Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  At those words, the great Solamnic swordsman relaxed and loosened his grip on the squire. With a curious smile, he regarded the lad in front of him.

  “Those are strange gods for your oath, Derek Crownguard. Strange gods indeed.”

  Sturm marveled at how the green strand followed the route he had chosen and planned.

  Down through the Wings of Habbakuk it fared, skirting the Hart’s Forest, that small thicket that housed, among evergreens and maples, the only vallenwoods in the Vingaard foothills. Southward it glittered, fading from sight in the morning mists but undeniably leading toward the river, toward the provinces of Lemish beyond, and toward the heart of that troubled country where the Southern Darkwoods lay.

  It was almost as though his journey had been mapped for him. Yet even though the Green Man had charted his way, the Plains of Solamnia no longer permitted a safe and simple passage, for the times had changed since the great heroic ages of Vinas Solamnus, Bedal Brightblade, and Huma Dragonbane—ages when the country was righteous and just, defended from its enemies by strong lance and stronger beliefs.

  Now it was nearly impossible to imagine those ancient times. The countryside had turned in violence and anger against the Knights. Peasants rebelled, Nerakan bandits raided the eastern borders, and darker things still were rumored to have settled in the heartlands—gibbering, scaled things, reptilian and sly, that snatched babies and slaughtered livestock, things that passed through the villages of a night like a cold wind, fingering thatch and masonry, rattling doors.…

  Sturm shuddered. Before him, the plains stretched to the edge of sight, mist-covered and flecked with the rust of dead heather, over which the green swath stretched like a glittering sash. It was a faceless landscape and harsh, where the country could lose him for days if the path failed or he wandered unwarily. The place had a peculiar silence to it, as if the wind had no voice here.

  Beneath him, Luin whickered serenely and stopped to graze on Vertumnus’s bright pathway. Sturm turned in the saddle and looked back into the Vingaard Mountains, where the great spire of the High Clerist’s Tower glistened in the midmorning sunlight. Though the road back was scarcely a three-hour journey, the tower seemed remote, as though it sat firmly in the heart of another age.

  He turned once again to the green way. It stretched ahead of him, over an imagined route that seemed suddenly hostile. Over the swiftly flowing Vingaard River, down into the hobgoblin strongholds of Throt—and all of this only a prelude to the Darkwoods themselves and to whatever Vertumnus had in mind.

  “Why, the getting there alone could kill me,” Sturm whispered uneasily.

  Indeed the getting there for some had been perilous. Stories of danger on the Solamnic roads were plentiful and grim. There was the caravan from Caergoth, missing for days, whose wagons were found still rolling along the road to Thelgaard Keep, the horses still in the traces, though their drivers and passengers had vanished entirely. There were also the dozen pilgrims from Kaolyn, bound for the shrines at Palanthus, whose bodies, noosed and dangling from the low limbs of vallenwoods, were scarcely more than husks by the time Lord Gunthar’s search party discovered them.

  Sturm rubbed his eyes and wrapped his cloak more tightly about his shoulders. Twice he had imagined someone was following him, but when he looked behind him, he saw only pale sunlight, only wind through the high grass.

  The dwarves told even darker stories, he knew, his imagination still racing. How in order to lure kindhearted victims into a lonely and treacherous spot, hobgoblins had learned to mimic the cry of a human infant, so that in the thick recesses of a fog …

  Fog! Sturm stood upright in the stirrups. While he was wool-gathering, the mare had stopped on the greenway, serenely eating the path in front of them.

  Tendrils of mist, unnaturally pale, rose like spirits out of the plains around him. The sun was oblique and muted. The air was white, gray at the greater distances where the rising mist blocked the sunlight altogether.

  Sturm leaned forward and squinted, his hand on his sword. So it wasn’t evening, after all, but a deep fog. He clucked his tongue at the mare, and warily Luin began to move again, placing one foot cautiously before the other as though she walked through a swamp or along an unsteady precipice.

  Then music rose out of nowhere, an old hornpipe in a minor key. Sturm drew his sword and wheeled about in the saddle, but everywhere was mist and music, and nothing more than that. At once he felt foolish, as if he had drawn his sword to fight the air.

