by Glen Craney
Robert shoved the morsel aside. “What has happened?”
James finally gave him the bad news. “Kildrummy is burned.”
Robert slumped, aggrieved by the loss of his invaluable northern castle. Yet he took refuge in hope. “Nigel must have escaped and fled north.”
James chose to let him think that for now. Given Robert’s fragile mental state, he thought it best not to reveal that he had discovered discarded wine casks from Brittany and tins of spiced meats outside Kildrummy. The campsite had served as headquarters for someone with more refined tastes than those cultivated by the Comyns. He felt confident that if Belle had been at Kildrummy, she would have left him some indication of her destination. He had searched the burned castle for evidence of her presence, but the walls had been charred and the rooms ransacked of any documents. Seeing Robert’s eyes fluttering, he gently slapped his cheeks to revive him. “Edward abandoned you here?”
Robert licked his cracked lips, searching for moisture. “Percy and Clifford attacked us at Dunaverty. Angus set sail to save his galleys and divert the English to Ireland. Eddie has gone west to God knows—”
Voices shouted out on the bluffs. Overhead, hooves pounded the ridges.
James motioned for him to remain silent. “We can’t stay here.”
“My legs … I can’t move them. What’s happening to me?”
James waited for the English search party on the bluffs to pass by. Then, he lifted Robert to his shoulder and gagged his mouth with a slither of bark to stifle his delirium screams. The drizzle was threatening to turn into a hard, chilling rain, and he feared if he did not find shelter soon, Robert would not last through the night. Despite the danger, he dragged him down the beach, praying that Clifford would suspend his search until the storm passed.
A CRY ECHOING THROUGH THE cave raised Robert from an unsettled sleep. He rolled over and, wincing, levered to his elbows. “How long have I been out?”
Hovering over a pitiful fire, James bit down on his sleeve and held a scalded knife to his festering shoulder to cauterize the inflamed gash that now threatened the use of his arm.
“Jamie … how long?”
In pain, James muttered through gritted teeth, “Three days.”
Robert stared at his own shaking hands, white as those of a corpse. “Am I dying?” Receiving no answer, he crawled toward James, his fingernails raking at the dirt. “Promise me you’ll not let me die an excommunicate.”
A raven flew into the cave and alighted on a boulder near the entrance. James recoiled into the shadows. Morgainne was stalking her two souls again. He hurled a stone at the death harbinger, remembering that she had followed him all the way from Kildrummy. When the blood-lusting bitch did not move, he lurched toward the entrance to chase her away. The wily goddess merely laughed at him. His stomach burned from hunger. By God, if they were going to die, they’d have a last meal, at least. Nothing would give him more pleasure than to roast that taunting harpy and gnaw on her bones. He reached behind his haunches and gathered up another sharp rock. The raven remained on her perch, daring him. He lifted to his knees and fired, but the raven dodged the rock and danced away with a taunting screech.
He sank in defeat, but then remembered that Robert was watching his every move. “You’ll not meet your Judgment Day on my watch,” he promised. “We still have that journey to make.”
The reminder of their boyhood pact galvanized Robert. “Aye, the Holy Land. Once we’ve mended, I say we take one of MacDonald’s galleys and dry our feet in the sands of the Lord.”
James sat back against the dank cave wall to steady against the dizziness. “You think the Moors ever laid eyes on a Lochaber ax?”
Robert closed his eyes. “The first time would be their last.”
“That it would.”
Wearied from just that brief exchange of false bravado, James became silent, laid low by the realization that in truth they had forfeited the chance of ever fulfilling their dream of taking the Cross. If they could not defeat the English and protect their own womenfolk, how would they throw back the infidels? They were likely being derided as incompetents in courts all over Christendom. The King of Jerusalem would never welcome into his service two excommunicated traitors turned beggars. Robert had always been the melancholic one, but now he felt himself falling into the black abyss of hopelessness.
