First Rays of the New Rising Sun

A short story

Hey Outrageous Fortune readers. Here’s a change for you. This is a short story I wrote that I’ve been thinking of posting for quite a while. After a lot of editing, I feel it’s good enough to post now! We will be back to our regular non-fiction posting later this week. Enjoy.

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The sun was rising again in Macedonia. It was six o’clock at the villa. The crew was hurrying around, putting our sandwiches into coolers and throwing them in the trunks. Trowels, brushes, measuring tapes, shovels, pickaxes, the GPR, and a hundred other little things we would need for the day. The air was cool on my skin this early in the day. “Yo, we’re leaving now,” said Decho from across the villa. “Sounds good. I’ll ride with you.” We talked as we walked over to Nick’s car. He drove out with the others following.

Nick grew up in southern California, a son of Macedonian immigrants. He started working in construction, and quickly transitioned to archaeology. 30 years later, he had traveled the world, created his own company, and now ran a field school for his local university. He was serious, decisive, the most industrious man I knew. He was the inverse of a hippie, concerned with the immediate and the productive. He had no ear for music. He had no interest in abstractions. But he was good at physical labour, and even better at management. He also snorted when he laughed, which was often, and I always found that endearing.

Decho was his only son, given a local name to the delight of the Macedonians who worked with us. I became good friends with Decho last summer. He was very different from his father. Sharp, funny, he was my best friend in this country.

Decho and his dad drove on through Bitola. People were tired so no one talked. And Nick was driving so there was no music either. So I looked out the window at a salad of architectural styles.

By now we were out of the city. We had rounded the mountain chain to the north, and now we drove straight south across the flat land of the valley. “Look, you can see the site,” said Decho. I pressed my face to the window trying to get a look. Then I saw it. Almost hidden amongst the mountains was an oddly flat ledge hanging onto the mountain’s face. God doesn’t draw in straight lines, I thought. I had spent all of last summer on that little defiance of nature. I tapped my foot quickly and stared out at the site as we drove towards it.

We drove past the schoolhouse, past the wooden bridge with the narrow little planks, and into the small town of Crnobuki. I stepped out onto sun-baked dirt and a cloud of dust floated around my legs. I tossed my jacket back into the car. It was too hot for that.

I walked away from the car, sat myself down in the shade, and waited for the Macedonian crew. They were always late last summer. That hadn’t changed. It had been so long since I saw them.

I had a nice pair of brown cargo pants that I had thrifted just for this back in California. I had a little glass bottle of coke in my thigh pocket. I liked how the red label popped against the colour of my pants. I drank the coke many days ago, now it was just my little water bottle. I pulled it out and took a drink. It was only 7:30 AM. It felt good to be back, life was still as simple and quiet as the year before.

The grass was drier this year. It had been a bright green this time last June. Now it looked like the hills of the Bay Area in September. But those hills weren’t brown, and neither were these. It was more like yellow and gold, pleasantly mixed. If you could see warmth, it would be that colour. I stared at the familiar landscape. A thousand yellow blades swayed as the wind gently led it about. And then the wind changed and they all leaned to the east. I watched this for a little while, little Balkan dancers on the side of the hill, waving in the sunlight to the rhythm of the wind.

I heard something in the distance. It was quiet for a long time, and then all at once I jumped up and heard the cars tumbling across the little wooden bridge. Three cars burst into the little village.

Dust clouds tossed and whirled around, and the cars came to a stop. There was that familiar salmon pink Lada Niva. It had been bought brand new in 1997, back when the Yugoslavian government had been open-handed with grant money for archaeology departments. More than 20 years later, it was still the department's only field vehicle.

A dozen workers and archaeologists stepped out into the dry heat. I got up and eagerly hurried over towards the Niva. “Slobodon!” I said. I gave him a big hug, but he gave me one bigger. Slobodan was at least 6’4 and looked like a bear. “Buddy! How have you been?” He had some of the best English of any of the Macedonian workers. “I’m glad to be back.” I smiled. Decho was by my side and Slobodon gave him a hug. He shook Nick’s hand. I saw Nikolai just then, and walked straight over and gave him a big hug too. The Americans and Macedonians were all chattering and embracing. I met a couple of new workers that weren’t there last summer. I saw Ingun too, the boss of this whole operation. He was a tired old man, who got his water from beer and wore a ripped up sky-blue baseball cap over his head. I hugged him, smelling cigarettes. He smoked at least a pack a day. He had soft, hazel eyes, a kind, content face, with black hair and a scruffy gray beard. His skin was wrinkled and tanned from decades under the Mediterranean sun. “I am glad you came back” There was that nice smile again. It came easy in this country.

