The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (39 page)

Robert shook his head as he coldly regarded his scruffy band of ill-clad men and questioned how he had been brought so low. But, at long last, he gave a half-hearted signal for the helmsmen to push off, and one by one, the galleys, each limited to a solitary covered lantern to avoid detection, formed a line and bit the water with supple quickness.

Soon the sun fell to the horizon, requiring the armada to keep the moon’s shimmering beam in its sights, remaining just north of its light to avoid detection. The oars slapped the water in a rhythmic beat.

Robert caught James staring mesmerized at the roiling storm
clouds passing to the west. He remarked dryly, “I trust the heavenly signs are
well met?”

James pointed to Columba’s pulsing star, which had just
appeared in the clearing sky. “I was thinking how fortunate I am. The exiled
saint never saw his homeland again. Whatever happens, at least I’ll see mine
this night.”

A
N HOUR INTO THE CROSSING,
the Scot pilots could no longer tack by the fires on Arran Isle behind them. The outbound currents had strengthened, insuring that there would be no turning back before the tide reversed in the morning, and the men had abandoned their nervous prattle and now rowed in tense silence. Robert stood uneasily at the bow, shrouded with the stricken look of a condemned man going to his execution.

To raise their spirits, James signaled Sweenie to a task that they had previously conspired. The monk climbed the mast and shouted against the wind:

“Scots, who have with Wallace bled!
Scots, who now with Bruce are led!
Welcome to your gory bed!
Or to victory!”

James slapped Robert’s back. “Now you’ll get your blessing.”

As he sang, Sweenie clung fast to the rigging with his blunt legs flapping like pennons. The men in the rear galleys, taking heart from the little monk’s fearlessness, unleashed a roar of admiration above the crash of waves.

Try as he might, Robert could not suppress a grudging smile at the feat.

James climbed the mast behind Sweenie and chimed in with another verse:

“Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front of battle lower;
See approach proud Edward’s power
Chains and slavery!”

The Scots rowed faster to the cadence of the ballad that had
been sung by the Wallace’s soldiers at Stirling Bridge. Even Edward Bruce, who
despised all such acts of frivolity, joined in the chorus:

“What, for Scotland’s king and law,
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fall,
Let him on with me!”

When they had finished their song, James slid back down the mast. Finding not a dry eye on the decks, he gripped Robert’s arm to firm his resolve. “Do you know how many are with us this night?”

Robert gave him a dubious glance, as if suspecting he had
fallen into one of his infamous dreaming spells. “Three hundred, unless you
count the fish. And I wouldn’t put that past you.”

James looked across the galleys to burn each face into his
memory. “I’ll wager you ten thousand old men will one day tell their grandsons
how they sailed with Bruce and Douglas on this wee sneak back into Scotland.”

T
WO HOURS BEFORE DAWN, THE
galleys floated in creaking
silence toward the mist-shrouded Ayrshire coast. The English had destroyed the
old Turnberry lighthouse, forcing the Scots to rely on the instincts of
Christiana’s pilots to navigate the dangerous reefs. Despite the roughening of
the sea, they maintained good formation, and when they came in danger of
grounding, James signaled for the rowing to stop.

He dived into the chilly
waters and swam ashore. Finding the dunes unguarded, he whistled the others down the hulls to join him. The shivering men waded in and mustered under the overhanging bluffs. They had gone over the plan a hundred times. Their scout on the mainland, Cuthbert, was not to light the signal fire until Clifford had depleted the garrison for one of his many forays into the countryside. Then, they would follow Cuthbert into the city by the cow gate and attack the sentries in their sleep.

Minutes passed, and then an hour, but Cuthbert did not
arrive.

James prepared to reconnoiter Turnberry’s walls when the
bluffs suddenly came alive with torches and voices. He held the others in their
crouches while he slithered up alone to the headlands for a better look. He was
about to tear into Cuthbert for his tardiness when the English cavalry came
galloping over the brunt, followed by foot soldiers thrashing at the gorse
brush with pikes.

He crawled closer to the castle and saw English scullions tending a large bonfire. He slammed a fist into the sand. Their watchmen on Arran had mistaken a burning refuse pit for the signal. The garrison would still be at full force, and Clifford now had his troopers patrolling the coast for landing parties.

