Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  “ ‘Nonsense,’ Lord Emelin protested. ‘My sword struck the boar, and it died. There is no more to say in the matter.’

  “Indeed there was no more to say. But I could see Angriff start to say it, nonetheless. He began to answer back and defend his honor. But Lord Emelin would have none of it.”

  Lord Boniface paused and regarded the lad before him. Sturm gaped at him, his fists doubled. Imagine the injustice of Lord Emelin! Sturm thought angrily. Why, ’tis against the Code and Measure entirely!

  “Not at all, Sturm Brightblade,” Lord Boniface corrected, as though he was reading the younger man’s thoughts. “The rules of the hunt are simple, as simple as Lord Emelin set them forth that morning in the Wings of Habbakuk. Angriff, though, was livid. There was something in this, he felt, that passed beyond rule and protocol, but rule and protocol said that the rest was silence. He withdrew his spear …”

  Boniface paused and shook his head, a little sadly.

  “And I sheathed my sword, and we mounted our horses. I watched my friend ride and fume,” he maintained, “from the Virkhus Hills back to Castle Brightblade. As mute as a sheep before the shearer, he was, and he spoke not a word that afternoon and into the evening. For you see, defiance of one’s father was more against the Code and Measure than anything Lord Emelin had done by the rules in the clearing.

  “Agion teased young Angriff all the way back to Castle Brightblade, calling him ‘bush-beater’ and ‘lyam-hound’ and ‘alan,’ as though the lad’s part in the hunt were simply locating the beast. Angriff stewed further, and still he was silent. But I knew we had not seen the end of the matter.

  “It was at the banquet that night for Lord Emelin’s triumph. All the principal families were there—the MarKenins, the Jeoffreys, the Celestes—and the talk was of hunt and ceremony.

  “When dinner had been served and the guests had settled into the lull of food and wine, Angriff approached his father’s seat. Agion, at the left of Lord Emelin, snorted as the lad approached and said, far too audibly, ‘here comes the boy to ask for the hound’s share.’ ”

  Sturm gasped. At the hunt, when the beast was skinned and cleaned, the entrails, the hooves, and all indelicate parts were left for the hounds. Agion’s words had not only been insulting, but they were also downright cruel.

  “Emelin turned to Agion and said something sharp but inaudible,” Boniface said, “but Angriff seemed to pay the big lout no mind. He stood silently before his father until Lord Emelin looked up from the exchange with his cousin. Then Angriff began, his speech soft and mild and overprepared, but as urgent as any words spoken in Castle Brightblade before or since.

  “ ‘My Lord Father knows,’ he said, ‘that sometimes the Measure and true justice are at odds. He knows also that, regardless of sword and stroke of grace, my spear dealt Lord Grim the mortal blow.’

  “It was stilted and awkward, but it made its point. A murmur spread through the room, and Lord Emelin stood up angrily.

  “ ‘Are you saying, Angriff,’ he asked, ‘that your father … that I have … stolen your kill?’

  “ ‘Stolen is not my word for it,’ Angriff replied, his own anger bursting through the calm and politeness. ‘I prefer seized.’

  “It was then that Lord Emelin reached over the table and slapped his son.”

  “Slapped him?” Sturm asked, his voice rising in outrage. “Among his fellows at a formal banquet? Why … there is no … no …”

  “No answer to such indignity,” Boniface replied calmly. “It would seem not. Yet Emelin had overstepped all bounds, had crossed the Measure’s decree that ‘though honor takes all shapes and forms, the father must honor the son as the son the father.’ To strike his father back would be unthinkable, as would words harsh enough to answer the insult. Nor could he stand there and accept the blow and maintain his honor as a man.

  “Emelin blushed in the aftermath. He knew he had overstepped, but he couldn’t take back the gesture. It would seem that Angriff had no recourse. But listen.

  “He stood in front of his father in a smoldering rage, the imprint of old Emelin’s hand still pink and flushed on his smooth jaw. Then Angriff turned deliberately and crashed his fist straight into the bridge of Agion’s nose.

  “It was like the sound of a large limb cracking in a high wind. Agion went over backward and heavily, crashing to the floor, where he lay unconscious, awakening after a good half-hour, babbling about stockings and rhubarb pie.”

