He drank more water, then spoke for the first time, a rambling stream of nomadic Kurdish. When finished, I responded in the same language.

  “What did he say?” said Faye eagerly. “What did you say?”

  “His name is Makmur, and he knows of me. The great white guide, as I’m known to his people. I said I knew of him as well, a dedicated shepherd and respected patriarch.”

  “Is that true?”

  “The great white guide business?” I shrugged modestly.

  “No, Sam Ward. Have you heard of him?”

  “Of course not. I was being courteous. It was expected of me.”

  Makmur’s eyes flicked to Faye, and the old man spoke again: “He says you must be an angel, because surely he has died and gone to Heaven.”

  Faye Roberts blushed. I didn’t know she had it in her. “Spunky little devil,” she said. “Tell him that’s the oldest line in the book.”

  I did. “He also says you would make a fine shepherd’s wife, and he has a grandson available.”

  “Remind him that he’s too injured to play matchmaker.”

  Sheet lightning flashed, illuminating the dark underbelly of the storm clouds. The old man spoke in a long rambling stream and I translated between his many pauses: “He says he has a right to live and work and eat off the mountain just as his father did before him, and his father’s father before him, etc., etc. He was beaten as a warning for others to stay away.”

  “Who beat him?”

  “Soldiers.”

  We were silent. Makmur’s breathing became increasingly labored. Blood bubbled from his lips, mixed with saliva. The rain came down steadily. The rain somehow made the setting even more forlorn.

  Faye asked, “Has he seen my father?”

  I repeated her question and the old man responded: “There were two men, foreigners, above the Gorge. That was a month or two ago. But he does not know who they were or why they were here.”

  Faye closed her eyes and seemed to pray a silent prayer. Meanwhile, I opened Makmur’s robe. There was a pool of blood spreading like a disease under the paper-thin skin of his abdomen. Internal bleeding. His ribs were broken, and maybe also a punctured lung, judging by his ragged breathing. Faye held his head in her lap as the wind and rain swept over us. We bundled the old man back up and sat with him until he died. His last breath was extraordinarily long, and his chest seemed to shrink down into the rocky soil. I shut his eyes.

  Five minutes later, Faye was still holding his head. I reached over and touched her shoulder. She looked at me, eyes troubled and wet. “Why did they kill him, Sam?”

  Thunder rumbled overhead. Water dripped steadily from the end of my nose. I looked at the beaten body. “My guess is that Emir Omar Ali has something to hide. Perhaps something very important.”

  We stared down at the sodden, broken body. The rain washed the blood away from his face. Faye finally said, “Won’t the wild animals get him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, I won’t have that.”

  Faye shucked her backpack, scavenged the area for the dark volcanic rocks and began placing them around the body. I slipped out of my own pack and helped, taking us the better part of an hour to completely cover Makmur’s small body. Finally, I broke his gnarled staff a third of the way down and secured it with twine from my backpack and shoved the makeshift cross between the stones over his head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The rain turned into a freezing drizzle.

  We had been hiking for the better part of six hours. During that time I thought of Makmur. He was murdered, that much was true. A powerful man like Omar Ali, acting within Turkish authority, could do just about anything. And trespassers were fair game. A simple beating of an old shepherd would go unnoticed, even if it resulted in death.

  The temperature continued to drop; our breaths fogged before us. Later, the drizzle stopped and there was a break in the clouds and the sun shone brightly down as if making up for lost time. A pair of white snowfinches streaked overhead, followed by an alpine chough that turned its head and watched us, then disappeared up through the clouds.

  The grassy slope was mostly barren, with the occasional outcropping of igneous rock. Later, we stopped beside a crystal clear stream, which wound down from above, bubbling over smooth stones. I handed out dried fruit and almonds. Almost too exciting for words. After eating, we sat back in the lush grass. Faye laced her fingers behind her head and stared up at the overcast sky. “Let’s be reasonable, Sam. There is no ark.”

  “Not according to Mrs. Dartmouth,” I said.

  “Who’s Mrs. Dartmouth?” she asked.

  “My Sunday school teacher.”

  “Of course.”

  The water made relaxing bubbling noises, the sort that’s recorded and sold in alternative health stores everywhere. I pulled out a shoot of grass and stuck it between my teeth. It tasted just like grass.

  I said, “I’ve heard all the arguments before. The arguments bore me. It’s a moot point. A classic example of science versus faith. I don’t know much science, and I don’t have much faith.”

  “That’s taking the easy way out, Sam,” Faye said. “Other than some unusual animal deposits that may be the results of a massive local flood, there’s just no evidence of a world-wide flood.”

  “They say God works in mysterious ways.”

  “But where did the water come from, Sam? And I don’t buy into the Canopy Theory. There’s little if any evidence supporting that Earth was covered in a layer of water vapor which contributed to the flood. Even so, where did all the water go? How did all the animals fit into one ark? How did the animals come to be on the ark?”

  “Refer to my prior comment.”

  I closed my eyes. My stomach made some digesting noises. Something rustled in the grass maybe twenty feet away. Probably a field mouse.