  “Come out, Vertumnus!” Sturm muttered, his voice rising with his anger. “Get out from behind your fog and nonsense, and let’s settle this. Sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man!”

  But the music continued serenely, perpetually, the tune varying and doubling back on itself, always recognizable and yet never the same. The fog began to dance to the music, swirling and shifting in a mad, encircling reel. Now Sturm could no longer see the ground. It was as though Luin waded through shallow, indefinite waters.

  Cautiously the lad dismounted and walked beside his mare, each step light and doubtful. He could no longer feel the newly grown grass, and he was beginning to wonder if the ground itself had turned to mist.

  “The keep … is Vingaard Keep to the left? The setting sun …” Sturm muttered. Directions were useless now, even if he could remember them in the midst of this infernal, confusing music. The rules of the road were changing rapidly, and he hated himself for being already lost.

  For an hour or so, Sturm trudged on through the murk, his path winding hopelessly and his thoughts slipping from bewilderment into alarm.

  Quite abruptly, the music stopped. The silence that followed was again breathless and hostile, as though the plains themselves were hushed in the expectation of some terrible crime. Sturm felt his sword shake in his hand.

  For a few minutes, he continued his wandering, his steps even more tentative. The hooting of an owl in a blasted oak sounded like a call from the land of the dead, and once or twice the lad thought he heard a baby crying nearby. The sounds brought him dangerously close to panic. Twice he set foot to stirrup but both times gathered his wits and thought better of it.

  “ ’Tis all you’d need!” he whispered angrily. “A nasty fall from a horse in a deep fog! Crack your skull and drive out what little brains you have left!”

  Finally, suspecting that he might even be headed back toward the Tower, Sturm decided to stop and wait out the fog. “For wouldn’t it please Derek Crownguard,” he asked Luin, “if I were simply to walk out of the mist in front of the great southern gate, having turned myself entirely about in a terror?”

  He gritted his teeth. “By Huma!” he swore, “I’d rather die than give that scoundrel a moment’s triumph!”

  Luin rolled her long nose over the lad’s shoulder and nibbled his hair thoughtfully.

  Together the two of them waited, old mare and young rider. They dozed, startling awake now and then at the wingbeat of quails, at the chittering sound of squirrels in the distant trees. Finally the evening approached, and the country fell hushed and settled around them.

  Sturm awoke with a start. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Clerist’s Tower, safe in the squires’ barracks. But he was armed and cloaked, and his bed was open ground. He turned over and blinked stupidly, remembering at once where he was.

  “Luin!” he whispered. The mare had wandered off, but she was somewhere nearby. Through the early morning darkness, he heard her, sniffing and pawing the earth. Sturm struggled to his feet, his father’s breastplate unwieldy and too heavy to balance. Reeling one last time, the lad righted himself and stalked off in the direction of the sound.

  Suddenly there was a gentle rustling on the breeze, a sound he would remember at once when he heard it years later in the ruins of Xak Tsaroth. At first he thought it was a storm wind coursing through the leaves, but the air was still. Sturm thought of Vertumnus, of the unnatural change of the seasons.…

  He stumbled forward as a hot br
eeze passed over him, carrying upon it a smell of sulfur and ash and anger. At first it seemed as if the plains were burning, that the mist was igniting around him. He was choking.

  Sturm spun about, whistling frantically for Luin. The mare emerged calmly out of the mist and the curling smoke, stopping only to browse lazily at a low clump of clover. He scrambled to her side, hoisted himself onto her back …

  And held on for dear life as Luin caught wind of something beneath the sharp smell of the air, a greater, more sinister terror. She kicked out instantly, hysterically, and galloped into the mist.

  Sturm clung to the reins, his ankle tangled in a stirrup. Vainly he tried to wrestle up into the saddle, but Luin’s wild and headlong path through the fog carried both of them over rough terrain, and it was all he could do to hold on. Behind him, the rustling sound faded, then resurged, this time far louder. It sounded like nothing the lad had heard before. He thought of cyclones, of the fierce Aferian wind that rides through mountain passes, leveling tree and house as it rushes onto the plains. Faster Luin galloped, her chestnut coat slick and flecked with foam now, and still the great noise closed on them, louder and swifter and more urgent.

