by Richard Farr
“So he invites him to Alexandria? And they come up with the Antikythera Mechanism as a decoder?”
“It would be like having your Dad and Maynard Jones in the same room, only better. Or worse. So. A century later, Posidonius reads the Geographika. That makes him want to start collecting the diskoi—obviously soon enough he’s going to want the Mechanism too. And suppose those divers in 1900 brought up only a fragment of something far more complex?”
The drug/caffeine cocktail has done its work; when we board our next plane, and climb through twenty thousand feet, my headache doesn’t come back. We get treated to gorgeous views of emerald fields and cracked-leather uplands, all lit by the final rays of sunset. Then the sky goes dark and the plane is banking over the darkening vastness of Lake Van. We descend steeply, as if preparing to land on the water. Runway lights show up on shore at the last moment.
It’s another hard, military-style landing. The plane bounces on its left-side wheels, threatens to take off again. We thump back down, skitter, skid to an awkward halt.
Welcome to beautiful Eastern Turkey.
The little arrivals hall is chilly, poorly lit, has the feel of an old Midwestern bus terminal—but our driver is waiting for us. He’s a big, broad guy of maybe forty, with a heavily creased face and a spiky, theatrical beard. Looks like a peasant, maybe a shepherd or something, except that he has perfect teeth and modern-looking frameless glasses. He doesn’t want to talk, but his heavily accented English is flawless.
“No four-wheel drive?”
“My four-wheeler is dead. Broken axle.”
“I paid for four-wheel drive.”
He looks at me as if he’d really rather kill me than either talk or drive, then shrugs contemptuously, as if I’m just wasting my breath because I know, and he knows I know, that there’s nothing to be done about it.
His name is—or isn’t—Mack.
“Mack, yes. Do I drive you to Ararat or not?”
“You can do that? Tonight?”
“Ararat is a big mountain. I can drive you to the base at Dogubayazit, maybe.”
“Why Dogubayazit only maybe?”
He looks away, as if embarrassed by something, then scans the arrivals hall. “Come outside.”
He walks us over to his busted-up Toyota minivan. It’s sitting alone under the yellow glare of a sodium light. Most of the bottom third has been blasted down to bare metal by rocks and gravel; the rest of it is caked thickly with dust. Also, the windshield has a long, diagonal crack that runs right across the driver’s field of view. Also, one wiper, one headlight, and both fenders are missing.
Morag walks around it, inspects it with a skeptical eye. “You can tell this was dark blue, once,” she says, pointing at a small section of the roof.
Mack ignores her and talks directly to me. “Strange things are happening there. We have heard rumors.”
“Rumors about what?”
He peers closely at me, seems to want to ask a question, doesn’t. “The Seraphim. People say they are doing something—I don’t know.”
Morag again: “Can this piece of tinfoil even get us there?”
He looks at her then as if seeing her for the first time, and gives the driver’s door a vicious kick, as if to prove that the whole machine is invincible. Surprisingly, nothing comes off except dust.
“My Toyota never goes wrong,” he says. “Not like your stupid American Land Rovers.”
“Land Rover is a British brand owned by an Indian corporation,” Morag drawls without looking at him.
He ignores this completely, or pretends to. “OK, Ararat. Four hours in daylight. Middle of the night, maybe five or six.”
I resist the temptation to check my watch yet again.
“Let’s do it.”
Can’t complain about Mack being slow, anyway: he drives like a suicide bomber. In the town of Van itself, he simply ignores the few red lights. Once we leave the city for the vast inky blackness of the East Anatolian countryside, he’s way too fast on bends, drives with just two fingers on the wheel, always prefers the horn to the brake. Luckily there’s not much traffic—when overtaking a slow truck on a blind curve, his safety technique is a muttered prayer.
