The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (4 page)

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.

F
OURTEEN-YEAR-OLD
I
SABELLE
M
AC
D
UFF
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.