He waited until the last of the horsemen had passed
overhead. Then, he slid back down the dunes and reported to Robert: “A fire …”

“And?”

“Not ours.”

Robert stared at him in disbelief. Shuddering with a look of panic, he ordered his brother Edward to recall the galleys. The exhausted men moaned and cursed as they began crawling back toward the water.

James held back. “I won’t go.”

“Percy and Clifford must know we are here,” Robert reminded
him. “We’ll be butchered if we stay.”

“And if we go back to
Arran, we’ll never keep enough men with us for another invasion. I say we split
up and regroup in Galloway.”

Robert studied his men behind him, reminded that they had risked everything to reach this shore. Seeing the desperation in their eyes, he finally agreed to stay. “We’ll scatter in threes and meet up in Glen Trool within the fortnight.”

“I’ll go with you,” Edward said.

Robert shook his head at Edward’s smothering insistence to always be at his side. “We can’t be captured together. Jamie goes with me. And the monk.”

Denied again, Edward sneered at James as he dispersed the
other men across the dunes to make the run inland.

Sweenie sent them off with a whispered verse from the ballad
that he had sung on the galley. “Welcome to your gory bed, lads. Or to
victory.”

O
N THEIR THIRD NIGHT OF
running from Clifford’s patrols, James, Robert, and Sweenie finally reached the forest around Glen Trool. To avoid leaving tracks, they followed the puddled banks of Loch Moart and eventually came upon a thatched hut that churned smoke from a stone chimney nested with hundreds of jackdaws and puffins. Overgrown with sphagnum and wadded with twigs, the cabin resembled a giant sett formed by badgers. It would have passed for any hunter’s winter outpost except for one remarkable oddity: a maturing hawthorn tree split the roof, evidence that whoever called this place home had long ago given up the pretense of maintaining the border between nature and civilization.

When darkness fell, James ordered Robert to remain behind with Sweenie while he stalked the cabin, hoping to find something to eat. He ran in stealth toward its window and, arriving, looked through the vined aperture. A pot of stew sat boiling over a fire, giving off an aroma nearly buckled his knees. He drew his dagger and cautiously opened the door to the hut.

Tending the hearth was a shrunken crone with thinned white hair drawn severely over the tops of her ulcerated ears and a cob-nosed face that was all creases and moles and hanging skin. Seeing him, the woman did not frighten, but merely arose from her stool and, as if having performed this sacrifice many times, poured a ladle of root soup into a wooden bowl and set it on the table.

James stared at the first food he had seen since the invasion. He couldn’t remember ever having smelled anything with such a heavenly tang, but he declined the offering. “Two men are with me. I can’t eat without them. I see by your circumstances that you haven’t enough for three.”

The old woman ladled two more helpings and set them on the
table.

Moved by her generosity, James stuck his head out the door
and signaled Robert and Sweenie up from their hiding. They entered warily and stared wide-eyed at the gruel. When the crone nodded them toward the table, Robert and the monk bowed to her and attacked the helpings like wild animals. James paused long enough from his ravenous eating to thank the crone. Yet she persisted in not speaking, and when they were finished eating, she merely removed the licked bowls from the table for washing. After lapping his bowl clean, he tried again to draw her out. “Your name, my lady, so that we might one day repay this kindness?”

At last, she proved that her tongue worked. “There’s
nothing ye could do for me, unless ye can raise the dead. I give sustenance to
all who come to my door in the hope that some charity might be visited upon our
king. None’s heard from him for months. I pray he’s still alive.”

Her earnest prayer heartened James. If the common folk like
this woman still supported Robert, he held out hope that they might yet redeem
themselves in the eyes of the oppressed and save the kingdom from English
domination. “Your prayers have reached God this night,” he told her. “You have
just served your liege.”

The crone rushed at him and thumped his head with her ladle.
“This is how ye repay me? Festooning me with jests? Get out of me abode!”

Robert stood from the table and tried to calm her. “Good
woman—”

The crone turned on him, aiming her kitchen weapon in
threat. “When King Robert returns, and I swear by Fillan’s hand he will, he’ll
bring a host so great that Edward feckin’ Longshanks, God damn his malformed
soul, will run south like a Irish hare in heat!”