  “My father hit Agion!” Sturm exclaimed, shocked and delighted. “But why? And … and …”

  “Listen,” Boniface said with a smile. “For what your father said was this: ‘Present this to my father the next time you wrangle. It will be as much my blow to him as his was to Lord Grim.’ ”

  Sturm shook his head admiringly. “How did he think of it, Lord Boniface? How did he think of it?”

  Boniface opened the bag at his feet and slowly, with some effort, drew forth the breastplate and shield. “It was his way to think of things, Sturm. He thought to leave these with me … to give you when the time arrived.”

  Breathlessly Sturm reached out for the shield.

  “I am bound by Oath to give you these,” Boniface announced cryptically. “But this sword is … my gift.”

  He offered the broadsword lying in his lap. “Your father, it seems, took the Bright Blade with him or hid it somewhere beyond even the knowledge and eyes of his friends. But Angriff Brightblade’s son deserves a sword the likes of which I am giving you.”

  He extended the weapon hilt first. It glowed obscurely in the lamplight of Sturm’s quarters.

  “Make it your own,” Boniface announced mysteriously. “It is bright and double-edged.”

  Boniface left Sturm with the sword resting on his knees. For an hour, or perhaps two, the lad polished the weapon. He could see himself in the gleaming blade, the reflection of his face distorted and foxlike on the angular edges of the armor. When Lord Gunthar Uth Wistan stepped into the room, Sturm scarcely heard him.

  “You must be more alert in the Southern Darkwoods,” the High Justice observed as the startled lad leapt to his feet, the sword falling from his lap and clattering against the stone floor of the chamber.

  “I was … I …”

  Lord Gunthar ignored the lad’s stammer and seated himself with a rattle and clanking of mail. Carefully he set down the package he carried—a heavy, cumbersome thing wrapped in a blanket. Sturm marveled that the man was walking the halls of the Tower in full battle dress. One would think that the High Clerist’s Tower were under siege.

  Now Gunthar extended his gauntleted hand, within which lay a fresh green cluster of leaves. “Do you know them?” he asked curtly.

  Sturm shook his head.

  “Calvian oak,” the Knight explained laconically. “You remember the old saying?”

  Sturm nodded. He knew rhymes and lore far better than leaves and trees. “ ‘Last to green and last to fall,’ sir. Or so they say down in Solace.”

  “They say the same up here,” Gunthar acknowledged. “Which is why it’s so odd that I carry these leaves in winter, don’t you think?”

  He regarded Sturm with a calm, unreadable stare.

  “I’m supposed to be going,” the lad stated, crouching and picking up the sword. “That’s what it means.” The room seemed warm about him, and faintly through the window, the smell of flowers reached him on the back of a southeasterly breeze.

  Chapter 5

  Of Departures and Schemes

  ———

  That morning, all but the boldest of them averted their eyes.

  In the chilly, torchlit corridors, as the night turned and the bell of the third watch tolled deep and lonely, the squires began to stir, preparing their masters’ armor and grumbling at the weather and the hour. It was a time that usually bristled with activity and horseplay and gossip, but on this morning, business stopped and conversation hushed as Sturm hastened by on his way to the stables. Silent, almost embarrassed,
the Knights and squires averted their gazes. Even the servants, usually indifferent to Solamnic events, murmured as he passed and made signs of warding.

  “Faring off a doomed man,” Sturm muttered to himself as he stepped into the great central courtyard, into the dark and the flurried last snows of the season. Derek Crownguard, long awake on mysterious business, stood a stone’s throw from the stable door, shrouded in misted breath and blankets. A brace of Jeoffreys stood with him, his whey-faced partners in misdeed. Aristocrats all, and first families for generations back, the three of them had no morning duties, and Sturm could only guess what would lift them from warm beds and superior dreams.

  As Sturm walked into the stable and reached for his saddle, which hung from its customary peg on the wall, he found it tied and tangled with dried vines, decorated bizarrely with branches of evergreen. He heard the laughter from outside and angrily tugged the saddle from the snarl of greenery. The vines snapped, he staggered with the saddle, and a chorus of young voices arose from the dark and the cold.

  “Return this man to Huma’s breast,” they sang.

