Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  It was a clumsiness that might prove to be Sturm’s undoing, the old Knight thought darkly.

  There was the matter of the peasantry, for one thing. The common folk of the Solamnic countryside had never forgiven the Knights for their supposed role in the Cataclysm—the disastrous rending of the world by quake and fire over three centuries ago. Grudges endured among the peasants, and though hostility and rebellion would submerge for a long while—perhaps ten, twelve years on occasion—trouble would resurface sporadically, as it had in the uprising five years back.

  As it had again, evidently, in the cold weeks following the Yule banquet.

  The Wings of Habbakuk, those broad, muddy foothills that lay due south of the High Clerist’s Tower and provided the easiest road into the mountains, had recently become a quagmire of snares and pits and crudely designed traps. Experienced Knights had no trouble recognizing the signs—a thickness of fallen vallenwood leaves over a well-traveled path, an unaccustomed play of shadow and light in the thickets that dotted the sloping plains. They were used to peasant trickery, as was even the greenest squire who had grown up within sight of the Tower.

  But Stephan was worried about young Brightblade, who three times had narrowly averted disaster while roaming the Wings with his comrades. On the last occasion, the lad’s sly old mare, Luin, had shown more wisdom than her skillful but incautious rider, hurdling a pit that would have killed the both of them while tossing Sturm from the saddle in the sudden leap. The lad’s game shoulder had ached for days, but that troubled Lord Stephan less than the curious circumstances.

  It was almost as though the traps had been set for Sturm alone.

  Lord Stephan rested his weight on the stone sill of the window and mused over the fading events of the Yule banquet—the arrival of Vertumnus, the fight, and the mysterious challenge. They were all dim, fading in an old man’s memory. Stephan thought of birds in autumn, how each morning there were two, or three, or four less on the battlements. Memory was like that, and you would look up at the first frost, and only the hardiest birds would remain.

  Spring was a more puzzling matter. Throughout winter, the moons had shifted in the sky, appearing first in the west, then the northwest, then altogether low in the east as they were supposed to at midsummer. Red Lunitari and white Solinari changed places and phases, and the astronomers claimed that black Nuitari did so, too. At first it was alarming, for the same astronomers, the scientists and the scholars maintained that the shifting moons could signal a greater disruption to come. Perhaps the Cataclysm would return, bringing with it the rending of earth, the shifting of continents, and absolute destruction. Perhaps it was something even worse.

  Soon, though, these fears had subsided. The moons weaved about the sky for several nights, and no crevasses opened in the ground beneath them. Greatly relieved, the folks in the Tower settled back into daily routine, and the foot soldiers even began to make bets as to where the moons would appear each evening. Finally even the most nocturnal inhabitants of the High Clerist’s Tower—the astronomers, the sentries, and the ever-vigilant Sturm—ceased to pay attention to the uncertain show in the heavens.

  Then the more subtle problems became apparent. Birds, accustomed to migrating by moonlight and using the position of the moons as a guide, became lost and confused. The robins and larks arrived early in the region, only to shiver amid the eaves and crenels as the winds and the snows returned.

  One morning Lord Stephan had been surprised by three gulls at his chamber windows. Tricked by the dodging moons, they had wandered very far from any sea. Their feathers were ruffled, and the tips of their wings were iced.

  Subject to the unsteady pull of Solinari, the Vingaard River first swelled, then receded, then swelled again, dangerously close to topping the old floodwalls built over a century ago by Sturm’s Brightblade and di Caela ancestors. The plants accustomed to growing by moonlight, moon-flower and aeterna, burgeoned wildly in the Tower gardens and topiaries, and out in the farmlands, asparagus and rhubarb and the sharp-tasting winter oleracea broke through the ground early, to the surprise of most gardeners and the dismay of most of their children.

  The most disruption, however, came in more speculative realms. For magic, of course, revolved around the phases of the moons, and the strange, erratic alignments in the heavens disrupted the local spellcraft so that all but the most powerful divinations failed, the winds and the weather were as changeable as the moons, and wavering lights dotted the Wings of Habbakuk. Several enchanters appeared before Lord Stephan with sausages or lanterns or shoes attached to their faces or more hidden parts of their anatomies, since the constant feuding among wizards was as liable to twist and backfire as it was to succeed.

