The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas Page 3

  Wil Douglas struggled against the rope. “Leave the lad out of this!”

  Longshanks yanked the cord at James’s waist. “Choose, or both will die.”

  Towering above James, Gibbie shook his head in a plea for him not to break.

  Longshanks dismounted and forced James to confront the two persons he loved most in the world. “If you commend your father to Hell, lad, you will inherit his lands as my vassal. On the other hand, if you turn against your fellow conspirator up there, you will be shunned as a turncoat. ‘There goes Douglas,’ your countrymen will curse under their breaths. ‘He gave up his mate to save his papa’s neck.’”

  Weak in the legs, James wanted to die rather than make the choice.

  Longshanks laughed at his anguish. “Either way, my golden-tongued fool, you will be of no consequence to Scotland from—”

  Gibbie leapt from the beam.

  Too late, Wil Douglas had thrust out his leg in an attempt to stop the boy from jumping.

  James tried to rush to Gibbie, but the English soldiers held him back.

  “Save him, damn you!” Longshanks shouted.

  Clifford scaled the scaffolding, but Gibbie, gagging, kicked away the officer's reaching hands. Twirling in the ember-choked wind, he looked down at James with bulging eyes, desperate to communicate a dying wish.

  The English officer finally reached the top beam and hacked at the rope with his blade. Gibbie fell limp to the mud. Clifford leapt down and straddled the body. Finding no pulse, he cursed and slung aside Gibbie’s lifeless arm.

  After a stretch of stunned silence, Gloucester rode up with his blade drawn and severed the rope restraining Wil Douglas. The earl ordered the sergeant at arms, “Take this man to the dungeon with the rest of the garrison. Hold him prisoner there until further order.”

  The sergeant looked for royal confirmation of the command. Longshanks quivered with rage at the brazen challenge. But seeing his troops nod with grudging admiration for the Scot boy’s brave martyrdom, he chose to leave the confrontation with Gloucester for another day, and spurred north while the prisoners were herded away. Prince Edward, on his pony, followed his father and spat on Gibbie’s body as he passed over it.

  As the pups tugged at Gibbie’s sleeve, James knelt aside his dead friend and vowed that no Englishman would ever again see his tears.

  II

  FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD ISABELLE MACDUFF slacked her reins, taking mercy on her garron as it fought for footing across the rough headlands above the Firth of Forth. Sensing a dark chill of danger, she looked toward the fore of the mounted column and saw her father, Ian, and her brothers signing their breasts in mournful silence. Despite her fear of heights, she risked a glance over the cliffs to discover what they had passed.

  Just then the fog thinned, revealing a circled cross of stone that had been erected on the ragged dunes below her. Truly, she thought, Kinghorn had to be the saddest place in all of Scotland. Eleven years had passed since King Alexander, full of drink and hot to share the bed of his queen at Methil up the coast, had galloped past these crags during the worst storm in memory. The MacDuffs had hosted the monarch in Fife on that eve of March 18, 1285, a date all Scots had come to fear. Several years earlier, a hermit’s apparition had appeared in the royal court to warn of a future disaster. When the foretold night finally arrived, her father had begged Alexander to remain at Dunfermline and sleep off the effects of the feast. But the king, an impatient and stubborn Celt, had dismissed the ghost sighting as a foolish superstition.

  The next morning, Alexander’s body had been found washed ashore here.

  She studied her father’s slumped shoulders and tried to divine his worries. Muscular and stout, he had a round head that nurtured only a few scrubs of once-reddish hair turned the color of straw with age. And like all full-blooded MacDuff men, he had the distinctive family lineament: wide-set eyes with bushy brows that merged over the bridge of a thick nose. Her male ancestors had been so proud of this fearsome feature that for centuries they had left open notches on their helmets to warn their foes that they were about to die at the hands of the legendary clan.

  As if sensing her scrutiny, her father turned in the saddle and shouted at her. “Keep up, Belle! The nag will scaur if it falls behind!”

