Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  Sturm felt ill-suited in his mourning gray cape and robes, especially among his old friends. He wondered if that was part of bereavement—that after the six months of gray and fasting and confinement, you were supposed to weary of it all, to yearn for setting aside the robes and moving to other things. Times were when he still missed his mother grievously, but already the face of Ilys Brightblade was blurred in his memory, and he had to tell himself the color of her eyes.

  But the story she had told him was fresh in remembering, down to the smallest details. Recounted on her deathbed, before the fever gave way to delusions and unconsciousness, it was a tale that would send him from Solace.

  Sturm shook his head, startled from memory by a loud, low voice. The dark imaginings of the clerical incense, of his mother’s unnaturally pale face, vanished into light, and once again he was at the Inn of the Last Home, Caramon leaning across the table, questioning him above the glowing candles.

  “Were you listening, Sturm? Here we are on the last night before you leave, your saddlebags packed full of provisions and letters and souvenirs. I wish you weren’t so set on Solamnia and this banquet and staying there for good.…”

  “I never said I would not return!” Sturm interrupted, rolling his eyes. “I’ve told you both before, Caramon. It’s … it’s a pilgrimage of sorts, and when I’ve learned a few things in the north and settled a few others, I’ll be back.”

  Caramon clutched the sides of the table with his red, thick-fingered hands and smiled apologetically at his prim and serious friend. Raistlin, meanwhile, remained silent, his dark, attentive face turned toward the hearth and the last of the dwindling firelight.

  “But all this questing and searching, Sturm,” Caramon explained. “It could take you away forever. It does that with the real Solamnic Knights.”

  Sturm winced at the real.

  “And if it did, we’d be none the wiser as to why you went in the first place.”

  “That, too, I’ve told you again and again, Caramon,” Sturm repeated calmly, his voiced strained and brittle. “ ’Tis the Oath and the Measure, and it is the Oath that binds the Solamnic brotherhood. That’s why I have to go north—into Solamnia … the Vingaard Mountains … the High Clerist’s Tower.”

  “The Code again,” Raistlin observed, quietly breaking the silence.

  The two larger youths turned at once to their scrawny, dark comrade. Leaning back in a darkened nook in the vallenwood trunk, the young adept was half lost in shadows, almost as insubstantial as his own sleights and illusions.

  Out of the gray flickering gloom, Raistlin spoke again, his voice melodious and thin, like the high notes of a viola. “The Code and the Measure,” he said scornfully. “All of that smug behavior that the Solamnic Order swears by. And the thirty-five volumes of your Measure—”

  “Thirty-seven,” Sturm corrected. “There are thirty-seven volumes to the Measure.”

  Raistlin shrugged, wrapping his tattered red robe more closely around his shoulders. Quickly, with a birdlike grace, he leaned forward, stretching his thin hands toward the fading glow of the fire.

  “Thirty-five or thirty-seven,” he mused, his pale lips tightening to a smile, “or three thousand. All the same to me, in its foolishness and legalism. You aren’t bound to obey a page of it, Sturm Brightblade. Your father, not you, was the Solamnic Knight.”

  “We’ve disagreed on this before, Raistlin,” Sturm scolded. He stopped himself and leaned uncomfortably back in his chair. He sounded like a reproving old schoolmaster, and he knew it.

  Raistlin nodded and swirled his tea in the cup, staring into the bottom as though he were reading omens in the cool dregs.

  “There have been other years, Sturm,” he whispered. “Other Yules.”

  Sturm cleared his throat.

  “It’s … it’s because Mother’s gone now, Raistlin,” he replied tentatively, looking thoughtfully at the glittering pool of wax in the dark ceramic candle holder. The wick floated on the shimmering surface. Soon the candle would go out entirely.

  “The Order is my last remaining family. There’s nowhere else to go but north. But mostly it’s because of what Mother told me … about what happened the night my father vanished.”

  The twins leaned forward, stunned by this sudden news.

  “Then there was something more?” Raistlin asked. “More that your mother hadn’t told you?”