“Alright, time to go up. Who’s bringing what?” Nick shouted. Everyone began rushing around, picking up this and that. Last summer, I always brought up the sandwiches and the water. For close to 20 people, it was heavy, but I liked the routine of it. I always knew what I was bringing up every morning. So I grabbed the cooler and started up the hill. The group passed a church tower made of stone. It was small, and old. A dog slept on the floor. It looked very cool inside.

Around the dog, broken pottery littered the floor. My hands rested on my backpack straps. I turned around and realized Ingun had fallen behind everyone. I waited for him and let the rest walk ahead, catching a breath for myself. My back had already dampened my shirt.

The two of us passed over a ridge, and, as we ascended the hill, I noticed a herd of sheep. There was a shepherd. He wore Nike flip-flops and an Adidas jacket. Like Ingun he was old and wrinkled, and talked quietly to another man next to him.

The sheep were very dark, dirty, and skinny. They had recently been shaved. Three or four sheepdogs solemnly watched the slopes. Almost all of them were limping. Each time a hoof touched the ground they quickly jerked it up. Ingun said something in Macedonian but he could tell by my face I had no clue what he said. So he lifted his shoe up and pointed it at with a pained expression on his face. I nodded. Hoof disease I guessed. The shepherds couldn’t have afforded antibiotics for the whole herd.

As we made the trek up the spine of the hill, I looked around at all the new and familiar faces. It was such a colourful crew, full of green and bright orange shirts, brown sun hats and dark green pants. I stuck myself by Ingun, Slobodon and Nick, who I knew were about to decide how to split the crew. Last year, we all worked on the top. The site was a two thousand-year-old defensive fort built by locals to defend against Macedonian invasion. Then the Macedonians invaded, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Huns, then the Slavs, it went on, as history does in the Balkans. The last day of the dig last summer they had found a Mongolian arrowhead, lodged in one of the basement walls. These stone basements stretched on for miles across the hilltop. Only a fraction of the basements had been dug up. With their funding situation, they would uncover only a fraction more.

Ingun had a premonition this upjumped city had a theatre of its own. Last summer, we had found a small silver coin, with a seat number on the back. A silver ticket. And they had noticed a suspiciously bowl-shaped depression on the side of the hill, with a long flat area in front of it.

“So who’s working on the theatre?” Nick asked, cigarette in his mouth. He only smoked in foreign countries.

“I’ll go if Decho goes,” I said immediately. Decho smiled.

“Decided. Who else?”said Nick.

“Danny and I will come too,” said Slobodon. Danny was a new worker, I didn’t know him.

Nikolai raised his hand. “I’d like to come too”

Ingun said something in Macedonian to Slobodon.

Slobodon turned to Nick and said “Ingun will stay by the theatre with us,” he paused to find the right word, “to help direct”.

“The supposed theatre,” Decho whispered under his breath.

Nick put a thumbs up. “Sounds great, but would Ingun mind if I took Nikolai with me? Most of my crew need someone to teach them how you do things around here,”

Slobodon told Ingun and he waved his hand. “Fine, fine”. I could feel the cooler bringing my body down on my right side, so I switched to my left. We still had a long way to go to the top.

Our new crew peeled off from the rest while they hiked up to last summer’s site. I rushed over for the last few seconds to drop the cooler off. But the grass had been flattened and made slippery by footsteps. I almost fell but caught myself.

I set the cooler down and winced as I felt the weight come off of my hand. I wiped some sweat off my forehead and opened it up. I took out a 2 litre of water and poured it into my coke bottle. I took a long sip, it was deliciously cold. The crew set up our tools and a tent for shade.

I caught my breath before I began work for the day. In early morning, before it got hot, the air was quite pleasant, and the view was lovely. The grassy hill was free of trees, so Nikolai could see all the way to the tall mountains of central Macedonia. So high they still had snow in June. And between those snow-capped mountains and my hill, was a valley peppered with windmills, churches, and villages, nestled against mountain slopes, and hundreds of farms of yellow, purple, and golden orange wheat, rye, maize, oats, vineyards and olive tree orchards.

I gazed across to the end of the valley, where my eyes met the twin towers of the coal power plant. Both a market and a political failure, the Greeks had built it right on the border so that the prevailing winds would carry the filthy haze into Macedonia instead of Greece. My eyes then finally drifted up and over the mountain peaks, noticing a subtle darkness in the sky. Behind them, far behind the mountains, the sky was the colour of a wine stain. The wind blew North-South, I felt it tugging a bit on my shirt. I finally picked up a shovel, and got to work. I knew they would be getting off work early today.

