The Oath and the Measure

Sturm shook his head, startled from memory by a loud, low voice. The dark imaginings of the clerical incense, of his mother's unnaturally pale face, vanished into light, and once again he was at the Inn of the Last Home, Caramon leaning across the table, questioning him above the glowing candles.

'Were you listening, Sturm? Here we are on the last night before you leave, your saddlebags packed full of provisions and letters and souvenirs. I wish you weren't so set on Solamnia and this banquet and staying there for good…'

'I never said I would not return!' Sturm interrupted, rolling his eyes. 'I've told you both before, Caramon. It's… it's a pilgrimage of sorts, and when I've learned a few things in the north and settled a few others, I'll be back.'

Caramon clutched the sides of the table with his red, thick-fingered hands and smiled apologetically at his prim and serious friend. Raistlin, meanwhile, remained silent, his dark, attentive face turned toward the hearth and the last of the dwindling firelight.

'But all this questing and searching, Sturm,' Caramon explained. 'It could take you away forever. It does that with the real Solamnic Knights.'

Sturm winced at the real.

'And if it did, we'd be none the wiser as to why you went in the first place.'

'That, too, I've told you again and again, Caramon,' Sturm repeated calmly, his voiced strained and brittle. ' 'Tis the Oath and the Measure, and it is the Oath that binds the Solamnic brotherhood. That's why I have to go north-into Solamnia… the Vingaard Mountains… the High Clerist's Tower.'

'The Code again,' Raistlin observed, quietly breaking the silence.

The two larger youths turned at once to their scrawny, dark comrade. Leaning back in a darkened nook in the vallenwood trunk, the young adept was half lost in shadows, almost as insubstantial as his own sleights and illusions.

Out of the gray flickering gloom, Raistlin spoke again, his voice melodious and thin, like the high notes of a viola. 'The Code and the Measure,' he said scornfully. 'All of that smug behavior that the Solamnic Order swears by. And the thirty-five volumes of your Measure-'

'Thirty-seven,' Sturm corrected. 'There are thirty-seven volumes to the Measure.'

Raistlin shrugged, wrapping his tattered red robe more closely around his shoulders. Quickly, with a birdlike grace, he leaned forward, stretching his thin hands toward the fading glow of the fire.

'Thirty-five or thirty-seven,' he mused, his pale lips tightening to a smile, 'or three thousand. All the same to me, in its foolishness and legalism. You aren't bound to obey a page of it, Sturm Brightblade. Your father, not you, was the Solamnic Knight.'

'We've disagreed on this before, Raistlin,' Sturm scolded. He stopped himself and leaned uncomfortably back in his chair. He sounded like a reproving old schoolmaster, and he knew it.

Raistlin nodded and swirled his tea in the cup, staring into the bottom as though he were reading omens in the cool dregs.

'There have been other years, Sturm,' he whispered. 'Other Yules.'

Sturm cleared his throat.

'It's… it's because Mother's gone now, Raistlin,' he replied tentatively, looking thoughtfully at the glittering pool of wax in the dark ceramic candle holder. The wick floated on the shimmering surface. Soon the candle would go out entirely.

'The Order is my last remaining family. There's nowhere else to go but north. But mostly it's because of what Mother told me… about what happened the night my father vanished.'

The twins leaned forward, stunned by this sudden news.

'Then there was something more?' Raistlin asked. 'More that your mother hadn't told you?'

'She… she was waiting for the proper time,' Sturm replied, his hands unsteady on the table boards. 'It was just that… the plague… then there was no other time…'

'Then when she told you was the proper time,' Caramon soothed, resting his huge hand on Sturm's shoulder. 'Tell us, in turn. Tell us of that night.'

Sturm looked into the eager brown eyes of his young companion. 'Very well, Caramon. Tonight I shall tell you that story. Remember that it is not easy in the telling.'

And with the twins leaning toward him expectantly, the autumn night uneasy with the high wind and the rattle of leaves across the roof of the inn, Sturm began the story.

'First of all,' Sturm began, his gaze fixed on the table, 'Lord Angriff saw to me and the Lady Ilys. Smuggled us off on the western road, before the peasants' torches closed a full circle about the castle. Soren Vardis was our guide, and the snow swirled over the high road, or the peasants might well have found us. In their anger, they didn't remember what the Order had done for them.'

The twins exchanged a curious glance, and Raistlin cleared his throat. Sturm continued, his gaze fixed on the dwindling fire.

'As to my father,' he continued dreamily, abstractly, 'when we were safely away, he turned his thoughts to the castle and its garrison. Alfred was there, and Gunthar and Boniface and a hundred men, of whom Father thought he could trust only the twenty Knights. For you see, the countryside went over to the peasants suddenly and swiftly, and the heart of many a foot soldier turned from the Order in the last weeks before the castle fell.'

Sturm clenched his fists, his dark eyes smoldering.

'What would you expect, Sturm Brightblade?' Raistlin murmured. 'What would you expect from peasants and brigands?' He rested his thin hand on the shoulder of the Solamnic lad. The mage's fingers were pale, almost transparent, and there was something unsettling in his touch.

Sturm shrugged and scooted his chair away from the table.

'Go on,' Raistlin breathed. 'Tell us your story.'

'Father descended into the bailey, where his soldiers had been assembled. The men crowded together for warmth, shivering in threadbare blankets, in secondhand robes. All but a dozen were there, and those who were absent were trusted Knights, deployed by Father to man the walls while he held council.

'The courtyard was a sea of gray shapes and misted breath, and the snow fell mercilessly as the morning approached. Father paced confidently in front of the troops, stopping only to draw a line in the snow, a commander's gesture. I had seen him do it before myself, in the Nerakan Wars, but even to grown men it was still quite a show.'

Sturm paused admiringly, a sad smile creasing his face. Outside the inn, the summer night swelled with music, the wild fluting call of the nightingale cascading over the slow, steady creaking of insects. Together the three lads listened to the sounds around them as weary Otik passed by the table, his arms heavy with half-filled tankards and dirty crockery.

Sturm looked up at the twins and resumed the story.

''Those who are with me,' Father said, 'stay your ground. For it shall come-snow and siege and insurgence.'

Then he pointed to the line at his feet, and they said that the mist dissolved above that troop of men, simply because not a one of them was breathing.

' Those who would go,' he said, 'whether to safety or to the ranks of the insurgents, may cross this line and travel hence with my blessings.' '

'With his blessings?' Caramon asked.

Sturm nodded. ' 'Twas blessings he said, no matter who tells the story. And I cannot figure it for the life of me, though I suppose that if neither heart nor oath could hold their allegiance, 'twould have been a crime to send them to battle.

'But the real crime was what followed. When eighty of them crossed the line and walked from Castle Brightblade…' He clenched his fists, then blushed, surprised at his own feelings.

'Tell us the rest,' Caramon said, lifting his hand as though to still his friend's torrent of anger.

'Father said not a word against those men,' Sturm continued, red-faced and glaring. 'Instead, he ordered the Knights down from the walls. Then there were but a score of them in the bailey, all of the Order, and the snow kept falling, falling upon those who stayed as well as those who left.'