  “She … she was waiting for the proper time,” Sturm replied, his hands unsteady on the table boards. “It was just that … the plague … then there was no other time …”

  “Then when she told you was the proper time,” Caramon soothed, resting his huge hand on Sturm’s shoulder. “Tell us, in turn. Tell us of that night.”

  Sturm looked into the eager brown eyes of his young companion. “Very well, Caramon. Tonight I shall tell you that story. Remember that it is not easy in the telling.”

  And with the twins leaning toward him expectantly, the autumn night uneasy with the high wind and the rattle of leaves across the roof of the inn, Sturm began the story.

  “First of all,” Sturm began, his gaze fixed on the table, “Lord Angriff saw to me and the Lady Ilys. Smuggled us off on the western road, before the peasants’ torches closed a full circle about the castle. Soren Vardis was our guide, and the snow swirled over the high road, or the peasants might well have found us. In their anger, they didn’t remember what the Order had done for them.”

  The twins exchanged a curious glance, and Raistlin cleared his throat. Sturm continued, his gaze fixed on the dwindling fire.

  “As to my father,” he continued dreamily, abstractly, “when we were safely away, he turned his thoughts to the castle and its garrison. Alfred was there, and Gunthar and Boniface and a hundred men, of whom Father thought he could trust only the twenty Knights. For you see, the countryside went over to the peasants suddenly and swiftly, and the heart of many a foot soldier turned from the Order in the last weeks before the castle fell.”

  Sturm clenched his fists, his dark eyes smoldering.

  “What would you expect, Sturm Brightblade?” Raistlin murmured. “What would you expect from peasants and brigands?” He rested his thin hand on the shoulder of the Solamnic lad. The mage’s fingers were pale, almost transparent, and there was something unsettling in his touch.

  Sturm shrugged and scooted his chair away from the table.

  “Go on,” Raistlin breathed. “Tell us your story.”

  “Father descended into the bailey, where his soldiers had been assembled. The men crowded together for warmth, shivering in threadbare blankets, in secondhand robes. All but a dozen were there, and those who were absent were trusted Knights, deployed by Father to man the walls while he held council.

  “The courtyard was a sea of gray shapes and misted breath, and the snow fell mercilessly as the morning approached. Father paced confidently in front of the troops, stopping only to draw a line in the snow, a commander’s gesture. I had seen him do it before myself, in the Nerakan Wars, but even to grown men it was still quite a show.”

  Sturm paused admiringly, a sad smile creasing his face. Outside the inn, the summer night swelled with music, the wild fluting call of the nightingale cascading over the slow, steady creaking of insects. Together the three lads listened to the sounds around them as weary Otik passed by the table, his arms heavy with half-filled tankards and dirty crockery.

  Sturm looked up at the twins and resumed the story.

  “ ‘Those who are with me,’ Father said, ‘stay your ground. For it shall come—snow and siege and insurgence.’ Then he pointed to the line at his feet, and they said that the mist dissolved above that troop of men, simply because not a one of them was breathing.

  “ ‘Those who would go,’ he said, ‘whether to safety or to the ranks of the insurgents, may cross this line and travel hence with my blessings.’ ”

  “With his blessings?” Caramon asked.

  Sturm nodded. “ ’Twas blessings he said, no matter who te
lls the story. And I cannot figure it for the life of me, though I suppose that if neither heart nor oath could hold their allegiance, ’twould have been a crime to send them to battle.

  “But the real crime was what followed. When eighty of them crossed the line and walked from Castle Brightblade …” He clenched his fists, then blushed, surprised at his own feelings.

  “Tell us the rest,” Caramon said, lifting his hand as though to still his friend’s torrent of anger.

  “Father said not a word against those men,” Sturm continued, red-faced and glaring. “Instead, he ordered the Knights down from the walls. Then there were but a score of them in the bailey, all of the Order, and the snow kept falling, falling upon those who stayed as well as those who left.”

  Raistlin stretched and rose from the table, leaning against the mantel. Sturm shifted in his chair, his young thoughts muddled and bitter.

