Christopher Golden - Ararat

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 strength 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.