  Lord Stephan had frowned at the complaining mages, doing his best to put on a face of outrage and sympathy, though he could hardly keep from laughing aloud. Finally, in the presence of one red-robed wizard from whose ears grapevines continued to grow noisily, he suggested that, if nothing else, by autumn the whine would turn into wine.

  Still, the changes in young Sturm were less amusing. With his grimness and walks on the battlements, he taxed the patience of even the most Measured and diligent Knights. His long afternoons in the Chamber of Paladine raised all kinds of speculation.

  “Praying, no doubt, for the Cataclysm to come again,” Lord Alfred had muttered gruffly to Lord Stephan that morning on the stairs. “If the world would open up and swallow him, it would be just as he wishes. And the swallowing world is welcome to him.”

  “Now, Alfred,” cautioned the older knight, his soothing tones unconvincing. “If you cannot find forbearance for the sake of the lad’s lost father, then surely remember the burden. It is time to set aside thoughts bitter and hard, and help the boy in his final preparations.”

  Spring drew nigh in the Vingaard Mountains, despite the wanderings of the moons and the confusion of plant, bird, and mage. The days marched on, and though the calendar was the only reliable measurement that time was passing, indeed the time approached for the boy’s departure.

  Sturm was alone in his chambers, the early evening upon him. He had spent a long morning in the central courtyard, Lord Gunthar instructing him roughly in the particulars of swordsmanship. Still panting from the exertion, his shoulder swollen and heated, Sturm removed the heavy vambraces from his arms, wincing as the metal and padding rubbed over bruises due to the fall he had taken riding the Wings, but also those from more recent outrages, born of training in combat and his teacher Lord Gunthar’s enthusiasm. It had been arms courteous, the wicker weapons padded and blunted to boot, but Gunthar was terribly strong, and the blows were telling, no matter the precautions.

  Sturm groaned and tossed the vambraces to the floor. Leaning back on his hard bed, he stared at the ceiling, his face flushed with exertion and embarrassment. Exertion, because Lord Gunthar had worked him over. Embarrassment, because the older man had done it easily, almost effortlessly, in a calm voice lacing the rout with instructions.

  “Raise your shield, Sturm!” Gunthar had railed. “You’re shuffling and puffing like Lord Raphael!”

  Sturm had winced. Lord Raphael was a hundred and twenty-three years old and babbled in senile rapture about the Cataclysm he really did not remember.

  Slowly the two men circled each other, student and tutor. Gunthar’s gray eyes never left the lad, fixed on the padded sword that bobbed in his right hand.

  “Your guard is low, lad,” Gunthar urged. “Vertumnus’ll have a sword in amidst you before you raise it!”

  Sturm had stumbled then, and Gunthar had pushed him back, seating him on the hard bailey ground. The Knight stood over him grimly and explained in a clipped, cold voice how Lord Wilderness would not wait politely for him to regain his footing.

  For the Green Man is not of the Order. He cannot be expected to fight with dignity and according to the Measure. There is no Measure in the outlands, which is why there is a Measure here. You will be the Measure at that meeting!

 
Now Sturm closed his eyes, and the sudden knock on the door startled him. He must have been sleeping, he thought with dismay, and he struggled with the laces to his greaves as the door opened and Lord Boniface Crownguard of Foghaven stepped into the room, broadsword in hand, on his shoulder a large canvas bag, filled with something that rang and clattered as he closed the door behind him.

  For a brief and nightmarish moment, the lad thought that instruction was about to resume with another sound thrashing at the hands of Lord Boniface. For a moment, he even thought something darker, even worse, was about to waylay him in the shadowy guests’ chambers. But Boniface was quiet, even mild, setting down his burden and seating himself at the corner of Sturm’s cot, the sword across his knees.

  His boots were muddy, and vallenwood leaves clung to the soles.

  “I saw you with Gunthar. You tire too easily,” Lord Boniface said gruffly.

