[Meetings 04] - The Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams - (ebook by Undead)

  Puffing and shouting, trailing mud and water, Sturm climbed to dry ground and spun about, the hobgoblin sword heavy in his hand. Five bandits had closed with Jack while Sturm was making his way up the banks. Whirling, ducking, and leaping, the air around him blurred with knife and dagger, Jack Derry looked to be more than a match for the five, but already there were three others bursting from the underbrush, two burly hobgoblins and a lanky man with a long scar on his lip.

  Sturm turned to face the ugly trio. Their movements were low, shifting, the prowl of pub fighters rather than the sharp demeanor of soldiers. It should be easy enough, the lad thought, and raising his sword in a time-honored Solamnic salute, he stepped forth into the unfolding battle.

  Within moments, he had a healthy respect for pub fighters. The hobgoblins were stocky and strong and surprisingly quick, but even more menacing was Scarlip, the lean bandit who hung back, his throwing dagger at the ready, waiting for the slightest opening. Sturm yearned for the ancestral shield as he danced to his left, keeping the hobgoblins between him and the tall deadly man.

  The smaller of the hobgoblins, a snag-toothed, yellow-green rascal that smelled of carrion, lunged at Sturm once, twice, a third time. Each time the lad parried the thrusts, and each time he was forced back farther, farther still, until he felt his heels slide in the mud of the riverbank. Desperately he lurched forward, sliding quickly past the outstretched sword of the creature, and thrust his sword under its leather breastplate as his face pressed against that of the hobgoblin. The thing's yellow eyes widened and glazed over as Sturm pushed it aside, yanked his sword from its middle, and turned to face its larger comrade.

  The big goblin, wielding a club the size of Sturm's leg, brought it crashing down in the high grass as Sturm slipped neatly out of the way. For a moment, he was in Scarlip's sight, and the lanky man stepped forward, preparing to throw. But Sturm leapt quickly to the other side of the big hobgoblin, which by this time had raised its club again.

  Down the monster brought the weapon, and down again, but each time Sturm was much too quick, his movements too elusive. Behind this strange and deadly dance, Scarlip grew more and more impatient. Watching the tall bandit whenever he could flicker his eyes away from the charging hobgoblin, Sturm saw the man step forward, feint, then stomp angrily when once again his target jumped to safety.

  So it could have continued until Sturm grew tired and goblin club or hurtling dagger found its mark, had not Scarlip grown too impatient. With a cry of frustration, the tall bandit hurled the first of his daggers.

  It lodged in the back of the goblin, who fell facefirst into the river. Smiling, Scarlip readied a second dagger and launched it toward Sturm, who stood panting and riveted by surprise and fatigue.

  Sturm saw the bandit's arm rise and whip forward, the dagger flashing through the air like a meteor. Then something struck him from the side and he toppled, the knife buzzing by his ear.

  Jack Derry knelt over him, sword in hand.

  "Stay down, Jack!" the young gardener shouted, then spun to face Scarlip.

  Dazed, winded, Sturm tried to get to his feet but failed.

  Jack? he thought. Why did he call me Jack?

  But there was no time for answers. Jack Derry raced toward Scarlip, who drew another dagger and hurled it straight at his midsection. Jack brought his own blade across his body with almost unnatural quickness, deflecting the missile neatly. Scarlip turned and started to run, but he reeled suddenly as a dagger passed over Sturm's head and lodged at the base of the tall bandit's spine. Bounding past Sturm with the quickness of a deer, Mara drew a dagger from Jack's belt and took battle station by the gardener.

  Blearily Sturm stood up. He looked toward the river, where seven bandits lay dead, victims of Jack's blinding speed and recklessness. But ten, maybe twelve more were coming in the distance, waving swords and shouting in the harsh accents of Neraka.

  "Get out of here, Jack!" Jack shouted to Sturm, who staggered toward him, alarmed and bewildered.

  "And take her with you," he said, with a gesture at Mara. "The gods know what they'd do to her!"

  "B-But—" Sturm began, and was cut short. Jack would hear none of it.

  "Go, Jack!" the gardener cried in his loudest voice, shaking his dark hair for emphasis. "Protect this woman—and don't forget, an acorn doesn't drop far from the tree!"

