Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  The younger guide glanced warily at his uncle, who had stiffened. Hakan’s lips pressed together in a tight line of disapproval, but he sneered quietly and picked up his pace, getting out in front of them. He wanted to find the ark as much as anyone, but had zero interest in documenting their efforts.

  “We left the van in the village of Eli, which sits at about two thousand meters,” Feyiz began. “The hike to Camp One is nine kilometers and should take less than four hours total. The terrain is not difficult for climbers who are physically fit—”

  Meryam stepped into the frame, glancing back at the camera as she kept hiking. “Right now, Adam is wishing he hadn’t eaten that massive portion of kunefe after dinner.”

  He groaned. “So true.”

  The trek continued in the same fashion, with Adam acting as cameraman and interviewer, Meryam as on-camera host and narrator, and Feyiz filling in the details. In quiet moments, when the on-camera banter lulled with the lateness of the hour, he glanced up at the mountain and felt a whisper of dread slide up his spine. Each time it dissipated before reaching his brain, the way dreams turned to mist and vanished in the first moments of wakefulness.

  He shifted the weight of his pack and kept moving, watching his step. The next time he glanced up at the mountain he thought he could make out the gouge on its face where the avalanche had occurred, a fresh scar that had changed the shape of Ararat.

  Meryam appeared at his side before he could even notice that she had dropped back to be with him.

  “You okay?” she asked quietly, though in the dark silence of the mountain even a whisper could be heard. Feyiz and Hakan kept moving, ignoring them.

  Adam nodded. “Sleepy, I guess.”

  “There won’t be much sleep the next few days.”

  “If we’re lucky, the next few months.”

  Meryam smiled, eyes alight. “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  “God?” Adam asked, eyebrow raised.

  “Whoever’s listening,” she corrected.

  Adam took her hand. Holding his camera in his right and clasping her fingers with his left, he felt the balance of his life. These two elements were all he needed. Inspired and more awake, he released her and clicked the camera to record.

  “What makes you so confident?” he asked Meryam. His boots crunched down on rough stone and brittle ice. “There are at least two competent teams of Arkologists in Dogubeyazit. They’ll be on our heels.”

  Meryam shoved a mass of curls away from her eyes and frowned at him. At the camera.

  “We’ve got a head start and we’re traveling light,” she said, more for the camera’s benefit than for his. “If there are mysteries waiting up there, we’re going to be the ones to solve them.”

  She grinned. Adam tapped the camera to stop the recording and returned her smile, but it felt like a mask. An uneasiness had settled into him like nothing he had ever experienced. It made his skin prickle and he thought of the scrutiny of hidden eyes. With every step, he felt as if he walked beneath the gaze of unknown enemies.

  “You need sleep,” Meryam said, concern etched on her face.

  “Just a few hours when we get to Camp One,” Adam replied. “Then we keep climbing.”

  Whatever had crept under his skin would burn off with the sunrise.

  He was sure of it.

  FOUR

  Adam rushed up from sleep, fleeing a dozen ugly dreams. He felt the grip on his shoulder and had his right hand clamped on a human throat before he’d even opened his eyes. Shaking off the caul of slumber, he focused on the face above him and discovered that he was choking Feyiz.

  “Shit,” he hissed, releasing the guide. “Sorry, man. Really sorry. You caught me in the middle of a nightmare.”

  They’d made good time to Camp One, but without any sleep at all, they had all agreed that they needed at least a few hours of shut-eye before they continued their climb. Now Adam’s head felt full of cotton and his eyes ached from tiredness. Sometimes a little sleep was worse than none at all.

  Feyiz wheezed and massaged his throat. “Damn it, Adam…”

  “Really. I’m sorry. It’s like I was still dreaming for a second there.”

  For a moment it looked like Feyiz might be pissed, start a fuss about Adam’s violent awakening, but a change came over his face. Whatever reason he had for coming into the tent and waking Adam took precedence.

