Years ago a stranger came to the market town of Arle, paid for one night at the inn, and in the morning hung a painting in the square. Under it he nailed a card: Somewhere in this is the way to the box. A small iron box, locked, sat chained to the fountain. People said there was silver inside. The stranger left on the noon coach and never came back.
The painting was crowded the way a dream is crowded. There was a clock with three hands. There was a tower, a moon, and a woman with a torch. Words were scratched faintly into the corners, some of them backwards, and a strip of odd little marks ran down the right edge like stitches.
For a while everyone in Arle tried. Then mostly only visitors did.
A surveyor named Tobiah reached Arle on a wet evening in the sixth autumn after the stranger left. He had heard about the box two towns back from a woman who said it was still locked. That was all she knew. He took a room, ate, and went out to the square with a lamp before the rain had properly stopped.
He was a patient looker. It was his trade. He stood in front of the painting for most of the night, and he found things.
Down by the woman's feet, so faint the lamplight almost slid off it, someone had written a line: pay for the future. On the base of the tower one word was in small letters where every other word was large. In a column of printed law near the bottom, one word, and only one, had a line drawn under it. And he could see that the stitches down the right edge weren't decoration. They repeated. They had the rhythm of a sentence in some other alphabet.
He went back to the inn near dawn, quietly elated, and told the innkeeper over bread that he believed he'd seen what nobody in Arle had.
The innkeeper was a broad, slow woman who had heard a great many people say that. She didn't argue. She took him by the sleeve into the back room and held up the lamp.
The wall was covered in writing, floor to beams. It was in a hundred hands and a dozen inks, layered and crossed out and written over, with dates beside most of it. Pay for the future, by the woman's feet was up near the ceiling, five years old. The small-letter word was there. The underline was there, circled twice. Halfway along, in a neat copperplate somebody had clearly been proud of, the stitches down the right edge had been worked out letter by letter into a sentence in a northern tongue.
Tobiah stood very still. Every one of his findings had been on the wall before he had heard of Arle.
"I should have come back here first," he said.
"Most do it the other way," said the innkeeper. "The painting's out front."
He spent the next day reading the wall instead of the painting, and it humbled him a second time, in a way he hadn't expected.
He had assumed the wall was a record of what the painting said. It wasn't. It was a record of what people had said about the painting, and the two were not the same.
Beside each line was a name, or a mark that stood for a name. When he followed the oldest lines back, he found that the word everyone called the first word had been proposed by a drover in the first autumn. Nobody had been able to test it. It got copied into a list. The list got copied into a better list. By the third year people were writing the first word, known and arguing only about the second. He couldn't find a single place where the stranger himself had said anything. The stranger had said nothing at all. Every confident line on that wall began as somebody's guess, made in good faith, and grew harder each time a new hand copied it out.
That was why the box was still locked. The lack of effort had nothing to do with it. The town had been trying for six years, mostly with the same few dozen words, rearranged millions of ways. It had stopped looking at the painting and started looking at the wall.
So Tobiah's night out front hadn't been worthless after all. That surprised him. He had seen the same things the old hands saw, which meant, at least, that those things were really there and not invented by repetition. And in two places he read the painting differently from the copperplate. Neither reading was better yet. They were just his, and he could not have known they were his until he'd read the wall and found them missing from it.
Before he left Arle he asked the innkeeper for a pen and wrote one small line on the only bare patch he could find, low down by the door:
Read this wall before the painting. Then read whose hand each line is in. Then go out and look again.
The innkeeper read it over his shoulder.
"That's three things," she said. "Most people manage one."
"I managed the third," Tobiah said. "I did it first and called it the whole job."
He paid for his room. The box was still chained to the fountain when the coach pulled out. He hadn't opened it, and he hadn't expected to. On the road he kept turning over what had stung him. It wasn't that his findings were old. It was that he'd said nobody has seen this without once asking who might have.
Things he had seen for himself were new to him, and that was honest. Whether they were new to the world was a separate question. Only the wall could answer it, and the wall had been ten steps away the whole time.
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