An hour had passed. It was much hotter. Ingun was sitting in his foldable chair, watching us work. “No hold it like that, hold it like this, better for back” he would say to me. He would get up and take the shovel from me and show me. Danny had uncovered a large stone 20 minutes earlier, and Ingun had known right away that it belonged to something larger. 20 minutes later, I was looking down at a row of stones, maybe a wall, maybe seats for a theatre. Sometimes I felt like Ingun had already dug up everything there was to see on the Earth, and his job was just remembering where everything was.

I kept hacking away at the soil. Sweat dripped off my forehead and darkened the dry dirt below me. I stepped out of the hole we had dug and slammed my pickaxe into the ground. I liked the way the pickaxe sunk into the soil and stuck.

I pulled the coke bottle out of my pocket and drank the whole thing. Not enough. I walked over to the cooler. We had set the tent up over the dig, so I had to walk on the steeper part of the slope around it. The grass was flush and smooth, and I almost slipped again.

“Bets on this being a theatre or not?” I asked Decho. He was staring at the ground, moving the metal detector around some of the dirt I had just broken up.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, I offer you two bets, 100 bucks if my coin lands on heads, or 100 bucks if this is a theatre? Which one are you taking?” He thought for a moment.

“Okay, the theatre”.

“So you think it’s higher than 50%!”

“No, I just think it would be more exciting to win 100 from that than the coin”.

“Oh so the stakes aren’t high enough. Okay, same bet, but you gotta give me 100 if you lose”. He stared at the dirt again.

“Still picking the theatre,” he said with a smirk. He continued as he scanned the dirt for metal. “It doesn’t really matter if we find a theatre or not, but it makes for happier living to be optimistic.”

I grabbed a shovel and scraped up the dirt he had metal detected. I looked at my hands and saw blisters starting to form on my palms. I frowned and kept going anyway. I’d get gloves tomorrow, I thought.

Lunchtime. Decho and I took our sandwiches out of the cooler. But we decided we wanted to see how everything up top was going. So we began the hike up.

The wind had been growing more intense since I had first noticed the bruise colored sky beyond the mountains. Now, the whole crew had caught on. We could clearly see the unfolding of the thunderstorm, trampling over the mountains like Hannibal’s elephants. Tendrils of black and grey crept over the mountains to the east, swarming the valley like masses of dark spiders scurrying down the foothills, covering and subduing villages, farms, and rivers.

We made it to the top of the hill, and chose to ignore the storm for now. The hill was still sunny, and I wanted the tomatoes in the cooler. Slobodon had picked them fresh just yesterday from his cousin’s garden, and dropped a crate of them off in our kitchen. So I took one out and sat in the sun with Decho. I started eating it like an apple. The red juice burst from its skin onto my lips and chin. I reached over and shook Decho’s shoulder. “Decho Decho, you’ve gotta try these tomatoes I’ve never had them like this!” It was as juicy as a peach, and tangy and sweet too. Normally I found tomatoes dull and wouldn’t eat one by itself. But those were from grocery stores. I stared at it in the sun. It was beautiful. It was pastel red and firm on the outside, but the gooey interior was a deep crimson and melted in my mouth. I saw Justin eating one too. “Justin these tomatoes are crazy!” “I know, they’re the best I’ve ever had.” We were both smiling. I remembered at that point that there was feta and bread in the cooler. I darted over to pair it with the tomato. The sun and the sweat and the work were all forgotten.

We all walked back down the hill. I had a good feeling. Plus, the mystery of what lay under the dirt was still alive at this point. The winds were rising, the storm was inching closer, and the air was more humid, but we still had about an hour left, it seemed.

We got back to the tent and I grabbed the pickaxe that I had sunk into the ground. I grabbed it by the handle, and jumped into the pit we had made. I started a new line, and Decho brought the wheelbarrow over. I saw out of the corner of my eye Ingun, making his way over to us across the tent. Ingun screamed.

I dropped the pick and climbed out of the hole. Everyone had already stopped and Slobodan was beside him. He had slipped on the brown grass and was clutching his hip. He was groaning in pain, looking up at the sky. Danny tried to bring him his chair, and he tried to get up but yelled out and fell back to the ground. His face was tight and his eyes had a wild, vulnerable look.

