Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  And on the third time, he heard something: wishful thinking, perhaps, or poetry, but something nonetheless that crept into the last verses of the song.

  “The Age,

  no fear no fear

  the thousand lives

  of men and their stories

  go to their graves.

  I am here past the edge of despair.

  “But we,

  hear o hear

  the people long

  in poem and glory

  fade from the song.

  The magic is free in the air.”

  In the music of those silences was sweetness and safety and an assuring sense that the dark was not bottomless.

  Sturm’s eyes filled with tears, and the melodies, both heard and unheard, died into the smoky night air. He sat upright on the bed. In the real silence that followed the end of the song, he strained to hear words, to gather direction or advice or encouragement. But nothing was there except the snoring of a distant guard and the crackle of the central fire.

  Intent and wide awake now, he settled back on the mattress and willed himself to sleep, but it was hours before he closed his eyes. When he did, he slipped suddenly from waking to slumber as though he had fallen atop a steep and sheer battlement.

  On the fourth morning, the door opened as usual. Sturm sat up, a little hungrier than usual after a restless night, hoping that the porridge might somehow taste better this morning. It wasn’t breakfast that greeted him, though, but the Druidess Ragnell.

  The old woman walked through the door, escorted by Guardsman Oron. With a swift wave of her hand, she dismissed the big man, who looked after her reluctantly as he closed the door behind her.

  “You realize that you will be here for a long time,” she said.

  Sturm did not speak. How could he address his father’s murderess? Angrily he lay back on the mattress, turning his face to the back wall.

  Behind him, he heard the druidess shuffle and cough. It was hard to imagine her at the head of an army.

  “And this is your greeting?” she asked. “This is that fabled Solamnic politeness?”

  Sturm rolled over, regarding her from across the room with a withering stare of hatred.

  “I thank you, m’lady,” he replied, his politeness wintry, “but I would prefer my porridge to your presence.”

  The druidess smiled, and with a creaking of her ancient bones, she seated herself in front of him. From the folds of her robe, she drew a branch—of willow, perhaps, though Sturm’s botany was weak, and he could scarcely tell. With a practiced, assured gesture, she traced a circle in the dirt on the floor.

  “Your trespass is a deep one, child,” she observed. “A deep one and dire.”

  “Trespass? To be brought into your presence under armed guard?”

  The druidess ignored him, her eyes on the swirl of dust in the circle she had drawn. Soon, in spite of himself, Sturm found his eyes following the rapid, switching movements of the stick in her hand.

  “It is trespass,” she explained, “because the people of Lemish fear the Solamnic legions, their bright swords and their horses and their righteous eyes.”

  “Perhaps their fear is their own doing, Lady Ragnell!” Sturm shot back. “Perhaps some crime of Lemish cries out for justice! Perhaps there are abandoned castles north of here that can attest—”

  “Attest to what?” the druidess interrupted, her voice calm and unwavering. Deep in her eyes, Sturm saw a flicker. Rage? Amusement? He could not tell.

  “Perhaps there is one reason, Sturm Brightblade,” soothed the Lady Ragnell. “Young people say so, which is why we ask them to take up the sword.”

  Sturm barely heard her, his eyes affixed once more to the circle of dust that was widening now, widening like the ripples on the surface of a placid pond when something is dropped in the water.

  “But I am not here for policy, young man,” Ragnell said. She was chanting now, the dust rising around her. “Nor for solemnities of country or court, neither to praise nor punish, but to show only …”

  Her voice was rising steadily into singing. Sturm heard the notes of one of the ancient modes and struggled to place it. Then, deep in the pause of the notes and the breathing, deep in the space between words, he thought he heard another melody, a song below words and thought.

  “I shall show you a handful of dust,” Ragnell chanted, the stick moving more and more swiftly, “A handful of dust I shall show you.…”

  A snowy country, level and treeless, stretched before him, so real that he shivered to look upon it.

  Throt. Something told him that these were the steppes of Throt before him. He was looking back into winter, back over months to thick ice and the turn of the year.