  “As to those who left, who joined the peasant army, the gods know what befell most of them. I have heard that many served their new allegiance bravely and well. But those who remained were still confident. For you see, my father had told them—told the Knights and the Knights only, his close group of followers sworn to the Oath and the Measure—that old Agion Pathwarden, in his seventies then but full of vigor and vinegar, was coming to lift the siege with fifty Knights, almost all the fighting garrison of Castle di Caela, just an afternoon’s ride to the south. They could wait it out, of that they were certain.

  “Certain until a messenger came from the peasant commander—an old druidess whose name my mother could not remember—that Lord Agion and his company had been betrayed. Someone in Father’s garrison had sneaked word to the peasants as to the secret, roundabout road Lord Agion would take from Castle di Caela to Castle Brightblade. They were ambushed in the foothills, grievously outnumbered. Not a Knight survived, though they all died fighting. They say that Agion was among the first to fall.”

  Sturm closed his eyes.

  “Did they ever find the traitor?” Caramon asked, always one for justice and retribution. Sturm nodded slowly.

  “So they say. And the best were all on the hunt—Gunthar, Boniface, Alfred MarKenin. Father had told them to let it go, but they hounded until Boniface flushed the turncoat. The man was a new Knight—from Lemish, predictably. Lord Boniface accused him, the man denied and denied, and of course it was trial by combat next. But the coward slithered away that very night. It is said that the peasants hanged him themselves; Gunthar saw a body on the gibbet when he passed through their lines.

  “Father sent word to the old druidess on the morrow. Despite the druidess’s natural skills as a general and a strategist, the peasants maintained that she was just and fair—just and fair to a fault. Since those whom he had trusted had betrayed him, Father ventured his faith into other grounds. He told her, that druidess, that he wanted no further bloodshed between Solamnics, whether they were of the Order or against it. That if such were impossible, that the spilled blood be his alone. To assure such a warring peace, he handed himself over to the peasantry in exchange for their promise of safe passage for the Lords Alfred and Boniface, for Gunthar and for the remaining garrison of Castle Brightblade.

  “Or so they say,” Sturm muttered, his gaze angry on the glistening shield. “For that night he walked into the blinding snow, and none who survived that time ever saw him again.”

  The common room of the inn fell into respectful silence. Otik paused in sweeping the hearth and leaned against his broom, and the young girl he had hired to spread fresh rushes on the floor ceased her midnight labor and crouched by the bar, knowing somehow that this pained, intimate talk demanded her stillness.

  “Did I tell you that Lord Angriff went to his fate laughing?” Sturm asked with an odd smile. “That as easily as if he were disrobing for the night, he handed his shield and breastplate to his good friend Lord Boniface?”

  Sturm closed his eyes. His voice cracked as he continued the story.

  “ ‘They are no use to me where I go,’ he said, ‘these instruments of Knighthood. And why are you troubled?’ he asked them. ‘Why do dark thoughts arise in your hearts?’ It was all they could do to keep from weeping, Mother said, for they knew that he went to his death and that they would never see the likes of him again.

  “So he embraced his companions that afternoon and passed from their midst, soon lost in the swirling countryside beyond the walls of Castle Brightblade. Two men followed him into the blinding snow. They disobeyed my father’s commands because of the love they bore him, and for a moment, the weeping men of the garrison saw my father and the two who followed him as a triad of dark spots in the depth of the blizzard, and then again at the very edge of sight, where the snow-shrouded torches of the peasants looked like low and distant stars, and the three of them seemed to enter the thin, dark ranks of the enemy, never falling, but as though they walked blindly into an impenetrable thicket.”

  Sturm shivered. “It is out of that thicket that the son of Angriff Brightblade has emerged, my friends. I shall find Lord Angriff Brightblade, or what has become of him, though the Jaws of Hiddukel stand in the way, full intending to undo me.”

  “Which they well may do, lad,” Raistlin said quietly. “Which they well may do.”

  Sturm swallowed nervously. “Whether they do or no, ’tis time I should test them. Would that I had your wits in my service, Raistlin Majere. Or Caramon’s strength. The High Clerist’s Tower is a fierce place for a backwoods boy.”