Robert resorted to the one subject that never failed to bring a smile to his friend’s face. “That lass of yours loves you more than life itself. If I were a wagering man—”
James snorted cynically. “If you’re anything, you’re a wagering man. Why else would you have listened to my nonsense about seizing the crown?”
“You’re the one who made the more foolish bet, putting all you had on me.” Robert reached into his jerkin and tossed an English pence at him. “Here’s another wager. I’ll give you odds that Belle and Liz are quilting a sham near some raging hearth right now. Nigel wouldn’t let me down. Norway is where they are, I’m certain of it. With my sister in Haakon’s court.”
James ran his finger across Longshanks’s inscription on the coin. Suddenly, he was swept by a wave of despair. “I’ll never hold her again.” He turned aside and rolled onto to his stomach, trying to chase the shooting hunger pangs.
“Don’t go down on me, Jamie. I can’t see it through if you give up.”
James blinked hard, trying to focus his tunneling vision. He groped his way to the fire and tried to stoke the embers, but what little driftwood he had managed to find was too green to take a flame. The oystercatchers had grubbed the bluffs clean of all the pignuts and tubers, and he didn’t have the strength to wade into the water and spear a fish. As the night’s cold descended on the cave, he felt an encircling darkness in his soul. He gave up on the fire and muttered in anguish, “I can’t see a light ahead.”
Robert crawled closer to the pitiful pile of kindling and blew weakly on the ashes. “It’ll be dawn in a few hours.”
“No, I mean … I can’t see how we can defeat the English. Wallace had ten thousand men with him. Five hundred came to our call. Half of those we lost at Methven. Longshanks holds every castle north of Carlisle. Your brothers are scattered. Angus has been forced to take to the sea.”
When Robert could not summons a rebuttal to that grim assessment, James lowered the back of his head to the ground. Fearing he would never wake up if he fell asleep, he stared at the ceiling to fix his eyes against the vertigo. Above him, a large black spider dangled on a thread. The wiggling creature had fallen from its corner and was retracting its legs in a frenzied effort to regain its web.
The spider threw itself against the limestone but failed to secure a hold.
Summoning what little strength he had left, James climbed to his knees for a closer view. Again and again, the spider launched an improbable quest to regain its home, only to fall short. “Rob, look at this.”
Half blind, Robert leaned on his elbows and watched the blurry image of a spider twirl toward him. On the spider’s back was a red and yellow streak, the colors of his clan’s heraldry. Nearly exhausted, the spider climbed its thread in preparation for one last attempt.
“He’s going for the rebound.”
Robert squatted under the spider and reached to assist it. “That thread won’t hold.”
He held back Robert’s hand. “No, he can do it. Come on, laddie!”
The spider continued its perilous ascent up the thread, stopping to rest every inch or so. When it could climb no higher, it paused as if to summon courage—and dropped to its death or freedom. The thread stretched and rebounded. The spider catapulted toward the web and clung fast.
They cheered as the spider crawled to the center of its web in triumph.
“A sign, Rob! See how he preens on his regained throne. A king speaks to a king! He is telling you never to give up!”
“You believe it so?”
A light flashed near the mouth of the cave.
James pulled Robert behind
him. Clutching a rock, he cursed under his breath, fearing that their shouts had drawn Clifford’s scouts. As the torches approached, he came to his knees, preparing to fight to the death.
The outlines of a woman in black robes appeared within the blinding aura of the torches. Her sleeves resembled wings, and her hood fell to a point like a predator’s beak.
James backed away. Not Clifford, but the raven goddess Morgainne, had come back for them. He remembered that she always melded into her mortal shape when arriving to announce a death. He scooped a handful of rocks and threw one of them at her. “You’ll not take him!”
“Who gives me orders in my own land?”
He flashed another stone to scare off the carrion bitch. “Take me, damn you, if you must have a soul to slake your blood thirst!”
The death goddess retracted her hood, revealing strands of wild red hair and pale skin. Several men with torches came up from the shadows and stood aside her. The shortest of them rubbed his arm and threw the rock back at James, grazing his ear.
“That’ll require a severe penance!” Sweenie cried, rubbing his scalp.
