The Ten Thousand Doors of January(53)
Yule was, of course, mistaken. True love is not stagnant; it is in fact a door, through which all kinds of miraculous and dangerous things may enter.
“Julian, love, wake up.” They had spent the night on a small, pine-covered island, occupied only by woodsmen and goatherds. Yule was nestled deep in their bed of canvas and cloth, sweating out the juniper-berry wine of the previous evening, but he peeled his eyes open at Ade’s call.
“Nng?” he asked articulately.
She was sitting with her back to the sea, crosshatched by the dawn light slinking through pine branches. Her straw-colored hair hung around her shoulders in a jagged line where she’d made Yule cut it with his fishing knife, and her skin had turned a rawish, unlikely shade of burnt brown. She wore the practical wrapping of a sailor woman but hadn’t yet mastered the folds and tucks it required, so that her clothes hung around her body like loose netting. Yule thought she was the most beautiful thing in his or any other world.
“There’s something I need to tell you.” Ade was rubbing the black words still staining her left wrist. “Something pretty big, I guess.”
Yule looked more closely at her, but her expression was unfamiliar to him. In their months together he’d seen her exhausted and elated, furious and fanged, bored and brave; he’d never seen her fearful. The emotion sat like a foreign tourist on Ade’s features.
She blew out a breath and closed her eyes. “Julian. I think—well, I know, actually, I’ve been pretty sure for a while now—I’m going to have a baby.”
The world hung suspended. The waves ceased their slapping, the pine boughs no longer brushed together, even the small creatures in the earth stopped their burrowing. Yule wasn’t certain his heart was still beating, except that he didn’t seem to be dead.
“Well, you don’t have to look so damned surprised. I mean, two people doing what we’ve been doing for half a year, you’d have to be downright stupid not to think we might—that I might—” Ade sucked her breath through tight-clenched teeth.
But it was difficult for Yule to hear her clearly, because the momentary silence had given way to something raucous and celebratory, as if his own stuttering heart had been replaced with a City parade. He strove to respond gently, cautiously. “What will you do?”
Ade’s eyes widened and her fingers splayed helplessly over her own stomach, as if warding him away. “Doesn’t seem like I have much choice, does it.”12 But there was no bitterness or regret in her voice, only that chill fear. “But men do, don’t they. Lord knows my father wasn’t—he didn’t—what will you do?”
And Yule realized then what should have been obvious: it wasn’t the baby Ade was frightened of, but him. It was such an enormous relief that Yule laughed, a great shout of joy that scattered the birds perched above them and made Ade bite her cheek with sudden hope.
Yule tossed his blankets aside and crawled to her. He took her hands—scarred and burnt, blunt-nailed and beautiful—in his. “Here’s what I will do, if you will let me: I will take you back to Nin and marry you, and find someplace to make a home for us. And the three of us—or four of us? Or six?—wait till you meet my brothers and sisters—will spend our winters in Nin and our summers sailing, and I will love you and our child more than any man has loved anything. I will never leave either of you as long as I live.”
He watched the fear in her face vanish. It was replaced by some burning, luminous thing that made Yule think of sea divers standing at the edges of cliffs or word-workers staring at the blank page. “Yes,” she said, and their whole lives lay in that single word.
If only Yule had been a better man, he might have kept his promise—to his daughter, if not to his wife.
Yule’s own mother tattooed their wedding vows on their arms. She worked with her white-knotted hair pulled back beneath a kerchief and her needles up-and-downing in the same rhythm Yule knew from childhood. It still seemed to him a kind of magic to see words emerging in the blood-and-ink trail of the needle like dawn following some old god’s chariot. For Ade the ritual lacked the weight of tradition, but she still caught her breath at the strange beauty of dark lines twisting up her forearm, and when she pressed her arm against Yule’s so their red-black wounds touched, and spoke the inked words out loud, she still felt something tectonic shifting beneath her feet.
The traditional Signing of the Blessings followed their vows. Yule’s parents—wearing bemused, affable expressions that indicated they didn’t quite understand how their son came to be married to a milk-pale foreigner with nothing to her name but the world’s ugliest boat, but were happy for him anyway—hosted the gathering, and all Yule’s cousins and stoop-backed aunties and university fellows came crowding in to have their prayers for the newlyweds recorded in the family book. They lingered to eat and drink themselves into a traditional stupor, and Ade spent her third night in the City of Nin crammed into Yule’s childhood bed, watching his cut-tin stars twirl overhead.
It took another week for Yule to wrangle a new arrangement between himself and the university. He announced that he had finished with his researches in the field and needed time and quiet to compile his thoughts, and would also like a stipend large enough to support a wife and child. They balked; he insisted. In the end, and after much muttering about his expected future contributions to the university’s reputation, the master required him to teach three times a week in the City square and provided him enough pay to afford a small stone house on the high northern hillside of the island.