  He took a threatening step toward Sturm, brandishing his sword. Sturm, convinced that his comrade had gone mad, stepped back as Mara rushed to him, seized him by the arm, and pulled him southward down the riverbank.

  "Hurry up, Sturm!" she whispered, dragging him bodily over a vallenwood root. "Now's your chance to rescue me!"

  Completely baffled, Sturm gave a last look toward the courageous gardener and turned away.

  Though hardly a hero, Cyren had been resourceful enough to herd the horses up the bank. Nervously they pawed the high grass, their big, rolling eyes returning again and again to the dodging spider. Sturm mounted Acorn and pulled Mara up in the saddle by him; she in turn had grabbed Luin's reins and brought the big Solamnic mare in tow behind her. As though the whole escape had been planned for months, Acorn's squat legs moved with quick purpose as she trotted them out of bow range and finally out of earshot.

  Sturm looked back one last time before the limbs and undergrowth blocked his view of the river. Jack stood smiling bravely, framed in needles and branches and new leaves. He was taunting the bandits, waving his sword and dancing in a peculiar bawdy fashion Sturm thought he remembered from some lost and cloudy time.

  The bandits held back for now. Jack had shown them his skill with the weapon, and none of them wanted to be the next to test his swordsmanship.

  But it wouldn't be long. Sturm shook his head, and a great sadness overtook him as he turned to the trail ahead of him, leaving Jack Derry behind. If it weren't for Mara, he would be side by side with the gardener, braving the Nerakans and hobgoblins until victory or death. But she was helpless and frail and . . .

  "Keep your eyes on the trail, Solamnic!" the helpless, frail little thing commanded as she grabbed his ear and jerked him back to proper attention. "I won't have Jack Derry risk his fool neck so that you can break ours!"

  * * * * *

  They traveled an hour, silent and lost in their lonely thoughts. Though he scarcely knew the gardener, Sturm mourned fiercely, his face hidden in the dark folds of his hood. Yet there was puzzlement equal to the grief.

  "Jack," he said to Mara at last, as the two of them rode south through the rising night. "Why did he call me Jack?"

  The elf maiden reached into the layers of fur that covered her. The moonlight splashed on the silver flute in her hand.

  "So they would come at him and not at you, simpleton," she replied, and she lifted the flute to her lips.

  "I don't understand, Mara," Sturm said, interrupting the first notes of the music.

  "Remember the snares and ambushes Jack told you about? The ones this Bonito—"

  "Boniface," Sturm interrupted. "Lord Boniface of Foghaven."

  "Boniface, Bonito . . ." Mara said dismissively. "Whoever was trying to trap or dismantle you. As I see it, Jack figured the bandits to be one of the snares:"

  "And calling me Jack . . ." Sturm began, the idea dawning on him.

  "Meant that the other young human male was the one they were looking for," Mara said. "The one who would do something foolish and Solamnic like hold them all off while we escaped."

  "So Jack was . . . was masking as me!" Sturm exclaimed, trying in vain to turn Acorn back on the path.

  "Are all the Brightblades this nimble-witted?" Mara asked ironically. "Get hold of your mare, Master Sturm, before she takes us all the way to Neraka!"

  * * * * *

  The dark came suddenly and swiftly, as it often does near the end of winter. Sturm had roamed through high grass and farmland, searching fruitlessly for the path to Dun Ringhill. Western Lemish, it seemed, was as featureless as the face of a moon, and just about as hospit
able.

  As far as Sturm could see, there was no lantern or lamp, no smell of woodsmoke in the air, no sound of herd or watchdog. It was an uninhabited country and a place without landmark.

  Sturm dismounted from the mare. The countryside rolled ahead of him, and the clouds blocked the stars so thoroughly that he couldn't tell north from west, much less tell direction by the heavens.

  "So much for Lemish," he said disgustedly. "Nothing but a pasture, this is."

  Mara stayed in the saddle, squinting as her sharp elf eyes scanned all possible horizons.

  "Dun Ringhill is somewhere around here," she said. "Of that much I'm certain."

  The grass stirred behind them, and Cyren scrambled into the open, trailing a single white strand of webbing.

