The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (5 page)

B
ELLE AND THE
M
AC
D
UFFS WERE
greeted by hostile stares from the other clans, who had gathered under an expanse of tall oaks in a sheltered Lanarkshire vale. On her journey south, she had overheard her father warn that such a large congregation of armed men threatened to draw retaliation from the English garrison at Carlisle. But Wil Douglas, the rebel leader who had recently bribed his release from Berwick’s dungeon, knew Edward Longshanks’s scheming mind better than most, and he had convinced the guardians that less suspicion would be aroused if they held their secret meeting here in the South, disguised as the annual harvest celebration. It was for this reason that her father and his ally, Red Comyn, a claimant to the throne, had reluctantly agreed to cross into the shire of the despised Douglases, the clan that had been their enemy for centuries.

As her father and brothers rode through the encampment with their chins in the air, she hung back several lengths, the only protest she could muster against her contrived presence here. She saw Wil Douglas waiting for their arrival at the tower of his castle with his second wife, the former Eleanor de Louvain, a frail Northumbrian sparrow who had fallen in love with him after he had taken her hostage during a raid on Jedburgh. She felt sorry for the Douglas chieftain’s new wife, for she was rumored to have no friends, disowned by her Northumbrian kin as a traitor and shunned by distrustful Scots.

She scanned the bleak environs and shook her head, unimpressed. These endless meadows, broken only by an occasional rocky eruption, resembled Yorkshire more than the northern Scot provinces. Huts slathered with pitch circled the tower like clusters of barnacles, and the curtain wall looked to have been razed and rebuilt so many times that its patchwork masonry brought to mind a cheap quilt. On a barren hillock to the west stood a sleepy village of twenty mud-joisted cabins. The Douglas Water, a rusty creek barely deep enough to sustain a small school of salmon, meandered past the only redeeming feature in this forgettable place: a small kirk dedicated to St. Bride.

Dismounting without an
offer of assistance, she walked unescorted through the camp. Everyone was
talking about the war, laying blame for the loss of Berwick, and she found it
nigh impossible to follow these swirling tempests and feuds. But there was one
reality she understood all too clearly: That despicable English king with the
odd nickname had ruined her dream of seeing the Stone of Destiny, and she would
very much like to curse the ogre to his face.

She was about to rehearse
the precise wording of that condemnation when a blast from a ram horn disrupted
the clans from their ale-fueled arguments. As if struck by madness, the men ran
howling toward the south gate. She was swept up in their rush and deposited in
an open field where twenty boys, including her two youngest brothers, crouched
at the ready with axes in their hands. Barefoot and naked to their waists, they
had formed up what appeared to be a battle line. Breathless, she exclaimed,
“Are the English upon us?”

A tall, shaggy Bute man standing next to her spewed his
mouthful of ale. “English? Are you a peat brick shy of a decent fire, lass? The
lads are running for the Dun Eadainn Ax.”

The rube spoke with such
a thick tongue that she had to ask him to repeat his explanation. Disgusted
with her ignorance of the northern Gaelic, he peppered his translation with enough
Scot words that she finally took his meaning. “They’ll catch their deaths in
this cold! Just for a tool?”

The inebriated Highlander swooped over her again, dowsing
her in spittle. “A
tool
, you say? A
talisman of miracles it is, holy as the Rood itself! Brought across the sea by
Fergus and buried under the great Arthur’s throne on Eadainn Fort Hill!” He
cursed her ignorance with a wild swipe at the air. “Go clean the trestles! This
is no business for a mush-headed filly anyway.”

She looked around and saw that the other women had retired
to the tower, no doubt to warble about wool spinning or the latest in fashion
from the Continent. Not interested in such trivialities, she ignored the command
to join them and pushed deeper through the throng of men to find out what was
so important about this race. At the starting line, she found the young
competitors elbowing for the best position. She risked another question to the
hairy drunkard who had just tried to banish her. “Which one’s the fastest?”

The Bute man huffed,
resigned to her persistence. “Put your purse on the carrot-headed one with the
idle eye. He’s half blind, but don’t let that fool you. He’s as ornery as his
old man. John Comyn’s his name. Everyone calls him ‘Cam’ because of the crooked
way he ganders.”