  Once upon a time, a voice began ironically, the words insinuating into the cold wind he heard and felt. Startled, Sturm shook his head. He couldn’t tell if this voice was Mara’s doing or rose from the chant of the druidess.

  About the time of Yule, in the goblin country, the voice went on. Now there was a village in the vision, a dozen squat huts half-buried in the snow. Smoke curled from a large central fire, and short, stocky shapes, bent and fur-clad, moved in and out of the shadows.

  A squalid place, isolated in the winter desert of Throt. Sturm bristled at the mere sight of it, remembering stories of goblin raids, the hordes as swift and merciless as wolves.

  When the Solamnic host rode out of the snow, as swift as a storm over the winter desert, Sturm was exhilarated, breathless. There were twenty Knights, perhaps twenty-five, cloaked and armored, their swords already drawn and thick, dark hides draped across the faces of their shields.

  It was the sign of no quarter, the dark shields—when the evil against them was too great, too unrepentant.

  “Why are you showing me this, Ragnell?” he asked. “Are my people going to lose the struggle?”

  Wait, the wind said in his ears. Wait and attend.

  At the head of the column, a tall horseman raised his hand. Behind him, the Knights spurred their horses to a gallop, and the war cry burst from them in unison.

  “Est Mithas oth Sularis!”

  Like unstoppable wildfire, they rushed through the goblin encampment. The tall commander brought his sword crashing through the nearest of the snow-covered yurts, and the air exploded with the sound of fracturing wood, of tearing hides, of the shrieks of the surprised inhabitants.

  At once the encampment was a shambles. Blades flickered like the wings of swarming bees, and the air was loud with the crash of metal against metal, metal against stone and bone. The goblin spears rattled harmlessly against the shields of the Knights, whose swords struck home with wild efficiency. Horses reared and plunged, and the goblins fell in waves before the onslaught.

  Sturm shook his head. His hands were sweaty and clenched, and he knelt on all fours above the vision’s swirling dust, his breath short and his long hair matted and dripping. For a moment, he saw only dirt and planking. He heard only the chanting of Ragnell in the vast silences of the Dun Ringhill lodge.

  Then the scene returned, in sharp and brutal detail. A large, rough-looking man—Sturm recognized him as Lord Joseph Uth Matar, head of the vanished family—emerged from a yurt, two goblin younglings in tow. Filthy little creatures, they were, biting and scratching and fouling themselves in their anger and fear.

  Without word or expression, Lord Joseph shoved the yammering little creatures to their knees. He spoke with them shortly, softly, laughing at their threats and curses. The audience over, a young Knight—Sturm guessed it was one of the numerous Jeoffreys—wrestled manfully with the squirming, spitting little monsters. Though his face emerged from the struggle a bit worse for wear after the scoring of their sharp nails, he managed to loop a tight new rope around their wrists and waists.

  The huts burned like kindling, like dried grass. Soon the site was ablaze, the black smoke billowing in the subsiding snow. Lord Joseph stood over the goblin younglings, while his lieutenants drew what shabby salvage
they could from the tents before setting them to torch.

  In the middle of a dozen bonfires, three Knights gathered together over the shrieking little monsters. Lord Joseph squinted, as if he were trying to see beyond the rising smoke. In all directions he turned, now shielding his eyes, as if he were looking for something remote or irretrievably lost.

  He nodded, satisfied. Quickly he mounted and muttered something at the two younger Knights, then galloped off at the head of the column. The two waited until the hoofbeats were muffled by snow and distance, until the only sound was the crackle of flame, the screaming and cursing of the young goblins.

  Then they drew their swords, and with an elegance born of years in the Barriers, of fencing school and tournament and careful, expensive instruction in the ways of the Measure, they raised the blades on high and brought them down on the little monsters in a graceful, almost beautiful arc.

  Sturm lifted his eyes, startled by the imagined screams. Ragnell was staring at him, her face expressionless.

  “Well, then,” she said. “I’ve enough of … showing for this day, Sturm Brightblade.”