  "I thought you had been in these parts before," Sturm said, looking up at the girl.

  "True enough," Mara said quietly, "I met Jack Derry once—not far from here."

  "What? How did you come to meet him? And who really is Jack Derry?" Sturm asked, stretching Solamnic politeness out of curiosity. For after all, there might be something the elf could tell him, something to lead them to the village, to Weyland the Smith and to eventual safety.

  "My money has it he's awaiting us in Dun Ringhill. The first step in finding this village is to know west from east. Sunrise will tell us that quick enough."

  She peered at him through the furs, her dark eyes intent and questioning.

  "You know well that it will not," Sturm grumbled. "Not quick enough, that is. The countryside is filled with bandits, and we'd best not camp in the midst of them."

  "Then we steer by starlight," Mara proclaimed and lifted the flute to her lips again.

  "Starlight?" Sturm asked skeptically. "M'lady, look at the clouds. . . ."

  But the elf had closed her eyes, an eerie music rising from her instrument. It was a Qualinesti plainsong, sacred to Gilean the Book. Crisp and staccato, the notes filled the moist air around them, and Sturm looked about uneasily, sure that the music would give them away to the bandits.

  Mara played, and a silver light shone in her hair. For a moment, Sturm thought she was glowing, then gradually he noticed the same light spreading over his arms and shoulders, over Acorn's neck and the chestnut flanks of Luin behind them. White Solinari had broken through the thick mask of clouds, and the road behind him and before him was as clear and dazzling as midday.

  "As I feared," Mara said, the song over and the clouds returning. "We've listed a bit to the south. We'll strike the river again if we keep on as we're going."

  "How . . . how did you do that?" Sturm asked, turning Acorn forcefully from the trail that the stubborn little mare insisted on following.

  "Gilean mode," Mara said quietly, "with the High Mode of Paladine placed in its silences. When you combine them, it's a song . . . of revealing. It dispels clouds and night, stills waters so you can look to the bottom of pond and river. In the hands of the great bards, it unmasks the dissembling heart."

  She smiled at Sturm, who caught his breath at the depths of her hazel eyes.

  "But I am no great bard," the elf concluded quietly. "With my music, we are lucky to see a momentary change in the weather."

  Sturm blushed and nodded, yanking once more at Acorn's reins.

  "Well, the clouds parted long enough," Mara said, pointing due east. "There's our direction. That way lies the Darkwoods."

  "But where on the woods' edge can we find Dun Ringhill?" Sturm asked. "The stars don't tell us that. If only we had Jack Derry here!"

  "Ah, but Jack is lost or upriver or . . . elsewhere," Mara said. "Leaving us alive if no wiser."

  "He believed I could find the way," Sturm muttered disconsolately. "He trusted that I was my father's son, that I am more resourceful than I feel."

  "My dear boy," Mara said with a crooked smile, "what in the name of the Seven makes you think that?"

  "He told me," Sturm said, "that the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree. What else could that be but talk of fathers and sons?"

  "Perhaps something a bit more . . . arboreal?" Mara asked. "Or a simple riddle that your thoughts of fathers have kept covered? After all, Jack couldn't give you directions to Dun Ringhill. Bandits have ears, after all, and would follow us like hounds."

  Sturm nodded. It made sense. Jack was, after all, a man of concealments and riddles. Seated on the increasingly unruly mare, Sturm mined his knowledge of tree lore, of gardening, of the mythical ancient calendar of the dryads that supposedly followed a symbolism of trees. None of it helped. He felt as though he were back in the maze of Castle di Caela or in the thickest reaches of the Green Man's fog.

  The mare wrenched once more, and he tugged furiously at her reins. "By the gods, Acorn!" he snapped. "If you don't—"

  He paused at the sound of Mara's laughter.

  "Now what?" he exclaimed, but the elf laughed even more.

  "Let go of the reins, Sturm Brightblade," she said, recovering her breath.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Think about it, Sturm. Who among us knows the way to the village of Dun Ringhill?"

  Slowly, reluctantly, Sturm opened his hand. The reins dropped limply over Acorn's withers, and sensing the new freedom, the little mare turned about and walked steadily east, then south, then east again. Mara resumed the music, this time singing the old song from Qualinost, adding to it equally ancient words.

