The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (76 page)

Belle wept as she offered him the jar. “Drink, my love.”

He reached to caress her blessed cheek. Her hair smelled of
fresh rose water and her light copper skin was as smooth and unblemished as on
that first day she had hovered over him during his boyhood race. How had she
escaped the Berwick cage? He tried to clear his mind, but the blinding throbs
kept attacking his temples. Had Caernervon concocted the false report of her
death? Had the knave somehow deceived Isabella into unwittingly abetting the
plot? Fighting faintness, he pressed his palms to his burning cheeks.

God damn these headaches!

A cascade of fractured
thoughts flooded his brain. Rather than surrender Belle after Bannockburn,
Caernervon must have secreted her here from England and ordered her nursed back
to health to be used as a pawn in future negotiations. But why had he hidden
her in this outback? Of course! The treacherous Dominicans had confined her in
some desolate Spanish nunnery in exchange for being allowed to install the
Inquisition on the Isles. After Caernervon was deposed, the monks must have
abandoned her rather than reveal their role in the nefarious deed.

Belle dipped her sleeve into the water to cool his grimed
face. “It is all in the past now, Jamie. If we’re to fill that manor with those
children, we’d best head home and get started.”

He gasped with joy. Heaven-sent proof!

Only she knew of the plans they had discussed on the eve of
the Methven ambush. He accepted the jar with trembling hands and poured its
soothing water down his throat and across his seared face. Replenished, he
moistened his lips and leaned down to receive the kiss he had been denied for
half his life. The jar fell from his grasp—shards shattered across the
sun-cracked ground.

Morgainne stood grinning up at him.

Distant shouts in a foreign
tongue rang out from the ridgelines.

Disoriented, he turned to
search for Belle again, but she had vanished. He looked up to the horizon.
Surrounding him were five hundred Moors on horse flying banners with the Red
Crescent. Their leader, Osmin, smiled down at him and, seeing no sign of the
Calatravans, raised his hands skyward to thank Allah for the good fortune.

The shape-shifting goddess drew a sickle from under her robe
and honed its edge with a sharpening stone. “Did ye think I’d forgotten?”

He swallowed painfully and tasted blood on his cracked
tongue. Not a drop of water had touched it. The death hag, he realized, had
deceived him with her glamourie. He clutched his breast, reassured at least
that the heart cask still hung from his neck. “I gave Robert my word on
Jerusalem.”

“Aye, ye did make that promise, didn’t ye. But your fate was
writ in the stars long before. Comes round all life, biting its tail in the
eternal jig.” She smiled at him one last time, then sank into her hood and
disappeared in a whirlwind of sand. Moments later, a raven flew from the vortex
and fluttered away.

“Jamie!” Sinclair called out. “Are you heatstruck?”

Roused, James blinked hard. There was no spring well before
him, only more dust-choked plains. He drew a wheezing breath and hung his head
in despair.

Ah Rob, I have failed you.

Alfonso’s lady had spoken true. He
had
grown too
old for the fighting. His gut instincts for sensing a trap had failed him.

As McKie, McClurg, and the Templars formed up in a mounted
schiltrons around him, he nodded in grim acceptance of his fate, and then rode
aside d’Aumont. “There is something I have long wished to ask you.”

D’Aumont girded his breastplate. “Then you had best ask it
quickly.”

“Those scrolls of the saints you found in Jerusalem. Did
they affirm Our Lord’s promise of Heaven’s reward?”

With an admonishing glare, D’Aumont repulsed that question
born from a crisis of faith. “You know I have taken an oath of secrecy.”

“Aye, and was that oath made to the same God of the Roman
Church who abandoned your Order to the torture chambers of Paris?”

D’Aumont paled at that reminder of the Church’s betrayal.

“Have we Scots not been more brother to you than those
tonsured sheep in Avignon?”

