Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  Muffled laughter came from the corner of the smithy, where Vertumnus crouched in violet shadow and yellow light, laying peat upon the glowing coals of the forge.

  Sturm cleared his throat and plunged on. “But I recall an agreement between the two of us, sealed at a Yuletide banquet. ‘Meet me on the first day of spring,’ you said, in my stronghold amid the Southern Darkwoods. Come there alone, and we shall settle this—sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man.’ You told me I had to defend my father’s honor, and you challenged mine.”

  Vertumnus nodded, his obscure smile fading into a sharp and rigid solemnity.

  “So we turn to the business,” he whispered. Laying the last square of turf on the fire, he stood to his full, imposing height—a head taller than the lad in front of him.

  Sturm gasped. He hadn’t remembered the Green Man this tall, this imposing.

  “Those were not all the words that passed between us,” he insisted. “You Solamnics, with your passion for rules and contracts, should remember the whole brittle world of what was said and the very words that said it.”

  “But I do remember,” Sturm replied. “ ‘For now I owe you a stroke,’ you said, ‘as you owe me a life.’ ”

  “Then our memories agree,” Vertumnus murmured. “Follow me into the smithy yard. There we shall satisfy the terms of this agreement.”

  Sturm set down the scabbard and stepped from the smithy into the afternoon light. Vertumnus waited for him by the well amid a litter of leaves, flawed artifacts, and half-finished ornaments. At once, a low music rose from the earth around them, and Sturm held his naked sword to the fore with a nervous and intent readiness.

  “Arm yourself, Lord Vertumnus!” he challenged, his teeth clenched.

  Lazily, catlike, Vertumnus leaned against the stones of the well.

  And then, in a blurred and blinding instant, he seized Sturm, his green hand closing over the lad’s sword hand with irresistible strength.

  “Sword to sword,” he muttered, and tightened his grip.

  Sturm winced. A sensation—overpowering, almost electrical—coursed through his sword arm. Sturm tried to cry out, to release the blade, but the power was binding, riveting and relentless. In shock, he looked at Vertumnus, who returned his stare with a gaze that was wild and gleeful and yet surprisingly kind. From the lad’s heart arose a tremendous sense of sweetness, and around him was music, the flute and the timbrel and the elven cello and somewhere, rising in the midst of these, the faint, crisp call of a trumpet he would hear again and again until that day on the battlements of the Tower, when the Dragonlord approached in the distance and he stood atop the Knight’s Spur and heard the song one last time, finally understanding what it meant.…

  He knelt on the ground amid plowshares and horseshoes and bent swords. Vertumnus stood over him, the sword bright in his hand.

  “Knight to knight, and man to man,” Lord Wilderness concluded quietly.

  Sturm could not look at his victorious opponent. Slowly, abjectly, he crept toward Lord Wilderness.

  “The terms are nearly met,” the lad said, fearful and beaten. “You may give me the stroke that is my due and take the life owed you.”

  Kneeling before Vertumnus, Sturm wrestled down his terror. He murmured the Solamnic funeral song in bleak preparedness for the falling sword.…

  Which touched his left shoulder, then his right, with a stroke that was light and affectionate and playful.

  “Arise, Sir Sturm Brightblade, Knight of the Forest,” Lord Wilderness chuckled.

  In consternation and anger, Sturm glared up at his opponent …

  Who had mocked him and dismissed his honor and taken his weapon …

  Who had wrenched the Measure even from chivalrous death …

  “The life you owe me, lad,” Vertumnus said, “is the one you would spend in swordplay and vengeance.”

  Sturm stared at him, dumbstruck and questioning.

  “My son has told you of … Lord Boniface Crownguard?” Lord Wilderness began. “And you have seen his handiwork before you on the road to the Darkwoods?”

  “I—I cannot say that road has been easy, Lord Vertumnus,” Sturm replied haltingly. “But I cannot believe it was Lord Boniface’s doing.”

  “Think!” Vertumnus urged angrily. “Bandits and assassins paid in Solamnic coin from here to the Clerist’s Tower, a gauntlet of misfortunes and accidents, the one gift you received from Boniface purposefully flawed … Simple mathematics could tell you the answer if your Oath and Measure weren’t blinding you to the truth!”