Edward Bruce rushed up to embrace his brother. “We’ve been searching under every rock from here to Mull for you. MacDonald has his galley waiting in the bay. The English patrols are on the eastern side of the isle. We must hurry. They’ll sail around the cove within the hour.”
Edward helped Sweenie and the other men carry Robert from the cave.
James held back, seeking his equilibrium from the discovery that the woman was not Morgainne. Still struggling to squint his eyes into focus, he asked her, “Who are you?”
She offered a hand to assist him to his feet. “Christiana of the Isles.”
“The daughter of Gamoran, the chieftain?”
She nodded. “My father is dead. I now lead my people.”
“How did you find us this far south?”
Christiana rolled her eyes into her upper lids, as if overtaken by an inner vision. She looked up at the spider hanging above her head and stroked its spine. The spider arched its back as if to acknowledge her greeting. She whispered something to it in what seemed to be some form of oracular communication. Then, she looked down at James and warned him, “A lady suffers for you.”
James’s weakening knees knifed him to the ground. “Belle?”
Christiana translated the rest of the prophecy from the spider. “She dangles. Bait to catch a king.”
He crawled closer. “Speak plainly, woman! Do you know where she is?”
Christiana’s voice turned husky. “Many years from now, a great nation is promised on the far side of the world. But this shall come to pass only if you and your king gain victory here.” She placed her ear near the spider to better hear its message. “Look to the blood crosses. They bear the salvation of the Light in your hour of travail.” After a long silence, she finished with another warning, “This war cannot be won by you alone.”
“Blood crosses? What in God’s name does that mean?”
She turned and walked away.
“Damn you! Answer me!”
At the mouth of the cave, Christiana looked over her shoulder at him with a heavy-lidded glare of contempt. “For you to prevail in this war, the women of your land must prove stronger than the men of your enemy.”
“Of my land? Do you forget that you are a Scot, as well?”
“I am an Isleswoman. Whether I shall one day be a Scot depends on you and your king. From what I’ve seen so far of your skills in governance, I doubt there’s much chance of it.”
“Babbling hag! What do you know of our war!”
Christiana whipped her cloak across her face, leaving only her flaming eyes bared. “I know this much. Only the female spider bears the colours of royalty. The truth of my vision has already been confirmed.”
James was utterly baffled by all of these shrouded declarations. “And, pray tell, how?”
“Had that spinning lass and I not come to your aid this night, you and your fair-weather king would have been dead by morning.”
XXI
BLINDFOLDED, BELLE WAS DRAGGED FROM a mule and shoved down a cobblestone path. The past week had been a whirlwind of confusion and terror, ever since that desperate night when the man pounding on the door of St. Duthac’s kirk turned out to be not James, but the Earl of Ross, a Comyn ally who had found and deciphered the scribbled message she had left at Kildrummy. Taken from the Tain sanctuary with the other women, she had been kept uninformed about her whereabouts. Now, as her eyes were uncovered, she adjusted to the harsh sunlight and saw a Latin inscription on the keystone of an archway.
Her heart sank.
She was standing at the gate to Lanercost Abbey, the English army’s headquarters just south of the Borders. The guards drove her into the abbot’s quarters. Inside, the windows were draped with black bunting and an odor of camphor filled the stifling air. Prodded another step forward, she saw a group hovering around a canopy made of gauze-thin linen. As a candle’s flame flickered, their faces became clearer: Caernervon stood aside a bed, flanked by the Earl of Ross and the Dominican Lagny. Elizabeth Bruce, her stepdaughter Marjorie, and the Bruce sisters knelt at the foot. They turned toward her with fright in their swollen eyes.
Caernervon retracted the sheer canopy. “Father, I have captured the bitches.”
A desiccated hand reached through the gauzy folds and beckoned Elizabeth Bruce closer. “Dearest Liz, praise God you are saved from that felonious husband of yours. … Where is he hiding?”
Elizabeth’s breathing shallowed. “I do not know.”
“Light!” the king shouted. “I am not in the grave yet!”
