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

by Glen Craney

  “I’ll not go without you.”

  “Get out!” James muttered while smiling at the sergeant. “Now!”

  Robert and his men kept good formation as they rode out of the castle, as if to greet the approaching Comyns. A quarter-league away, Tabhann and Cam halted to discern the identity of the distant riders. Robert maintained a gentle canter—until wheeling ninety degrees and spurring north with his men.

  Tabhann, suddenly recognizing the Bruces, lashed to the chase.

  While the guards on the walls were distracted, James retreated on his horse into the inner tower. He climbed the central staircase, scraping the lacquered floorboards with his mount’s shoed hooves. Reaching the second floor of the great hall, he unloosed a torch from the wall to set fire to the tapestries, and soon the hall was engulfed in billowing smoke. He reined the spooked horse back toward the stairs and, turning to make certain the flames had taken, saw a flash of metal above the hearth.

  The Dun Eaddain Ax.

  Determined to regain his boyhood prize, he drove the balking horse back into the inferno. Choked by the smoke, he pressed his sleeve against his nose and searched the hot stones for the relic that Tabhann had stolen. At last he found its handle and pulled the ax from the moorings. His horse buckled in a panic, nearly overcome by the heat. As he reined back toward the staircase, he heard a shout through the smoke—

  “Idonea!”

  That voice sent a shudder down his spine. Was his mind playing tricks? No, it couldn’t be. The Comyns would never risk bringing Belle this far south.

  “Where are you?” screamed a woman from deep within the smoke.

  His throat was too strafed to call out. One of the Comyn guards broke through flames, but he kicked the man back into the inferno. The smoke prevented him from finding the staircase. Losing consciousness, he saw a faint beam of light streaming through the haze. The golden particles formed an image of the Virgin Mary. Her radiant halo pulsed with hues that transformed from a cold indigo to the incandescent orange of the sun. The Virgin stood beckoning him toward her with outstretched hands.

  Was this the hour of his death?

  He crossed his breast, grateful at least that the Blessed Mother, not the raven goddess Morgainne, had come to escort him to his Judgment. The blackness became peaceful and … the frightened horse charged toward the holy light. He hugged the animal’s sweating neck and recoiled from a jaw-jarring impact.

  A loud shattering rang out like the singing of angels.

  A rush of wind assaulted his face—he was airborne.

  He came to his wits sprawled on the bailey grounds. A few paces away, his horse writhed with a fractured leg. He looked up to the tower and saw that he had just crashed through a stain-glass window bearing the image of the Blessed Mother.

  Tabhann leaned out the broken window. “Close the gate!”

  Recovering his jarred sight, he discovered that the Comyns had returned to the castle after giving up their chase of the Bruces. Ax still in hand, he mounted the nearest pony and dashed for the portcullis. He saw that he wouldn’t make it through in time, so he leapt off the pony and slapped it toward the lowering spikes.

  The guard was forced to abandon the crank to draw his sword.

  James dodged the blow and swung his ax.

  The guard looked down in disbelief—at his severed arm.

  Twenty Comyn men rushed down the tower, angling to surround him. He clambered up the ramparts and jumped over, a second before a volley of arrows zinged overhead.

  The pony was waiting for him.

  TABHANN HELD A SWORD AT the throat of the sergeant who had been duped into allowing the Bruces to enter the castle. “Who did this?”

  The sergeant’s wobbly knees buckled him to the floor. “The Devil himself, by the blackness of his skin.”

  Tabhann’s searching gaze swept toward the mantle above the hearth. The brackets that held the ax were empty. He kicked at the sergeant in hot anger.

  Belle, dusted with smoke residue, ran into the great hall and found her husband with buckets in his hands, inspecting the fire damage. Before she could speak, Cam staggered up the staircase clutching a letter.

  “He’s dead!”

  Jubilant, Tabhann embraced his cousin. “We are finally rid of Douglas?”

  Belle collapsed to her knees at hearing the news of—

  “My father!” Cam cried. “Bruce murdered my father!”

  Belle sank in relief. It was not James who had been killed, after all.