  “Olivieri’s team is passing us by,” Feyiz said. He cleared his throat. “Meryam sent me to wake you.”

  Shaking off the last mists of a nightmare—in which long, withered arms had reached out from behind the pendulum of a grandfather clock—Adam slid from his sleeping bag and dragged on his boots. The cold mountain air whipped through the open tent flap and he shuddered as he grabbed his jacket. Scraping at his bristly beard, he thought of his first trip to Alaska. It was cold here, but compared to that journey, the predawn morning on Ararat felt nearly tropical.

  “Bad dreams,” Adam said with a shrug.

  Feyiz nodded. “We all have them.”

  True enough, but the unease left behind by his nightmare lingered. Adam pushed through the flaps and exited the tent. An inch of snow had fallen on the grassy pasture that made up Camp One and a few stray flakes eddied in the air overhead. The rock formations that jutted from the pasture made this a perfect spot for the camp, allowing tents to be erected behind natural windbreaks. For most of the year, it would be quite comfortable up here, but now winter had begun to knock on the door and the weather would be unpredictable on the best days.

  Meryam and Hakan stood about twenty feet away, sipping coffee from thermoses. They had set up a camp stove and used water from the small stream that ran beside the camp—higher up they’d have to melt snow for water. Right now, the camp stove seemed an indulgence they could not afford, not when another group of climbers was passing right by the camp instead of stopping to rest. He counted a dozen heads, half of the group on horseback and the others leading mules laden with equipment. The third rider was a burly man with a prematurely gray beard and goggles on his forehead that Adam knew had the same prescription as his eyeglasses. Armando Olivieri was the kind of man who came prepared, and once Adam had learned about those goggles they served as a constant reminder of the professor’s determination.

  Olivieri spotted him by the tent and waved as the parade went by. Worried and irritated, Adam strode toward Meryam and Hakan. The two of them had ignored each other on the hike up to Camp One the night before and they didn’t seem exactly chummy now, but for the moment it was clear they were on the same side.

  “What the hell does Olivieri think he’s doing?” Adam asked.

  Meryam glanced at him. “Moving on to Camp Two, I assume.”

  Adam laughed softly. After the trudge to Camp One, it would have been smart for the professor’s team to stop and rest, but he could see skipping that step, considering they were in competition. The next step would be to ascend to four thousand meters or higher—about the same elevation as Camp Two—and then come back down to allow for acclimatization, avoiding the risk of altitude sickness. A night’s sleep would follow before the typical climber would rise in the small hours of the morning and make the much steeper trek to Camp Two, stopping there for another night before the last part of the ascent. If they’d been climbing to the peak, that would be another six hours up and then a much more rapid descent, but of course they weren’t heading for the peak.

  “You really think they’re going to try straight for Camp Two and stay there?” Adam asked. “No acclimatization?”

  Hakan grunted. “What choice do they have?”

  Meryam turned toward them. “If Olivieri wants a crack at the cave, he has to beat us there.”

  “Shit,” Adam rasped. He turned to shout for Feyiz but saw that the man had already moved the gear out of the tents and started breaking them down. At least he seemed to understand the need for speed.

  “We’ll overtake him,” Meryam said. “Fifteen minutes and we go.
Pack up, have a wee, and get your camera ready. Another day, another adventure.”

  “You can’t pretend you expected them to catch up this quickly. We only slept four hours and here they are—”

  “With no sleep,” Meryam added. “And without Feyiz and Hakan for guides. Twelve people, most of them not used to climbing. Odds are some of them will get mountain sickness if they attempt it. Neither of us has ever been prone to it. If we need to skip acclimatization, I think we’ll be okay, but Olivieri’s got two tweedy Arkologists and a sixty-year-old rabbinical scholar on his team. They’re going to need to acclimatize. They just are.”

  Adam nodded, telling himself it all made sense, but something niggled at the back of his mind. “What about those guides? Who the hell are they?”

