Christopher Golden - Ararat

“Well?” Adam prodded.

Hakan opened the paper, scanned it quickly, and then grunted.

He looked up, straight at Meryam for once. “We must go.”

“Now?” Feyiz asked. “It’s an hour past dark.”

Meryam grinned. “Which gives us all night to reach Camp One… an excellent head start.”

As they rose from the table, Meryam paused to drain the last red bliss from her wine in victory. She and Adam were going to be first to the cave.

First to lay eyes on whatever waited there.

Feyiz drove the van, their gear piled in the back, and they wended through the sleepy streets of Dogubeyazit. Adam grinned most of the way, suffused with a giddy exuberance he had rarely felt since childhood. Under starlight, they drove along badly paved roads to a tiny village called Eli, where the pavement came to an end and they arrived at a parking lot at the base of the mountain.

Here in Turkey he felt relatively safe, and yet the presence of the Iranian border only kilometers away made the sky in that direction seem laden with menace. On one hand it seemed silly to feel as if the whole nation held a personal animosity toward him, like a cloud of malice waiting for a shift in wind direction so that it could swallow him whole. On the other hand, if he crossed the border and was caught, he would be instantly arrested and imprisoned. Stupid to think about—he had no intention of entering Iran—but such were the things that lingered in his mind.

The trek toward Camp One was a hike rather than a climb. They spilled from the van, checked their gear one last time, and then slipped on their packs. Adam pulled on a wool hat, tugged down the earflaps, and shivered as his body began to adjust to the cold night air. This is foolish, he thought, glancing up at the mountain as the wind whipped around them. Then Meryam turned toward him and he saw the ecstatic glint in her eyes and the grin she wore, and he remembered that foolish was their stock in trade. The whole point of their books and their online videos was to help ordinary people overcome their fear of taking risks.

He retrieved his camera from the back of the van, sighted on Meryam, and began to record. “So, what are we going to call this one? Adam and Eve Find the Ark ?”

“Let’s actually find the ark before we start claiming we’ve done so,” Meryam said with the smile that always broke his heart. That wasn’t a smile he could ever refuse, and it was as good an opening line as he could have wished for.

She adjusted the pack on her shoulders and turned toward the mountain. Feyiz and Hakan had already started up the path, neither waiting for them nor offering to help. Feyiz knew they didn’t need his help. Hakan simply didn’t give a shit.

They trudged a half mile or so before Adam bothered with the camera again. The terrain looked ghostly in the starlight and he wanted to wait until they were far enough from the parking lot that none of the lights from the village or the road would interfere with the atmosphere he wanted to create. Normally they would have had horses, maybe a mule or two, but there were only four of them and their goal was to reach the cave first, establish their claim. They couldn’t spare anyone to wait behind with the animals as they made their way from Camp Two over to the part of the southeast face that had calved off. There would be no safe way to reach the new cave, but the least dangerous option would be to cut across to a place above the opening and descend to it rather than try to climb all the loose rock and earth below it. Starting another avalanche might kill them all. Adam and Meryam were making careers out of calculated risks, but neither of them wanted to die from being stupid.

“Feyiz,” he said, catching up to the guide and rolling the camera again, “we’ve done this with you before, but for viewers who aren’t familiar, can you give us some details on what’s ahead?”

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.

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.