  Disgusted, Tabhann threw open a window to air out the chamber. The smoke slowly cleared, revealing Idonea’s charred body under the mouth of the chimney. He kicked the widow’s corpse aside and muttered as he walked out, “At least the day hasn’t been a total loss.”

  Belle rushed to the crone and unclenched her rigored fist. A shard dropped from the dead widow’s hand. In her last moments of life, Idonea had pressed her face to the flue in a frantic search for air. Belle covered the ghastly-burned body with a blanket and, grief-stricken, prepared to leave when she saw a message scribbled on the stones above the hearth.

  No MacDuff, no King.

  NOT EVEN BISHOP LAMBERTON'S ARRIVAL with Elizabeth Bruce could lift the black cloud of despair that had descended on their new king. Robert sat slumped in a corner of the abbot’s quarters in Scone Abbey, the exhilaration of the past days replaced by a grim realization that half of Scotland now condemned him as a usurper. With James’s aid, he had crossed Stirling Bridge before the Comyns could prevent his escape and, rushing to this ancient site of coronations, had seized the crown. But the hasty ritual held the day of his arrival had fallen flat, and on this night, the clansmen were gathered in the nave to hear his justification for the brazen act.

  Elizabeth could no longer stand by in silence and watch her husband spiral deeper into his pit of melancholy. “It is easy enough to be king of summer, Robert! But persist in this morose pity, and king of winter you will never be!”

  He repulsed her reaching hand. “Now you turn against me, woman?”

  James came to Elizabeth’s defense. “You’ve turned against yourself. Confront the clans in this unseemly gloom and they will also turn against you.”

  Robert glowered at him. “I have you to blame for this.”

  James bristled at the charge. “I advised you to be resolved. I’d rather be certain than right. You’ve always preferred to be right and never certain.”

  Robert hung his head, too distraught to offer a rebuttal.

  The bishop signaled for James and Elizabeth to give him privacy with the king. Led by James from the chapel, Elizabeth began weeping, fearful of what now awaited the consort of an irresolute traitor to England. When he was alone with Robert, Lamberton dragged a chair near the hearth and donned his purple stole. “I will hear your confession.”

  Robert turned aside. “It is no use. I am doomed to Hell’s fires. No monarch can survive a papal interdict for murder. Clement will order every priest in Scotland to withhold the sacraments.”

  “The pope does not dictate who rules Scotland.”

  “And God? What of His judgment?”

  The bishop perfunctorily signed his breast and muttered the necessary incantations, not revealing to Robert that he despised this Roman abomination of mandatory annual confession, which had no precedent in Scriptures. “Allow me to worry about the Almighty’s judgment. What sins have you committed?”

  Robert’s eyes flooded with self-reproach. “I have lusted for power.”

  “Go on.”

  “And nurtured a burning hatred for the Comyns.”

  “A righteous hatred.”

  “Murder on holy ground.”

  Lamberton lifted Robert’s chin to demand his reluctant gaze. “Did Christ not commit violence upon the money changers in the Temple?”

  “Aye, but …”

  “The English and their Judases prey upon our land. You have overturned their usury tables. You will drive them from our temples.”

  “Can
I be so easily forgiven for Red Comyn’s death?”

  “God alone is the arbiter of men’s souls. But this I can promise you. I will stand with you on the Day of Judgment and contend against St. Peter himself to prove that you have acted with God’s blessing. For your penance, you must, for the remainder of your life, abide by two oaths. First, you will never accept papal tyranny over Scotland.”

  “And if I have no choice?”

  Lamberton placed a hand on Robert’s head. “I will see to it that you do.”

  Robert thought hard on that promise. Before committing, he asked to hear the condition that he was required to accept.

  Lamberton fixed a fearsome glare on his royal penitent. “Never again doubt that you are our rightful king.”