  He turned toward Hakan, who took a long drink of his steaming coffee, then poured the rest out on the fire and began kicking dirt and freshly fallen snow over it.

  For the first time, Meryam seemed unsure of herself. Adam loved her for her confidence, but she didn’t always think things through. He turned to see Feyiz zipping up a backpack.

  “I thought your family had cornered the market up here.”

  Feyiz frowned and studied his uncle. “Uncle Hakan and his cousin Baris are not in agreement on who ought to be giving the orders. The family is split on this subject. A final decision has not yet been made.”

  Meryam swore, spinning on Hakan. “You let us think no worthy guide was going to help the Arkologists up the mountain, that you had them all under control!”

  Hakan went and nudged Feyiz aside, knelt, and began to unzip and repack the backpack, a silent assertion of control. He knew better, he was telling them all. Feyiz might be a passable guide, but he was in charge.

  “The silent treatment again,” Adam said. “Perfect.” The mountain wind whipped around him and he shivered, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. “So Baris is helping Olivieri. And if they reach the cave first—”

  “It is not only your professor friend who will find victory there,” Hakan said. “The family will think my cousin more capable and he will become the chief guide. The argument will be settled by achievement. Baris will not worry about altitude sickness. If several become ill, he will have one of his men descend with them.”

  Meryam handed Adam her coffee thermos. “This is the only thing that’s hot. There’s some bread and honey. Eat fast.”

  Adam didn’t want to bother eating anything, but he knew he would need some food in his belly. He turned toward Feyiz, who had begun to break down the second tent.

  “Wait,” Hakan said, digging a plastic bottle out of the inside pocket of his coat. He twisted off the cap and began to tap pills out into the palm of his glove. “Take these first. Two different pills, take one each.”

  Meryam didn’t hesitate, plucking the medications from Hakan’s hand.

  Adam examined the pills, brows knitted. “I assume one of these is Diamox. What’s the other?”

  “Procardia,” Hakan said. “For blood pressure. It should prevent…” He turned to Feyiz and said something in the language they shared.

  “Edema,” Feyiz translated.

  “These medicines are no guarantee,” Hakan continued, “but take them and drink a lot of water, and with luck we will not have to carry you off the mountain.”

  Adam selected pills for himself, studying Hakan’s face. “This cousin you didn’t tell us about? He’ll have given his group the same medicines, I assume?”

  Hakan closed the pill bottle, slid it back into his jacket, and stomped on the last embers of the fire. Meryam approached Adam and cupped his scruffy, bearded cheek in her hand. When he turned to her, she dry-swallowed the pills and grinned.

  “Let’s go, my love,” she said. “We’re in a bit of a hurry now.”

  “Olivieri’s got horses and mules,” Adam replied quietly, clutching his own pills.

  “And you’ve got me. Get ready and then start filming.”

  “You have a plan?”

  Meryam laughed. “The only possible plan. They’ll want to use their animals as long as possible. They’re going to Camp Two and then straight across to the southeast face, above the cave, just as we’d planned to do.”

  Adam thought about the broken rock and earth that the avalanche would have spread down the mountainside beneath the entrance to the cave. He thought of the inch or more of snow that had fallen on top of it during the night.

  “So we stay just west of the rockfall. Straight up, but not in the avalanche zone,” he said. “Not completely suicidal, but still dangerous as hell.”

  As the burning rim of the sun crested the eastern horizon, her eyes sparkled. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  The next time Meryam saw Olivieri more than nine hours had passed. She had her pick buried in the icy rock in front of her and the claws of her crampons digging for toeholds. Her stomach twisted and bile burned up the back of her throat but she forced herself not to vomit with the pain inside her skull. Acute altitude sickness could be fought. She’d already taken more medication and she had both prayed to and cursed her own god and everyone else’s. She told herself that she would be all right, and maybe that was true. As long as her lungs didn’t fill with fluid and her brain didn’t swell—the results of pulmonary or cerebral edema—the other symptoms would subside eventually.

