“But I want to see something.”
“See whatever you want, but I’m not getting out the jewels.”
“I was thinking,” said Umbo.
“Like climbing a cliff, thinking is a perilous activity for those unused to it.”
“What if I take two jewels instead of just the one?”
“Then I would have been carrying around sixteen instead of seventeen.”
“That’s why I want to see them, right here beside us. If I take out two jewels, fully intending to keep them both, will one jewel disappear from the bag?”
“You’re provoking me on purpose,” said Loaf.
“Or would we end up with two jewels? Could we take them all, and have duplicates of all but the one?”
“Or would you provoke the wrath of the universe and cause the sun to explode?”
“That’s not very likely.”
“Nothing you do is likely, boy. Now go back in time like a good little saint and steal the jewel that we wouldn’t have to take if you weren’t the spawn of a devil.”
“Your assessment of my father is right enough, sir,” said Umbo, imitating Rigg’s high manner of speaking, “though if you referred to my mother I’d have to kill you.”
“Get the jewel,” said Loaf. Then he closed his eyes to wait.
“Aren’t you going to watch?” asked Umbo.
“I don’t want to see you reach into an invisible hole and make a jewel magically appear in your hand. It’s too disturbing.”
“And I’m saying, watch. You don’t want to miss this.”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” said Loaf, getting testy. He didn’t like people telling him what to do. Especially a mere child. Though Umbo was a good deal smarter than some of the clowns whose orders Loaf had obeyed when he was in the army.
“Then I’ll put it another way. I don’t want you to miss this, because I’m trying something important. I’m going to try to bring you with me.”
“I have no such talent,” said Loaf. “So just do it.”
“Hold my hand,” said Umbo. “And keep your eyes open.”
Loaf closed his eyes.
Umbo took his hand anyway.
“Open your eyes,” he said.
“No,” said Loaf. He wanted to use the time to get lost in a dream.
“Please,” said Umbo. “Don’t be stubborn. Do it for me.”
Loaf sighed and opened his eyes.
The woods around them were vivid with autumn colors, and a rain as light as mist was falling. Now he could feel it on his face.
“By Silbom’s right ear,” said Loaf.
“Now I’m going to let go of your hand,” said Umbo, “and try to keep you here with me.”
He let go.
“Still see the autumn leaves?” asked Umbo.
“Yes,” said Loaf. “But I don’t see you!”
Umbo looked shocked. “I’m invisible?”
“I can still see your clothes, but they’re empty!”
“Liar,” said Umbo. “You’d be a lot more upset than that if I had disappeared.”
“You’d like to think so,” said Loaf. “Dig it up and take the jewel, you little thief.”
Umbo dug with his hands. “How far down did you bury it?”
“Not as deep as that.”
“Then . . . did I make a mistake? Did I take us back before you buried them?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s because you’re digging in the wrong spot,” said Loaf.
“I saw where you dug to get to them!”
“But you were watching from over there, and a long way, too. You didn’t miss by much. Back from there about a pace. But first fill in that hole and hide it.”
“Why? There’s nothing in it.”
“Because you don’t want to put it into somebody’s mind that something was buried here—not this near to the real hiding place. Remember, we’re leaving seventeen jewels hidden here and we won’t be back to claim them for a while yet.”
“Why don’t you fill up the hole?” said Umbo. “You’re the one who knows how to hide things.”
So Loaf refilled the first hole and scattered a handful of tiny pebbles and short twigs across it until it looked just like the surrounding dirt. Meanwhile, Umbo had found the real hiding place and had the bag opened to show all eighteen jewels.
“I can’t remember now which one is missing,” said Umbo.
“Don’t play games,” said Loaf. “Somebody could come along at any moment—in either time.”
“I’m not joking,” said Umbo. “You have to open up the jewels we already have and see which of these is the missing one.”
“You’re doing this on purpose because you want to do your experiment,” said Loaf.
“Who’s wasting time now?” asked Umbo.
Loaf sighed, drew the bag of jewels up out of his trouser leg, and opened them. “I can’t tell you which one is missing, I can only tell you which ones are here.”
“So lay them down beside the others.”
“No,” said Loaf.
“Then you do it—you look back and forth.”
Loaf reluctantly did as Umbo asked, looking back and forth. It bothered him deeply to be seeing duplicates of these one-of-a-kind gems. But he finally identified the missing jewel. He pointed. “That one.”
“So take it,” said Umbo.
Loaf felt very strange as he reached out and picked up the jewel and put it from one bag into the other.
“Now take another,” said Umbo. “Please, let’s see what happens!”
“No,” said Loaf.
“What can it hurt? Either the stone will disappear from the new bag or it won’t.”
“Umbo,” said Loaf, “I don’t know what it can hurt. But I also don’t know that it can’t hurt, and there’s too much at stake to play around. We have to get to Aressa Sessamo to help Rigg, if we can.”
Umbo sighed petulantly and retied the old bag—he had never seemed so young in all the time Loaf had known him. “Fill up the hole,” said Loaf as he counted all eighteen jewels, together again at last, retied the new bag, and dropped it back down into his trousers.
Then he disguised the real hiding place as he had disguised Umbo’s previous mistaken one.
“Done,” he said. “Now take us back into the present.”
“We never left it,” said Umbo. “We were perfectly visible in both times.”
“I mean make the past go away.”
And just like that, the bright-colored leaves of the autumn woods turned back into branches newly a-bud with spring.
“All right,” said Umbo. “We’re done. Let’s get to Aressa Sessamo.”
“No,” said Loaf. “You have to go leave your messages in the past for Rigg and you to see.”
“Of course I don’t,” said Umbo. “No more than I had to actually go back in time and tell you to stop Leaky from killing that drunk.”
Loaf sat down on a low stone wall and leaned his forehead on his fingers. “I know I sound like Leaky, but Umbo, we have to do it.”
“I don’t even remember what I said to myself,” said Umbo. “I never knew what I said to Rigg.”
“Whatever you say now will be what you said then.”
“No,” said Umbo. “Because now I’ll be saying it without any sense of urgency. It’s going to be different. Look, I already said it. The proof of that is the fact that the jewels were buried behind the latrine, because that’s what my message to Rigg told him to do. And we have the knife, because I told myself to get it and hide it. We live in the version of these events in which my messages were already given!”
“Then why did we have to wait in Leaky’s Landing until you learned how to go back in time?”
“Because we had to get the jewel! And because it’s a useful thing for me to know how to do. It would be stupid to just know that I had learned how to do it in order to deliver those messages, and then not learn how to do it just because those messages were already delivered!”