  Angling her garron away from the slippery cliffs, she whispered a prayer for Alexander’s soul. Why had God taken their king at such an inauspicious time? Was it truly in retribution for his heretical attachment to the old pagan ways? If so, why were so many people required to suffer for the sins of one man? One tragedy was not baneful enough, it seemed, for Alexander’s lone surviving heir and granddaughter, the infant Maid of Norway, had met her own miserable death a few months later on a capsized galley near Orkney. That disaster left the clans quarreling for the empty throne, and on this journey south from Fife, she had seen firsthand the calamitous results: Ancient oaks stood split and charred, sheep carcasses lay rotting in the fields, and beggars lined the roads. In the six months since the loss of Berwick and its seventeen thousand citizens, the English invaders had turned Scotland black with desolation.

  When news of the massacre reached Fife, she had asked her father why the other clans did not go to the aid of Wil Douglas when they still had the chance to turn back the English. There be only one creature a Scotsman despises more than an Englishman, he had told her. That be another Scotsman.

  The path west turned inland toward a shadow-streaked glen, and the sun threatened to disappear over Ben Cleuch. Vowing to chase these melancholic thoughts, she gathered her long black hair around her neck and tightened her cloak against the rising sea winds. She was grateful at least that one of her prayers had been answered: By this time on the morrow, at the annual Michaelmas gathering of the clans at Scone, she would attempt to sneak a glimpse of the fabled Stone of Destiny.

  She had always been enthralled by stories of the Lia Fail, the name given to the Stone by the Highland monks who still spoke the Gaelic. Brought to Ireland by the ancient Israelites and ferried across the sea by the first kings of Scotland, the sacred relic possessed the gift of prophecy and was said to scream its blessing when touched by the true king. Her clan, the oldest of them all, had for centuries performed its exclusive privilege atop the Stone: The laying of the crown upon the head of a new monarch.

  No MacDuff, no King!

  That was the warning spoken as the first words to every babe delivered of a MacDuff womb.

  She hadn’t slept for two nights, exhilarated by the chance to finally visit the venerated Mound of Credulity, where divine sanction was bestowed upon royal power. Had the Stone truly been the pillow used by the biblical Jacob to rest his head while he dreamed of the Ladder to Heaven? It was said that no other rock of the same texture and composition existed. Would its black sheen still be stained with the blood of the Canaanites? She held fast to a reassuring faith that England would never subjugate Scotland so long as the kingdom possessed the most powerful talisman of protection in all of Christendom.

  Wearied of her obsession, her brothers constantly taunted her that she would never hear the Stone speak. Only men, they enjoyed reminding her, were allowed within the confines of Scone Abbey, where the Stone was kept under guard on a wooden pedestal before the high altar. Inconsolable after learning of the ban, she had prayed each night to St. Bride, patron saint of courageous women, whose nuns tended the eternal flame in Ireland and threatened damnation on any man who stole a gaze at its sacred light.

  Then, nearly a year ago, on her birthday, an old bard had appeared under her window in St. Andrews to deliver a message: One day you shall hear the deafening shriek of the Heaven Stone. She had protested that such a miracle would require her to be in the presence of a monarch during his coronation. How could she ever manage such a feat? He had offered her only an enigmatic riddle in reassurance: The Stone comes to those who serve it. Ever since that night, she had kept her promise to the bard never to speak of the revelation. After all, to be blessed with an oracle by
a Highland poet was a mark of solemn fate, and of all the MacDuffs living and dead, only she had been so honored.

  Her garron neighed sharply in warning. Caught up in her musings, she only then realized that her father had not turned the column north at Inverkeithing, but was continuing west along the coastal route. She caught him glancing back at her, as if expecting a reaction. She cantered closer and asked him, “Do we go to Scone by Stirling?” When he remained defiantly silent, she persisted. “Father?”

  Finally, he admitted, “We are not going to Scone.”

  “Not Scone? Where then are the clans to meet?”

  “Douglasdale.”

  She stared at her father, unable to comprehend the change of plans. “The South? But the clans have always met at Scone!” She leapt from her pony and circled his horse in a fit of despair. Her outburst threw the column into disarray. “You have deceived me!”