  “You are no weakling, Sturm!” Caramon encouraged loudly, startling the little girl by the bar, who scurried into the shadows, trailing rushes. “You can ride, too, and use a sword far better than I can. It’s just that … just …”

  “I’m no swordsman,” Sturm asserted. “Not really. Not like my father was, nor like they’re accustomed to seeing in the north. Nor half as brave, nor nearly the horseman. Ask my mother. Ask our Solamnic friends, who travel south just to tell me these things.”

  Caramon opened his mouth as if to answer, then leaned back in his chair disgustedly. Words once again had mastered him. Somewhere below them, on the road that wound through the vallenwoods of Solace, the whicker of a horse rose out of the whistling night wind, and the harsh shout of a rider followed it.

  “What we both are trying to say,” Raistlin urged, turning away from his thoughts and regarding Sturm with a bright, unsettling stare, “is that if you hear such things in Solace, you’ll hear worse in the Vingaards. This is too early, Sturm. The North is ravenous, and the Order … well, the Order is as you have told us.”

  “It must be now, Raistlin,” Sturm argued, lifting the cup to his lips, tasting the tepid, smoky brew. “It must be now because, above the Code and Measure and my mother’s last stories, I can stand it no longer.”

  “What’s that?” Caramon asked, his mind already elsewhere. But the story continued in his thoughts: the incomparable Angriff Brightblade, master swordsman and hero and noble Knight, who had the nerve to vanish magnificently at the siege of Castle Brightblade.

  Who had the nerve to leave behind a son and too many questions.

  “I have to know,” Sturm announced dramatically. “I have to find my father. Yes, yes, he may be dead. But up there, he’s a memory instead of … well, instead of a legend.”

  Raistlin sighed. With a strange, broken smile, he turned back to the fire.

  “Everything my father has done,” Sturm explained, “in the lists, in the Nerakan Wars, in keeping castle and family—”

  “Tramples on your young days,” Raistlin interrupted. He coughed, no doubt a winter cold, and swirled the lukewarm tea in his cup. “This hunt for fathers,” he observed ironically, “is a haunted thing. You have to put a face on the one who is killing you.”

  Caramon nodded slowly, though he did not really understand. His gaze followed that of his brother. The twins sat in silence, staring at the red embers.

  Yes, it is haunted, Sturm thought angrily, looking at the two of them, content in their
strangely balanced fellowship. But you will never understand. Neither of you. For no matter what befalls, you have each other to … to …

  To show you who you are.

  And no one is killing me.

  Baffled in the thicket of his own thoughts, Sturm rose from the table. The twins scarcely noticed his departure as he walked into the bracing Abanasinian night. Caramon waved softly over his shoulder, and the last Sturm saw of his friends, they were sitting side by side, framed by firelight and yoked by shadows, each lost in his opposite dreams.

  Chapter 4

  A Parting Story

  ———

  Now, with the journey north and a season in Solamnia behind him, all Sturm had kept of that moment was its expectation and gloom.

  As midwinter stormed toward the first blustery week of February, and windswept snow dusted the dark inclines of the Vingaard Mountains, Sturm spent the time in training, schooled by Gunthar in riding and swordsmanship, by Lord Adamant in the lessons of forest survival, and by all most Solamnically in vigil and prayers and deep dread. In the evening, after his instruction, he paced the battlements of the Knight’s Spur, squinting southward where the Wings of Habbakuk sloped down to the Virkhus Hills, then even farther down onto the Solamnic Plains. When the weather was clear and windless, the lad imagined he saw a ridge of green at the southernmost edge of sight. The Southern Darkwoods, he thought, and his shoulder ached. And Vertumnus. Late winter, and I am far from ready.

  What he had in place of Raistlin’s cryptic comments were questions more immediate. He asked them of himself nightly, setting his lantern on the crenellated wall.

  “Why did the Green Man come to the Tower? And why was this Yule different from any other? Why was I chosen, and what does he want of me? What awaits me in the Southern Darkwoods?

  And regardless of sword and horse and instruction, how can I prepare for a man of shadows and magic?

  Lord Stephan Peres would watch from his offices with rising concern. Out his window, he could see the solitary wavering lantern in the morning darkness. He had watched Sturm train and prepare for departure, and though the lad was a quick study, he had started green and clumsy and would end not too far from where he started.