He stared at Per in disbelief. “Look. I was sent here to try to fix something that shouldn’t have happened, to repair the damage to the timeline. What if this is it? What if by ignoring this, and letting it happen, history changes and causes everything to fall apart?”
“What if by taking the note, or confronting Lars Jonsson, that is what changes history?” Per asked. “You don’t know.”
“I do know that something was supposed to occur in the next day or so that was the important event, the divergence that we have to fix.”
“But you don’t know what it is.” Per shook his head. “You have been sent on a fool’s errand. I am sorry to say so, but it is true. You cannot change something when you do not know what it is. And even if you did know, if you somehow figured it out, then how do you change it? It is not as if there is only one possible outcome for any action. There are thousands of different ways that things can go.
“So even if you somehow did know that this box, and this note of Lars Jonsson’s, are the thing you need to change, what then? Do you destroy the note? Do you lay in wait for Lars Jonsson, and slay him when he walks through the door? Do you tell him that you know what he is trying to do, and threaten to reveal his plan to the authorities? Do you offer to help him to kill the king and his son?
“There are more possible courses of action than anyone could count, and yet you stand there telling me that one, and only one, of these is the right one. How, then, do you decide which one is the correct one?” Per shook his head. “I am sorry to say so, and for a time I thought it might not be true, but I see now that your friend Fischer is a fool, and he has put your life in danger for no very good reason.”
He stared at Per in silence for a moment. He felt deflated, as if Per had pointed out the very thing that all of them should have seen, perhaps did see, but no one wanted to admit.
Finally, he said, “You yourself said that you hoped I would succeed,. You said you felt that things weren’t right. And now you’re saying it’s hopeless.”
“I still do hope. If I did not, I would hang myself from yonder beam, and be done with it. But hope is itself a foolish thing, is it not? To remain hopeful when everyone around you is dying of the plague, when your own life is not what it was meant to be, and there is no way to change it? And even hope cannot blind me to the truth, that if this is the important thing, the cause of this divergence you spoke of, then I do not see how any man could decide which way to go. Perhaps your Fischer knows, and did not tell you?”
“No,” he said, in a defeated voice. “I don’t think he knows, either.”
“Then we can only do one thing. Put the note back into the box, give it to Lars Jonsson tomorrow, and see what happens.”
• • •
The next day dawned cool, but the sky was a clean, pure blue. It looked freshly-washed, and to Darren’s eyes, immensely cheering after the chill gray monotony that was all he’d seen since his arrival in Norway. The sunlight lifted his mood, even though the memory of the depressing conversation of the previous evening still nagged at him. Even the chickens seemed happier, and strutted around in the slanted rays of sunshine in the little yard behind the smithy, pecking at the grains he tossed to them and making what sounded like happy chicken noises.
Per, on the other hand, was gloomier than usual, and prepared their meager breakfast in silence. Darren tried more than once to strike up a conversation, but statements such as, “The weather looks like it’s improved” and “The chickens laid three eggs this morning” were answered with monosyllabic grunts, and finally he gave up.
The day crept its way slowly forward. Per worked on an intricate silver buckle that looked as if it went to a man’s belt, but unlike the previous day he seemed to prefer to work without an audience, and after a while Darren decided to go for a walk.
The air was considerably warmer than the previous day, and there was bird song in the distance, but the road was still rutted and muddy and he had to watch his step to avoid a misstep into a puddle of ice-cold water. He walked up the road to Gerda’s house, and found his rescuer outside, digging in a small patch of garden in front of her ramshackle cottage.
He greeted her warmly, and she turned around and gave him a smile that was mostly gums.
“Well,” she said. “Darren Carlsson. Still alive, I see?”
“The day’s still young,” he said. “There’s still plenty of time to get killed later.”
“That is true, my friend. That is true. But I’m glad you’ve come to visit. How is Per Olafsson? Still alive too, then?”
“Yes, Per’s still alive. But we’ve got a dilemma, Gerda, and I thought I could ask your advice.”
She stood up and wiped the mud off her hands onto her dress, then tried to brush the mud from her dress and succeeded in returning most of it to her hands, then shrugged.
“Can’t escape mud,” she said. “Kind of like death, mud is. Sticks to everything in the end. At least it’s better than fleas, eh?” She poked him in the ribs and laughed at her own joke.
“Yeah, better than fleas,” he said. “But anyway. We have a problem, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Well, why don’t you come inside, and we can each have a mug of ale, and you can tell me about it, and then I’ll tell you what to do.”
She led him into the house, and after two mugs of ale were poured, and they were seated at the narrow table in what passed for a kitchen, Gerda said, “Now, what is the problem, Darren Carlsson?”
He told her about Per’s discovery of the note, and how they’d read the writing on it, and discovered the plot to kill King Magnus and his son.
“And the Archbishop is involved?” she said.
“It seems like it.”
“Always trouble when you get religious men involved in political matters.”
“My country has the same problem,” he said.
“Well, what did Per think should be done?”
“Per said we should put the note back, and give it to Lars, and let fate take its own course. He said we couldn’t change matters anyway, and would likely just get ourselves killed.”
