The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  He had devoted parents who were prevented from spoiling him only by the sheer number of their offspring. He had six brothers and sisters, who were, like siblings in every world, alternately his dearest friends and direst enemies. He had a narrow bunk decorated with tin stars dangling from the ceiling, which filled his dreams with gleaming planets and fanciful places. He also possessed a bound set of Var Storyteller’s Tales of the Amarico Sea given to him by his favorite aunt, and a temperamental cat that liked to sleep on the sunbaked windowsill while he read.9 It was a life well suited to daydreaming and reverie, which were the things Yule loved best.

  Yule and his siblings spent their afternoons working with their father on his small fishing boat or helping their mother in her tattoo shop: copying out blessings and prayers in different scripts, mixing inks, and scrubbing her tools. Yule preferred the shop to the ship, and especially loved the long afternoons when his mother permitted him to watch her pricking tiny, blood-dotted words into a customer’s skin. His mother’s word-working wasn’t especially strong, but it was enough that her customers were willing to pay more to have their blessings written by Tilsa Ink, because her blessings sometimes came true.

  His mother originally intended to apprentice him to her art, but it soon became clear that he lacked even the faintest spark of word-working talent. She might have trained him anyway, but he had no patience for the actual labor of tattooing. It was simply the words he loved, the sound and shape and marvelous fluidity of them, and so he drifted instead toward the scholars in their long white robes.

  Every child in the City of Nin was subjected to several years of schooling, which amounted to weekly gatherings in the university courtyards to listen to a young scholar lecture them on their letters and numbers and the locations of all one hundred eighteen inhabited islands on the Amarico. Most children fled these lessons as soon as their parents permitted it. Yule did not. He often lingered to ask questions, and even wheedled a few extra books out of his teachers. One of them, a patient young man named Rilling Scholar, provided books in different languages, and these became Yule’s most prized possessions. He loved the rolling way new syllables felt in his mind and the strangeness of the stories they brought with them, like treasures from sunken ships the waves left behind.

  By age nine Yule had achieved proficiency in three languages, one of which existed only in the university archives, and by the time he turned eleven—the traditional age for such decisions—not even his mother could object to his clear destiny as a scholar. She purchased the long lengths of undyed cloth at the harbor market and only sighed a little as she wrapped her son’s dark limbs in a scholar’s fashion. He was out the door with an armful of books in a white-blurred instant.

  His first years at the university were passed in a state of dreamy near-genius, which provoked both frustration and admiration from his instructors. He continued to learn new languages with the ease of a boy scooping water from a well but seemed unwilling to dedicate himself sufficiently to master any single one of them. He spent untold hours in the archives, turning manuscript pages with a thin wooden paddle, but frequently missed assigned lectures because he’d found an interesting passage on merfolk in a sailor’s logbook, or a crumbling map marked in an unknown language. He consumed books as if they were as necessary to his health as bread and water, but they were rarely the books he had been assigned.

  His most generous instructors insisted that it was purely an issue of time and maturity—eventually young Yule Ian would find a steady subject of study and dedicate himself to it. Then he might select a mentor and begin contributing to the grand body of research that made the University of Nin so prestigious. Other scholars, watching Yule prop a book of fables against the water pitcher at breakfast and turn the pages with a faraway expression, were less sanguine.

  Indeed, as Yule’s fifteenth birthday approached, even the most optimistic scholars were growing concerned. He showed no signs of narrowing his field of study or proposing a course of research, and did not seem in the least concerned by his approaching examinations. Should he pass them, he could be formally announced as Yule Ian Scholar and begin his ascent through the ranks of the university; should he fail, he would be politely asked to consider some other, less demanding apprenticeship.

  In retrospect, it is easy to suspect that Yule’s aimlessness was actually a quest, a search for some shapeless, unnamed thing that lurked just out of sight, and perhaps it was true. Perhaps he and Adelaide spent their childhoods in much the same manner, searching the limits of their worlds in search of another.