The Templar sighed,
nodding to confirm the truth of that point. Driven to the revelation, he said
in a near whisper, “There will be no Day of Judgment. No bodily escape from the
grave.”

Shaken, James watched as the Moors on the ridges drew their
scimitars and made a great show of forming up and contending over which
squadron would take the honor of leading the assault. “And the Resurrection?”

D’Aumont shook his head at the futility of it all. “Our Lord
reappeared to the Apostles in spirit only. He never sought to be nailed to the
Cross. Only a fool, or worse, a priest, would claim that needless suffering
leads to salvation. Christ begged his disciples to follow His teaching, not to
worship His untimely death. His brother James and the Magdalene understood
this. Most did not.”

“If Christ did not overcome the flesh for our sins, how then
are we to be redeemed?”

“Not by blind belief in the dictates of murderous popes.”

“Then these crusades against the infidel have been for
naught?”

D’Aumont nodded bitterly. “There have been many creeds. But
none have ever been superior to one’s own truth. Our war is not fought between
faiths. It is fought by the legions of Light against the archons of Darkness.”

James dropped his chin to his chest. Why had he asked such a
blasphemous question at this last hour of his life? Thousands of crusaders
before him had gone to their deaths fortified at least with the certainty of
Heaven’s approach. Now he understood why certain conspirators in the Church had
goaded the French king and his puppet pope to eradicate these Templars. If the
contents of their Jerusalem scrolls were ever widely revealed, the reason for
the Church’s wars against the Albigensee heretics and these Saracens would be
exposed: The suppression of Christ’s true mission.

He thought he had come to know these Templars, but the more
he learned about them, the more shrouded in mystery they seemed. “If you do not
revere Our Lord’s Tomb, why then did you accompany me on this journey?”

D’Aumont and his two monks reached into their packs and
unfurled their old mantles emblazoned with the splayed red crosses, just as
they had done at the climax of the charge at Bannockburn. Theirs would be the
last Templar blood shed in battle. Unlike the beams of the Roman cross of
mortification, the traverses of their
cross pattée
did not end
disconnected, but flared until their tips nearly merged, an esoteric promise
that those who fought against the slavery of Darkness would one day reunite to
defend the Light of Truth again.

On the ridges around them, the Moors saw the red crosses.
They reined back, daunted by the reappearance of an old enemy they thought long
vanquished..

D’Aumont straightened in the saddle and glared defiantly
against what Fate had brought him in his final hour. Finding James still
waiting for an answer to his question, the Templar finally admitted, “We came
because you Scots gave us refuge.”

James turned aside in shame, disgusted at having pitied his
own misfortune. At least he would die on a mission for his country. These men
were about to sacrifice themselves for a mere debt of honor.

Devoid of a plan for the first time in his life, he could
think of nothing more to do but ride forward and mark off those fighting at his
side, an old habit. He reached the end of his line of mounted warriors and
rubbed his bleared eyes. Was his roasted mind betraying him again? He circled
and again counted ten knights—one more than he had brought here, with Keith
back in Seville tending his broken arm.

A ruddy-faced newcomer spat a maw of chewed root at the
hooves of James’s horse. “Another bonnie scrape you’ve led us into, Douglas.”

James blinked hard, confounded. Where had he seen that deft
arc of spittle before?
No, it couldn’t be.
The death goddess had to be
playing another one of her perverse tricks on him. “Gib?”

“I’m still of the opinion that you’re touched in the head.”

“Where did you come from?” James asked, questioning his own sanity.

“I never left you.”

James glanced at the Templars to test if they too saw Gibbie
Duncan, his boyhood mate who had jumped to death on the gallows at Berwick. Had
these monks applied their occult craft to tear away the veil separating this
world from the next? Did this prove the Culdee claim that existence is a
circle, spiraling from flesh to shade and back to flesh?

“A lass is waiting for you over that ben,” Gibbie said,
gnawing casually on a root. “She said to tell you to look up.”