  “To be fair,” she added, “there’s substantial evidence of a massive flood occurring in the Black Sea basin about seventy-five hundred years ago. Two colleagues of mine, both noted oceanographers, have proven this event to be the largest in recent history, geologically speaking. Many lives were lost, including whole communities. The evidence even suggests that this disaster helped spread farming into central Europe, and could be the basis of the Noah’s ark story, along with the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.”

  “Should I make copious notes for the quiz later?”

  “Are you ever serious, Sam?”

  “Look,” I said. “You scientists have all the proof you need to denounce it, the believers have all the faith they need to believe, so who the hell cares what I think?”

  “But you make a living endorsing that myth.”

  “Correction, I make a living safely guiding people onto a very dangerous mountain. What they do on the mountain is their business.”

  “Have you ever seen any evidence of the ark?”

  “No.”

  She sat back, satisfied. “As I said, it’s a myth. Bedtime stories. A classic hero tale, one man conquering nature and all that.”

  “Now that you’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “Perhaps we should get going.”

  And that’s when Faye screamed, and not because of a field mouse.

  ***

  The creature was long and beautiful and as deadly as they come. Relative to the North American cottonmouth, the puff adder, with its patch-work pattern, was perfectly camouflaged for its surroundings. It moved languidly through the dry grass a foot away from Faye’s out-stretched leg.

  “Sam!”

  Puff adders were deaf; or, more accurately, lacked hearing. Good thing.

  “Christ, Sam, do something!”

  “Just be still.”

  Its forked tongue, covered in sense organs, flicked in and out, testing its surroundings. The adder was long, perhaps the longest I’ve seen on the mountain. And it was shedding. Seen in a different light, the snake could look ghastly, which was probably the light in which Faye was seeing it.

  “I’m going to faint, Sam.”

  “Not a good idea,” I said.

  “I-I can’t breathe.”

  I moved forward, crouched low to the ground. The adder paid little attention to me, or even to Faye, for that matter. It seemed intent on the bubbling stream, and suddenly made a turn for the worse… slithering over Faye’s ankle.

  “Sam!”

  “Sit still.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  The snake’s tongue flicked out rapidly, wiggling like a worm on a hook. Faye’s eyes suddenly rolled up into her head and her elbows slipped from under her. She fell silently back into the soft grass. It was just as well, and a whole lot quieter.

  I grabbed the snake’s tail and pulled it away from Faye. True to its name, the creature puffed out extraordinarily and swung its jaws, bubbling with venom, at me, but they fell just short. Thirty feet away, I set the creature free in the wet grass.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We followed a series of sheep trails along a rocky slope as the wind hit us first from one direction, then another. Sparring like a boxer. The effect was complete instability.

  I checked on Faye. She appeared to be doing fine. Her face was set in grim determination. Grim determination was an asset on this mountain. We stopped under a rock overhang and drank from our water bottles. I watched a dust devil move up the slope, then lose its steam and dissipate into nothing. Faye said, “I’ve never fainted before.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

  “But nothing to be proud of either.”

  “Then I promise not to tell,” I said, “no matter how much the tabloids offer.”

  The wind tousled her hair. Her hair looked good tousled. She removed her sunglasses and looked at me. “You can be very sweet behind the jokes and tough-guy attitude.”

  “Sweet, tough and funny,” I said. “A hell of a combination.”

  “Notice I didn’t say modest?”

  “I noticed.”

  Her eyes followed the slope all the way to the snow-capped peak thousands of feet above. “Do you think we’re wasting our time?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe Emir Omar Ali has some answers to your father’s disappearance.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I said, “The shepherd established that your father and his student were above the Ahora Gorge, which may be near Omar’s camp. If your father did come across Omar, he would have stumbled upon a whole hornet’s nest of trouble—just look at what happened to the shepherd.”

  “Do you think Omar killed them?”

  I shrugged.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “Maybe we should have a look at Omar’s camp,” I said.

  Faye chewed her lower lip, alternately moistening it with the tip of her pink tongue. I didn’t chew my lip; instead, I watched her. Same effect, less chewing. “But how do we get in?” she asked finally.

  “We’ll cross that ice bridge when we get there,” I said.

  “I suppose we can’t just say we were in the neighborhood,” Faye said.

  “No,” I said.

  “And selling Girl Scout cookies is out of the question.”

  “That was funny.”

  “Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”

  “Just take a hot shower and you’ll be fine.”

  She laughed. The wind abruptly died down, and all was silent. Not even the chattering chirp of a krupers nuthatch. She suddenly turned to me, eyes flashing. “If Omar had anything to do with my father’s disappearance, I’ll want justice.”

  I detected something hard in her voice. “Justice, or revenge?”

  She set her jaw. “Both.”

  “On Ararat, there is no justice. And revenge will cost you extra.”

