The Indigo King - James A. Owen [26]
Bert stood and hobbled his way over to the mantel of the small tumbledown fireplace at the far side of the shack. On it sat a skull, a scroll, and a small box of a unique design.
Bert removed the box and set it in the center of his small table. The box wasn’t polished, but it was shiny with age; great, great age. The wood it was constructed of was pale, and there were cuneiform-like markings carved into the top and sides. Across the bottom were signs of scorching, as if it had been held to a flame. Jack reached out to lift the lid, but Bert slapped down his hand with the ash staff.
“Not so quickly, lad,” the old man said. “No telling what’ll come out of the Serendipity Box. Don’t want to let anything out that’s best kept in, for now.”
“What is a Serendipity Box?” Jack asked as he rubbed his knuckles. “Some sort of Pandora’s Kettle?”
“Not so dire as that,” said Bert. “It was your mentor, Stellan, who actually named it, John. What it was called before that, I can’t say.
“As the legend goes, it was given to Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, who passed it to his own son, Enos. Where it went after that is mostly lost to the mists of antiquity. But sometime in the past, it came into the possession of Jules Verne, and it was he who explained its workings to myself and Stellan.
“Adam explained to his son that the box could be used but once, and it was his choice alone when to do so. It would give whoever opened it whatever they most needed, and so the old Patriarch advised Seth that he should save it for a crisis, for a time of great peril, and only then open the box.”
“What did Seth use it for?” asked John, who still had not decided whether he even wanted to touch the Serendipity Box, much less open it. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It was too long ago, and there are too many versions of the stories to know for sure,” Bert replied. “Some say that he was given a knife with which to avenge his brother, Abel. Others, that it contained three seeds from the Tree of Life, one of which he placed under Adam’s tongue when he died, the second of which he planted in a hollow at the center of the Earth, and the last of which he saved. One story even says that his wife, whom some called Idyl, sprang forth fully formed from the box, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, and that she was not a Daughter of Eve at all.
“There is a fragment of scripture that claimed Enoch and Methuselah both used the box, and another that claimed it had been used by Moses to part the Red Sea. An entirely apocryphal account says that it was the Serendipity Box that held the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas Iscariot. But no historians I know of believed it.”
“Why is that?” asked John.
“Because,” said Bert, “according to the story, it was Jesus Christ himself who gave Judas the box.”
“Who had it between then and now?”
Bert shrugged, then rubbed absentmindedly at the stump of his right arm. “Jules and Stellan had some theories, and we read through the Histories at Paralon for clues, but apparently miracle boxes that are only good for a single use aren’t worth writing about.”
“Jules never said where he got it?”
“Here,” Bert said, rising and taking the skull from the mantel. He tossed the skull to John, who jumped up and caught it against his chest. “Ask him yourself. And let me know if he answers—I’ve been talking to him for years now, and he hasn’t said a word.”
The companions were speechless, except for Chaz, who watched with mild interest. “Kept it, did you, old-timer?” he said blithely as he walked to the window to pull back the curtain and peer outside. “I suppose the king wouldn’t notice one more or less in his tower walls.”
“This is Jules Verne?” John asked, flabbergasted. “He’s dead?”
“The world we knew thought he died in 1905 anyway,” said Bert, “and he may well have. But he had a lot of traveling around to do, in time as well as in space, and he had the bad fortune to end up here, with me, in this dismal place.”
“What happened?”
“Mordred was waiting for us,” said Bert. “He knew we were coming, somehow, some way. And before