I’m up front, and as we track north beyond the tip of Lake Van, I try repeatedly to draw him into conversation. Hoping to find out more about rumors; hoping also to understand why his English is so good and what his humorless, silent, disapproving manner is all about. Is he just a grinch? A Turk who disapproves of the rich tourists he has to serve? Or a Muslim who disapproves of American infidels? He won’t say anything. When we get a six-inch nail in a tire, only an hour into the trip, and he has to put on the spare by flashlight, the answer comes to me.
“Mack?” I say, as we hit the road again, with several hours to go and no second spare.
No answer.
“Mack?”
I can tell he’s heard.
“Mack, you’re not Turkish, are you?”
In the glow from the dash, I can see his face crinkle as if he’s bitten a lemon. But he still doesn’t say anything.
“You’re Armenian.”
He doesn’t smile, but at least the look he gives me is neutral, even surprised. “Armenian, yes.” He pulls a small wooden cross out from under his shirt. “Armenian Christian.”
“And you don’t like us, because you think we’re Seraphim, going to this, this—to whatever’s happening at Ararat?”
He doesn’t exactly answer the question. “The Seraphim should stay away. But they are powerful now and there’s nothing we can do. Ararat has been a sacred place to Armenians for thousands of years. Since before Christianity, even.”
“Home of the gods, yes? Like Olympus for the Greeks.”
Mention of the Greeks produces another lemon face—then finally, as if it has been waiting for permission to come out, a big smile and even a chuckle. “I am Armenian, so I hate the Turks. I also hate the Greeks, the Iranians, the Russians, and the Kurds. If I have time, maybe at the weekend, I remember to hate the Israelis and the Americans too. But right now it’s difficult to keep up, because I’m busy hating the Seraphim even more. You see, my wife and daughter both converted to the Seraphim. And then they vanished.”
He pauses, fingers the cross again. “I am an Armenian, and therefore I hate everybody. I am also a Christian, and therefore I love everybody. Life is complicated.”
“But Mack, we’re not Seraphim. We’re going to Ararat to find my father. And my best friend.”
“They are Seraphim?”
“Sort of the opposite. We think the Seraphim kidnapped them. My father had information they wanted. Or they thought he did.”
Now Mack wants to know everything. I start by telling him about Dad. When I’ve paused to let him digest the uncomfortable fact that my father is the notorious William Calder, I ask him for his real name. No particular reason; it just seems the right thing to do.
He mumbles it through his beard. At first I don’t get it.
“Tarnel. Tenyal?”
He slows way down: “Tah-ni-yel.”
“Ta-ni-yel? That’s my name.”
He looks at me as if I’ve just claimed to be the pope.
“No, really, it is. Taniel. Only we say Daniel.”
I find my passport, point to the word. He can’t read it in the poor light, peers close, and swerves into the wrong lane, narrowly missing three guys who chose that moment to roar out of the gloom on one small motorcycle.
Morag is in the back. She leans her head in between us, doesn’t even mention the near-miss. “This is going to be confusing, Taniel. And you just kind of look like a Mack to me, frankly. I think we should stick to calling you Mack.”
He looks over his shoulder at her, amused or offended, it’s hard to say. “Where are you from? China? America also, like”—he exaggerates the unfamiliar pronunciation—“Daniel?”
“Me? I’m not from China or America. I’m from everywhere.”
He considers this fo
r a minute. “Call me Mack.”
“I will,” she says. “By the way, your English is extremely good, Mack.”
“Good for an Armenian peasant who drives tourists around in an old Toyota? Is that what you mean?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Relax. You’re right. I am an Armenian peasant. Was, anyway, before they civilized me. I grew up in a wooden hut with a grass roof. I hunted boar with my father in the Zangezur Mountains. But I did well in school, got a scholarship, and ended up teaching history at Yerevan State University.”
He points to the northeast, in the direction of Armenia. “Let me tell you something about Yerevan. From there, looking south, the skyline is dominated by Ararat. Just like Rainier in your Seattle—I have seen the pictures. Except that Ararat is our national symbol—and it used to be in Armenia, before half our country was stolen from us by the Turks.”