  Robert flinched from the piercing inspection of his soul. Yet the cleric had uttered that last assurance with such spiritual certitude that, for the first time, he felt instilled with the conviction that his destiny was indeed preordained. He kissed the bishop’s ring in gratitude and arose with a deep breath of renewal. Whispering a prayer to seal his confession, he arose, lifting his shoulders, and walked into the abbey’s nave. Six hundred nobles stared up at him in harsh accusation. He waited until their murmurs dissipated. Then, he shouted, “I will avenge the murder of Wallace! And I will see you free of English tyranny!”

  The lairds were stunned by his transformation. This self-proclaimed king held none of his usual shiftiness of glance or look of wishing to be elsewhere. They had expected to hear another rambling legal brief in defense of his seizing the throne, but instead he had greeted them with a ringing call to action the likes of which had not been heard in this chamber since Wallace. Recovering from a stupefied silence, they erupted in cheers and stomping.

  Drawn by the clamor, James rushed into the nave. Robert greeted him with a smile begging his forgiveness.

  From the sacristy, Lamberton watched their reconciliation with pride. When the acclamation reached a crescendo, the cleric pulled a cord and unfurled the royal standard from its perch over the clerestory.

  The clansmen gasped, and not a few wiped tears, for they had not seen the hallowed banner in twenty years, not since it had been ceremoniously withdrawn from view after King Alexander’s death.

  “You crown a murderer!”

  That shout—from the rear of the nave—disrupted the veneration.

  At the doors stood Ian MacDuff, the outlaw son of the chieftain who had been killed at Falkirk. Young MacDuff swaggered down the aisle and lifted Robert’s hand into the air. “Still stained with Comyn blood!”

  Robert yanked his hand back and tried to stammer a defense.

  Before Robert could finish a sentence, James lunged forward and drove MacDuff against the rood screen. “Your blood will stain mine!” As the clansmen erupted in heated arguments, James elbowed MacDuff aside and jumped atop a stall to be heard. “Comyn’s death was self-defense!”

  “What did you expect a Douglas to say?” MacDuff countered.

  “Longshanks wants Bruce dead!” James reminded the clansmen. “Does that not tell you who should lead us?”

  MacDuff raised his arms for silence. “It matters not! Have you forgotten?”

  “Forgotten what?” asked one of the men.

  MacDuff snarled an evil grin. “The Destiny Stone remains in Westminster.”

  The clansmen deflated, cruelly reminded that no coronation could take place without the holy relic. They turned to Lamberton for his opinion on the legality of that ancient impediment.

  “MacDuff speaks true,” the bishop conceded. “No king can rule without the scream.”

  Robert slacked his jaw at the bishop’s inexplicable betrayal.

  MacDuff reached into his pocket and threw a few coins across the floor of the nave. “Drinks for you lads! I’d not have you waste a journey.” With his defeat of the Bruces confirmed, he strode confidently toward the rear entry and reached for the bolt on the latch—

  The doors opened, seemingly of their own accord.

  Six Culdee monks carried in a wooden box half the size of a casket. On Lamberton’s command, they lowered the casement and pried open its lid. The clansmen gathered around the box and saw that it held a stone of black basalt whose shape was more a pillar than a block. Polished to a gleam, it was intricately carved with ancient symbols such as triangles and spirals that merged and danced in waves as if animated with an ineffable energy. The reflection from the candles sparkled and multiplied off its brilliant sheen. Confused by this delivery, the clansmen turned to the bishop for an explanation.

  Eyes glinting with mischief, Lamberton asked them, “Did you really think I’d let the English take it?”

  One by one, the men leaned over the casket to take a second look. Many were too young to have seen the Stone of Destiny and had only heard it described as a chunk of pale red sandstone drilled with holes. Some of the men fell to their knees, others scrambled to caress the precious talisman.

  As a low buzz of excitement escalated into cries of unabashed joy, Lamberton nodded to James in sheepish contrition. Raising his voice so that all could hear, the bishop explained how, during the English invasion of Perth in 1296, he had directed the Culdees of Glen Dochart, under an oath of secrecy, to remove the true Stone across the Firth of Tay to a cave on Dunsinnan Hill, near the crumbling castle of old King Macbeth. In its stead, he had ordered a cornerstone from an abandoned kirk be carved with a few meaningless glyphs and placed below Scone’s altar. When Longshanks and his soldiers marched into the Abbey that tragic day, the Culdees had put up a spirited defense of the forgery.

