Ararat

by Christopher Golden

She whipped her head around to stare at him, heat rushing to her face, unable to explain her urgency, the necessity, her obsession with making this discovery herself. Rough and handsome in his scruffy way, it was the warmth and intelligence in his eyes that always got to her—that had supported her through so many journeys—but there were things she could not say to him. Not now.

  At the moment she had only one word for this man she loved.

  “Climb!”

  “What—”

  “Adam, just climb!” she snapped. Hauling back her pick, she planted it in the rock and ice above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked her left boot at the mountain, caught the teeth of her crampon into a toehold, and scrambled upward.

  As she moved out of his sightline, she heard Adam swear, as he finally registered what she and Hakan had reacted to. Meryam glanced over again and saw the line of half a dozen silhouettes moving along the ridge to the west, nothing but dark cutouts against the golden gleam of the dying sun, shapes moving through the hour of long shadows.

  There were no more words. Adam climbed, his grunts of exertion after nine long hours a perfect, synchronous match for her own. They had stopped to rest multiple times and debated stopping for the night, but the combination of Meryam’s fierce desire and Hakan’s determination to beat his cousin had made them press on. More than once she had thought they were being ridiculous, that Olivieri’s team would have camped and rested or fallen ill. There were only six or seven out of the original twelve members of that group remaining, which meant that some of them had stopped or gotten sick and had to descend, but between Olivieri and Feyiz’s uncle Baris, they’d forced the rest to keep going.

  Left hand digging into snow for a solid hold, she kept climbing. Pick, boot, hand, boot, using her knees to brace herself. The sun had been warm, but as it slid over the distant, jagged edge of the world the temperature dropped precipitously and the wind buffeted them, screaming as it whipped across the face of the mountain. Meryam scrabbled upward, an awkward, clawed spider. Feyiz and Hakan began snapping at each other, but she couldn’t focus on climbing and translating at the same time, so she ignored them.

  “Meryam,” Adam said, “talk to me. You all right?”

  She ignored him. Loved him, but could not draw the breath it would take to reply. The cold radiating up from the mountain had gotten inside her, aching in her bones. Her face and nose stung now that the wind had cranked up. Pick, boot, hand, boot. Heart slamming inside her chest, lips so dry she felt them crack, Meryam lifted the pick again but wavered. A sharp pain spiked through her head and she blinked, vision blurring at the corners of her eyes. For half a heartbeat she lost herself, forgot where she was, and then the sick twist of nausea clutched at her again and she felt hot bile rushing up the back of her throat.

  No.

  Refusing, spittle on her lips, she choked it back down and forced her guts to be still. Her head pounded as if huge fists smashed against her skull. She breathed deeply and steadily, waiting for the pain to abate. Dread prickled at the back of her neck, a feeling of vulnerability, as if all the cruel malice in the world had abruptly been directed toward her. That dread turned to a thousand tiny, icy points and spilled down her back, sliding over and through her before it was gone.

  “What the hell was that?” she whispered to herself, barely aware she’d spoken. Frigid, salty little tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them away.

  Sound rushed in before she had a chance to even recognize that the world had gone silent. For a moment she had just blanked out, the same way the electricity in their flat went dark for just a blink during a bad storm. The lights flickered and the clocks all reset, flashing twelve. Heart thrumming, blood rushing to her face, Meryam sucked in a ragged breath and began to sag backward.

  Adam called her name. He planted a hand on her back and in doing so, lost his own footing. Kicking out, jamming the toes of his boots into the rock and snow, he started to slide and the mountain slid with him. Loose rock tumbled and Meryam screamed his name, started to reach for him before another hand grabbed her from the left—Feyiz, keeping her from doing something stupid.

  “Don’t move!” he snapped.

  A curtain of snow began to slide off to their right, stone and earth and white shifting and tumbling down. Hakan called out a prayer but none of them moved, just listened to the whispered rumble of the mountain’s displeasure. Adam had gone silent but kept moving, grasping, stabbing his pick into the shifting rock. They’d come right up beside the location of the avalanche but the snow had hidden the rockfall, and Adam had climbed right onto it.

