by Glen Craney
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.”
TEN 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?”
The brothers nodded eagerly at the prospect for revenge.
That was the first Robert had heard of the dangerous plan. He warned James, “There’s fighting enough here in Galloway still.”
Since leaving the crone’s cabin, James had pointedly refused to speak to him, making it clear whom he blamed for Belle’s capture. Only now, without the courtesy of a direct glance, did he reveal his intent to plunge into the Borders and the northern English shires to harass the garrisons there. “I’ll stay with you until we deal with this English army on our heels. Then I’m going south to find her.”
XXIII
JAMES PLACED HIS EAR TO the shepherd’s path that led into the Glen Trool wilderness, but the ground remained quiet. After three days of scouting this meandering loch that fed the Black Water of Dee, he had found no sign of the English army that the Galloway crone had reported was here. He was starting to suspect that the old woman had simply imagined it all.
He prayed that she had also been mistaken about Belle’s capture, but somehow he had to find out for certain. In the old days, to locate the whereabouts of an enemy or lost comrade, his father had often employed an ancient Pictish trick called ‘riding the wind.’ The hags who taught the magic warned that separating one’s spirit from the flesh to travel to far places was a tactic full of peril, for one could easily become lost forever in the netherworlds.
Despite the dangers, he decided to risk it. He sprawled out on his back with eyes closed, imagining a map of England against his lids. The sun’s rays warmed his face and brought a tingling numbness to his legs, and soon he slipped into that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness. He felt his spirit rising to his head and leaving his body.
Moments later, a shadow came over him.
Had he been transported to Belle so quickly? He resisted the urge to open his eyes and instead allowed the vision to congeal. A soft hand caressed his face. He sank into her touch, amazed at how real this conjuring seemed. She slid her fingers slid past his throat, untied his shirt, and searched for the heart stone she had given him. Clever lass. He captured her face to bring her lips to his.
Her scream scattered the corbies in the trees.
He leapt to his feet, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun. The silhouette of a girl stood before him. He was disoriented, uncertain if they were still in Glen Trool. Had his wind riding reversed the spell by bringing Belle’s spirit to him? This apparition before him had her height and long black hair. She stared at his face for several seconds, as if she didn’t recognize him.
“I thought you were dead,” she said.
Overjoyed, he reached for her. “I searched for you at Kildrummy—”
A scrawny girl in rags pushed him away. “Don’t hurt me!”
He rubbed his eyes. What was this curse that every woman he now encountered looked like Belle? Was Morgainne playing games again with her glamourie? Recovering from his disappointment, he reached into his pouch and offered the half-starved lass a piece of jerky. “Are you from these parts?”
She stopped her chomping long enough to mumble, “Muldonoch.” She kept looking beyond his shoulders. “Where are the others?”
“What others?”
Her eyes darted from side to side. “I heard the king was in these woods.”
“Who told you that?”
She wouldn’t look at him directly. “Is there more food?”
He noticed a rip on her blouse edged with bloodstains. He tried to examine a whip mark on the top of her back, but she fought him off. He steadied her with a grip on her arm, then pulled down her collar and found her shoulders marred with flogging scars, recently inflicted. “Who did this to you?”
She tried to yank her arm free of his grasp, refusing to answer him.
He threw her over his shoulder. “You’ll damn well get your wish to see the king!”
JAMES WALKED INTO THE CAMP and dropped the kicking lass in front of Robert. “One of your subjects wishes an audience.”
“I sent you for venison. She looks too scrawny for roasting.”
James prodded the crawling girl forward on her knees. “We’re the hunted ones. And she’s the flush hound.”
Robert clamped the lass’s chin. “Who sent you into these wilds?”
The fierce glares from the men around her finally drove the frightened girl to an answer. “An Englishman named Clifford. He holds my family and said he’d kill them if I came back without learning your numbers.”
James roughly hoisted her to her feet. “Clifford is in Glen Trool? Lie to us, scamp, and you’ll wish you were back in his hands.”
“You think I don’t know who thrashed me? Another lord rides with him! They call him the Flower of Northumberland!”
He glanced at Robert with kindled anticipation on hearing the sobriquet of Pembroke, the treacherous earl who had deceived them at Methven. He tightened his grip on the girl’s shoulders. “How many are with him?”
“Three thousand, maybe more. They’re coming up the loch like locusts and bragging they ain’t leaving until they have King Hob’s head on a pike.”
Edward Bruce drew his dagger and grabbed the girl’s hair to bend her throat for cutting. “Traitorous hizzie! You’ve led him to us!”