  But restless quests are not the business of serious scholars. Yule was therefore summoned one day to the master’s study to have “a serious discussion of his future.” He arrived an hour late with his finger marking his place in A Study of Myths and Legends in the North Sea Isles and a bemused, distant expression. “You summoned me, sir?”

  The master possessed a lined, somber face, as scholars do in most places, and venerable tattoos that wound up both arms indicating his marriage to Kenna Merchant, his dedication to scholarship, and his twenty years of admirable service to the City. His hair clung to his skull in a white scimitar, as if the heat of his working mind had burned it away from the top of his head. His eyes on Yule were troubled.

  “Sit, young Yule, sit. I’d like to talk to you about your future here at the university.” The master’s eyes fell on the book still clutched in Yule’s hands. “I will be blunt with you: we find your lack of focus and discipline of gravest concern. If you can’t settle yourself to a course of study, we will have to consider other avenues for you.”

  Yule’s head tipped curiously to one side, like a cat offered an unfamiliar bit of food. “Other avenues, sir?”

  “Activities better suited to your mind and temperament,” the master said.

  Yule was silent for a moment but could think of nothing better suited to his temperament than spending sun-soaked afternoons curled beneath the olive trees reading books in long-forgotten languages. “What do you mean?”

  The master, who had perhaps expected this conversation to involve more distressed pleading and less polite puzzlement, pressed his lips into a thin maroon line. “I mean you might apprentice elsewhere. Your mother, I am sure, would still train you as a tattooist, or you could act as a scribe for one of the word-workers on the east side, or even a merchant’s bookkeeper. I could speak to my wife, if you’d like.”

  Only now did Yule’s expression begin to reflect the horror the master anticipated. He softened again. “Well, my boy, we haven’t reached that point just yet. Simply spend the next week in contemplation, consider your choices. And if you would like to stay here and take your scholar’s exams… find a path.”

  Yule was dismissed. He found himself leaving the cool stone halls, striding through courtyards and spiraled streets, and then climbing the hills behind the City with the sun baking the back of his neck, without ever being fully aware of any particular destination. He was simply moving, fleeing the choice the master had given him.

  To any other young boy hoping to join the ranks of the scholars, the choice would have been an easy one: either he proposed a line of research in Amarican history or ancient languages or religious philosophy, or he abandoned all such aspirations and worked as a humble scribe. But to Yule both paths were unspeakably bleak. Both of them would necessitate a narrowing of his boundless horizons, an end to his dreaming. The thought of either made him feel tight-chested, as if two great hands pressed on either side of his ribs.

  He could not have known it then, but it was much the same way Ade felt on the days she ran out to the old hayfield to be alone with the sound of the riverboats and the wideness of the sky. Except that Ade had grown up with the harsh boundaries of her life always close at hand and had long since set her will against them; poor, charmed Yule had simply never known such rules existed before that day.

  He staggered away from his discovery, past the scrubby hillside farms, past the last packed-earth roads
, scrambling along animal trails and over rocky bluffs. Eventually even the animal trails disappeared into gnarled gray stone, and the wind carried faraway smells of salt-soaked wood. He had never been so high above his City, and he found he liked the way it dwindled below him until it was just a collection of distant white squares surrounded by the vastness of the sea.

  His skin itched with wind-dried sweat and his palms were rubbed raw against the stones. He knew he ought to turn around, but his legs continued carrying him onward, upward, until he pulled himself over a ledge and saw it: an archway.

  A thin gray curtain hung from the arch, fluttering in its own breeze like a witch’s skirt. A smell issued from it, like river water and mud and sunlight, nothing at all like the stony salt smell of Nin.

  Once Yule saw the arch, he found his eyes reluctant to look anywhere else. It seemed almost to beckon him like a half-curled hand. He walked toward it with a mad feeling of hope flooding his limbs—an impossible, sourceless hope that there was something marvelous and strange on the other side of that curtain, waiting just for him.

  He pulled aside the curtain and saw nothing but knotted grass and stone beyond it. He stepped beneath the arch and into a vast, swallowing darkness.