Robert gently grasped her shaking hands. “My man here speaks
true, good mistress. You have indeed just fed that host … I am the Bruce.”

The old woman squinted
to take in his features, spitting a wad of saliva to deny the claim. “I saw
young Bruce once in a Glasgow tavern. Served him and his grandfather with
tankards, I did. You wouldn’t suffice for his bootlick.” But when Robert
reached into his cloak and pulled out the gold brooch with his clan herald, she
stared at the talisman and slowly raised her gaze again to his scruffy face
again. Eyes bulging, she staggered to her knees. “Forgive me, m’lord.”

Robert raised the woman back to her feet. “I am the one who
requires forgiveness. I have left too many of my subjects in such straits. My
wife could use a good matron like you.”

The crone blanched. “Ye’ve not heard? … No, how would ye?”

“Heard what?”

The crone’s eyes darted as tried to evade the answer.
Finally, she swallowed hard and revealed, “Your queen has been captured. Those
traitorous Comyns handed her over to the English six months ago.”

“God help me! My daughter and sisters?”

The crone nodded, her hands shaking from witnessing the
king’s outrage. “Scattered off to English prisons.”

James leapt up from his stool. “Another lass was with them.”

The woman ran her
fingers through his thick hair, trying to place his face. “Are you the son of
the Hardi? The one they call the right hand of the king?”

“Aye.”

She hesitated, until his fearsome glare demanded that she say what more she knew. “Some of the English soldiers were puffering in the village. The Countess of Buchan is being paraded about in a cage to be abused by all who pass.”

James overturned the table in a rage. “Where?”

The woman backed away, frightened by his outburst. “I
daren’t know.”

Robert was certain that the woman had just heard a wild,
unfounded tale. “Longshanks would never deal with a lady in such base manner.”

James glared darkly at him. “Aye, you’d know well enough!”

Robert’s face drained at the insult. “I’ll not suffer that
from—”

The door squealed open.

James turned to find three men, armed with axes, at the
threshold. Cursing his failure to keep watch for Clifford’s men, he grabbed a
chair and prepared to fight them off. He motioned Robert and Sweenie behind
him, and then waited for the attackers to make the first move.

The old woman shouted something in Gaelic.

The intruders lowered their weapons and descended to their
knees.

The crone brought Robert to them. “These are me sons. Now
you have a start on resurrecting that army ye lost to those whoresons at
Methven.”

Robert was stunned by her selfless offer. “Who will see to
your safety?”

She glared a warning at her sons not to speak. “Me husband
will be back from hunting soon. He’ll watch over me.” She raised her lads to
their feet and pushed them to the door. “Now, off with ye. The English demons
are on the far side of Loch Trool, thicker than spring gorse and begging for a
bloodletting.”

T
EN HOURS INTO THEIR RUN
for Glen Trool, Robert begged a
moment’s rest. Gaining his breath, he asked the sons of the crone, “You lads
have names?”

The tallest answered. “I’m Murdoch. This is McKie and
McClurg.”

“From three different clans?” James asked.

“We’re half-brothers,” Murdoch explained. “My father was
killed on Roslin Glen. McKie’s old man fell at Stirling Bridge.”

Until that moment, James had given no thought to their
markedly different features. Murdoch was dark, lithe, and angular, and carried
himself with the quiet somberness of a friar sworn to silence. McKie, the
second oldest, was raw-boned and ruddy and kept his head perpetually down as if
determined to ram it against a wall. The youngest, McClurg, was blond and
moon-faced with peach fuzz for a beard, and he was the only one of the three
who had even threatened to crack a smile. In fact, the only characteristic all
three shared was a remarkable ability to travel on a half-run for hours without
becoming winded.

Robert asked McClurg, “Your father is away hunting?”

“He died on Falkirk field.”

James shared an astonished glance with Robert, realizing that the mother of the boys had lied about having a husband who would protect her. He admired their pedigree, spawned as they were from a clan of hardy fighters. “You lads will be in my service from here on. Any of you feel like going on a little excursion into Northumbria to visit to the English scum who murdered our fathers?”