Hearing his name, Cam Comyn looked up from his three-pointed
stance and startled Belle with a buck-toothed grin. His lazy eye trailed off,
causing her to look toward its unintended direction. He regained her attention
by flexing his scrawny biceps in her face.

She was astonished that anyone might suppose such
boorishness remotely impressive. Sniffling and blowing snot, the clod possessed
the vapid stare and twittering movements of a dullard. Indeed, a more repugnant
creature she could not imagine—until the taller boy next to him turned toward
her. That one possessed severe Nordic features with dirty sandy hair and slant
narrow eyes. His high pale cheekbones were pocked from the pox and his bridged
nose resembled the jutting prow of a galley. She had seen gargoyles more
pleasing to look upon.

The Bute man poked her
shoulder in a taunt. “Then again, there’s his cousin, John Comyn of Buchan.
He’s more balm for the eyes, eh lass?”

“I thought you said the other one was John Comyn?”

“The whole brood goes by
that name. Mayhaps those are the only two words they can all scribble.” The
Highlander’s huge girth rippled from his laughter. “Tabhann is what they call
the taller lad to keep the two scarecrows straight. You wouldn’t know what that
name means, would you now, being a right learned Fife lady and all. Tabhann is
Gaelic for a dog’s bark.” He unleashed a volley of ferocious yelps.
“Do you catch it, lass? His bark be worse than his bite!”

With her ears ringing, she tried to escape the converging
huddle of men, but Tabhann Comyn cut off her path. She forced another opening
with her elbows and took off on a dash, dodging the laughing clansmen—only to
whipsaw like a newborn colt into a short, bare-chested competitor.

The clansmen howled with laughter at her skittishness.

Blinded by embarrassment, she was pulled to her feet by the
boy she had just head-rammed.

“Here’s a fine turn,” the boy announced with a slight lisp.
“For once, a lassie running
to
me.” Just as swiftly, he turned his
attention back to the race and fixed his eyes on the only high ground within
sight, a distant crag overgrown with trees and circled by a narrow path.

She couldn’t be certain what unnerved her more: this
tadpole’s smirking quip, or his ability to put her out of his mind so easily.
As if reading her thoughts, he turned again and winked. She recoiled with a
bounce of her chin.
Who is this
infuriating lad?
Such preening confidence was unnatural in one so slight.
She caught herself staring at him with a blushing smile.

Tabhann crumpled her new admirer with a fist to his ribs.
“Leave her be.”

A second blast of the horn shot the runners off in a whirl
of mud and grass. Tabhann took off with them, turning to laugh at his victim,
who was still on his knees and gasping for air.

Belle ran to the injured boy and lifted him to his feet. Her
act of mercy miraculously revived him, and although his head barely reached her
chin, he lifted to his toes and kissed her on the lips. She shut her eyes in
shock. When she reopened them seconds later, she discovered that he had shot
off like a hare. She was allowed no time to either enjoy or despise the
moment—her arm was nearly yanked from her shoulder.

Her father dragged her away. “Stay clear of the Douglases!”

Roughly handled, she glanced back at the last runner—
that
faint sliver of bone and flesh was the son of Wil Douglas? “I only asked if he
was hurt!”

“And shamed your own kin!”

“Are the Douglases not Scots?”

Her father answered her
with a slap that stung like flung ice. “Black stain of Original Sin, you are!”
he shouted. “Damnable jeeger of me whole brood!”

She stifled a cry. The blow hadn’t hurt half as much as the
judging gawks of the clansmen around her. Tall, with thick dusky hair and a
copper complexion, she was again made aware that she looked nothing like her
stout father and choleric brothers with their flaming red scalps and freckled,
liverish skin. They treated her like a bastard child, so much so that she often
fantasized that she had been stolen at birth from another country. It was near
to the truth, for her father never tired of shaming her with the story of how
the first MacDuffs had arrived with the Gaels to subdue the darker Pict savages
that had painted their bodies with pagan tattoos and had sacrificed their
children to appease the gods of their warrior queens. She was constantly being
reminded that her deceased mother had come from those same witch-hatched
natives.

