The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (51 page)

James held back his report
for discretion’s sake, but that only caused the men on foot to press closer and
balk the horses. He had agonized for weeks over whether to reveal his
clandestine meeting with the Dominican at Melrose Abbey, until the offer for
Belle’s release was rendered moot when the earls of Warwick and Lancaster
captured Gaveston and executed him on Blacklow Hill. He now deemed it best to
say nothing of the matter, lest Robert forever regard him with suspicion.
Jostled by the soldiers eager to hear, he found Randolph holding back on the
periphery. He shouted at his friendly rival, “Tom, is this what now passes for
discipline in the King’s army?”

Shamed at being called out, Randolph rode through the scrum
and tried to flog the men back to their stations with the tails of his reins.
“Did you not hear Douglas? This is not a fete!”

Robert shook his head at the fractious scene. He knew any
attempt to keep the reconnaissance secret would only make matters worse, for
the news would just spread through the camp anyway, skewed and inflated by
rumor. With a wan look of trepidation, he nodded for James to give the report.

As the men fell silent, James revealed, “Caernervon has
reached Falkirk. The first elements of the English army will be here before
sundown.”

Robert’s face flushed. His scouts had last placed the
invasion force in York, leading him to believe that he had another week to
prepare. Worse, the disappointment in James’s eyes confirmed what he already
knew: This wapinshaw army of sixty-days farmers and fishermen was in no
condition to fight veteran English knights. He braced against the pommel to
steady and asked the question on all their minds: “How many?”

“The English train stretches to Coldstream ford,” James
said. “Thirty thousand foot and two batailles of archers. Three thousand
knights lead them.” Hearing the men around him murmur that the invaders were
bringing thrice their own number, he added to their consternation. “Clifford
and Gloucester are in the van, with Cam Comyn and his turncoats.”

Randolph tried to put up a brave front for his uncle. “If
that is all they—”

“D’Argentin has also joined them,” James added, leaving even
Randolph speechless.

Those names had come hurling at Robert like body blows, none
more stinging than the last. “Caernervon has opened his coffers for the best
knight in France?”

“Aye, and …” James hesitated, his voice trailing off.

“Out with it!” Robert demanded.

James angled his horse to shield this next bit of news from
the crowding men. “Elizabeth’s father is at Caernervon’s side … with the
Bohuns.”

Robert sat staring at him blankly, as if not quite believing
what he just heard.

James did not need to spell out what all of this meant:
Caernervon and the English lords had ceased their bickering and were now united
in their determination to subjugate Scotland. Robert’s father-in-law, the Earl
of Ulster, was bent on wresting Elizabeth back from a treasonous marriage, and
Gloucester had likely been given the choice of taking up arms or suffering the
same fate as those lords who had been executed after their unsuccessful coup
attempt for the throne. D’Argentin, unemployed since the English treaty with
the French, had no doubt been seduced into the English service by the
Dominicans with a promise that the campaign would be a holy crusade. Yet what
galled Robert most, he suspected, was the arrival of the Earl of Hereford,
Humphrey de Bohun, and his freshly knighted nephew, Henry. The pompous elder
Bohun had once been engaged to Elizabeth, and when she broke off that
arrangement, the cad had besmirched her honor by claiming that she had become embroiled
in a scandalous dalliance.

Edward Bruce edged his pony closer to roust Robert from his
vexed thoughts. “We have no heavy horse.”

Robert whirled on his brother in hot anger. “What in the
Devil’s womb would I do without you always revealing the obvious to me?”

“To Hell with you, then!”

His fiery temper flinted, Robert quarreled at full voice
with Edward, giving no regard to the effect it would have on the already
disheartened men who milled around him. “Had you not agreed to that fool-headed
pact with Mowbray to lift the siege on Stirling, Caernervon would never have
gained the support of the English barons!”

“Bridle yourselves,” James warned the two brothers, glancing
at the ranks to remind them both about the fragile morale of the volunteers.

Robert required a moment to recoup his steely composure.
Finally, he turned a cold shoulder on Edward and whispered to James, “This army
has one battle in it. If we fight here and fail, we are done.”