Slobodan and Danny grabbed his arms and legs, trying to carry him over, but he screamed again and they lowered him back on the hill. He said something pained in Macedonian and Danny brought him a water bottle. He drank a couple sips and then let his head fall back on the grass. I could see sweat forming on his forehead. His eyes didn’t look so wild anymore. Someone called for some shade over his face. I didn’t know who. But I moved unconsciously towards Ingun, and took my bandana and spread it out wide a few inches over his face. That was my job for the next 30 minutes as we waited for the ambulance.

Eventually Nick came down, as well as Nikolai. “Oh shit” he said as he carefully walked over the grass on the hill. “I think he broke his hip” Slobodon said to Nick. He sighed. A gust of wind almost blew the tarp off the hill side, and a bunch of the workers rushed to grab hold of it.

Ingun had begun chain smoking to numb the pain. At one point he got a business call, and laying on the grass with a broken hip, started speaking perfectly normally. He then got 2 or three more, and smoked about half a pack in the next half hour. We all chuckled at this. The ambulance apparently takes a long time in Macedonia.

At first, there was no lightning, even when the storm had almost come over our heads. For a second there was a bright flash, followed by the noise of thunder that washed over and rolled away from us. The lightning strike had not been much farther than the base of the hill. Everyone looked around at each other nervously. Nick told Nikolai to bring the other crew down from the top of the hill immediately. We would have have left earlier, if not for Ingun.

Not a minute or two later did I finally hear the sound of an ambulance in the distance. I looked out and saw the tidy little farms spread across the valley, sewn together like a quilt of yellows and greens laid over the valley floor. Along one of the thin dirt roads I could see a furious little ambulance racing towards us like a bat out of hell, kicking up a dust cloud on its trail. The wind was wailing and large heavy drops had begun to fall. I had a new reason to cover Ingun’s face with the bandana.

I watched as the sheep dogs frantically ran down the slope towards the village, leaving the limping sheep far behind. Both crews were running around, passing shovels and pushing wheelbarrows. Everyone had a job, and they worked quickly. Another bolt of lightning struck the ground somewhere near. I didn’t see it, I was watching Ingun.

Not able to abandon Ingun in the rain, the whole crew had to wait impatiently as the ambulance came to the base of the hill. It was quite dangerous to be on the hill in a lightning storm. Nick muttered to Slobodon, “We should’ve hauled ass 20 minutes ago.”

Slobodon and others went down the hill to meet the ambulance. They rushed back with a stretcher.

“The ambulance people want us to bring him down,” said Slobodan. Water was streaming down his face. He came over and started lifting Ingun’s shoulders. My body unconsciously moved to grab his legs. Together, they hoisted him up as Ingun yelled out in pain, and as gently as possible, laid him on the cloth stretcher. Again, without thinking, I placed my hands around one of the loops, and Danny, Slobodon, Christian, Yove, and Nikolai grabbed their own handholds. Nick was too old, and the others just watched. I had just been moving off instinct, a thought hadn’t crossed my mind in minutes.

We lifted him up, Ingun cried out a little, and we began our descent.

The crew ran down the spine of the ridge towards the cars. I heard an owl hooting in the church tower below. The wind blew my hat off and my eyes went wide, but I couldn’t race after it. It was gone.

After a couple minutes of holding Ingun, the thin strap had already dug into my hands. I kept on switching hands, holding it in different ways, but the gravity of walking down hill was getting too much. I had chosen the middle strap, and two people had stopped holding him halfway down because the trail was too narrow. Worse still, the blisters had broken apart, and the strap kept sliding down my sweaty hand into them.

I just kept going, but after a while, I looked down and realized my hand was shaking like an old man’s. This had never happened to me before. I guessed that my body was just screaming at me to let go. The pain was growing with every second. It started shaking so badly I wasn’t sure if I could choose to hold on or if my body would just make the decision for me.

If Ingun had been anyone else, I might have asked to hold for a moment, or given up. But I just couldn’t. I was in the middle, and if I dropped him he would tumble down the hill like a sack of potatoes. I kept thinking “I have to do this for Ingun, I don’t care how much my hand hurts. I’ll walk 100 miles like this if I have to”. I talked like this to myself the whole way, I would remember this moment forever I told myself. I wanted to be proud of it.

With the sound of thunder roaring all around us we finally got to the end of the trail, and lowered him onto the ambulance bed. The ambulance raced off and we all ran to the cars. My hands were swollen and red, and I was licking the blisters as I ran. The village was a symphony of howling dogs banging against thin metal fences. I jumped into the car with Decho and Nick. The engine roared as we drove off with lightning on our backs. Rain showers washed off the side of the window in heaps, but I could still make out the bright flashes of lightning, and the owl resting in the window of the tower, waiting for the rain to subside and the worms to come out.