“So why did you become a driver for hire in Van?”
“I was kicked out of Yerevan when the Seraphim became strong there. I was angry about my wife and daughter; when they left me, I felt they had been brainwashed, and so I led a protest movement against the Seraphim. That is dangerous: I received threats, my apartment was looted, and I was beaten up. It seemed safer to get out of the country. I am an exile—just like Mount Ararat itself is an exile.”
“It seems to me,” Morag says, “that Taniel and Daniel are on the same side.”
He reaches across without taking his eyes off the road, shakes my hand. When he laughs, it sounds like water in a long metal pipe. “The enemy of my enemy. Good enough.”
CHAPTER 21
LITTLE ARARAT
Just after dawn, we stop at a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, screech to a halt, and Mack disappears without a word. “God,” Morag says, stretching, “I hope he’s getting us some breakfast.”
He is. After twenty minutes he returns with two plastic grocery bags that seem improbably white and shiny in this remote, gray-brown place. The bags are full of paper-wrapped parcels containing steaming lavash flatbread and a single pottery bowl full of stew. I take them from him and spread the contents on a patch of grass near a stream. The smell is more dinner than breakfast, but all three of us are ravenous. And the stew—lentils, vegetables, meat—is chewy and tough, but tastes wonderful.
“Lamb?” I ask.
“In theory, lamb.”
“What about in practice?”
“Times are difficult.”
“Meaning?”
Mack stabs a piece of the meat with the tip of a knife, conveys it to his mouth, chews for a minute. His mouth is still full when he answers: “Times are difficult. They had a very old goat.”
He takes another bite before gesturing back at the village. “Friends. They let me know what’s happening. We can’t go to Dogubayazit.”
“Why?”
“It may be just talk, just people getting frightened. But they say the Seraphim have taken over the whole area in the past few days. Either Quinn is the world’s best liar, or thousands of people are about to ascend into the dimension of the eternal. We could try to blend in, but it may be better to avoid them.”
“How long?”
“There’s a side road. It means longer in the car, a couple more hours maybe. But it will get us higher up the mountain.”
Morag takes the front seat next to Mack after that. At some point, despite everything, I fall asleep. In a fragment of a dream, Dad and Quinn are having an angry argument in a supermarket. I’m trying to pretend I’m not there; Rosko is trying to pull them apart.
When we hit a large bump, I crack my head painfully against the window frame and wake up. Still fifty miles to go, but Ararat already dominates the land in every direction. A conical, five-thousand-meter volcano. It does remind me of Rainier—only it’s even more isolated, and looks more elegant, more magnificent, more deadly.
Morag turns round to make sure I’ve seen it. “Impressive, aye?”
“A home fit for the gods.”
Soon we can see two peaks: Ararat itself, and a secondary peak, Little Ararat, a few miles farther southeast. The traffic thickens around Dogubayazit. Groups of people are standing by buses, clutching their little red books. Mack hits the gas and speeds on. Ten miles later, he pulls a sharp left onto a rutted gravel road, and for several more miles, as it gets steeper, we hang on to any available surface as the minivan bucks and groans its way upward. For the last half mile, we’re grinding forward in the lowest gear at such a steep angle that I wonder if we’ll just flip over backward. When we do stop and pile out, Ararat lies to the north, partly hidden from us behind the lesser peak. There’s barely a goat track in front of us.
“I guess you have to leave us here,” I say to Mack. “Thank you anyway. It was a pleasure—Taniel.”
“Daniel.” He offers a little bow. “What the Seraphim are doing here, I have a bad feeling about it. If I leave you, I have a bad feeling about that as well. And feeling guilty is something that annoys me.”
Reaching into the back, under the rear seats, he pulls out an old woolen blanket. Underneath there’s a small backpack, a couple of water bottles, and a large hunting rifle. He points the rifle up the goat path.
“Someone has to fight these people. Follow me.”