  “But why?” Sturm asked. “If Lord Boniface Crownguard is capable of such treachery, why waste it on the likes of me?”

  “Why?” Vertumnus asked, and suddenly music filled the littered yard, as though somehow the wind passed over the flute at his belt, drawing song out of it. “Listen, and look to the reforged blade of your sword …”

  He could not help but look, and in the heart of the blade, Sturm saw a snowy landscape, the metal swirling from silver to white. Sturm squinted and looked closer.…

  A sinister, shadowy company of men, cloaked and hooded against the driving snow, assembled at a remote pass. At the head of the column, a man was seated on horseback, his hood tilted back despite the weather. Bearded and scarred he was, as if he were carved from rubble and dried branches.

  The man was deep in conversation with another, elegantly dressed in Solamnic armor. The Knight had come with scant escort: another Knight, it seemed, and three foot soldiers. His armor beaded with melted snow, the Knight in command slipped a scroll into the rugged man’s knotted hand and pointed through the boiling frozen air to a dark passage between rockfaces.

  “Through that pass they will come,” he said.

  Sturm knew the voice. He started to shout, but the music surged about him and silenced him.

  “The standard will be that of Agion Pathwarden,” the man said. “Red centaur against a black mountain.”

  The rough man huddled more tightly in his cloak. “And for this such a generous payment. Lord …”

  “Grimbane,” the man replied. “You know me only as Lord Grimbane.”

  “Illusion!” Sturm shouted, wrenching his eyes from the vision. Vertumnus sat atop the anvil, regarding him curiously and a little sadly. “It … it must be illusion! It must …”

  “But if it is not …”

  “I shall wreak such revenge that …” Sturm began.

  “No.” Vertumnus slipped gracefully from the anvil. In two long strides, he was beside Sturm, hand clasped tightly on the lad’s shoulder.

  Sturm gasped. The pain was gone … the wound …

  “No,” Vertumnus repeated. “It is no illusion. For I was the other Knight, Sturm Brightblade. I rode in the snow to that remote pass, where scroll and payment were handed over to the brigands. Along with the infantrymen who accompanied us. And when Agion fell and the castle was doomed, I was the one that Boniface blamed.”

  Dumbstruck, Sturm dropped the sword. Blinded by tears and anger, he groped for the blade on the smithy grounds, while Lord Wilderness continued serenely.

  “I followed him into the mountains and the driving snow, buoyed by my love for the Measure, my delight in the honor Lord Boniface had conferred upon me by asking me to accompany him. The love and delight changed to loathing and rage when I watched him conspire, watched the money pass from Knight to bandit.

  “But there was nothing I could say. I returned to Castle Brightblade, where Boniface, doubling over his tracks like an old fox in the snow, used the Code and the Measure and the whole damnable Solamnic machinery to convict me of his treachery. When I left the ranks and wandered into the risking snow, I knew nothing of Hollis and the change that awaited me. I thought I walked toward death, toward a slow fading into ice and slumber, but I preferred such a death to that exacted by the Order—to the shedding of my blood and my joy beneath the nails of a bloodless, joyless company.

  “But I have not brought you this far for a bloodlett
ing. Solamnic revenge is a nasty, entangled thing, as hot and poisonous as spiders coupling. And no to your Oath and Measure, too, and the pride your Order derives from them. For the Measure may be revenge by rules, but still it is revenge, still intricate and vicious.”

  “Then … then what?” Sturm almost shouted.

  Vertumnus crouched beside the lad.

  “Stay in the Darkwoods,” he said. “Forgive Boniface … the Order … your father … the lot of them. Forgive them and leave them behind you. Forgive them.”

  “But there is the Oath and Measure!” Sturm insisted. “A thousand years of law—”

  “Have done no good!” Vertumnus interrupted vehemently. “They have made monsters of the Crownguards and the Jeoffreys, have slaughtered nameless thousands, have cost you a father and wounded you past hope, past recovery, unless …”

  Fearfully, angrily, the lad scrambled away from the man in front of him, striking his shoulder against the stones of the well. Tripping over a discarded andiron, he lurched to his feet at last, his eyes clenched in pain and desolation and anger, his knuckles white on the hilt of the sword.