  He’s dead, Meryam thought, and the sickness in her gut turned to a hollow, icy pit. Pure emptiness. Her heart went numb. She held her breath.

  With a sound like a chorus of voices shushing her, the cascade slowed and then stopped altogether. Adam perched at the edge of it, pick embedded in a tumble of loose rock, rigid as he waited to see if it would start again.

  Meryam took a few short breaths, her heart thumping. She felt her pulse throbbing at her temples but the pain in her skull had calmed to a dull ache. She wetted her lips.

  “Move!” she called to him, then flinched at the loudness of her voice, afraid even the sound might cause the slide to begin again. “Carefully, but move now!”

  Hakan began to descend, the mountain still solid beneath him. They had been climbing right alongside the rockfall until Adam had moved over beside her, but Meryam knew there would be all kinds of fissures in the rock and earth so close to the avalanche zone. They had to be wary.

  Adam shifted his left hand. Rocks skittered downward but he moved his left foot. A fifteen-foot segment of the rockfall shifted again, just slightly. Meryam let the mountain take her weight, cradle her as she breathed and prayed to any god that might listen. It wouldn’t be fair. Just not fair.

  Feyiz spoke softly to her, small encouragements and reassurances that all amounted to “He’ll be all right.” But neither of them knew that.

  Ropes, she thought. Pitons. A larger team, proper safety precautions.

  Oh, my God, I’ve killed him.

  Adam tugged his pick out of the rocks and it all started to give way beneath him. He didn’t swear or cry out to God. Instead he shouted for Meryam, in that instant more anguished at being parted from her than at what might happen to him next.

  “Roll!” Hakan roared at him.

  The mountain flowed downward but Adam heard, and instead of fighting for a hold he rolled left. Even as he rode the shifting stone and snow, he made himself tumble to the side. All it took was half a dozen feet and he sprawled onto solid, unmoving mountain face. Hakan scrambled down to meet him as he managed to get a new hold, dig in his pick and the crampon claws at the toes of his boots.

  “Adam,” she whispered to herself, a different sort of prayer.

  Forty feet below the place where she and Feyiz perched, Hakan reached Adam and talked to him quietly, checking his body for broken bones and his pupils for dilation, in case he’d suffered a head injury. To the west, the sun had started to slide out of sight, the upper corona turning vivid colors that spread along the horizon line. They had only minutes before even this golden light vanished and then all that would be left was the glow of the stars and the crescent moon. The incline was not difficult for climbing—the rockslide might have killed Adam, but otherwise this part of the face required only stamina, caution, and a modicum of skill. They had been climbing easily enough … but sleeping out here would be impossible.

  In the dying light she could see the blood on Adam’s face, a cut or scrape on his forehead that trickled dark red streaks across his cheek and into his beard. He’d been knocked around, but when he glanced up and met her eyes, she knew he was all right. Still with her. Still on this journey.

  “We’ve got to climb,” she said, turning to Feyiz.

  From the moment when her body had seemed to give up on her, when that terrible feeling of malice had pressed down on her, until right now, she had taken strengt
h from the guide’s presence, but only as she saw the concern in his eyes did she realize that Feyiz was more than just a guide or an ally. He was a friend. She had a history of not recognizing friendships when they really took form, when they became true and solid like Pinocchio becoming a real boy. That flaw had cost her in the past, but she felt it now.

  “Come on, Feyiz,” she said. “We’ve got to—”

  Hakan shouted for them to look up. Meryam cringed, put her shoulder against the mountain and ducked her head, afraid something had been dislodged above them. When nothing fell she blinked and craned her neck to gaze up toward the peak, but a jagged ridge blocked her view. A wave of relief swept over her—a shelf, perhaps seventy meters up. It would take time, but …

  She blinked.

  Feyiz had begun a prayer of thanks. In her peripheral vision, in that last golden gleam of daylight, she saw his smile. Only then did she understand, and broke out into a smile of her own.

  The cave.

