“Can I have everyone’s attention, please?”
The rumble of conversation continued for a few seconds, dishes and silverware clinking, and Meryam thought she might have to speak up again, louder this time. But then forks and cups began to lower and the staff shifted one or two at a time to face her.
There were half a dozen lightweight plastic tables, stackable things that were only brought out at mealtime. The chairs were just as lightweight, just as stackable, but there weren’t enough of them. The crew took turns standing. From Meryam’s perspective they ought to have been happy to have tables and chairs at all. Happy they weren’t, scooping cold canned beans with their fingers.
Be kind, she told herself. But she wasn’t in a charitable mood. She felt a buzz of aggravation at the back of her skull like a small headache that she couldn’t seem to shake.
“I understand some of you are nervous about continuing your work on the Ark Project,” Meryam began. She scanned the space ahead of her—the archaeologists and students, the workers, the guides, the doctor, the Turkish monitors and the paleopathologist, Olivieri, and Adam. Walker’s little trio sat farthest away from her, near Helen Marshall, who Meryam knew wanted to keep in view of the roped-off area she’d been working in that day to make sure no one stumbled into it.
“Some of you are religious people. Some of you have superstitions that stem from those religions or from childhood,” she went on. Anger flickered across several faces. Off to her right, Hakan uncrossed his arms with a sneer she had seen before. “I am not questioning your spirituality or suggesting that your faith is in any way illegitimate. There are Jews among us, as well as Christians and Muslims and atheists. I’m not here to tell you what to believe. What I will tell you is this—you have nothing to fear.”
An American—an NYU student named Errick Noonan—sat up straighter in his seat. “How can you promise that?”
Meryam relaxed. It was the question she had hoped for. They would listen much more closely to her answer to a challenge than if she’d made a simple statement.
“You’re all intelligent people. Many of you are experts in your fields of study, or on your way to becoming that. Others have an intimate knowledge of this mountain, of this region. We’re living inside an ancient ship—an ark. There’s a lot we don’t know. Who built it? How did it get up here? Why was it built? These are the questions and the onus is on all of you to find the answers.”
“Those aren’t the questions on my mind tonight,” Errick said.
“Must we bother with this idiocy?” called an older Turkish student, a master’s candidate called Kemal. “Some of us are tired of the constant chatter. You want something to fear? Worry about the storm that’s coming, or whether your foolishness will get you dismissed from a once-in-a-lifetime project.”
Errick stood up quickly, plastic chair falling over backward. “Are you kidding me?” he demanded, jabbing a finger in the air, pointing at Kemal. “You can’t tell me this isn’t getting under your skin. Any of you.”
“Sit down, Errick,” Wyn Douglas said. “Meryam was—”
“I know what Meryam is trying to do. But I heard Dr. Patil talking about the cadaver you’re all so protective of.” He whipped around, gesturing at several other students, most of them Americans who were on Wyn’s crew with him. “This thing’s got horns. It’s not human. Dr. Patil said himself that it looked like a demon—”
Dev Patil held up a hand. “Now, hang on a minute. I never said it was a demon, only that it had horns like a demon.”
Errick threw up his hands. “There you go!” He spun to face Meryam again, voices rising around him, some in support and some calling for him to return to his seat. “Doc Patil knows more about this than anyone and he won’t even use a human pronoun to describe that thing. Why? ’Cause it isn’t human.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” someone shouted.
Helen Marshall called for Errick to sit and listen.
Kemal got up from his chair. “The only demons around here are the little terrors running around inside the heads of anyone who believes there is something to fear! There is no devil! There is no evil! There is—”
“I never thought so, either,” Errick said. “But now we’ve got a goddamn demon about eighty yards from where you’re standing, man.”
“There is no—”
“No?” Errick echoed. “You keep saying ‘no?’”
He twisted around, scanning for someone, and when he spotted Kim Seong he marched in her direction.
Walker stood abruptly. “Back the fuck off, kid.”
Errick hesitated, and voices rose up to fill the pause, arguing.
“Hey!” Meryam shouted. “That is bloody well enough!”
The last few words made her throat raw, the quivering rage in her so startling—to her and her staff—that all eyes turned toward her again. At last.
“Errick,” she said, quietly now, but her voice carried in the sudden silence. “Sit down. Don’t make me say it again.”
Meryam waited, calming herself as the student returned to his table, righted his chair, and sat heavily. Walker, Kemal, and several others who had leaped to their feet also returned to their chairs. Those who had already been standing seemed to wish they had somewhere to sit, if only to avoid Meryam screaming herself hoarse.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said, and saw them all stiffen. Most of the time, people who had to announce their impending honesty were about to lie to you. But the words that followed surprised her with the way they made her heart thump and the way her cheeks flushed as she spoke them.
The truth felt raw, even as it came out of her mouth.
“I don’t believe in devils or angels,” she said. “Maybe there’s some kind of great, wise being out there in the cosmos—I think there probably is, but mostly ’cause I think it’s arrogant for us to think we’re the smartest things the universe has to offer. But demons and ghosts, the voice of God, heaven and hell? Not a doubt in my mind that it’s all shit. Here’s my confession, though, and you need to understand this. I want it to be true. If the ark is real, if God told some bloke called Noah to build this old tub ’cause he was about to flood the damn world, that means there is a heaven. It means death isn’t the end and we carry on afterward, and maybe I get to see my gran again someday. She never put much stock in God but was kinder to me than anyone else has ever been.”
Several people glanced at Adam, wondering how he felt about this statement, given that she’d agreed to marry him. Meryam didn’t care how he felt about it just then.
“Here is what I do know. The body we found is deformed. We haven’t established its sex, so ‘it’ is a perfectly acceptable pronoun. As soon as the storm is over, we are going to transport it to Istanbul. Until that time, if it makes you nervous or your superstition is so great that you are actually afraid, I suggest you focus on your work and stay away from the tented area at the back of level one. Now, if that’s all—”
Hakan clapped his hands once, loudly, the sound echoing.
Every head turned. Meryam wanted to murder him. He’d clapped to interrupt, to get attention, but he’d done it like a dog calling his master to heel, and he was the project foreman. He had been rude to her all along, dismissive, critical of her gender, but never this openly.
“You have something to say, Hakan?”
He sneered. “You say ‘superstition’ the way people say ‘dog shit.’”
“I don’t think—”
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Hakan went on.
Feyiz swore and began moving across the cave, as if to separate Meryam from his uncle. Hakan saw the younger guide coming and dismissed him with a scowl. Feyiz was not a factor to him.