  Blasphemy. I shall not have it. By Huma and Vinas Solamnus and Paladine himself, I shall not have it I

  “My father is the Order now!” Sturm cried out, his voice thin and anguished in the silent yard. “My family is the Order! Go back to your woods and leave me alone!”

  He awoke lying on the anvil, the scabbard in his hands. All about him, the smithy had vanished, and with it the stable. A solitary Luin grazed peacefully amid a nearby vine-covered orchard, and Lord Vertumnus was nowhere to be seen.

  The music had stopped. In one direction, then another, Sturm moved, circling about the anvil and facing in all directions, hoping the song would resume, would guide him to Vertumnus. But the whole village was silent—thickly, oppressively quiet.

  Luin raised her head and whinnied, but Sturm heard nothing.

  He looked above, and the wind was diving silently through the trees. The leaves rustled noiselessly, and overhead a flock of geese moved quickly south in their seasonal migration toward the cooler regions, their wingbeats and cries inaudible.

  “What?” Sturm asked aloud, starved for a sound, even that of his own voice. He shouted again, and again a third time.

  It was the only sound in creation, and it shivered before it lost itself in the deep and abiding silence around it. Then out of the silence came the dull, regular sound of a drum in the distance. Sturm strained to listen, to follow the sound, but wherever he turned, it was equally faint, and wherever he moved—toward Luin, toward the anvil, back toward the center of town—the sound was unchanging, muffled.

  He was in the village green before he recognized it as the sound of his own measured heart. He stopped and drew the sword. In the quiet around him, he heard the scuttle of leaves, a high wind sighing in the branches.…

  And at once, unexplainable by all of his rules and codes and instructions, he knew that he would never again find the Green Man.

  Vertumnus leaned back in the low notch of the vallenwood limbs, staring intently at the clouded surface of the forest pool below him. At the foot of the tree sat the Lady Hollis, and beside her was their son, Jack Derry.

  Weyland the smith crouched nearby amid a dozen of his fellow villagers, his beefy hands involved in an intricate weaving of copper and silver wire. What he was making was not apparent yet, not even to the most clever in that circle, but all watched eagerly, awaiting whatever amazement his touch would reveal in the metal.

  They had gathered there, all of them, at the summons of the druidess, eager for news of Lord Wilderness as the morning waxed to a bright midday. Rumors circulated among the villagers: that war was brewing with Solamnia, that Lord Wilderness had been seized by a band of Silvanesti elves, that he had ridden alone to the north, seeking vengeance for some incomprehensible injury. Finally they heard the music carried on a crisp wind from the direction of the town, and they knew he was nearby and would be with them soon.

  In late morning, the music had stopped, and Captain Duir, posted at the outskirts of the woods, was the first to see Vertumnus approaching, downcast and walking slowly, the leaves in his clothing and hair sere and yellow.

  Vertumnus told them nothing, nodding abstractly when Jack Derry introduced him to the elf maiden Mara. He ignored the consolations of the Lady Hollis and the bickering of the dryads and climbed to the spot where he now was seated and lost himself in deep meditation.

  After a while, the villagers forgot about Lord Wilderness and returned to their various forest tasks, to the gathering of comfrey and foxglove, to the hunt and to fishing in the large brook that ran through the depths of the woods. Mara continued to watch him, to puzzle at his absence and unhappy demeanor. At last she asked Lady Hollis if the meeting with Sturm had taken place.

  The druidess nodded, intent on steeping a yarrow tea which Mara’s years as a maidservant in Silvanost told her was a cure for melancholia. “Indeed it has,” Lady Hollis maintained.

  “Then I expect from the look about Lord Wilderness,” Mara said, “that young Sturm has bested him.”

  Hollis looked above, where Lord Wilderness leaned forward in a silent stateliness, his dark eyes troubled.

  “I expect from the look about him,” the druidess replied, “that young Sturm has bested himself.”

  It was hours before Vertumnus spoke. The day had passed into late afternoon, and the larks were already nested. All about the company, the forest was alive with the quarrels of squirrels and the high, skidding sounds of brown doves returning south to roost in the branches of elm and maple.