  The clansmen stomped their boots in admiration for the clever ruse.

  “A sign!” James shouted. “God saved the Stone of Destiny for the Bruce!”

  Ian MacDuff stood motionless, unable to believe this sudden turn of events. As the delirious clansmen pushed past him to touch the relic, he fought his way down the aisle to confront Robert again. “Aye, you may have the Stone Fatal! But you still lack a MacDuff! My clan must give the oath! It is the law!”

  This time, Lamberton’s consternation was genuine. In the excitement, he had forgotten the second condition for installing a new king.

  MacDuff came nose to nose with Robert and taunted him with the shibboleth that would doom his royal ambitions. “No MacDuff—”

  “No King!”

  MacDuff spun to accost the scoundrel who had stolen his thunder.

  At the opened doors, surrounded in an eerie haze of steam, stood a hooded woman draped under a cloak muddied from a forced ride.

  The men were aghast at this violation of the ancient prohibition against women entering the presence of the Stone.

  James took a step closer to aid his sight in the nave’s dim light.

  It cannot be.

  Even if Tabhann had allowed Belle to come south from Dundarg, a journey this far on horseback in such short time in harsh weather would have been nearly impossible. His chest tightened with a foreboding. Had the voice he heard at Dalswinton been hers in the flesh, and not his imagination? Had she died in the conflagration, only to come back now in the ghost?

  But this was no shade that now strode down the aisle.

  Belle repulsed her brother’s attempt to block her from the Stone. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she lowered to her knees and ran her hands across the ridges of hieroglyphics that circled the basalt. The blessed talisman appeared exactly as she had seen it in her dreams—noble, defiant, and mysterious. Ten years ago at Kinghorn, her father had banished her heart’s desire, but she had never given up hope. The lead-cased windows flashed from a streak of lighting, and a shattering scream came from Moot Hill, a hundred paces to the north. The clansmen shuddered from the unworldly sound. She looked up and saw a golden nimbus swirling around Robert’s head.

  The sign.

  She kissed the Stone and retraced her steps down the aisle. Reaching the rear doors, she turned back. With her face aglow, she shouted at the men, “This night, a MacDuff stand
s for the Bruce!”

  She threw open the doors and marched out into the driving rain.

  The clansmen were too stunned to move.

  James rushed Robert to the doors before the others could fathom what was happening. Lamberton, signaling the Culdee monks to retrieve the Stone, hurried them to follow.

  Only when Robert had been whisked from the Abbey did those who remained behind divine the unthinkable act that Belle was preparing to perform. They rushed from the abbey, jostling and elbowing to be the first to reach the mound where Scottish kings had been inaugurated as far back as memory could attest.

  As Belle led the soaked procession to Moot Hill, she smiled at the irony in God’s inscrutable ways. In times of old, before the Roman missionaries banished women from their spiritual authority, men had followed Pict queens up this same path. She reached the grassy apex and turned her face toward the attacking rain to invoke the spirits of those holy women who had come before her. Extending her hand, she called for the slender band of hammered gold that the bishop kept under his cloak. She stood behind the Stone and, waiting, held the crown aloft.

  Still flustered by her miraculous arrival, James climbed closer to her and whispered, “You would do this for him?”

  “I do this for you.”

  “You’re putting your life in danger.”

  “By this, I would make it right between us.”

  James backed away, allowing Lamberton to escort Robert to the Stone seat.

  Belle pressed her womb against Robert’s back to steady against the wind.

  Robert felt her shivering against him. “My lady, you are cold.”

  “No, my lord,” Belle whispered. “I tremble because I have, at last, come to know the purpose of my life.”

  Ian MacDuff fought his way up the hill to the fore of the gathered ranks. “Woman, I forbid this! You will not betray your clan and husband!”

  Belle shook so fiercely from a rage fed by a life of bending to men’s threats and violence that she feared she might drop the crown. “What is a clan without a country? As for my husband, you and my father forced the Comyns upon me for your own gain!”