  ***

  We followed a shallow gully, its rock-strewn floor uneven and difficult to traverse. Like witch’s hair, patches of dry grass grew futilely among the rocks. The sun continued to set, slowly disappearing behind the distant foothills, casting the sky into a brilliant orange glow. A male caspian snowcock, its little white chest puffed out, watched us from the branch of a scraggly bush.

  From the gully, we followed a winding sheep trail until we reached a jagged ridge. Here, the wind hammered us like batting practice. My chapped lips hummed with pain. Rarely was there a time when my lips weren’t chapped. Faye’s dark hair blew behind her like a tattered battlefield flag. She held onto the sleeve of my jacket. Unfortunately, there was nothing for me to hold onto. We had a perfect view of the Bayazit plain below, which shimmered in patches of browns and tans and greens. I could see the town of Dogubayazit on the western horizon as a finger of black smoke rose from it. I hoped Pascal hadn’t burned down my bar. Again.

  We continued along the crest of the ridge. Almost immediately I spotted a lithe creature darting expertly from rock to rock, pausing every few feet to test the air. Suddenly it stopped, ears twitching. It must have caught wind of us. The white ghost, as the local shepherds call him. The snow leopard turned slowly and displayed its long white teeth and black gums, and in a blink of an eye the big cat was gone, disappearing among the huge granite boulders.

  We moved forward into the sunset, the horizon a fiery canvass, painted orange and red and violet with the rays of the setting sun. And as we wound our way up a narrow path, sprinkled liberally with loose rock, Faye Roberts cried out behind me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I turned in time to see Faye crumple to the ground in a heap. I dashed to her side, sliding down the loose rock. I saw that her right leg was sticking out at an awkward angle.

  “Can you stand?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is it your knee?” If it was her knee, we were heading down the next morning.

  She shook her head. “Ankle.”

  I helped her into a sitting position. She unlaced her right boot and massaged her ankle, wincing. “I don’t think it’s bad. I’ve twisted it before in racquetball. Just give me a minute.”

  “You need ice,” I said.

  She looked around the rocky slope. “If you see some, tell me.”

  “The streams here are at near freezing temperatures,” I said.

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m going to carry you to the nearest stream.”

  “No thank you. I’d prefer to wait.”

  “No waiting. As it is, we have precious little light to negotiate the trail.”

  She continued to protest even as I lifted her into my arms. I moved forward, carrying two backpacks and a full grown woman. Once, my own foot rolled over a loose rock, but I managed to keep my balance. My legs burned and my arms shook and I did my best not to pass out from exhaustion.

  Not soon enough, the rocky trail gave way to plush grass. Here, a trickling stream cut through the plateau. Near the stream’s grassy bank, I set her down. She removed her boot and sock and put her foot in the water and promptly yelped.

  “Jesus, it’s cold.”

  I grinned and stretched my aching back. “It’s glacial run-off. With any luck, it should stop the swelling.”

  “And with any luck, I’ll feel my toes again.”

  ***

  I staked our tents side by side. As I worked, Faye watched me from her perch near the brook. “That was a very nice thing you did, Sam.”

  I shrugged. “It’s all part of the service. You know, helping damsels in distress and all that. How’s the ankle?”

  She pulled her foot out of the water. Her foot glowed palely under the moonlight. In a dazzling feat of dexterity, she pulled her ankle to approximately three inches from her face, and examined it up close and personal. Then she put her foot back in the water. The water rippled and glistened like black lava under the moon.

  “It’ll turn purple, but the swelling appears to have stopped.”

  “Good.”

  I dug a fire pit within the rocks, and fueled it with dry grass and a match. The sky above shone with a million and one stars. The pot of tea came to a boil over the small butane stove, and I poured a cup for each, and handed out beef jerky and trail mix. The trail mix was tilted more toward dried cranberries than anything else, which was fine by me. Faye drank and ate alone by the brook’s edge. When I finished the trail mix, I sat next to her and sipped my tea.

  “Feeling sociable?” she said.

  “You looked lonesome.”

  “Can I take my foot out now?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Who died and made you Dr. Quincy?” she said.

  “Dr. Quincy?”

  “It’s the first doctor that came to mind,” she said sheepishly.

  “But he was a medical examiner,” I said. “You know, autopsies.”

  “He probably knew a thing or two about swollen ankles.”

  “Then again he was a fictional character. The extent of Jack Klugman’s medical knowledge is in the script.”

  “But he played the part well.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “So can I take my foot out?”

  “If you promise to leave Dr. Quincy out of any future arguments.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Fine,” I said, and handed her a hand towel with the embroidered symbol of the Gule Gule.

  Faye wiped her foot and examined the towel. “Does Camilla know you have this?”

  I grabbed the towel from her. “No. And neither does she know of the others.” I rummaged through my backpack and produced two crumpled cigarettes that had seen better days. I lit both and handed her one. I lay back in the dry grass and watched the clouds congeal into something much larger.

  Faye exhaled a steady stream of blue-gray smoke. “You’re a bad influence on me, Sam Ward.”

  “I’ve been known to have that effect.”

  “But it is relaxing,” she said. “And if ever there was a day that I needed a cigarette, it’s today.”