Wiping the sting from
her cheek, she stole another glance at the competitors running off. The Douglas
boy, she then realized, was dunned with the same tawny complexion. She wondered
if he also suffered taunts of being sired from the Black Danaan, a race of
foreigners said to have arrived on the Isles from Iberia.

Shrugging off that mystery, she looked up and caught Red
Comyn watching her humiliation with unabashed relish. Thickset and looming,
this awful man who claimed title to the Scot crown had a ruddy face overgrown
with an unkempt flaming beard, and he took in all that passed with the cold
eyes of a mountain cat. But there was no stealth of movement about him; he
walked with a lumbering step and was always heard before seen, wheezing and
heaving with each breath, as if unable to summon sufficient air through his
trefoil nose webbed with fine blue lines. Most who encountered him for the
first time mistook this odd mannerism for derisive snorts.

Red chortled. “You could have used another son, eh MacDuff?
But she serves your purpose nigh.”

Ian forced a leg of roasted rabbit into her hand. “Put some
meat on that scrawny frame! Red’s kinsman won’t beseek a bag of bones for a
wife!”

She stared gape-mouthed
at her father. “I am to be … married off?”

“Did ye think I brought you here for idleness?” he said with
a snarl. “You’re a woman now. That’s what you’re always telling me. Bonnie
chance it is that Red here and his roosters take a fancy to you.”

Red dug his greasy hand
into her hair as if planting a claim. “You’re not too fine for us, are you now,
lass?”

She tried to fight him off. “I’d rather die!”

Her father cocked his fist at her again. “I’ll damn well
grant the wish!”

She flinched, but this time she felt nothing.

A loud collective roar caused her to open her eyes. Wil
Douglas had rammed her father into a tree. Stoked by the prospect of a fight,
the clansmen cheered the two brawlers on. Forgotten in the melee, she stalked
the scrum and silently urged the Douglas chieftain to deal her father a painful
lesson.

The elder Douglas heaved Ian onto his back. “Take a hand to
that lass again and I’ll make certain you never sire another miserable
MacDuff!”

Red Comyn dragged Wil Douglas off of Ian. “We’ve had
enough of your meddling! You lost Berwick! But you had no trouble saving your
own hide!”

The Douglas chieftain
raised his bloodied fist. “Berwick fell because you—”

“That’s Jamie Douglas in the fore!”

Alerted by that shout of
disbelief, the clansmen turned to see the puniest of the competitors leading
the pack down the slope at the halfway point.

Belle took advantage of the distraction to get away from her
father and the Comyn chieftain. She rushed to the edge of the camp and saw
young Douglas pull several paces ahead of the other boys. He was almost flying
across the rocks while carrying an ax half as heavy as his own weight.

A MacDonald man drained his tankard and chased the gulp with
a gibe aimed at the Comyns. “Red, when’s the last time one of your brood lost
the race?”

Before Red could recover from the shock, Wil Douglas
answered for him, “When I outpaced him on Ben Nevis thirty years ago.”

The clansmen cackled and thumped forearms—all but the Comyns
and MacDuffs, who stood glaring at the distant runners in stupefied silence.

While the others rushed to gather at the finish line, Belle
saw Red Comyn nod furtively to her eldest brother, who acknowledged the mysterious
signal and slithered off. The Comyn chieftain pointed a finger at her in
warning that she’d best not reveal what she had just witnessed. She turned back
toward the crag in time to see the Douglas boy disappear into the thick oaks.

H
IS CALVES THREATENED TO CRAMP,
but James drove on through
the swirling patches of low fog and blinding glints of light. Having run this
route a hundred times, he knew the last stretch would be the most difficult, a
steep descent down loose rocks followed by the long kick over the flat valley.
But he had never risked a sprint so early in a race, and now his sides felt as
if they were going to split. Would he have enough strength left for the
straightaway?

He heard the yells of the other runners several lengths
behind.

The black raven that had followed him from the start circled
and led him on. Another turn, and he arrived at the final target: an image of a
dragon painted on an ancient oak. Should he waste precious seconds to cross the
ravine and impale his ax at close range? If he threw it on the run and missed,
the ax might tumble into the gorge, and he’d be disqualified. Without slowing,
he drew a deep breath and let the ax fly.