the ninth century and that his innovations had changed the course of events. He left the computer and sat on the sofa with his trusty notepad. Scott began to think about possible explanations for the lack of evidence

It was possible that his innovations hadn't left any lasting legacy, but he didn't want to dwell on how that could have happened. Such an explanation would need to be based on almost the entire population of Dalriada, Fife, Ayrshire and Galloway being wiped out so that his ideas weren't carried forward through time. His more permanent ideas like concrete could have degenerated in the eleven hundred years that had passed, but he wasn't willing to accept the whole-scale slaughter that underpinned such a theory

Was it possible that his twenty-first century understanding of the world and history was too narrow to explain things? He returned to his computer and began to search for alternative explanations. In no time at all he was looking at reams of material on such theories as multiverse - popularised by the sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock, but which seemed to have some basis in cosmology, and physics. Then there was the many-worlds interpretation or MWI. This suggested that rather than a single 'world-line' of history there was a possibility that history was rather a many-branched tree where every possible branch of history could be realised. This was further refined into the relative state formulation by some guy call Hugh Everett and popularised by Bryce Seligman DeWitt.