  Sturm thought of reaching for his sword, of turning to face whatever it was that Vertumnus had sent after him. But Luin kept galloping like a wind herself over the Solamnic Plains. To remove one hand from the reins would risk a broken neck or back, a fatal dragging over the hard ground. He hung on, then, slinging his leg over the saddle once, twice, a third time, but the speed of the horse and the weight of his armor kept him dangling and struggling, unable to recover his balance. The mist behind him began to glow with a menacing, blood-red light, and in the heart of the light, a huge dark shape swooped toward him on leathery batwings, and the air was hot and hotter still until the heat was intolerable.

  And suddenly, unexpectedly, the music returned, the fog closed around them, and the light bent away from him, taking with it the sound and the heat. Coughing, gasping, halfway atop the mare, Sturm watched the mist open up and swallow the hulking, leathery form of the pursuer. The heat and the roaring subsided.

  And the music echoed in the rocks around them. A different tune this time—a quickstep filled with deception and comedy, so contagious that the nightingales perched in the darkened boughs of oak and vallenwood began to trill and mimic in answer. Luin slowed to a canter, to a walk, and Sturm, winded and baffled, finally settled himself on her back.

  “By Branchala, that was a strange thing!” the young man muttered. He looked around him as the mist scattered, falling like rain back into the hard, spare ground. Above him, the stars appeared in the Solamnic night sky—first the moons, then bright Sirion and Reorx. By their reckoning, he was miles south of where he had been.

  “What … what was it, Luin?” he asked. “And … where are we?”

  The mist had subsided now, and from horseback, Sturm could see some distance across the level plains. A village lay in the distance to the west, its faint lights twinkling in the clear winter night. It was an inviting prospect—warmth and shelter for whatever time remained before sunrise.

  But Sturm knew peasants, knew the abiding hatred they nurtured for the Order. Whatever the village, however kindly its lights, the Kingfisher, Crown, and Rose were unlikely to be welcomed in its dwellings.

  Sighing, the lad turned his gaze east, to where, faint in the sunrise and the fading white light of Solinari, the two towers of a large castle jutted on the horizon. It was not Castle Brightblade, that was certain, but it was a castle, and castles in these parts spelled refuge to those of the Oath and Measure.

  Slowly, leisurely, Sturm guided his mount eastward toward the towers, which seemed to rise like mist from the ground in front of him. It was nearly dawn when the battlements heaved into view, and in the faint gray of earliest sunlight, he made out the faded standard of the castle, emblazoned on an enormous shield above the western gates.

  The standard was weathered, the paint chipping and peeling, but Sturm knew enough of his own family history to make out its lineaments—a red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field.

  “Di Caela!” Sturm breathed. “The ancient house of my grandmothers! We are far south of where we should be, good Luin. But in a way, I suppose, we are home.”

  The mare snorted again at the prospect of approaching shelter. Slowly her walk became a trot, then a canter, and with redoubled energy, she carried Sturm Brightblade toward the worn gates of his ancestors.

  Chapter 6

  The Darkwoods

  ———

  Deep in the Southern Darkwoods, lying in a hammock of vine and leaves, Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and set down his flute. Around him, the light was distorted, green and amber, as though the woods themselves were a dark and curving glass.

  The hammock was suspended between two ancient oaks above the foundation of a ruin even more ancient. Moss-covered stones dotted the clearing like worn teeth, outlining faintly the foundation of a small building, perhaps a moat house or monastery, no doubt abandoned and left to fall apart some time back in the Age of Might.

  Vertumnus’s eyes flickered open suddenly. Perched above him in the branches of an ancient oak, two dryads stared down at him in perplexity.

  “You could have killed him!” hissed the smaller of the pair, her black hair knotted in a long coil. Her voice was rich and sinister, like the rush of wind over dried leaves.