“Lay off her,” Robert ordered.
Edward threw the girl aside, incredulous at his brother’s refusal to punish the treason. “We’ve waited for three months. All the English have done is gotten stronger. I say we attack them now!”
As the lass staggered coughing and gagging to her knees, Robert searched the dark d
epths of the wilderness below for more evidence to confirm her unlikely claim that an English army was here in the west, hunting them. If she spoke true, they would soon be surrounded and outnumbered. Although a few more recruits had trickled in to him from Carrick and Annandale, his younger brothers with their three hundred volunteers had not yet arrived from Ireland. “We can’t move against Pembroke without Tom and Alex.”
James saw that the girl became even more jittered at the mention of the Bruce kinsmen. He clamped on her arm to draw out what information she might be withholding. “What do you know about them?”
Her face turned white. “They landed in Galloway, but …”
“Out with it!” Robert shouted.
“The English captured them! They butchered your brothers and scattered their limbs for the crows to feed on!”
While Robert stood frozen, unable to believe what he had heard, Edward raced for his armor, frothing and swearing like a madman. Several of the men followed him to the weapons while others waited for the order to march on the English and take revenge.
James drew Robert aside. “If we splinter now, we’re lost.”
Robert dropped his hands to his knees. “What would you have me do?”
“We don’t have the numbers to fight them in the open.”
Edward, blind with rage, had to be restrained from rushing at James. “They weren’t your brothers!”
“Question my loyalty again, and I’ll do Clifford’s work on you!” James shoved Edward aside and climbed a boulder to be heard by all. “Have you forgotten Falkirk? The English bring warhorses and outnumber us six to one! I say we fight them at our time and in the manner of our choosing! Make the forest our field of battle and burn every path before them! Let them share the hunger we now suffer!”
Horrified, Edward looked to Robert, expecting him to countermand such a craven strategy. “Rob, Douglas would make us the laughing stock of every court. Do you want to be remembered as the king who turned Scotland into a land of cutthroats? If we’re to die, let us die with honor here.”
“Did Tom and Alex die with honor?” James asked Robert. “I say we send honor to Hell with the bloody English bastards!”
Still choked with grief, Robert waved up the little monk who now served as his chaplain. “I’d have the Almighty’s counsel on this.”
Sweenie pondered the dilemma. Then, he waddled up the boulder and climbed atop James’s shoulders to be heard by the ranks. “St. Peter carried a sword to defend our Lord. Did he not slice off the ear of a Roman soldier?”
McClurg nodded. “Aye, but Christ told him to lay down the blade in the garden of sorrows.”
“That He did, wise Master McClurg!” Sweenie cried. “Yet is not Our Lord all knowing? Christ knew that St. Peter was carrying the blade long before He ordered it sheathed. So, I ask you, why would Christ allow the apostle to bring the weapon in the first place if He did not believe there be a time and a place for its use?”
The men traded amazed looks; they were never disappointed in Sweenie’s ability to read signs and justifications for their cause in Holy Writ.
Sweenie kicked at James’s ribs, spurring him to keep moving along the high rock. “I once asked the Dewar about this very conundrum.” He delayed the revelation to heighten their expectation and draw the men even closer.
“Damn it, Sweenie!” McKie shouted at the monk, who was winking as if armed with a secret. “Are we going to have to beat it out of you?”
Sweenie grinned slyly. “Aye, lads, the Dewar did indeed tell me of a more satisfying explanation. One revealed in a long-lost gospel brought to our fair land by St. Joseph of Arimathea. St. Peter, it seems, was not a simple fisherman.”
“What was he, then?” Edward asked.
“A freedom fighter.”
“Like us!” McClurg observed.
Sweenie pounded his tiny palm against the top of James’s head to emphasize the point of his sermon. “Aye, like us, lads! The good saint of the sword and his mates were called Zealots. Why? Because they fought like madmen to rid their people of a conqueror’s yoke. And like us, they hadn’t the numbers or weapons to overcome the Romans in open battle. So, what’d they do, you ask? They relied upon raids and the fomenting of trouble in the night.” He paused to allow the import of this to sink in. “Now I’m asking myself why should we fight our war on the Devil’s terms? God intended no man to be a slave to another. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, saith the Lord. I say we give to Longshanks what he’s given us. Hunger and fire and terror!”
Robert regarded Sweenie skeptically, but finally he begrudged the monk a nod of approval. His new Culdee chaplain might not be the most orthodox of churchmen, but he knew how to spiritually prepare men for war.