Like his father, James
had been born with the gift of sensing the critical points of a battlefield. He
felt certain that Caernervon’s first objective would be not to form up for
battle, but to relieve the besieged garrison at Stirling Castle, which stood a
league to the north and offered an ideal springboard for an invasion of Fife
and the Highlands. More to the point, the pampered Caernervon despised sleeping
in tents. That June had been the hottest in memory, and the stifling humidity
and stagnant water had spawned a plague of midges that attacked exposed flesh
at night. He was confident that the impatient English king would first try to
force an entry into Stirling and gain its dry comforts without delay.

He remembered once, as a boy, having crossed this soggy terrain around
the croft huts of Bannock village. The forest of New Park merged with the
meandering stream here to form a natural funnel that had a deceptive,
changeling nature. The overgrown shocks of cotton grass appeared to offer firm
footing, but below their thin layer of peat trickled hundreds of rivulets that
became gorged with rain. The only stretch suitable for heavy cavalry was a
ridge called the Dryfield, a sloping terrace adjacent to the Carse where the
marshland rose gently east of the Roman road. He looked to the west and saw
that the horizon had turned the color of aged pewter. The air was unnaturally
still. If the skies opened up during the night, the Carse would become a
quagmire. He turned back to Robert and counseled, “I say we force them to fight
us here.”

That suggestion nearly catapulted Edward Bruce from his
saddle. “You’re the one always telling us to fall back, Douglas!”

James kept his insistent gaze fixed on Robert. “They’ve got
us in fists. But we’ve got them in wits.”

Robert gave up a jittered half-laugh at hearing the words he
had quipped years ago when the Comyns surrounded them as lads.

Before Robert could think up a hundred reasons why defending
the road to Stirling could not succeed, James rode up to a swell along the
ground and shouted at the troops, “I stand with our king on this field! Will
you stand with us for Scotland’s freedom?”

The cattle-hating Islesman spat at the hooves of James’s
horse, making clear that he had heard his fill of Southerners boasting about
the exploits of this Black Douglas of Lanarkshire. “I don’t see you doing any
standing. Freedom is a word that rolls slippery from the lips of a man on a
horse. You can hightail it when the fighting gets hot. Wallace couldn’t stop
the Angles. What makes you think you can?”

James rose in his stirrups to be heard by all. “What gave
you galley rats the notion that I intend to just
stop
the English?
Haven’t we always been satisfied to just stop them? And haven’t they always
come back like vermin? Hell, I’m going to drive them to London and wipe my
boots on their asses in the Tower where they murdered my father!” He glared
down at the disgruntled seaman from Bute and added, “Any man who doesn’t want a
part of that can go home and empty his salmon lines to feed his new English
overlords!”

The Lanark men stomped in approval and threw taunting elbows
at the mouthy Isleman, who finally begrudged a nod of admiration. At last, he
and his fellow Northerners had found a man who, unlike these English-bred
Bruces, talked their language.

With a sly smile, James leaned to Robert and whispered Sweenie’s
favorite benediction, “Welcome to your gory bed, or to victory.”

Robert gave the impression of a coiled spring as he turned
to and fro in his saddle, playing out the potential battle in his mind and
weighing the consequences of a retreat.

James was aware that Robert had never been able to shake the
memory of those Welsh archers decimating Wallace’s schiltrons at Falkirk. He
could almost hear the doubts rattling in his head. None of them had ever
commanded a full-pitched battle. Loudon Hill had been no more than a skirmish
against the incompetent Pembroke, and most of these lads had never been locked
in anything fiercer than a wrestling match. They whooped and bellowed for a
fight now, but what would they do when they faced Flanders warhorses? There were
three months of campaigning left until the harvest season. Robert might try to
stare down Caernervon long enough to convince the English to turn back. He
might also order Keith and his light cavalry to protect the escape route to the
West, and if hard-pressed, run for the Isles during the night.

Robert turned on him with a questioning glare, as if sensing
the invasion of his thoughts. Met with an arched brow to goad his decision, he
took a deep breath of resignation and ordered his brother, “Bury the spikes.”

Edward lurched forward in the saddle. “You cannot mean to
hold this ground!”

“It will do no harm to listen to what Jamie proposes.”

