Free The Lost Ark by J.R. Rain

stepped into a fantasy land created by Tolkien. My tongue felt fat and sticky—the brutal reality of this world. I stopped in the middle of the grassy field and removed my backpack. Faye did the same and we both drank eagerly.
    As we did so, a distant figure emerged from the fog. Seconds later, the figure proved to be a man. He stumbled once, but held himself up with a long wooden staff. He was dressed in a tattered robe. I could see blood on the cleaner parts of his robe.
    Faye pressed against me; the feeling of closeness was not unpleasant, and her need for comfort was surprisingly appealing to me. “He’s a shepherd,” I said. “And, like us, he’s trespassing.”
    The shepherd paused, swayed on his feet, and then fell forward.
    * * *
    He lay face-down, torn robe spread around him like broken angel wings. I carefully rolled him over. Faye gasped. His nose was broken and swollen and split from side to side. Blood poured from his nostrils and into his gray beard. His equally gray hair was caked with blood. He could have been seventy years old, and in those seventy years he surely had seen better days.
    “What happened?” Faye asked, dropping to her knees.
    I shook my head. “Could have taken a fall, or been caught in a rock slide. A few years back, an American astronaut was struck by such a falling rock. When they found him, he looked similar to this.”
    Faye reached under his head and lifted it and poured water over his puffed and cracked lips, washing away some of the blood and exposing more deep wounds around his mouth. The old man opened his brown eyes for the first time and tried to sit up but Faye held him down.
    He drank more water, then spoke for the first time, a rambling stream of nomadic Kurdish. When finished, I responded in the same language.
    “What did he say?” said Faye eagerly. “What did you say?”
    “His name is Makmur, and he knows of me. The great white guide , as I’m known to his people. I said I knew of him as well, a dedicated shepherd and respected patriarch.”
    “Is that true?”
    “The great white guide business?” I shrugged modestly.
    “No, Sam Ward. Have you heard of him?”
    “Of course not. I was being courteous. It was expected of me.”
    Makmur’s eyes flicked to Faye, and the old man spoke again: “He says you must be an angel, because surely he has died and gone to Heaven.”
    Faye Roberts blushed. I didn’t know she had it in her. “Spunky little devil,” she said. “Tell him that’s the oldest line in the book.”
    I did. “He also says you would make a fine shepherd’s wife, and he has a grandson available.”
    “Remind him that he’s too injured to play matchmaker.”
    Sheet lightning flashed, illuminating the dark underbelly of the storm clouds. The old man spoke in a long rambling stream and I translated between his many pauses: “He says he has a right to live and work and eat off the mountain just as his father did before him, and his father’s father before him, etc., etc. He was beaten as a warning for others to stay away.”
    “Who beat him?”
    “Soldiers.”
    We were silent. Makmur’s breathing became increasingly labored. Blood bubbled from his lips, mixed with saliva. The rain came down steadily. The rain somehow made the setting even more forlorn.
    Faye asked, “Has he seen my father?”
    I repeated her question and the old man responded: “There were two men, foreigners, above the Gorge. That was a month or two ago. But he does not know who they were or why they were here.”
    Faye closed her eyes and seemed to pray a silent prayer. Meanwhile, I opened Makmur’s robe. There was a pool of blood spreading like a disease under the paper-thin skin of his abdomen. Internal bleeding. His ribs were broken, and maybe also a punctured lung, judging by his ragged breathing. Faye held his head in her lap as the wind and rain swept over us. We bundled the old man back up and sat with him until he died. His last breath was extraordinarily long,