  “And Gunthar tires not easily enough,” Sturm answered with a weary smile, dismissing his bewilderment and fear. The older man chuckled.

  “Angriff Brightblade’s boy you are, though,” Lord Boniface concluded, and Sturm looked at him hopefully. “Somewhere down in the cellars of yourself. Yes. It’s just a matter of letting the Brightblade out to air. You see, Angriff would have stayed at Gunthar in the courtyard until he won—’tis as simple as that. Till death or Cataclysm come, Angriff used to match me sword on sword, and though I was the better swordsman …”

  Boniface paused and cleared his throat.

  “Though I was the better swordsman,” he continued, “your father would have won on sheer mettle and daring and backbone.”

  Boniface paused again and looked curiously at the lad beside him. “There was also,” he said thoughtfully, “an affinity with the sword itself, as though something in him could sense the thoughts and movements of metal. A good smith or armorer he might have made, had not the Order called him. But such things were subtle, almost unconscious, as though he received them as an inheritance of blood.”

  “None of which I am heir to,” Sturm declared weakly. “Neither affinities nor mettle nor daring nor backbone.”

  “And yet you are off to face Lord Wilderness,” Boniface replied softly, “after considerable training and study. By what road will you travel?”

  “They say the best way is always the most direct,” Sturm replied. “I intend to ride straight toward the Vingaard Keep, then south down the river to the great ford. I shall cross the Vingaard there, then pick up its southern branch and follow along the banks straight into the Darkwoods themselves. Nothing more simple, no smoother road.”

  Lord Boniface’s firm hand rested heavily on his shoulder.

  “A brave plan, Sturm Brightblade, and worthy of your name,” he pronounced. “I myself could have fashioned no better route.”

  “Thank you, Lord Boniface,” Sturm replied with a puzzled frown. “Indeed your confidence assures me.”

  The older Knight smiled and moved closer to Sturm. “Did Angriff ever tell you,” he asked, “the story of his feud with his own father?”

  Sturm shook his head and smiled slowly. Since he had arrived at the High Clerist’s Tower, it seemed that each Knight he met had a tale to tell of Lord Angriff Brightblade. Happily, eagerly, the lad learned forward, prepared for yet another story.

  A slow smile creased the face of Lord Boniface, and he began the telling.

  “Your grandfather, Lord Emelin Brightblade, was a good Knight and a good man, but he was known for neither patience or gentleness. Son of Bayard Brightblade and the Lady Enid di Caela, Lord Emelin was Brightblade tough and di Caela … haughty? Stubborn?”

  Sturm glowered. He remembered absolutely nothing of his grandfather Emelin, but he wasn’t sure that he liked the critical words. Still, Boniface was accustomed to speaking his mind to Brightblades, it seemed.

  The older Knight continued, his eyes on the sword in his lap. “Well, it has never been the easiest of bloodlines. Angriff feared his father as much as he respected him, and in the difficult years of his teens, he steered away from old Emelin at formalities, preferring to meet him only at the hunt. For it was there that their spirits usually blended, as the poems and histories tell us it should be with fathers and sons.”

  Boniface stretched back on the cot, linking his hands behind his head.

  “Usually,” said Sturm.

  “I remember those hunts,” Boniface continued. “The smell of woodsmoke on cold mornings like this, when we would ride after the boar. I remember best the winter of Lord Grim.”

  “Lord Grim, sir?” Sturm asked. Despite his love for Solamnic history and lore, he remembered no Knight named Grim.

  Boniface snorted. “A boar. Grim was a great-tusked boar who eluded the best of us in that winter of three seventeen, when your father and I were seventeen ourselves and ready for anything except that pig. Lord Grim lost us in the mountains, in the foothills, in the level, snow-covered plains where you could track for days.

  “The Yuletide passed, and still we could not catch him. It was not until midwinter when we brought him to ground, not far from here, in the Wings of Habbakuk. I remember the day well. The hunt. The kill. But mostly what happened afterward.”