  Ian dismounted. “I warned you to chase this foolishness from your head!” Taking her by the shoulders, he shook her to silence, then gazed sadly toward the north, revealing that he was also distraught over this breach of the ancient tradition. “None of us will see the Stone this year. Perhaps never again.”

  She was stricken. “But why?”

  “The Stone is not on Moot Hill.” Driven by her demanding glare, Ian finally explained, “Edward Longshanks has taken the Stone to London. The monks at Perth gave it up without a whimper. Those tonsured cowards expect us to fight their wars, but they would betray Christ Himself before risking their own necks. The English king keeps it under his throne in Westminster and now boasts that, by our own laws, he is master of Scotland.”

  “The Stone screamed in his presence?”

  He would not look at her directly. “There were screams enough … from London Tower.”

  Biting on her sleeve to stifle a sob, she imagined to her horror how the English tyrant must have kicked and abused the Stone, torturing it like a prisoner on the rack to extract its secrets. “Edward Longshanks cannot become king of Scotland! Not without the Stone’s affirmation! You told me so!”

  Her father’s eyes hooded with shame as he gazed at the distant banners of an English occupation garrison fluttering over Stirling Castle to the west. “That tale was just a priest’s deceit to gain donations for a new abbey.”

  She thrashed at him in protest. “The Stone is true!”

  Ian captured her wrists until she relented. “I stood witness at Alexander’s coronation! I tell you there was no scream! It is high time you gave up these foolish fantasies!” He turned away and looked grimly toward Stirling Bridge, where all of Scotland’s troubles eventually crossed.

  Crestfallen, she coughed back tears. “Can we go to Scone to see where the Stone once rested, at least?”

  Her father shook his head. “I’ll not lay eyes on the sacred mound so gutted and defiled.”

  She fell to her knees, undone. To lose a precious dream was anguish enough, but to have it renewed upon one’s heart only to be dashed a second time was a cruelty that she could not fathom. The bard’s prophecy had been nothing more than a soothsayer’s ruse. All faith drained from her, and she vowed never again to believe in a God who would allow the perpetuation of such a falsehood. She looked up at her father, who had remounted, and called out to him. “Why then have you brought me on this journey if not to see the Destiny Stone?”

  As he road off, he answered her without turning, “You’ll meet your destiny soon enough!”

  Snapping their reins to renew their journey, her brothers glanced back at her with knowing grins.

  III

  BELLE AND THE MACDUFFS WERE greeted by hostile stares from the other clans, who had gathered under an expanse of tall oaks in a sheltered Lanarkshire vale. On her journey south, she had overheard her father warn that such a large congregation of armed men threatened to draw retaliation from the English garrison at Carlisle. But Wil Douglas, the rebel leader who had recently bribed his release from Berwick’s dungeon, knew Edward Longshanks’s scheming mind better than most, and he had convinced the guardians that less suspicion would be aroused if they held their secret meeting here in the South, disguised as the annual harvest celebration. It was for this reason that her father and his ally, Red Comyn, a claimant to the throne, had reluctantly agreed to cross into the shire of the despised Douglases, the clan that had been their enemy for centuries.

  As her father and brothers rode through the encampment with their chins in the air, she hung back several lengths, the only protest she could muster against her contrived presence here. She saw Wil Douglas waiting for their arrival at the tower of his castle with his second wife, the former Eleanor de Louvain, a frail Northumbrian sparrow who had fallen in love with him after he had taken her hostage during a raid on Jedburgh. She felt sorry for the Douglas chieftain’s new wife, for she was rumored to have no friends, disowned by her Northumbrian kin as a traitor and shunned by distrustful Scots.

  She scanned the bleak environs and shook her head, unimpressed. These endless meadows, broken only by an occasional rocky eruption, resembled Yorkshire more than the northern Scot provinces. Huts slathered with pitch circled the tower like clusters of barnacles, and the curtain wall looked to have been razed and rebuilt so many times that its patchwork masonry brought to mind a cheap quilt. On a barren hillock to the west stood a sleepy village of twenty mud-joisted cabins. The Douglas Water, a rusty creek barely deep enough to sustain a small school of salmon, meandered past the only redeeming feature in this forgettable place: a small kirk dedicated to St. Bride.