  “Return this man to Huma’s breast,

  Beyond the wild, impartial skies,

  Grant to him a warrior’s rest

  And set the last spark of his eyes

  Free from the smothering clouds of wars

  Upon the torches of the stars …”

  Sturm stepped from the stable. Despite himself, he couldn’t keep from smiling. After all, the boys were singing a Solamnic funeral song.

  They finished the verse and stood scornfully in front of him. Derek Crownguard was flushed and breathless with off-key singing, but he loomed substantial in front of his rival, his leather armor pocked and blemished and dirty, his face in much the same shape. Behind him, two pale, bat-faced Jeoffreys wheezed with malicious laughter.

  A crazed thought dawned on Sturm. If he were indeed to fulfill Derek Crownguard’s wish and never return from this strange and misbegotten journey, why not leave as his father had left his mourning garrison that legendary night when Castle Brightblade fell? Indeed, why not leave them with laughter?

  Suddenly, wildly, Sturm joined in the singing.

  “Let the last surge of his breath

  Take refuge in the cradling air

  Above the dreams of ravens where

  Only the hawk remembers death.

  Then let his shade to Huma rise

  Beyond the wild impartial skies …”

  Louder and louder Sturm sang, drowning out first one Jeoffrey, then the other, then the ringleader Derek himself. Puzzled, a little frightened, the squires backed away from the stable, Sturm following them and singing louder still.

  Thoroughly unnerved, the Jeoffreys turned and ran, leaving Derek backing through the courtyard alone. Sturm stepped up to him, singing still louder, until lights flickered and shone in the Tower windows as disgruntled Knights were jostled from their sleep by Derek’s strangely backfired joke.

  Quickly and more quickly the haughty squire backed up, the laughter all vanished from his face now as he looked into the hard eyes of this obviously mad southerner. So intent was Derek Crownguard on his retreat that he didn’t notice the young gardener Jack, who had stopped behind him for a moment’s rest in the unpleasant duty of hauling a wheelbarrow of manure away from the stables.

  It was a true shame he did not notice.

  Backward Derek toppled into the bed of the wheelbarrow, but his fall was cushioned by its rather fresh contents. He lurched from the wheelbarrow, stumbled, and fell, and Sturm finished the funeral song in a loud and exultant voice.

  Stephan and Gunthar stood on the battlements above the boys, peering down on them and watching the strange morning music come to pass.

  “All Brightblade, that one is,” Lord Gunthar said softly to his old friend.

  “Not all Brightblade,” Stephan allowed. “But, the gods willing, he is Brightblade enough.”

  Sturm smiled again as he saddled his horse. He felt wild and unsettled and strangely free.

  Derek had blushed and fumed and backed away, this time very carefully, leaving his first-family arrogance behind him in the snowy courtyard. Lord Boniface had emerged furiously from the steps leading to the Knight’s Spur and caught the soiled squire by a clean sleeve.

  “How dare you pass the morning in horseplay,” Boniface growled, “when I’ve a hundred tasks remaining for you before sunrise!” They trooped away across the courtyard, the Knight berating his squire and battering him with question after obscure question. The gardener Jack covered a gap-toothed smile and pushed the wheelbarrow off after them, humming Sturm’s tune ever so quietly.

  Sturm chuckled as he watched the procession. No doubt Derek would be doused and then sent to his carpeted chambers now, angry and flustered, rehearsing what he should have done or said when the upstart from Solace turned on him, roaring with laughter and dirges.

  “Give him a day, Luin,” Sturm whispered to the mare, who snorted affably in the slowly dispersing dark of the stable. “Give Derek a day, and let me be far away on the road, and there’s no telling what the story will be as to what took place this morning in the courtyard.”

  Already the castle grounds were defined in a pale gray light. The lamps in the tower seemed dim now, and overhead the bats and glowing vespertiles rushed to the safety of cave and lowland barnloft. Deep on the plains, the horizon took shape.

  The sun had risen by the time Sturm led Luin into the courtyard and up to the southern gates. Lord Stephan was there to see him off, mist trailing through the white strands of his beard. Gunthar was there, too, and he inspected the young man sternly, making sure his horse was properly saddled and that his inherited armor fit him with Solamnic propriety.