  Meryam plucked her pick from the mountain’s face and lunged upward, digging in. Pick, boot, hand, boot. Quicker than she’d been at the start, all pain in her head forgotten. She glanced over at the silhouettes of Olivieri’s team, just inky black marks against the darkening mountain, and knew she was going to beat him.

  Feyiz followed her. Forty feet below, injured or not, Adam had begun to climb again, with Hakan looking after him.

  Remnants of queasiness lingered in her gut, but Meryam kept moving and breathing deeply. There would be more meds when they reached the shelf. But only a tiny part of her brain remained aware of her discomfort. The rest of her thoughts were dedicated to climbing toward the mystery that had brought them here. She tried not to fantasize, dared not to hope, but even if they found nothing but a gaping wound in the side of the mountain, at least she had reached it first.

  Her back muscles burned. Her arms felt weak, as if she had been deceiving her body for the past few hours by continuing to climb, somehow persuading flesh and bone that she had not asked them to endure far more than she had any right to expect they could. Now she needed just a little more. Weariness set in, carved its blades deep. Knowing they were so close to finding rest made every handhold harder to find, made her body heavier with every inch she dragged herself up the mountain.

  Below, Hakan and Adam spoke to each other. The words floated up to her but she did not bother listening to discover if their conversation was speculation or an evaluation of Adam’s injuries.

  “Meryam,” Feyiz said, moving up beside her when she began to slow. “Do you need me to—”

  She shot him a withering look. “Do not help me.”

  The hard edge in her voice went too far. She knew it, but she saw the shifting shadows across Feyiz’s face and the moonlit gleam of his eyes, and she knew he understood. She hadn’t come this far to accept help from anyone. This had been her quest from the start—not even hers and Adam’s, but hers—and she wouldn’t accept a hand up from anyone unless she started falling. Maybe not even then.

  Moonlight, she thought. For the first time she noticed that while they’d been climbing, in just the past few minutes, the sun had gone down. The glow of it still haunted the western horizon but it had vanished off the edge of the world.

  In the darkness, she reached up her empty hand and caught nothing but air. A glance upward, and she saw the edge of the shelf. The lowest corner of the new cavern that had appeared in Ararat’s face.

  She grinned, warmth flooding her chest, buried the point of the pick into the flat edge of the stone shelf, and dragged herself up and into the cave.

  Lying on her back, watching the stars come out, Meryam began to laugh.

  Then she turned onto her hands and knees and threw up.

  * * *

  Adam wanted to drop his pack onto the floor of the cave and collapse. The muscles in his calves and shoulders burned and his knees were stiff in what he imagined was a prelude of what it would feel like when his youthful tendency to overdo things brought his joints to arthritic ruin. He wanted water and a bite to eat and to take a moment to revel in the knowledge that they had beaten Olivieri’s team to this cave, even if they found nothing at all.

  Then Meryam started to retch.

  “Meer?” he said, rushing to her side even as Feyiz and Hakan clicked on flashlights and began to scan the cave’s deep shadows.

  In the crescent of moonlight that touched the first dozen feet of the cave’s interior, Meryam lifted a hand to wave him away. “I’m all right.”

  “Bullshit.” He took her hand, felt her pulse, asked her if she could breathe all right.

  “Not while I’m—”

  Another thin stream of vomit interrupted her. Meryam stayed on her hands and knees, trying to catch her breath. Adam put a hand on her back and tried to soothe her.

  “You’re okay,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “You’ll be all right. If we need to get you down—”

  “No.”

  “—we’ve already secured the entrance. We’re here. Olivieri’s team may show up on our doorstep at sunrise, but they can’t claim the dig for themselves—not with the deal you made with the government. If there is a dig, I mean.”

  “I’m not … not going down.”

  “You can acclimate,” Adam went on. “Take Feyiz with you. Rest here a few hours and then—”

  Meryam whispered something he didn’t catch. Adam leaned in, asked her to repeat herself, and she twisted round to stare at him. Her eyes caught the moonlight but instead of silver they glinted a coppery red for just a moment. A trick of the light, and the night.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached a hand to him. “Help me up.”