  "The sun,

  the splendid eye

  of all our heavens,

  dives from the day

  "and leaves

  the dozing sky

  spangled with fireflies,

  deepening in gray.

  "The leaves

  give off cold fire,

  they blaze into ash

  at the end of the year,

  "and birds

  coast on the winds

  and wheel to the north

  when autumn ends.

  "The day grows dark,

  the seasons bare,

  but we

  await the sun's

  green fire upon

  the trees.

  Ahead of them, green footprints sprouted and grew among the dingy ground cover. Acorn leaned forward, grazed softly on one of them, and began her slow progress on the new trail. Luin followed, browsing at the footprints, too, eating the trail behind them. At a farther distance, the high bushes tilted and switched, a sign that the spider Cyren followed, as always obscurely and furtively.

  They hadn't traveled twenty yards before the music arose in front of them, too. A fluid, beautiful descant joined with Mara's singing, and Sturm closed his eyes and saw liquid silver passing like a magical stream before his inner vision.

  So Vertumnus had joined in the music again. Sturm sat back in the saddle, resigning himself to Acorn's direction and the melody all around him. Though the Green Man's song invariably led to . . . challenges, it also led toward the Southern Darkwoods. And despite the challenge and the peril, that was the goal of his journey.

  On they traveled, and even though the night was thick about them, Sturm's heart was much lighter. Jack Derry's riddle had been a little thing, not much compared to the mysteries that lay ahead. But solving one thing gave hope to solving another. The road ahead of him looked less daunting now, and as the lights of Dun Ringhill shone dimly before him, Sturm imagined the smithy, the sword re-forged, Vertumnus faced down and beaten on the first day of spring.

  It all seemed possible, even likely. He felt the crisp exhilaration of adventure, of swords and riding and mystery and beautiful females. He sat back in the saddle, brushing against the sleeping Mara, who mumbled and tightened her grip about his waist. For a moment, the journey seemed something he was born to do.

  He didn't notice the men until they rose like fog from the high grass, sudden and quick and quietly efficient. The man in the forefront, a brown, wizened little character, smiled and raised his hand.

  "Good even, Sturm Brightblade!" he called out, his common speech fluent but th
ick with the accents of Lemish.

  Good old Jack Derry, Sturm thought admiringly. As quick in travel as he is with the sword. "Ho, there!" he called out, dismounting from the horse. And then, more formally and Solamnically: "Whom have I the honor of addressing?"

  "Captain Duir of the Dun Ringhill Militia, sir!" the weathered little man announced, standing at comical attention. "Assigned to protect the western approaches."

  Sturm looked back in amusement at Mara, who was rubbing her eyes and straightening herself in the saddle.

  Sturm stepped forward, removed his glove, and offered his hand in the traditional Solamnic gesture. Shyly, awkwardly, Captain Duir extended his own hand, and the two men exchanged greetings as equals.

  Sturm nodded and smiled at the peasant soldier, who slowly smiled back, his blue eyes narrowed now with a new and strange amusement.

  "Master Sturm Brightblade of Solamnia," the captain announced, his grip tightening on the young man's hand, "I arrest you as an invader, in the name of the Druidess Ragnell!"

  Chapter 13

  A Ride Back in Memory

  He could return to the Tower now.

  Boniface watched Sturm's arrest from the topmost branches of a distant vallenwood. The spyglass he carried with him was cloudy but good. He saw the boy offer his hand, saw the captain take it, saw the gestures of friendship stiffen and sour, and saw the militia take them all—the horses, the elven mistress, and Brightblade—off toward the town of Dun Ringhill, where the old druidess sat at the head of an angry tribunal.

  The finest swordsman in Solamnia wrapped his dark cloak about him tightly and shivered with pleasure. From a distance, framed in the menacing red moonlight, he looked like a huge raven or some unspeakable bat-winged creature, huddled in the height of the enormous tree. The spring wind died at the foot of the vallenwood, and in the upper branches, it was ultimate winter, dead and still, the steam of Boniface's breath rising like a specter into the midnight air.