“There’s sense in that,” she said. “If you took the note, he would know you’d found it, and probably try to kill you to save himself.”
“Yes.”
“He seems like a man who is willing to risk a great deal. To turn over the box to Per in the first place. He was counting on Per’s not finding the secret compartment.” She rubbed her lumpy chin thoughtfully. “He must have lost the key, and needed a replacement quickly before he met the man who is supposed to receive the message. But he also seemed to me to be an arrogant man, who assumes that he is smarter than everyone else around him. He probably thought, ‘Ignorant silversmith, he will never think of looking for a secret compartment,’ and then, ‘Even if he finds the note, he will not know how to make the writing appear,’ and then, ‘Even if he figures out how to make the writing appear, he will not know how to read it,’ and then ‘Even if he knows how to read it, he will not understand what it means,’ and then, ‘Even if he understands, he will not dare to interfere.’ So there you are.” She thought for a moment. “Of course, it’s also possible that Lars Jonsson does not know the note is there, and is carrying it for another. Or that he is the intended recipient of the note. You have made a lot of assumptions, that because he is carrying the box, he knows what the note says.”
“Per said something like that, too—that we didn’t know enough to make the right decision.”
“Per is probably right.”
“So what should we do?”
“Well, it seems to me that the main thing here is to keep the two of you from being killed. There are two possible things to do that might avoid that fate, for the time being at least. One is to do what Per suggests, which is to put the note back into the compartment, and let Lars Jonsson go away with it, and if the king is killed, then that is what God intended, and well enough.”
“And the other?”
“R
eplace the note with a blank slip of paper. When Lars takes the box, he will probably check to see if the note is there. He will open the secret compartment, and see a blank bit of paper, just like he expected. Because remember, if you put the original note back—the writing is now visible, right? So Lars will know you read it, or at least suspect. But if you put a blank slip of paper in the compartment, Lars will think it is the original note. And then he will deliver it to the man he is trying to meet. And the man will try to read the message, and there will be nothing there. When this happens, I doubt Lars will think, ‘That silversmith! He must have read the note and then replaced it with a blank bit of paper!’ No, he will think, ‘The message is not here, it must be the one who wrote it who gave me the wrong piece of paper, or did not use his secret ink properly.’ Thereby, you and Per are both saved, for now at least, and the king may be as well.”
He stared at her for a moment, then sprang up and kissed her on the forehead. “Gerda,” he said, “you’re brilliant.”
She blushed. “Now, you know, if my husband, rest his soul, were still alive, he’d be that jealous. And the two of you would have had to fight a duel to the death over me, and I’d have been grieved whichever of you had lost.”
• • •
Per was less sanguine about the whole thing.
“A man like Lars Jonsson will know what has happened,” he said. “And since none but us have handled the box, whoever the intended recipient of the message is—he will know who did it. These are men who are unafraid to kill a king and the men who are guarding him.” But he agreed that Gerda was right. Now that the writing on the original note had been accidentally unmasked, there was no other obvious choice.
A small slip of paper, cut to the size and shape of the original, was placed in the secret compartment, the bottom panel reset, and the lid closed and locked. The original note itself went into the fireplace, where it shriveled to blackened ashes in seconds.
“There,” Darren said, as the eerily familiar box and its newly-made silver key were placed on the counter in the shop to await sunset and its owner.
However resigned Per was to a bad outcome, even he seemed a little twitchy as the sun’s rays slanted downward from the west. He looked through the little window into the road, but no one came. There was no sign of Lars Jonsson. The shadows lengthened, and the light glinting on the muddy surface of the road was burnished bronze, and still no one came into the shop, not Lars… nor anyone else.
“Are we remembering wrong?” Darren asked, as the last of the sun’s rays vanished behind the hill west of the smith. “Did Lars say we should bring the box to him? I remember his saying that he was staying at the inn down the road.”
“No, I am certain of it. Lars said he would come here to pick up the box, and to give me my payment.” Per frowned. “But I wonder if perhaps we should bring it to him, nonetheless.”
“The sooner we get it out of our hands, the better, as far as I can see,” he said. “Even though the original note is gone, it’s still part of a plot to overthrow the government. I think you need to get it back to Lars as soon as you can, and hopefully never see it again.” He paused. “It’s funny. That box always had good associations to me. It belonged to my grandmother, and she used to keep all sorts of odd stuff in it…”
“…‘knick-knacks,’” Per said.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “And my grandma was a gentle, sweet lady. I wonder what she’d have thought if she’d known it was used to carry treasonous messages about killing members of the royal family.”
“I wonder if it would have made a difference to her,” Per said. “Everything, everywhere, has been touched by good people and bad, used for good purposes and evil. There is no object that cannot be made to serve both purposes. Was she a wise woman, your grandmother?”
“Very wise.”
“Then she probably would have said, ‘Although this box was once used to bear messages of destruction, we will now cleanse it by devoting it to good purposes.’”
“You’re probably right.”
“And I think you are also right, Darren Carlsson. The time has come to send the box on its way. Let us bring it down to the inn, and get it into Lars Jonsson’s hands, and I will collect my twelve silver pennies. And that, we will hope, will be the end of it.”
