by Glen Craney
“Have you men been fishing again?” asked the mounted officer prodding him from the water. “This minnow is so puny you ought to throw it back.”
James shivered with doubled fear. He had never forgotten that haughty Herefordshire tongue that sounded so Welsh—it belonged to Robert Clifford, Longshanks’s cutthroat who had presided over Gibbie’s death at Berwick.
Clifford dismounted and dragged up Eleanor Douglas from the middle of a scrum that was abusing her with taunts and snaps of their reins. He clamped her chin and forced her to look at James, who was still on his hands and knees. “Is this who you’ve been looking for?”
Eleanor averted her eyes. “I don’t know this lad.”
Clifford pressed a heel against James’s neck to inspect his face more closely.
“My father rides here within the hour!” James blurted as his head was being crushed against the ground. “You’ll pay for this!” From an angle, he saw his stepmother close her eyes in anguish, and realized too late from her slumped reaction that she had been trying to hide his identity from the English. He had given himself away by his sheer rage.
His memory of Berwick revived, Clifford grinned and signaled for his troopers on the walls to drag out another prisoner. “He beat you to us.”
Bloodied and half-conscious from a beating, Wil Douglas was hauled through the gate. He looked up in despair to find that James had again disobeyed his order to remain home.
Clifford enjoyed watching their mutual humiliation. “This castle is forfeited to England. Its lord, a traitor, will be delivered to London Tower.”
James fought to escape his captors. “You won’t take him!”
Clifford throttled his neck. “Do you know where William Wallace hides?” When James shook his head, Clifford threw him to the ground and ordered his troopers, “Release the old man. Take the lad instead.”
“No!” Wil Douglas shouted.
James tried to rush to his father, but he was held back.
Laughing, Clifford slapped Wil to his knees. “He’s a damn nuisance to you, Douglas. Why not be rid of him?”
Glaring a warning at James to remain silent, Wil pleaded with Clifford, “Take me. That is the law.”
Clifford strode before his bemused troopers. “The outlaw quotes us the law!”
“These Scots breed like rats,” a sergeant warned. “If we don’t root out the whole brood, the young ones will come back to bite us. Let me string up the whelp.”
Clifford stared at James for a dangerous moment—and kicked him aside. “This one doesn’t even have babe teeth yet. He won’t nip at us. We hung his better half at Berwick.”
The sergeant didn’t look convinced by that prediction. “I’ve seen rats maul a hound in these parts.”
Clifford waved off the warning as he mounted again. “Leave the culls to breed. Soon enough, they’ll all be runts like him.”
James crawled to his father. “I’m sorry!”
On his knees, Wil grasped his son’s head with bloodied hands and whispered to his ear, “Your stepmother is with child.” He pressed so hard in desperation to impart the importance of what he would next say that James nearly screamed from the pain. Looking deep into his son’s frantic eyes, Wil ordered him, “Remember, you are a Douglas. You bend to none but God and your conscience.”
James fought back his tears, determined to honor his vow made over Gibbie’s body at Berwick, never to let the English see him weaken again.
As her husband was dragged away, Eleanor was prodded toward the burning tower, so near to the flames that she was forced to shield her face from the searing heat.
“You and the lad may stay with these walls,” Clifford told her. “Or what remains of them after they’ve cooled. Henceforth, all rents from this domain will be paid to me.”
“Winter will soon be on us!” Eleanor cried, falling to her knees to beg. “How will we find food?”
Clifford laughed over his shoulder. “You heathens are an enterprising tribe. You always seem to manage.”
VI
THE WINTER OF 1298 BROUGHT down the worst storm in memory from the Highlands, piling snow high against Castle Douglas. Robert Clifford had burned the hunting groves for fuel that fall, scaring off all wildlife except a few grouse, and the granaries had long since been emptied. Eleanor Douglas, too weak to nurse, had sent her new babe, Archibald, off to live with her husband’s kin in the north. And without even a crib of fodder left, many of the villagers had been forced to abandon Lanarkshire to beg for food on the streets of Carlisle or Stirling.
