Michael Williams - The Oath and the Measure

The spider hoisted over her shoulders, she scrambled up a rise, pulling herself the last few steep yards by bracing her feet against the thin trunk of a sapling willow. Then it was light, fresh air, and the windswept clearing above the dwindling forest.

Tenderly she set the spider down. She knelt on the top of the hill and drew forth her knife. Intently, almost reverently, she began to dig a grave in the rocky soil. As she did, she sang a mourning song from the west, learned in her travels with the creature she buried.

"Always before, you could explain

The turning darkness of the earth,

And how the dark embraced the rain

And gave the ferns and flowers birth.

"Already I forget those things,

And how a vein of gold survives

The mining of a thousand springs,

The seasons of a thousand lives.

"Now winter is my memory,

Now autumn, now the summer light

So every spring from now will be

Another season into night."

So she dug and sang the song again, until a horse nickered behind her and a shadow passed over her. Jack Derry approached and knelt beside her. Silently, with that healthy confidence she had grown to trust in their travels together, and also with an unaccustomed seriousness, the gardener drew forth his knife and joined in the digging.

By midnight, the creature had been placed solemnly in a bed of leaves, then covered over by Jack as Mara played an ancient elven air, sweet and elegiac in the purple night. She played, and slowly, incredibly, the red moon Lunitari rose from behind a stand of poplars and joined white Solinari overhead.

Astonished, Mara looked beyond the surprising intersection of the moons to the high and cloudless sky above Lemish. There the bright helix of Mishakal shone, blue and white in the earliest morning. Jack smiled.

It was later that morning, or a morning soon after, when Sturm awoke in the midst of the forest. Dressed in full armor, he lay beside a slow, moss-clogged brook in a strange, solitary place he had never seen. Vines and tendrils and briars grew thick about him, and all around the foliage was undisturbed, as though he had been dropped onto this spot softly from a great height.

He rubbed his eyes and rose up. It was a moment before he noticed the change in his movement, the renewed strength in his arm and the vigor in his legs. Amazed, he looked at his hands, which were ruddy and familiar, rid of the green that had haunted his veins and his dreams.

"Dreams…" he murmured, and felt his shoulder. The skin was smooth, unscarred, and his arm was limber, completely restored.

"Where do the dreams leave off?" he asked himself, and crashed clumsily through the thicket.

For a long morning and afternoon, Sturm Brightblade wandered the Southern Darkwoods, his apprehension rising. He remembered the words of Lord Wilderness at Yule-tide: "If you fail to meet me at the appointed place, on the appointed night, your honor is forever forfeit." And so he searched for Vertumnus's trail, his eagerness tumbling into bafflement as one path after another emptied him onto the plains of Lemish, north of the smoke and the bunched huts of Dun Ringhill. Like a maze designed by a capricious forester, each trail led him back to the same spot, and each time, Sturm was surprised by his arrival, as the path issuing from the forest appeared to be different.

He spent the night at the wood's edge. The trees seemed to recoil from his small campfire, and by morning, he discovered that his campsite had moved or the woods had receded, for he lay a good hundred yards from where he had bedded down.

Puzzled, still bleary from sleep, he approached the woods and found that the trail had vanished. Several brief sorties into the borders of the woods led him back to the same spot, and it dawned on him gradually that the forest itself was rejecting him. He could enter the woods forever, but whatever road he took would lead him back out at once.

"The first night of spring has passed," Sturm said to himself, his despair rising as yet another path into the forest led back to the campsite. "I have missed my appointment with Lord Wilderness, or squandered it in dreaming. I have dishonored my vow."

And yet he was still alive. The wound in his shoulder had not "blossomed" in some ominous, fatal way. Indeed, he examined his shoulder and found no trace of a wound-nothing except the faintest flutter of discomfort when his fingers pressed too hard against the spot.

Something told him the struggle was not over, that he would meet Lord Wilderness if he kept to the search a little longer. Shielding his eyes, he stared north and south down the thick, impenetrable border of trees and briars, then turned toward Dun Ringhill.

"Of all the places I have been," he whispered, shouldering his sword like an infantryman's pike, "I expect I am least welcome in that village, but surely the secret lies there."

Long before he reached the outskirts of the village, Sturm lost the smoke and flickering light he had seen from the north. He tried to steer himself by memory, hoped desperately for Vertumnus's guiding music, but the edge of the forest was featureless, and the only sounds were the occasional calls of the birds. Just when he thought he would never find Dun Ringhill, he stepped over a rise onto its very outskirts.

The place was grotesquely changed, as though something unnamed and large had taken terrible revenge on its outskirts. Hut and hovel tilted crazily, pushed from their foundations by vines, by sprouting trees, and by the constant pressure of encroaching undergrowth. It was green in Dun Ringhill, green to the very rooftops.

Sturm wandered through the jungle of foliage and houses, the fierce buzz of insects in his ears, his sense of smell distracted by the sharp perfume of evergreens, the attar of flowers. From east to west, the greenery had spread, or so it seemed, and the huge central lodge was covered with vines and lifted neatly from its foundations by the great, spreading roots of a two-hundred-foot hackberry.

Sturm weaved through the alleys and side streets quietly, his sword bare as he made his way in a roundabout path toward Weyland's smithy. Across the overgrown village green he raced, west through a spontaneous surge of grapevines and gourds toward the edge of town where, if his senses had not completely betrayed him, the smithy and the stables lay side by side. His armor clattered through the ivied alleyways, and his hope alternated with fear of discovery.

The streets around Weyland's establishment were silent and empty. It was as though this part of the village had been abandoned, or the villagers had drawn away for an hour because something momentous and private was happening near the forge and the stables. Though the villagers were distant, their things were near: Daggers, torques, awls, and spindles littered the village green, and more than once Sturm stepped on broken crockery, which crunched beneath his boots like the exoskeletons of enormous insects. A bronze mirror leaned crazily against the door of a house, its surface obscured by verdigris. Not far from it, strangely untouched by all this growth and decay and abandonment, lay a golden veil, its edges embroidered with green roses. Sturm knelt and picked up the garment, holding it sadly up to the sunlight.

He tossed it into the air. The garment rocked in the breeze, billowed and settled on the windowsill of an abandoned cottage. At that very moment, the ring of hammer against anvil sounded through the edge of the village.

Sturm broke into a run, his hopes racing wildly. Of any man in the village, Weyland would know the way to Jack Derry. And Jack would know the way to Vertumnus.

The doors to the stable stood wide open, and though the horse neighed and snorted from the warm, pungent dark, in the window of the smithy was movement and light and an even more welcome noise as a man passed back and forth before the forge, singing softly to himself.