By this time, the light had mostly faded from the sky. Per attached the new key to the box’s handle with a leather cord, wrapped the box in a piece of cloth, and then lit two oil lamps, leaving one burning in the front window, and taking the other to guide their steps down the road to the inn. The walk only took five minutes, but the warmth of the day was already passing fast, and the chill was seeping back in by the time they stepped through the door.
The front of the inn housed a small and rather disreputable-looking tavern. Three men, already in advanced states of inebriation, slumped over mugs, staring off into space with glum expressions. The innkeeper, a sallow, rail-thin man whose gloomy countenance made Per look ebullient by comparison, gave the two newcomers a glance and a sigh before coming over to them.
“Evening, Per Olafsson,” he said. “Evening, stranger.”
“His name is Darren Carlsson.” Per set his lamp down on the counter. “He is staying with me for a time, and helping me in the smithy.”
“Then evening, Darren Carlsson,” the innkeeper said. “You don’t ever come by for beer, Per, so I’ve no doubt you have other business here.”
“Yes, Christian, I do have other business tonight, but afterwards, perhaps we could sit down and share a mug of ale with you.”
“That would be pleasant,” Christian said. “Business is much fallen off since the plague came through and killed most of my customers.”
“I can see how it would have that effect,” Darren said.
“So tell me what business you have, and we will talk about the sorry state of affairs in these parts over mugs of beer after you have concluded it.”
“I am looking for a stranger who has been staying with you for two days, a hearty, strong fellow, with a bold, sneering face, named Lars Jonsson. I have been working on a job for him, and he was to claim it and pay for it today before sunset, and he did not come. So I have come looking for him.”
Christian nodded. “He is here, but I have not seen him since he ate his midday meal. I presume he is still in his room, which is yonder”—he pointed off up the stairs at the back of the room—”the door on the right. But you may want to know, his visitor may still be there.”
“Visitor?”
“Another tall sneering fellow cut from much the same mold. These wealthy landholders, who can tell one from the other? He came in, much as you have, asking for Lars Jonsson, and then vanished up the stairs. I have not seen or heard either of them since.”
Per’s eyes met Darren’s.
“This can’t be good,” Darren said.
Per shrugged. “Nevertheless, it is time to get this box back to its rightful owner,” he said, and set off up the stairs.
Darren’s heart pounded in his chest. Something was wrong, here. Something was very, very wrong.
Per knocked on the door, and a deep, commanding voice said, “Come.”
Per opened the door, and walked into the dimly-lit room. He followed, a little more timidly, peering over Per’s shoulder.
“I wondered if I would have to go looking for you,” the man at the table said, turning and looking at them, the light from an oil lamp reflecting from his smile.
It was not Lars Jonsson. He had never seen this man before in his life.
“So, I take it that this is the secret message that was to be delivered to Erik Jorgensson in Trondheim? Excellent. This will help immensely. We can now round up and slay the rest of the traitors to our king.”
“Message? What message?” Per said, in a voice so flat and uninflected that Darren almost believed for a moment that he wasn’t lying, and had to stop himself from saying, “Remember? The one we found in the secret compartment in the botto
m of the box?”
“Do not lie,” the man said, his voice calm and cheerful. “See how liars are treated?” He gestured over to a corner of the room, and only then did Darren see that Lars Jonsson was, in fact, there with them. He was missing his head, which lay a little way off, still wearing a shocked expression.
“Lars Jonsson also lied to me,” the man said. “He told me he knew nothing of a message. I asked him why, then, was he staying in a filthy little inn in the hills east of Trondheim, instead of enjoying the favors of his mistress and feasting on mounds of excellent food and wine in his manor in Oslo? He told me that he was here on business, and had stopped to hire a silversmith to fashion a gift for his woman.”
“That is, indeed, what he told me,” Per said. “I am the silversmith.” He uncovered the box, and lifted the silver key, hanging from its cord.
“Ah, yes, the box,” the man said. “Poor Lars. If he only hadn’t lost the key, he might actually have succeeded, and as we speak already be on the way back to Oslo. But God took a hand in things, and Lars’s horse stumbled in a stream and went lame, and the saddlebag came loose and fell into the water. Lars thought he’d rescued everything, but when he stopped for the night, he discovered that the key was missing. The all-important key, which opened the box containing the message for his accomplices—the message that even he could not be trusted to read.”
The man looked up at Darren, and smiled. “You may know nothing of it, young silversmith, but your scrawny friend there does. I read it in his eyes. Understand this—we know all about the note, and what it said, and how it was written with magical secret ink that only appears when the paper is warmed over a flame. So fear not, the conspiracy has been thwarted. But we need the note itself, as proof that there are bigger fish in the net than yon messenger boy—” here he gestured again at Lars’s headless body, “—and that those fish have the names of Olaf, Archbishop of Trondheim, and Valdemar, King of Denmark.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Per said.
“Then give me the box, and I will show you. Of course, it will be my sad duty to slay you both afterwards, but I hope you will recognize that I very much regret it.”
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