  “He has departed now,” Vertumnus announced. Instantly two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on the limb of the vallenwood where he sat, the yellow leaves falling sadly from his beard and tunic. “Back toward the Vingaard, and no doubt on toward the Tower and the rest of his ponderous Order.”

  “Where you might have gone yourself,” Hollis observed, “were it not for the good fortune of a winter’s night.”

  Vertumnus smiled down at her. “And the kindness of the forces who besieged Lord Angriff’s castle.”

  Hollis smiled, handing a steaming cup of yarrow tea up to her perched and leafy husband.

  Vertumnus looked fondly at Jack Derry below him, still marveling at the rapid maturing of his and the Lady Hollis’s sapling son. After all, to be but five years old and grown to maturity, with a fighter’s arm and a ranger’s eye and …

  And an interest in a certain recently bereaved elf maiden.

  Vertumnus smiled, then frowned. There were other things to see to, and some of them were pressing close at hand.

  “I understand,” Lord Wilderness announced, “that Mara the elf is skilled in the knowledge of the flute and some of the ancient modes.”

  Mara blushed, but Hollis laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “I—I have learned a few tunes in my time, Lord Wilderness,” she said, her eyes on the leaf-strewn floor of the forest.

  “Well and good,” Vertumnus said. “And I understand it was love and invention that led you to them.”

  “I was greatly deceived when I learned them,” Mara said bitterly, lifting her face to the Green Man.

  “Deceived, perhaps,” he agreed, “but not greatly. Love and invention outlast the best of our dreams.”

  Mara frowned. She had passed, it seemed, from incomprehensible Solamnic rules into this world of leaf and shadow and parable. There was no telling what would come next.

  “What do you ask of me? Of my playing?” she questioned.

  “Accompaniment,” Vertumnus replied, and from the branches of a nearby maple came a vicious, rousing hiss. The dryads poked their heads from behind a cluster of leaves, their little eyes glittering with anger.

  “It’s not enough,” Diona said, “to hitch your wagon to this hag of a druid!”

  “You’re taking in elves now!” accused Evanthe. “For what sinister purpose, the gods only know.”

&nbs
p; “Begone with the both of you!” Vertumnus laughed, tossing the teacup at them. He sprang from the vallenwood branch and landed lightly on the ground, scattering a flock of doves. “Else I’ll shut you back in the trees where I found you!”

  “We don’t scare easily!” spat Evanthe, dripping with the lukewarm dregs of the yarrow tea. “You showed your softness when you wouldn’t kill that Solamnic or … or … ensorcel him!”

  “But you know of no softness in me,” Hollis declared flatly. She folded her arms and smiled fiercely at the dryads. “I am the sacker of villages, the razer of castles. And I can ensorcel as well as any.”

  The dryads cried out as the maple limb upon which they sat burst forth with thick sweet sap. Chagrined and syruped, they made their escape, leaping from branch to branch, leaf and dirt adhering to their sticky garments as they rushed off into the depth of the woods. A wave of laughter followed their departure.

  “Would that I had the magic that young Sturm needed,” Hollis said, a little more soberly.

  “He could choose whether or not to let the thorn be changed to music, and change him in turn,” Vertumnus said. “He chose instead to have you remove it, to stay as he was. He chose his sword arm and the Order.”

  “But the wound will always be with him,” Ragnell insisted. “Though the time will come when he does not remember it, the wound will always be there.”

  “To the last of this and anything,” Vertumnus said, drawing forth his flute, “the lad could and can choose. But there is one thing remaining that demands my hand, my ensorceling …”

  Vertumnus scowled, and Jack Derry laughed at his father’s dramatics.

  “My love and invention” the Green Man concluded quietly, his eyes on Mara. “For there is an ambush prepared at the Vingaard Ford. I must protect the lad from an old blood feud, from the burden of his father’s quarrel on the shoulders of the son. And for this, I need the accompaniment of another flute, another music.”

  Mara bowed nervously. “It would be my honor to assist you, sir. And my honor,” she added quickly, “to assist Sturm Brightblade.”