  Dismounting without an offer of assistance, she walked unescorted through the camp. Everyone was talking about the war, laying blame for the loss of Berwick, and she found it nigh impossible to follow these swirling tempests and feuds. But there was one reality she understood all too clearly: That despicable English king with the odd nickname had ruined her dream of seeing the Stone of Destiny, and she would very much like to curse the ogre to his face.

  She was about to rehearse the precise wording of that condemnation when a blast from a ram horn disrupted the clans from their ale-fueled arguments. As if struck by madness, the men ran howling toward the south gate. She was swept up in their rush and deposited in an open field where twenty boys, including her two youngest brothers, crouched at the ready with axes in their hands. Barefoot and naked to their waists, they had formed up what appeared to be a battle line. Breathless, she exclaimed, “Are the English upon us?”

  A tall, shaggy Bute man standing next to her spewed his mouthful of ale. “English? Are you a peat brick shy of a decent fire, lass? The lads are running for the Dun Eadainn Ax.”

  The rube spoke with such a thick tongue that she had to ask him to repeat his explanation. Disgusted with her ignorance of the northern Gaelic, he peppered his translation with enough Scot words that she finally took his meaning. “They’ll catch their deaths in this cold! Just for a tool?”

  The inebriated Highlander swooped over her again, dowsing her in spittle. “A tool, you say? A talisman of miracles it is, holy as the Rood itself! Brought across the sea by Fergus and buried under the great Arthur’s throne on Eadainn Fort Hill!” He cursed her ignorance with a wild swipe at the air. “Go clean the trestles! This is no business for a mush-headed filly anyway.”

  She looked around and saw that the other women had retired to the tower, no doubt to warble about wool spinning or the latest in fashion from the Continent. Not interested in such trivialities, she ignored the command to join them and pushed deeper through the throng of men to find out what was so important about this race. At the starting line, she found the young competitors elbowing for the best position. She risked another question to the hairy drunkard who had just tried to banish her. “Which one’s the fastest?”

  The Bute man huffed, resigned to her persistence. “Put your purse on the carrot-headed one with the idle eye. He’s half blind, but don’t let that fool you. He’s as ornery as his old man. John Comyn’s his name. Everyone calls him ‘C
am’ because of the crooked way he ganders.”

  Hearing his name, Cam Comyn looked up from his three-pointed stance and startled Belle with a buck-toothed grin. His lazy eye trailed off, causing her to look toward its unintended direction. He regained her attention by flexing his scrawny biceps in her face.

  She was astonished that anyone might suppose such boorishness remotely impressive. Sniffling and blowing snot, the clod possessed the vapid stare and twittering movements of a dullard. Indeed, a more repugnant creature she could not imagine—until the taller boy next to him turned toward her. That one possessed severe Nordic features with dirty sandy hair and slant narrow eyes. His high pale cheekbones were pocked from the pox and his bridged nose resembled the jutting prow of a galley. She had seen gargoyles more pleasing to look upon.

  The Bute man poked her shoulder in a taunt. “Then again, there’s his cousin, John Comyn of Buchan. He’s more balm for the eyes, eh lass?”

  “I thought you said the other one was John Comyn?”

  “The whole brood goes by that name. Mayhaps those are the only two words they can all scribble.” The Highlander’s huge girth rippled from his laughter. “Tabhann is what they call the taller lad to keep the two scarecrows straight. You wouldn’t know what that name means, would you now, being a right learned Fife lady and all. Tabhann is Gaelic for a dog’s bark.” He unleashed a volley of ferocious yelps. “Do you catch it, lass? His bark be worse than his bite!”

  With her ears ringing, she tried to escape the converging huddle of men, but Tabhann Comyn cut off her path. She forced another opening with her elbows and took off on a dash, dodging the laughing clansmen—only to whipsaw like a newborn colt into a short, bare-chested competitor.

  The clansmen howled with laughter at her skittishness.

  Blinded by embarrassment, she was pulled to her feet by the boy she had just head-rammed.