The Ten Thousand Doors of January(45)
Yule made an exasperated noise. “Oh, very well. In three days, then. Will that do?” The master assented, but his expression said he anticipated nothing but disaster and mortification.
In this, as in few other things, the master was mistaken. The Yule who arrived for his examination appeared to be an entirely different boy from the one they had all known and fretted over for years. All the dreamy wonderment and misty-eyed curiosity had burned away like a sea fog beneath the sun, revealing a somber-faced young man who radiated a kind of fierce, unshakable intention. His proposal was a model of clarity and ambition that would require mastery of multiple languages, familiarity with a dozen different fields of study, and untold years spent combing through ancient tales and half-written stories. It was customary at the conclusion of such presentations for the scholars to voice objections and concerns to the proposal, but the room was quite silent.
It was the master himself who spoke first. “Well, Yule. I can find no fault with your course of study, save that it will take you half your life. All I would like to know is where this sudden… certainty has come from. What set you on this path?”
Yule Ian felt a tremor in his breastbone, as if there were a red thread tied around it and someone had just yanked the other end. He considered, briefly and foolishly, simply telling the truth: that he sought to follow the skittering ant-trails of words into other worlds, to find a burnt-orange field lit with fireflies, to find a girl the color of wheat and milk.
Instead, he said, “True scholarship needs neither an origin nor a destination, good master. To seek new knowledge is its own motivation.” This was precisely the sort of lofty non-answer that pleased scholars best. They preened and cooed like doves around him, signing their names to his proposal with many extra flourishes. Only the master paused before signing, watching Yule the way a fisherman watches a darkening cloud on the horizon. But he, too, bent his head to the pages.
Yule left the hall that day with a formal blessing and a new name, both of which his mother tattooed in sinuous spirals around his left wrist. The words were still hot and stinging in his flesh the next day when Yule ascended the white-stone stairs that led to his favorite reading room. He sat at a yellow-wood desk overlooking the sea and opened the first sweet-smelling page of a new notebook. In uncharacteristically neat script, he wrote: Notes and Researches vol. 1: A Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology, compiled by Yule Ian Scholar, 6908.
The title, as you have no doubt surmised, has since been revised.
Yule Ian Scholar spent a considerable portion of the next twelve years hunched over that same desk, alternately scribbling and reading, surrounded by so many towers of books that his study came to resemble a paper model of a city. He read collections of folktales and interviews with long-dead explorers, logbooks and holy texts from forgotten religions. He read them in all the languages of the Amarico Sea, and all the languages that happened to have fallen through the cracks between one world and the next over the previous several centuries. He read until there was little left to read, and he was obliged to take his researches “into the field,” as he airily informed his fellows. They imagined, in the comfortable manner of scholars, that “the field” merely referred to exotic archives in other Cities and wished him well.
They did not presume that Yule would cram his shoulder bag full of journals and dried fish, pay for passage on a series of trade ships and mail carriers, and march out into the wilds of foreign islands with the focused air of a hound following an animal trail. But the trails he followed were the invisible, glimmering tracks left by stories and myths, and instead of animals he hunted doors.
In time, he found a precious handful of them. None of them led to a cedar-smelling world with inhabitants the color of cotton, but he was not discouraged. Yule was stuffed with the kind of unblemished confidence that belongs only to the very young, who have never truly known the bitterness of failure, or felt the years of their lives trickling away from them like water from cupped palms. It seemed to him then that his success was inevitable.
(Of course, I know better now.)
He often liked to imagine the scene: Perhaps he would find her home after weeks of hard traveling, and she would look up from her work to see him striding toward her, and that wild smile would split her face. Perhaps they would meet in that same field and they would run toward one another through springtime-green grasses. Perhaps he would find her in some distant city he could scarcely imagine, or in a howling thunderstorm, or on the shores of an unnamed island.
With the baseless arrogance that so often plagues young men, Yule never once considered the possibility that Adelaide would not be waiting for him. He never imagined she might have spent the past decade flitting in and out of worlds with the instinctive ease of a gull swooping from ship to ship in the harbor, without a single book or record to guide her. He certainly never imagined she might build herself a rickety boat in the mountains and sail it onto the indigo waves of the Amarico Sea.
It was such an outlandish notion, in fact, that Yule almost dismissed it entirely when he heard a strange rumor on the docks of the City of Plumm. It came to him as most rumors do: as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that assembled themselves slowly into a single story. The most often-repeated details seemed to be these: There had been a strange ship sighted off the eastern coast of the City of Plumm, with sails of eerie white canvas. One or two fisherwomen and traders had approached it, curious to see what species of madman would sail a ship without blessings stitched into the canvas, but they had all veered quickly away. The ship, they claimed, was sailed by a woman as white as paper. A ghost, perhaps, or some pale undersea creature come to the surface.