Wasted to the bone, James trudged back through the vast drifts toward the desolate tower and its crumbling roof, which now sheltered only a small section of the floor. Earlier that morning, leaving his stepmother wheezing aside the cold hearth and old Dickson nearly frozen at his post near the door, he had plodded outside, barely able to stand, hoping to snare anything that moved. Returning now empty-handed, he kicked open the iced door and staggered inside the fireless keep. He found Bishop Lamberton helping his stepmother sip from a gourd of cold gruel.
Seeing him, Eleanor struggled to her feet and drew a painful breath. “Jamie, ready the horse.”
James was so dizzy that he had to find the wall for support. Recovering his balance, he muttered the same promise he had made a hundred times. “Father will return soon.”
Eleanor shook her head to negate that hope. “The bishop here has generously agreed to take you in.”
Lamberton reached into his belt pouch and brought forth a slither of rabbit jerky. “Come, lad. It’s for the best.”
James shunted aside the offer, undone by his stepmother’s loss of faith in his ability to care for her. “You’d have me give up our home?”
“I’d have you live!” Eleanor cried. “I’d have us all live! There is nothing left for you here.”
Anxious to depart before the English patrols arrived, the bishop gathered up some of James’s ratty clothes strewn across the floor and packed them in his knapsack. “I need a notary, lad. I’m told you’re adept with the script.”
James resisted his attempt to lead him away. “I want to go fight with Wallace!”
Lamberton monitored the flapping oilcloth on the window for sounds of the dogs barking outside. “You must cast that nonsense from your head.”
“He was good enough for my father!”
“And for me, once,” Lamberton lamented, his voice trailing off in despair. “But we were all betrayed by our hearts.”
James turned on his stepmother, trying to find some sign of fight left in her. Four months had passed with no word from his father or Belle, true. Yet Eleanor had been the one who had firmed his father’s conviction when he doubted the wisdom of joining Wallace. She had even sent Hugh, her own eldest son by her first marriage, to take up with the rebel army. Now, she turned away from him, the last reserve of her resolve spent.
After a tense silence, Lamberton surrendered a revelation, one that Eleanor had apparently known for days. “Steady yourself, lad. … There is droch news from Falkirk.”
“Wallace?”
“Defeated in battle.”
James refused to believe the claim, until—
“Hugh!” Eleanor broke into tears of grief. “His body … found mutilated.”
Informed of his stepbrother’s death, James glared at her in accusation. How long had she known of Wallace’s defeat? She had tried to take the place of his deceased mother, Elizabeth Stewart, but he had never been able to forgive her for her English origins. Now, despite her losses, he turned a cold shoulder on her and, though fearing the answer, asked the bishop, “Wallace … is he dead, as well?”
Lamberton shook his head. “It was a near-run scrape. I begged him to take to the forest and wait for better ground. A prideful belief in his own invincibility blinded him. He formed up in the open fields against the English knights.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the Selkirk, with what remains of his force. The North is open fo
r plunder. My own lands in Kirkliston are aflame.”
“Wallace will fight again!”
Eleanor reached for his hand to calm him. “Jamie … Ian MacDuff was also killed in the retreat.”
James stared at the bishop, trying to make sense of what that welcome news might bode for his future. Then, suddenly roused from his torpor, he shook the snow from his cloak, determined to start out again and find Belle.
Eleanor blocked his path to the door. “I know you having feelings for the MacDuff lass. But her brother will now lead the clan, and he is no friend to us. The Comyns are in league with the MacDuffs. You must forget her. She’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
His vision tunneled from hunger and confusion. His expectation of Wallace’s victory and of marrying Belle during the peace that would follow was all that had kept him going. Inconsolable, he slid to his haunches.