James lifted his pained eyes to the sky, now cast in that
liminal golden light of a late Spanish afternoon, when the constellations could
be seen without the aid of darkness. Above the Castle of the Stars, he found
the tail of Sirius, trailed by a lone silvery orb, pulsing and bright.

Keep watch on Columba’s star. I will find you.

Drawing strength from that reminder of Belle’s promise, he
reined forward, and as he straightened in the saddle, he felt Robert’s heart
cask bouncing against his breastbone. Its weight felt the same as the elf-stone
he had abandoned on the burning cage at Berwick. He had become so accustomed to
carrying Belle’s talisman over these many years that he had all but forgotten
its burden. Had she clairvoyantly given him the stone that day in Douglasdale
to prepare him for this final task?

The Moors screamed their battle cry, signaling the attack.

He offered up a silent prayer to Columba’s star, just as the
saint had done centuries ago from his lonely perch atop Iona’s grassy hillocks.
Death’s approach was not what brought the ache of anguish to his breast now.
No, it was the realization that he, like Columba, would never see home again.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine Loch Lomond on an autumn day. The
purple heather was ablaze and the oaks turned orange and red. A mizzling rain
began to dimple the glittering surface that danced with trout and fireflies,
and a bracing breeze wafted down the blue-green slopes of Glen Falloch to cool
his burning forehead. He would have stayed there forever had the distant shouts
not transformed from the high-pitched Arabic into the guttural yelps of
Yorkshire English.

Morgainne had granted him a last miracle.

Before him lay the Dryfield scarp at Bannockburn. Not the
infidels, but Caernervon’s thousands, were coming at him.

He would die in Scotland, after all.

He drew the Dun Eadainn ax from behind his back.

As the enemy closed in from all sides, McKie, McClurg, and
the Templars slammed down their visors to meet the onslaught.

Bemused by it all, Gibbie leaned an elbow against his pommel
and spat the last of his root mash in a jet that grazed James’s nose. “So, what
would the famous Black Douglas of Lanark who never suffered a scratch upon his
pretty face have us do now?”

James sat lost in the center of the storm. As the ring of
dust quickened and closed in on him, the ground quaked from the pounding of a
thousand hooves. He removed the cask from his neck and stared at it wistfully.
Robert’s heart would be lost, left to languish here …

They got us in fists, but we got them in wits.

He laughed aloud, braced by those words of bravado that
Robert had quipped to him when the Comyns had ambushed them as lads. If Gibbie
was with him now, could Robert, Sweenie, and the others be far behind, spouting
their taunts and jests? A balm of lightness swept over him, and then another
thought struck: Had Robert arranged this doomed journey to speed his reunion
with Belle?

“Jamie!” Gibbie cried over
the rising din. “What do we do now?

James leaned across the
saddle and thumped his old boyhood friend on the chest. “We do what we’ve
always done.” He whipped Robert’s heart cask by the cord above his head and
heaved it forward at the infidels like a slingshot. Spurring to his last
charge, he grinned at Gibbie and shouted, “We follow our king!”

A
S THE QUEEN MOTHER CAME
to the end of her account, William
Douglas sat in stunned silence. He remembered, as a lad, having heard that one of the Scots in the honor entourage, a knight named Keith, had been left in Seville to mend his broken arm. When Keith learned of the disastrous battle on the Al Andalus plains, he had rushed to the field and had found James’s riddled body near the thrown heart cask. Keith had brought both back to Scotland. Sighing from weariness with the world, he stood to take his leave, unable to comprehend why God had denied King Robert and his uncle their dream of reaching the Holy Land.

Isabella,
daubing her eyes with a kerchief, placed a hand on his forearm to delay him a
moment more. “The Bruce’s heart, I was told, now lies at Melrose Abbey?” When
the earl confirmed that report, she hesitated before risking the one question
that she had withheld for too many years. “I was never told where your uncle
was laid to rest.”