  Sturm set down the greaves carefully, his gaze locked on his father’s old friend. Boniface closed his eyes and was silent so long that Sturm was afraid the Knight had fallen asleep. But then Lord Boniface spoke, and Sturm followed him into the story. It became twenty-five years ago and far south of the Tower.

  “Lord Agion Pathwarden led us into the foothills. Your cousin. As burly a Pathwarden as ever arose from that now-vanished line. Named for a centaur friend of his eccentric father, Agion was. Your grandfather’s best friend, and a great brawler, and many was the time that the two of them came to blows, scuffled cleanly, and parted friends. Like his namesake, Agion seemed half horse, a big man in the saddle, charging like the south wind over the slopes and inclines of the Wings.

  “We had caught the trail right after dawn, the thick-necked alan dogs, our best hunting beasts, caterwauling at the mere smell of Grim and racing through the rocks like water rushing uphill, fanning wide and converging, pouring through a narrow pass into a stand of scrubby aeterna where the boar was waiting. It was all the huntsmen could do to restrain the pack. They bayed and bellowed and swirled around that narrow copse of evergreen. Grim was in there, everybody knew, but each of us was … reluctant to go in and greet him first.”

  Sturm nodded and shuddered, having survived his first boar hunt back in the fall.

  “Finally four of us dismounted and entered the copse on foot: Agion and Emelin and your father and I. Angriff and I were along as squires, more or less. We were supposed to hold the spears, stand our ground and be silent. But Angriff wasn’t the sort. When Agion crashed through the brush and chased the boar from cover, your father was on it like a panther, quick and menacing, striking the beast once, twice, a third time with spears. Grim was old and thick of hide, and your father’s casts were those of a youth—swift and accurate, but lacking the muscle to pierce through gristle and bone.”

  “So it simply enraged the boar,” Sturm observed, and Boniface nodded.

  “Grim charged at Agion, who turned, ran, and scrambled out of the way through a thick aeterna, the boar skidding and stirring gravel just a step behind him. Meanwhile, your grandfather circled about the creature and waited for the chance at the delivering cast.

  “That chance did not come, because Angriff was impatient. Through the brush he rousted old Grim, and time and again I lost him in the mist and the thicket. Finally I heard a shuffling, a cough, and I stumbled around a thick latticework of branches … and found myself face-to-face with old Grim himself.”

  Boniface paused. He stood and began to pace the room as Sturm held his breath, listening.

  “He was as shaggy as the bison of Kiri-Jolith, dripping with dew and mud and half-hidden in mist and evergreen. He looked like something from the legends, out of the Age of Dreams and the bardic ta
les. I remember thinking, right before he charged, that if Nature were to take on flesh and form, it would be this beast before me, in its unruliness and terror and its strange hideous indifference.”

  Again the Knight paused, his hands clenching, grasping the air as though he were trying to clutch something or push something away.

  “He … charged you, Lord Boniface?” Sturm asked finally. “The great boar charged you?”

  Boniface nodded. “Had my sword out in a flash. But I never used it.”

  A strange shadow passed over the Knight’s face. Sturm waited expectantly, sure that the man was remembering that moment, the horrible charge of the boar.

  “I never used it,” Boniface repeated. “Angriff’s spear passed neatly between Grim’s shoulder blades, and the boar staggered and rose and staggered again. Believe me, I was well out of the way by the second stagger, but I saw it all unfold—your grandfather and Agion burst into the clearing, and Lord Emelin’s sword flashed silver in the winter sunlight as the blade rose and came slashing home.

  “For a while, we all stood there above the boar. The alans were baying somewhere outside the circle of trees, so distant in our thoughts that it sounded like we were only remembering them.

  “Then Lord Agion spoke. ‘A fitting end to our adversary,’ he said. To Lord Grim, whose trophy shall grace the hall of Lord Emelin Brightblade, his slayer.’

  “Your grandfather smiled and nodded, but your father stood pale and too quiet, and at that moment, I knew that something between them was about to unravel, perhaps beyond repair. ‘But, Lord Agion,’ Angriff protested, stepping into the matter as brashly and foolishly as he stepped into each hunt, each tournament. ‘I expect that the history will show that I cast the first and telling spear.’