  If she did develop edema and didn’t descend immediately, it would be quite a different ending to her story. She would die.

  Breathing deeply in the thin air, Meryam dug the toe of her boot into the ice and hauled herself upward, ripped her pick out and smashed it back into the mountain overhead. Skipping acclimatization had been a stupid, stupid plan. Setting off on their own, even with guides who knew the secrets of the mountain better than the curves of their wives’ flesh, had been idiotic.

  The horizon had turned a deep indigo on one end of the sky, the sun gliding into hiding on the other. A hand touched her back and she glanced to her right, surprised to see that Adam had overtaken her. The wind whipped at his face, making him squint.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “The wind,” Meryam said, resting against the mountain. “What’s the problem?”

  “Feyiz is right. We should have stopped at that shelf we passed half an hour ago. I think we should go back to it.”

  Grip tightening on the handle of her pick, she stared at him. Queasy, head pounding, she had to play the words over in her head to make sure she’d heard them correctly.

  “Hakan said we could make it! He said we were almost there!”

  Adam’s expression hardened with frustration. “That was an hour ago and where are we now? Do you see the damn cave? Even if we get there, you know as well as I do that there’s no ark inside. It makes for great footage, but it’s impossible for a flood to have reached this height—”

  “Who’s this talking now?” Meryam said. “Not my Adam. I’m the atheist in this relationship, remember? What’s impossible when God’s in the mix?”

  Her parents and brother refused to speak to her or even acknowledge that she still shared the same planet with them. The alienation had both broken her heart and emboldened her to fulfill her dreams, but still it was so lonely. The last time she had been with them, on a hot July day in London six years before, she had seen sadness and longing in her mother’s eyes but only hatred and disgust from her father and her brother. If her mother had the courage to flout her husband’s wishes, Meryam thought they might speak again one day. But she doubted that time would ever come. Declaring herself an atheist had been as bad as spitting in her father’s face and she had known that before she had ever spoken the words. She had done it anyway, determined not to hide her true self. Not ever.

  Now here she was, desperate to claim whatever lay in that cave. Part of her wanted to find it empty, to throw that emptiness in the faces of the self-righteous bastards in every faith she had ever encountered. But another part of her wanted very badly to find
something … anything to believe in. Anything that might ignite a spark of faith in her and lead her, if not home, then at least to a place where she and her family could speak again.

  “Can we have this conversation later?” Adam said. “We need to do something. We can’t make it to the cave before sunset and it’s too dangerous to—”

  She set her knees against the thin layer of snow and let go of the pick, just the crampons on her boots holding her in place. “Come on! It’s not like it’s a vertical face. I’ll get banged to hell if I fall, but I’m not going to plummet to my doom.”

  He fixed her with a cold glare. “Stop it.”

  Meryam sighed and grabbed hold of the pick. Yes, they ought to have brought pitons and rope, and if they’d brought them they would have been using them here. And, yes, if she did fall at the wrong point and couldn’t slow her tumbling descent, there was always the chance that she’d smash into a rock or fall into a crevasse, but the terrain to the east was so much steeper. A sheer, jagged face, even under the snow. As long as they kept climbing straight up—

  “No,” Adam said, reading her face. “We’re already close to the rockfall. You don’t know how close. Not even Hakan knows. We’re going back down to that shelf and camping there for the night.”

  Meryam grabbed hold of the pick again, feeling herself deflate. “If we stop, I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I can carry on.”

  Adam rested against the mountain beside her. “You should’ve spoken up.”

  Hakan shouted at them from below. Meryam felt her hackles rise, ready to snap at him for his impatience. Then she caught the tone in his words, and put the syllables together to form a name. Olivieri.

  She glanced below her and saw Hakan pointing up and to the west, then she lifted her gaze and squinted into the burning golden light of the setting sun. Higher on the mountain, still at least eight hundred meters below the peak, a line of black silhouettes made their way across a snow-clad ridge.

  “Shit.”

  “Meryam—” Adam began.