  It pressed and sucked at him like tar, suffocating in its enormity, until he felt solid wood beneath his palms. He heaved against it in desperation and still-burning hope—felt it grind against long-undisturbed dirt—and then it was open, and Yule stepped out into burnt-orange grasses beneath an eggshell sky. He had only stood for a few moments, openmouthed in the strange air of another world, when she came striding toward him across the field. A young woman the color of milk and honeyed wheat.

  I will not repeat the tale of that meeting a second time. You’ve already heard how the two young persons sat together in the early-fall chill and told their impossible truths of here and elsewhere. How they spoke in a long-dead language preserved only in a few ancient texts in Nin’s archives, which Yule had studied for the sheer pleasure of new syllables dancing on his tongue. How it did not feel like a meeting of two people so much as a collision of two planets, as if both of them had swung out of their orbits and hurtled into one another. How they kissed, and how the fireflies pulsed around them.

  How doomed and brief their meeting was.

  Yule spent the next three days in a state of dazed elation. The scholars grew worried that his mind had been subtly damaged in some fall or accident; his mother and father, who were more familiar with the maladies of young boys, worried that he had fallen in love. Yule himself offered no explanations but only smiled beatifically and hummed out-of-key versions of old ballads about famous lovers and sailing ships.

  He returned to the curtained arch on the third day just as, on the other side of an endless darkness, Ade returned to the cabin in the hayfield. You know what awaited him, of course: bitterest disappointment. Instead of a magical door leading to a foreign land, Yule found nothing but piled stones on a hilltop and a gray curtain hanging still and rotten as the skin of some dead creature. It did not lead anywhere at all, no matter how furiously he cursed it.

  Eventually Yule simply sat and waited, hoping the girl might find her way through to him. She did not. You may picture the two of them—Ade waiting in the deepening night of the overgrown field with hope guttering like an overspent candle in her chest, Yule perched on the hilltop with his skinny arms held around his knees—almost like figures on either side of a mirror. Except instead of cool glass between them it was the vastness between worlds.

  Yule watched constellations creep over the horizon, reading the familiar words pricked in starlight: Ships-Heaven-Sent, Blessings- of-Summer, Scholar’s-Humility. They slid over him like pages from some great book, familiar as his own name. He thought of Ade, waiting in her separate darkness, and wondered what her stars told her.

  He stood. He rubbed his thumb across the silver piece he’d brought with him—thinking he might show it to her as proof of his own world—and let it fall to earth. He didn’t know if it was an offering or a casting-away, but he knew he didn’t want to carry it any longer, to feel the knowing, silver-stamped eyes of the City Founder watching him.10 He turned away then, and did not return again to the stone arch.

  But doors, you will recall, are change.

  The Yule who left the arch that night was therefore a somewhat different Yule from the one who had found it three days previously. Something new thudded in his chest alongside his heart, as if a separate organ had suddenly come pumping to life. It had an urgent, driving rhythm, which Yule could not fail to notice even through his misery. He pondered it as he lay in his narrow bed that night, listening to the disgruntled sounds of his siblings falling back to sleep after being woken by his return. It did not feel like despair, or loss, or loneliness. It reminded him most of the feeling he had sometimes in the archives when a scrap of writing written on ancient vellum pulled him onward, deeper, until he lost himself in a spiraling trail of stories, but even that was nothing compared to the thrumming urgency he now felt. He fell asleep worrying vaguely that he’d developed some sort of murmur in his heart.

  The following morning he recognized it as something much more serious: the discovery of his life’s purpose.

  He lay in bed for several more minutes, contemplating the immensity of the task before him, then rose and dressed at such speed that his siblings caught only a glimpse of his white robes whipping out the door. He went straight to the master scholar’s office and asked to take his exams immediately. The master reminded him gently that aspiring scholars were expected to present thorough and prepared proposals for their future studies, which convinced their fellows of their seriousness, dedication, and ability. He suggested that Yule take the necessary time to compile bibliographies and collect his sources, perhaps consult with more advanced scholars.

  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.