  Adam went cold, felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. “You know what can happen with altitude sickness. Come on, don’t mess around with this.”

  “I’m…” she began, before her body seized up as if she might be sick again. Breathing through her nose, teeth bared, she managed to fight it off.

  Adam knelt beside her. He reached for her wrist again, worried about her rapid heartbeat.

  “It’s not altitude sickness,” she said, jerking her hand back. “Stop.”

  “What is it, then?” He’d been feeling unwell himself—a clammy, almost feverish film on his skin and a thumping in his head. “No matter how many pills Hakan dishes out, you can’t climb as long and as high as we did today and not have it wreak havoc on your body. I’m all twisted up inside myself.”

  “It’s not altitude sickness,” she said again. Firmly, hanging her head and taking even breaths.

  “Then what?”

  Meryam glanced up at him, her gaze pale and sad. “Fine, all right? Maybe it is. But I’m not climbing down. I didn’t come this far to go back without at least—”

  Feyiz called to them. Adam studied Meryam’s face, searching for the thing he felt certain she must be hiding. It might have been that she felt worse than she wanted to let on, or it might have been connected to the wall she had been building up between them. Adam had been hiding from that bit of truth for a while, but now he felt it more keenly than ever.

  “Meryam…” he began.

  Feyiz shouted, and this time they both heard the urgency in his voice.

  “Coming!” Adam called back. He unzipped Meryam’s pack and dug out her light, handing it over before retrieving his own.

  She took his arm and rose, unsteady as she clicked on her light. The floor canted slightly, slanting downward. Only when they turned together and stepped deeper into the cave—out of that corona of moonlight—did they hear the soft, muttered prayers that came from off to the left. Adam waved his flashlight beam in that direction and saw Hakan. Meryam’s torch beam moved slowly across the floor of the cave and then froze as it illuminated a pattern that might once have been an animal. Shapes like bones lay under a layer of powder that seemed partly snow and partly a chalky dust. A ribbon of thin, leathery skin or fabric flapped in the breeze.

  Meryam reached out and too
k Adam’s hand.

  Feyiz continued to call for them, but now neither of them seemed able to reply. Adam noticed Hakan moving toward the back of the cave off to their left but the man’s presence hardly mattered. The only things that did were the next breath, the next step, and the way Meryam’s torch beam and his own continued to sweep across the nearest parts of the cave. The mouth of it—this vast wound in the side of the mountain—must have been at least a hundred feet wide, and the flashlight beams were not powerful enough to disperse all of that darkness. But as Adam and Meryam moved deeper, hand in hand, their torchlight kept revealing more of what waited for them in the darkness.

  A dusty array of buckled timber beams jutted slightly from the floor of the cave. No, they were the floor of the cave.

  Adam felt as if he were far beneath the ocean, weighted down and wading in slow motion through the deepest, darkest waters. The beam of his torch picked out the half-collapsed remains of a creaking apparatus that might once have been stairs. Dust motes swam in the shafts of light that he and Meryam played across the beams, like plankton floating past undersea. Then the wind howled at the mouth of the cave and the timbers creaked again and the illusion of the ocean bottom vanished. His mouth and skin felt dry and his head throbbed and he stared.

  Meryam released his hand and took a step forward, and the tilted cave floor groaned underfoot. Flinching, she looked down and Adam followed her gaze to see that her boot had pressed down upon another timber.

  “Holy crap,” Adam whispered, frozen.

  He swept his torchlight to the right, revealing thick, rough-hewn wooden columns, partly blackened by thick smears of pitch. Short walls that might have been the walls of animal pens blocked parts of his view, but there were other withered, desiccated piles of bones, large and small. Most of the mummified remains belonged to animals, but his torchlight danced across two shapes that might once have been human. He shone his light upward and saw the lattice of beams that still held a second floor, perhaps a third.

  Not floors, he thought. Decks. God help me, they’re decks. The animal bones alone told the story but none of them thus far had been willing to say it aloud. Tremors of giddy joy shook his body.