For three or four miles we do just that, silently picking our way across stony fields, through gullies and deeper ravines, past stubby little birch trees. The day is hazy. The great mountain, with its cap of snow, appears and disappears among the nearer ridges of Little Ararat. The air smells of juniper bushes and damp sheep.
Nearing the saddle between the two mountains, we find ourselves in a narrow valley filled with fog. Mack holds up a hand to stop us. There’s a sound like wind passing through autumn leaves. And the Seraphim emerge out of the fog as if congealing from it, like a platoon of ghost soldiers.
Thirty of them, in single file, each with the thin white scarf—a group of eighteen, followed by a group of twelve. Each one is chanting softly, each one carrying the little red book. The chant has a simple musicality to it, with the stress on the second syllable in each set, a deliberate breath between each group of four lines.
Or-DA-na
Mi-CHE-fa
Kul-DE-nu
Qu-QA-lan
Rem-XU-xi
Kol-BA-kol
Ip-DA-hin
Ul-GE-mun
“Mysteries?” Mack asks.
“No,” Morag says. “Not yet, anyway.” She steps right up to one of them—an older woman in a long brown skirt, heavy pleated jacket, and head scarf.
“Excuse me. Where are you going?”
The woman smiles pleasantly and replies in what I guess is Turkish, but then a man behind her, also dressed as if he’s local, addresses Morag in English.
“We are going home,” he says. “To the Architects.” He talks normally, casually—like someone who might say, We’re on our way to the game. And another man hands Morag his book. “Here, take it. Perhaps you will follow us. When you are ready.”
“Thank you,” Morag says, accepting the book. And to Mack: “No. Not Mysteries. Quinn would say these people are still on their way to the light. Just try not to listen to the chanting, or you’ll end up following them.”
I understand what she means. There’s something overwhelmingly comforting about the sound, something elemental, magnetic.
“Shouldn’t we stop them?” Mack says, but Morag shakes her head. It’s odd to see how easily she asserts her authority. “We’re here to find Daniel’s dad, and our friend Rosko,” she says. “Above all, we’re here to work out what’s happening and see if we can stop it. No purpose getting into a fight down here.”
By the time Mack puts his head to one side, then straightens it again—an eloquent gesture of grudging assent—the last figures in the column are already dissolving into the fog. They leave behind only the warm inviting rustle of their voices. I don’t want to stop them; I want to follow them. Morag seems to sense it and grabs me by the e
lbow. “D, don’t listen. You’re tuned to this. Vulnerable to it. Just like Iona was. Don’t listen.”
Several hours later we’re at least two thousand feet higher up on Little Ararat. We come to an abandoned monastery, just a couple of stone walls. “Big earthquake,” Mack says laconically, pointing at a pile of rubble. “In 1840. A couple of villages on the north slope just disappeared.”
“Did Ararat erupt then?” I ask him.
“Ararat is about as extinct as you can get.”
“Don’t tell me—there’s evidence it was a major population center until an eruption during the Bronze Age.”
“Yes—how did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
Five-thousand-year-old bodies, entombed in the ash beneath our feet: I wonder what they could tell us. I’m also hungry, thirsty, sore—and Morag’s in worse shape than me. We slump down amid the broken stones, finish the water, contemplate the misery of having no food.
There’s a rotted, lethal-looking stone stairway up the side of one wall. Mack trots up it like a mountain goat; on a precarious fragment of turret, he produces a pair of binoculars from his bag.
“Daniel. Morag.” He pronounces it Morek, but at least he’s pronouncing it. “Look: you can see them now.”
We peel ourselves off the ground and claw our way up to his perch. Stupid for all three of us to die because a bit of old masonry collapsed. But the structure is three feet thick. Could probably support a bus.
The main peak is a lonely giant with a cape of ice, six or seven miles away. Mack’s binoculars bring great lines of ants on its upper slopes into view: people, hundreds of them, converging from almost every direction. But Morag takes the binoculars from me, pans them over the whole landscape, and points to something up to our left. “Look.”