James heaved Sweenie off his shoulders and landed him with a knuckle-scrape on his tonsured dome in congratulations. “Well-preached for an excommunicated homunculus.”
Motioning James and Sweenie down, Robert climbed atop the vacated boulder to address his men. “Let this be our testament! Tell our people that we will harry the English on foot and draw them to the darkest corners of our terrain! Turn the forests and moors and mountains into our allies! Our war will know no season! Let the English come north and find fields burned and laid waste! Soon enough their empty guts will have them longing for home!”
James saw the traitorous girl listening spellbound to the speech. He looked up to Robert and asked, “What about the lass?”
Robert glared down at the girl. “Are you a true Scot?”
She cowered on her knees, expecting her throat to be cut. “Aye, my lord.”
“And you’re willing to prove it?”
“For your forgiveness, anything.”
Robert forced her to suffer another moment’s penance, then ordered her: “Return to Clifford and tell him that King Hob sits at the mouth of Loch Trool licking his wounds.”
“What if he asks of your strength?” she asked.
Finding her counting the men with her fingers, James curled her hand into a fist to save her the trouble. “Tell our old friend Clifford the truth. Our king is accompanied by five hundred miserable skeletons who never cease scrapping.”
THE NEXT MORNING, JAMES LED ten men on a run across the western traverse of the steep Trool. On the opposite banks of the loch, Edward Bruce and his detachment of two hundred Scots hid behind the trees high on the ridges while Robert and the rest of the army remained in the camp to stoke the fires that would hopefully seduce the English into the glen.
James conceded that this plan to split their small troop was fraught with risk, but he could see no other choice. If the English were allowed to pass through the forest uncontested, Pembroke and Clifford would reach the sea and burn the coastal cities between Straener to Turnberry.
He felt behind his back for his ax, making sure it was still there. All now depended on his suspicion that the stubborn English whoresons had not learned the lesson of Stirling Bridge. He would apply Wallace’s famous feint again, allowing them to chance upon him in the glen. Once discovered, he would retreat on foot and draw the English cavalry deeper into the wilderness on a chase. When Clifford’s knights became separated from the protection of their infantry, he and his Scot raiders hidden on the hills above would introduce the English to Hell’s new location.
After positioning his men in their lairs at the bottom of the glen, he sent the three sons of the Galloway crone ahead to scout. The elusive lads had earned the nickname “the Trinity” because they seemed everywhere at once; Murdoch, the fastest and quietest runner of the three, had been dubbed the Unholy Ghost.
Minutes later, the Trinity brothers returned from their reconnaissance and hightailed it around a bend where the loch angled sharply. They found their comrades hidden behind the brush on the mountain’s side of the path.
“Three hundred yards,” Murdoch whispered to James. “Clifford leads the column in full armour.”
James grinned. Just as he had hoped, Pembroke and Clifford had divided t
heir forces and were now marching down both sides of the loch. Now, he needed one more break to fall his way. Pembroke was too clever to bring his knights into such a narrow confine without infantry at his front, but Clifford did not have the patience to be slowed by a large number of foot soldiers. With a series of prearranged hand signals, he set the rest of his men in the brush on the steepest side of the path. Satisfied with their concealment, James abandoned his hiding and walked casually down the path toward the sounds of clanging breastplates and pikes.
Clifford, riding at the head of the knights, kept his attention locked on the high ridges overhead. Behind him, two hundred infantrymen marched warily, two abreast. The English officer rode several more paces down the path before discovering a bearded man in buckskins standing with his fists set on his waist. He cantered closer—and lurched forward from sudden recognition.
James retreated in a slow run back up the glen.
Clifford dug in his spurs and charged. “A hundred pounds to the man who takes Douglas alive!”
The single line of mounted English knights imploded in a greed-fueled rush to fight for advantage on the narrow path. Pinned by the loch on one side and the wooded rise on the other, several drove their mounts into the water in search of a shortcut.
Luring them closer, James ran along the banks while looking over his shoulder. Clifford was gaining on him. He counted off the seconds to estimate how many more English had passed the position of his hidden men. When Clifford came within a lance’s throw of him, he darted off into the thicket.
“Don’t let him escape!” Clifford shouted. “Leave the horses!”
Screams rang out from the rear of the English column.
Clifford spun in his saddle.
The Trinity lads were ambushing his stragglers and slicing the throats of those who could not move forward. Thwarted from going to their rescue by the mash of his own column, the officer had no choice but to drive deeper into the glen. A rumbling shook the ridge above him—felled trees and boulders came crashing down the slope. He and his English knights leapt from their horses and dived into the loch to avoid the avalanche.