  She rose to her feet, and the dust slowed and settled. Heavily, as though the morning had wearied her, she trudged to the door and knocked. Oron lifted the latch and stood aside as the druidess passed by, never looking back at Sturm.

  The young knight sat on the mattress, lost in thought, troubled and unsettled by what he had just seen. Mara began to sing again somewhere nearby, and her voice was clear and consoling. But Sturm’s thoughts strayed at once from her singing, lost in the Oath and the Measure and the things he had just seen.

  Weyland the smith slept in the room off the forge, the fire safely turfed and banked. At this time of year, he was grateful for the warmth, for the cold nights at the edge of spring were uncomfortable for most of the villagers.

  By the early hours of the morning, his sleep became restless. He was accustomed to rising at dawn, and over the years, his body had come to anticipate sunrise, stirring and slipping in and out of wakefulness during the last watch of the night.

  He thought he heard something astir in the forge—a faint scuttling sound, as though something in the furnace had shifted. He closed his eyes. Not unusual, such sounds, and especially when an uncommon draft of wind found its way down his baffled chimney, stirring the peat with which the fire was covered. Nothing out there worth stealing anyway, he told himself, and drifted back to sleep, in his drowsiness forgetting the Solamnic sword he had reforged two nights ago.

  The sword hung by a cord from a nail in the wall. The work the smith had done was nearly perfect. The blade was sharp and strong and resilient, “ready for a hundred battles,” as Weyland had said proudly, holding the weapon up to the afternoon sunlight. And yet from this time forth, it would be two swords: the heirloom of fifty generations of Brightblades, its lineage stretching back to Bedal Brightblade in the shadowy Age of Might; and a new sword, one to which no lineage mattered, born anew and fresh.

  This night was the first adventure for the new sword. While Weyland slept, a small hairy tendril reached out and encircled the hilt. Then another and another.

  Cyren had barely the strength to carry the weapon. He spun about, staggering backward over the smithy floor, the sword balanced on his back. Suspended between fear and hunger, the sword heavy in his clutches, the spider turned, teetering under the weight, and scrambled for the door to the outside.

  Unfortunately, between the dark and the fear and the turning, he rushed for the bedroom door instead. The blade struck the doorframe, and wakened by the sound, Weyland sat upright, bleary-eyed and bleary-headed.

  As large an eight-legged vermin as he had ever seen stared at him, wide-eyed, from across the room.

  It would be hard to say who was more frightened. Smith and spider screamed together; Weyland leapt through the open window and Cyren clambered about, rattled the sword against the doorframe again, and streaked across the forge and out into the night. Racing around the side of the house, the spider collided with the hysterical smith, and the two of them, screaming louder still, careened off one another and fled into the darkness.

  In the center of the village, Sturm awakened to the shriek and the outcry. The guards stirred restlessly outside the door of his cubicle, and someone called out “What’s ’at?” from somewhere near the central fire. A beery, deep voice rumbled “Hush!” and the lodge was suddenly still again.

  Sturm lay back and looked up through the opening in the roof of the roundhouse. The sky was bright, the clouds distinct and edged with red, as though Lunitari had passed into splendid fullness.

  He had been dreaming something about Knights and swords and goblins in a dark battle, and somewhere distant martial music—not a flute this time, nor a voice, but a trumpet.

  On the other side of the cubicle wall, he heard Mara muttering. Sturm smiled wearily.

  “Can’t even stop talking when she sleeps,” he whispered. The scene the druidess had shown Sturm puzzled and unsettled him. The burning houses, the youngling goblins, the hunt in the driving snow …

  He lifted his eyes just in time to see a long white thread tumble down from the opening, and above it Sturm saw a hideous, segmented face with ten huge eyes.

  Chapter 16

  Into the Darkwoods

  ———

  Cyren had come for Mara first. It had taken every bit of his bravery to scale the roof and stand above a large fire, much less to dangle silk into the midst of the village guards. His grotesque, segmented face framed by stars and moonlight, he beckoned frantically, chattering and whirring.