  “These ancestral arms are a bit … outsized, lad,” Gunthar proclaimed in disappointment, staring skeptically at Angriff’s breastplate, so wide and swallowing that it looked as if someone had dropped Sturm into a cage. “Perhaps you have a more suitable fit in your quarters?”

  Sturm shook his head.

  “A closer fit, yes, Lord Gunthar. But more suitable? I think not. For I am the Brightblade, called to a challenge by Lord Wilderness. My legacy rides with me to the gods know where.” The lad masked a smile. It was a speech he had rehearsed while combing the mare, and he thought it was all resonant and Measured, a fitting exit line and a fitting prologue to his own great adventure.

  Pompous little bumpkin, Lord Stephan thought with gentle amusement. Rattling about in that coffin of a breastplate. We’ll see how well ‘the Brightblade’ and his legacy weather the coming news.

  “The gods know where, indeed, Sturm Brightblade,” Stephan announced aloud as the great oaken gates of the Clerist’s Tower opened behind him. “But your first destination is no doubt the Southern Darkwoods, and the way to that place Lord Vertumnus … insists on showing you, it seems.”

  Sturm’s eyes widened as he looked over Stephan’s shoulder. Inexplicably, vines had grown from the cobblestones at the foot of the Southern Gates, spreading over the huge passageway like an enormous green web. And out on the wings of Habbakuk, tumbling south and east into the rocky foothills, a narrow swath of grass had risen from nowhere. Overnight it had spread from the gates of the castle down onto the Solamnic Plains. As bright as green fire it was, and as flawless as a ribbon or a dignitary’s carpet.

  “A good host he is, this Vertumnus,” Sturm jested weakly, rubbing his shoulder, which all of a sudden had begun to throb. “A good host indeed, to guide me from the Tower to his hold.” His words felt thin in the misted air.

  “I trust the venture is not as dark as your friend Crownguard makes it,” Lord Stephan insisted. “Nonetheless, I cannot lie and say the path will be easy. But may the Dragon and the Mantis guide you also, and may the Gray Book open and show you its wisdom.”

  Waxing pompous myself, Lord Stephan thought. Must be the hour and the greenery. For it had taken the Knights by surprise, too—Vertumnus’s magic leading up to the ver
y gates of the stronghold. A narrow swath of green it was, but powerful. Lord Gunthar had stepped from the gates and touched it, first with his sword, and then with his bare hand. Stephan had followed suit, and the spring grass felt warm and pliant between his fingers, and with the touch had come a strange, undefinable yearning for the depths of the wilderness, for the fastness and green of the forest.

  “May the Dragon and the Mantis guide you,” he whispered again as Sturm led his horse gingerly through the maze of greenery out onto Vertumnus’s magical path. Boniface and Gunthar watched from the walls, too, and to all three of the Knights, the lad seemed frail, forever unprepared. Again Lord Stephan regretted that Oath and Measure prevented the lot of them from taking up arms and following.

  Brightblade the lad might be—indeed, Lord Angriff’s son he was, in image and spirit. But what lay ahead …

  Boniface dragged his sputtering squire to a secluded spot off the gardens. It was near a shed, where the gardeners’ tools lay amid broken statuary and the wreckage of a gnomish irrigation system that had never worked in the first place.

  Boniface looked about him and quickly set upon his hapless nephew.

  “Is everything in place, Derek?”

  “Ev-everything?” the boy stammered nervously.

  “Everything, you pampered little fool! The trap at the ford, the mare’s malady, the ambush, the surprise at the village, the—”

  “Unc—Lord Boniface, please!” Derek urged in a whisper, nodding frantically in the direction of Jack, who was serenely dumping the manure on the pile at the foot of the garden. The gardener wiped his hands and shuffled carefully through a maze of flowers, where he knelt and examined the green bud of a green rose.

  “Never mind him!” the Knight ordered, his voice low and menacing. “Only a servant and simpleton he is, but perhaps even he would have done better in preparing the surprises for that fool of a Brightblade.”

  “You may rest assured, sir,” Derek replied coldly, his anger and dignity rising. “By Paladine and all the gods of good, you may know that everything you planned for Sturm Brightblade is in place and awaits only his … his honorable presence.”