  Vertumnus did not answer. Slowly he folded his hands on his chest, and for a moment, he looked like the statue of an entombed king, still and regal and unfathomable. The dryads stirred uneasily above him, the tall one scrambling down the side of the hammock as nimbly as a spider down a web until she came to rest by the side of the Green Man and nestled against him, her face buried in the green thicket of his beard.

  “I know ye’re not for killing him,” she whispered seductively, her voice flute music and her touch the light flutter of a bird’s wing. “And it makes no difference to us. But daunt him and confuse him and send him addled back to his creed-bound brothers. Do it! Do it now!”

  Vertumnus chuckled, and the wind whistled through his laughter.

  “You’re as bloodthirsty as stirges, the whole oak-dwelling lot of you,” he rumbled. “And as foolish and insistent as magpies.”

  The leaves rustled as he waved away the dryads.

  “Begone with the both of you! ’tis morning and time for me to sleep.”

  He stretched, and the dryad at his side scrambled out of the hammock and onto the dried leaves of the forest floor. Pouting, she stared at the green prodigy half-drowsing in the branches above her, his voice filled with alien wonder and magic.

  “Not one of us, are ye,” she accused. “Not yet. And no longer one of them, though ye may yearn for the days gone by.”

  Vertumnus only laughed and turned in the hammock. He shook his head, and acorns rained through the netted vines, and for a moment, the air shimmered with a thousand swirling samaras. With glittering black eyes, he regarded the dryad, his gaze warm and amused but unreadable.

  “Who are you to say, little Evanthe, whither I yearn or aspire?”

  From somewhere amid the thick, spreading branches of juniper, a great owl descended, alighting on the clews of the hammock, a sprig of sharp blue berries in its beak. Vertumnus winked at the owl, ironically regarding the sulking nymphs below him.

  “As for now,” he yawned, “get ye to an oak tree, and my companion and I will drowse and dream the dreams of the nocturnal and wise.” Vertumnus arched an eyebrow, turned to the owl, and waved away the nymphs once again—this time more impatiently.

  Angrily the dryads glided toward the center of the woods, looking back over their shoulders once, then a second time, at this unmanageable green mystery in their midst.

  “Ye’ll never be one of us!” the little one shouted tauntingly. “Though ye’re green as a sapling, as a summer leek, ye’ll never be like us, Lord Wilderness!” Then both of them vanished into the dappled light of t
he forest depths.

  Vertumnus smiled and closed his eyes.

  “Diona,” he whispered, raising the flute to his lips, “you will never imagine how little that troubles me.”

  Serenely the Green Man looked into the dark vault of the forest. He touched his lips to the flute, then lowered it, spoke a few soothing words to the owl in a language of whistles and coos and of wind through the high branches, and the great bird nestled in the spreading thicket of his hair. Vertumnus raised the flute again, and the rest of them came from the shadows—nightingale and tiercel, elk and squirrel and bat, and a single amber-eyed lynx.

  Slowly Lord Wilderness began to play, in the stately ninth mode that the bards call Branchalan. The startled owl took to wing as the hammock in which the man lay bristled with a fresh growth of leaves. Though the world and the weather around him was still in the tag end of winter, it was suddenly high summer.

  Vertumnus played, and flowers budded and blossomed about him, entwining their thin, hollow stems in his beard and hair. Quickly he shifted to the tenth mode, the serene and lilting Matherian, and the air about him wafted with sweet fragrances. On the branches above him, the songbirds nodded, lulled by the lovely smells, and gradually they began to sing along, as they had in the fog on the Plains of Solamnia.

  The Green Man’s eyes twinkled with delight. For the eleventh mode was next—the Solinian, the Song of the White Moon, the Granter of Visions. Throughout Ansalon, ears were turning, lifting to the air where, soft and almost undetectable, the melody arising from the Southern Darkwoods would fall upon them.

  Swiftly the green fingers danced over the body of the flute, flashing and blurring as the music quickened. Vertumnus looked to the gray patch of morning sky above him, visible through the opaque net of branches, and slowly watched it fill with the white face of Solinari.