  Mara was up the cord like a spider herself. Once, twice, she braced her feet against the concave ceiling, springing and pushing off athletically so that she swung over the lodge like an acrobat. Finally she vanished into the opening in the roof, her brown legs kicking. She peered back into the room and tossed the cord over the other side of the wall to Sturm.

  Sturm rocked back on his ankles and took a deep breath. The escape looked reckless, even foolish, but it was, after all, an escape.

  Struggling hand over hand, favoring his shoulder, which had again begun to grieve him, Sturm pulled himself up the webbing until his feet balanced delicately atop the front wall of his cell. Below him, the guardsmen lay sleeping, their backs propped against the outside of his cell. A half-dozen more snored by the banked fire, and at the far entrance, two more slept standing, bowed over their spears.

  Sturm smiled, a little more confident, and tied the strand of webbing about his waist. From here, it was only a short leap to the opening in the roof and out to freedom. Bracing himself against the top of the wall, he jumped out, extending his arms …

  … and sailed a good three feet short.

  He turned in the air, trying a last desperate grasp, and lost what little balance he had left. His feet flew above him and tangled in the webbing. Stifling a cry of panic, Sturm dropped precipitously headfirst toward the glowing, peat-covered center of the fire. The webbing brought him up a few feet short of combustion, and he swung slowly, silently, like a pendulum above the sleeping guardsmen.

  The fall had jerked the breath from him. Panting, he reached up for his ankles, and on the third try, he managed to grab them. Wrestling himself to a better position, he grabbed the cord again and pulled straight up into the opening, where Mara helped him slide onto the roof.

  It had seemed like an hour in the doing, and yet another to untangle him. When Sturm looked up, Mara was crouched over him, Cyren looming over her like some canopy transformed by a perverse enchanter.

  “Here,” the elf whispered, handing Sturm his sword. “Reforged by the very smith Jack Derry told us to find, so I’d venture the work is good.”

  “The smith!” Sturm hissed. “You found him, then?” Kicking the last spider’s strand from his ankle, he crawled toward the edge of the roof.

  “He’s over by the far stables. We’ll be in danger of patrols and discovery there! Why, even a barking dog …”
<
br />   “Show me the way,” Sturm demanded. “I’m bound for the smithy no matter what.”

  He turned to Mara, grasping her hand urgently. “Jack Derry owes me explaining.”

  Sturm slipped the reforged sword into his belt and slid down the roof of the roundhouse. He caught himself at its edge, where new ivy formed a green latticework down the walls to the green of the village square. Mara sighed and followed behind him, the spider clinging to her back and chattering nervously. When they both stood on solid ground, the elf maiden pointed toward the stables, and beyond them the smithy, and through the shadowy alleys of Dun Ringhill they crept, avoiding the tangling light of the moon, until they stood at the edge of the village.

  Where a lone light flickered in Weyland’s window.

  Sturm heard the music when the smithy came into sight. Remote and insinuating, it recalled the young knight to Vertumnus, to the journey ahead of him and the awaiting challenge. He raised his cloak against the rain and motioned Mara to hang back in the shelter and shadows. In a low crouch, he crossed the last stretch of open ground to the forge. Quietly he crept to the window and, standing on tiptoe, peered inside.

  Two men stood at the banked furnace, with rakes removing the peat so that the blacksmith’s day could begin.

  They were talking about spiders.

  “As big around as my head, I tell ye!” the larger of the men exclaimed, holding forth two blackened hands, measuring the creature in question.

  The other man remained silent, his back to the window. Sturm couldn’t see him for the glow from the fire and the tricks of shadows, but he was strong and agile enough, and he seemed to know the uses of a rake.

  “Starting at spiders,” he finally said, his voice muffled by movement and the soft tugging sounds of rake over moss. “What would that celebrated master of yours have to say about that?”

  “The same your celebrated father would say,” the big man replied with a curious smile, standing upright and wiping his brow. Sturm drew even closer to the window, feeling the hot air from the forge.