The royal physician rushed up to massage the old monarch’s chafed temples, muttering muttered a warning about the sun aggravating the headaches.
Longshanks, shriveled to half his normal weight, repulsed another invasion on his person and tore the canopy from its supports. He dragged up against the headboard and captured Elizabeth’s hand. “Am I too frightful to look upon?” When she tried to retreat, he forced her ear to within inches of his labored breath. “Vile rumors are being spread about you, Liz. They are saying you counseled Bruce to turn against me.”
Elizabeth’s words quavered. “Your Majesty—”
“Of course, I protested that slander. My favorite daughter of the loyal Carrick would never betray my trust.” Finding her too distraught to form a response, he caressed her tangled russet hair, each stroke firmer in its threat. “My little songbird. You were always so facile with the quips. Perhaps you need some time in a nest to regain your voice.” He shoved her away. “Take her to York dungeon!”
Little Marjorie screamed as Elizabeth slid to her knees, her mouth gaped in a silent shriek.
Belle rushed up to prevent Elizabeth from collapsing. She pleaded leniency for her queen. “Robert Bruce cares nothing for this woman. He abandoned her in his haste to escape from Methven. You will only be doing his bidding if you allow her to languish and suffer.”
Stunned by Belle’s intercession, Elizabeth was about to contradict that falsehood when Belle glared a warning at her to remain silent.
The Earl of Ross, seeing that the king could not place Belle’s face, came to his aid. “The Earl of Buchan’s absconding wife, Sire.”
Belle caught a shadow of movement in the corner. Isabella of France, standing off in dark to avoid the king’s detection, came into the dim light. The French princess shook her head in a covert plea for Belle not to draw more attention. But Belle ignored the warning and stepped in front of the prostrate Elizabeth to deflect the king’s ire. “I now belong to James Douglas.”
Longshanks covered his scabrous shoulders with a velvet robe stained in blood and phlegm. Wincing from the painful effort, he stood and, tottering before finding his balance, shuffled a few steps toward her. “So, it was you who placed the crown upon the traitor?”
“Upon the rightful king of Scotland.”
Longshanks enjoyed the bemused reac
tion of his son—and spun back on Belle, slapping her to the floor. “Perhaps you’ve not been informed of what we do to traitors.”
Disoriented for a breath, Belle looked up from her knees. Through stinging tears, she saw the king nod to the Earl of Ross. A side door opened, and attendants carried in a board draped with a sheet.
Longshanks ripped off the covering.
The severed heads of Nigel Bruce, the Earl of Atholl, and Christian’s husband, Christopher Seton, sat impaled on spikes, their faces frozen in their last agonized repose.
Belle stifled a gasp. The mouth of a fourth head—which looked disturbingly familiar—had been grotesquely stretched open. She nearly vomited, sickened by the smell of putrid flesh lathered with preserving tallow.
Longshanks seemed to draw strength from the macabre display. “Atholl protested that his rank did not merit a common hanging, so I had him strung up twice as high as the others.” He laughed so hard that a hacking spasm nearly choked him. Regaining his breath, he grasped the bloody scalp of the unidentified head and held it in front of the women. “Do you not recognize him?”
Sobbing, the women shrank from the bloody stump.
“Kildrummy’s blacksmith. He sold you out for gold. I always pay my debts. I had his throat filled with his reward.”
Belle turned from the dangling sinews, struggling to maintain her wits. If Longshanks inflicted such horror on these men, what diabolical tortures would he devise for James and Robert? She saw a scalpel on the bed stand, three paces away. Calculating each movement required to capture the blade and plunge it into the king’s chest, she looked across the room. As if sensing her plan, Princess Isabella edged in front of the guards, watching the aim of her eyes.
Longshanks limped and lurched around Belle. “I suggest you speak, woman, while I am still in the mood to listen. … Where are Bruce and Douglas?”
She tensed to lunge for the scalpel, and—
Longshanks erupted in another coughing spell. He staggered into the table, sending the surgical instruments flying across the floor.