After failing to convince his brother to change his mind,
Edward angrily waved his sappers into the grassland between Coxet Hill and the
Torwood. The diggers began excavating hundreds of potholes and filling them
with four-pointed wooden caltrop jacks designed to pierce the hooves of the
sturdiest horses. Others followed behind them, camouflaging the spikes by
covering the holes with the thin first layers of the uprooted sod.

W
HILE THE
T
ORWOOD ENTRY WAS
being mined, James led Robert
and the other officers on a gallop toward St. Ninian’s kirk, an ancient Culdee
chapel that sat on the road to Stirling. Arriving, James dismounted and walked
through the surrounding graveyard that was filled with leaning stone crosses,
many marking the remains of Wallace’s veterans killed at Stirling Bridge. He
entered the kirk and upended a pew. Finding a nub of charcoal, he drew a map on
the back of the sitting boards.

His blood still up, Edward Bruce was on James’s heels. “That
was a bonnie speech, Douglas! Now tell us on how you intend to prevent three
thousand English knights from sconing our infantry.”

“Clifford will bring his heavy horse up the Falkirk road,”
James predicted. “We’ll keep them from forming lines longer than ours by
funneling them between New Park and the burn.”

The other officers traded skeptical glances, unable to fathom how their poorly armed and outnumbered troops could stop Caernervon’s advance, even on such a circumscribed field.

Randolph shook his head. “To reach New Park, our left flank
would have to be stretched to the breaking. We don’t have enough men to form
two ranks.”

“We won’t strengthen the left,” James said. “We’ll weaken
it.”

Aghast, Edward came nose to nose with him. “This is war, not
chicken thievery. Leave the tactics to those of us who have been trained in
them.”

James shoved Edward aside and traced a serpentine line
across his map to represent the flow of the Bannock stream through the low
valley that led up to the castle. “Caernervon will see the weakness on our
left. He’ll try to cross the burn to the east and circle our rear.”

Edward elbowed back to the fore. “Here’s a bit of military
wisdom that has apparently escaped you, Douglas. We don’t
want
the English in our rear.”

“No, but we want Caernervon to try for it.” James turned to
Robert and pointed to the spot on the map where the stream turned back and
formed a bulge of marshland with a narrowing neck. “When he does, he’ll meet
his watery grave right here.”

Robert studied the etched map. “Your plan assumes that
Caernervon does not mass his infantry on the Dryfield and turn to fight us.”

“He won’t lead with his foot levies,” James promised. “He’ll
expect us to run at the first sight of his armoured horse, just as we always
have. Half his army is still a day’s march from Falkirk. He doesn’t have the
patience to wait. If we fall back to New Park tonight, he’ll think we’ve
decided to retreat. When he sends in his knights to gain the castle without
foot support, we’ll slice the head of the snake before the tail knows what hit
it.”

As they waited for Robert’s decision, the only sound to be heard
in the kirk was the clatter of a trapped curlew in the rafters. James knew his
proposed strategy was fraught with risk, for Robert’s caveat had exposed the
weakest link in the chain of events that would have to happen to cause it to
succeed.

Edward broke the tense silence. “Rob, this is madness. If
they wheel west and draw up for battle, we’ll be crushed.”

“Aye, I
am
a madman,” James said. “I’m about to fight the
largest army ever mustered on this Isle with men who hate each other more than
the English. And if that’s not the Devil’s work enough, I have to put up with a
bawheid with haggis for brains like you leading one of our divisions.”

Randolph had to restrain Edward from charging at James.

While his officers bickered
over the best course of action, Robert walked to the cruciform window and gazed at
the rising mists below the Bannock burn.

James prayed that, for once, Robert would be unconventional in his
strategy. Longshanks would never have fallen for such a trap, but Caernervon
was a notorious creature of habit, devoid of creative thinking, impatient of
subordinates, ever suspicious of those who displayed brilliance and dimmed his
own haphazard light. Gloucester and Clifford would be on guard for such tricks,
true. Yet Gloucester suffered from the taint of suspected treason, and Clifford
had never been knighted. Caernervon would take his counsel from the Bohuns and
the other court schemers who were eager to load their booty wagons.