Lamberton brought him back to his feet. “Come, lad. Serve as my scribe and learn the ways of statesmen. You may one day find the knowledge useful.”
LAMBERTON LED JAMES ON HORSE down the old Roman road that skirted the royal hunting park south of Stirling Castle, the legendary keep that guarded the main passage to the northern provinces. Clifford had set a toll station on the King’s Table, a circular plateau at the base of the crag where the great Arthur had once gathered his Grail knights, and English soldiers were hassling a long line of weary Scots, forcing them to pay an exorbitant tax to suffer the indignity of crossing Stirling Bridge and pass a macabre gallery of heads severed from those defenders butchered at Falkirk.
The bishop slowed their approach, and when the guards were distracted with abusing the waiting Scots ahead, he reined off the road into a thicket.
Aghast at the trespass, James resisted. “They’ll hang us for poaching.”
Lamberton signaled for him to follow on the quick, so James reluctantly obeyed. They gained the cover of the trees, and the bishop cocked his ear to make certain their detour had been accomplished without detection. The snowdrifts off the pike were too difficult for the horses to navigate, so the cleric dismounted and walked his mount along a frozen creek, the only path through this remnant of the ancient Caledonian Forest. Assured at last that they had not been followed, he revealed at last, “We are not going to St. Andrews.”
James held back, angered at being deceived. “The Hell you say!”
The bishop tromped on through the snow. “A galley awaits us in Argyll.”
“The Isles? Why did you lie to me?”
“Let this be your first lesson. Reveal your plans to no one, not even your closest comrade. The English have ways of forcing one to betray his loyalty.”
“I’ll not hide atop the peaks like some vagabond!”
“We sail from the Isles for Paris on the fortnight. France is our only hope to stop Longshanks.”
“What if the English discover you’ve left the country?”
“By law, I answer only to the Church. But I do not intend to test the immunity afforded me as a diplomat. We will sail from the west, out of reach of their ships in the Channel. And there is a landmark on our route that I wish you to see.”
DURING THEIR WEEKLONG JOURNEY UP the west coast, James found the bishop to be a mysterious, elusive man with many pagan quirks. Lamberton neither honored the Sabbath nor offered prayers in the traditional offices of a cleric, but rode with the wary gaze of a soldier, scouting each ridge and zigzagging between copses for cover. One morning, passing a Benedictine abbey near Turnberry, the cleric shot a wicked eye at its crooked Roman cross, denying it the traditional signing. Yet the most queer of all his rituals was a penchant for stopping under ancient oaks and pronouncing Gaelic blessings.
They had engaged in only desultory conversation until, reaching the Glen of Kilmartin at approaching dusk, they came upon a low bogland bordered by the purple hills and flooding waters of Loch Crinan. A giant fist of gray rock broke through a valley that had been turned into a glade by the melted snow. In the fields around this strange crag, peat harvesters had unearthed a dozen granite dolmens, all set in a circle.
Spying the imposing mount, the bishop lashed into a gallop as if greeting an old friend. He dismounted at the foot of the crag and waddled up a winding path, signaling for James to follow. Heaving from the exertion, the bishop finally staggered to the summit and dropped himself on a boulder. After regaining his breath, he ordered his new charge, “Tell me what you see.”
Gazing into the west, James shielded his eyes from the low sun. He could just make out the white foam of the Irish Sea through the mists. “I see the end of Scotland.”
“Nay, you see the beginning of Scotland.”
Perplexed by that suggestion, James looked down at his feet and saw that he was standing on an oblong slab the breadth of a shield. On its face, streaked with deep fissures channeled by rainwater, had been carved a drawing of a wild boar next to a worn footprint a knuckle in depth.
Lamberton raised his hands over the crag as if offering a benediction. “A thousand years ago, our first kings were inaugurated here. A great race of men brought the Stone of Destiny from Ireland to this very spot.”
James leapt off the sacred rock, afraid that he had just committed a sacrilege. “How did a bunch of sorry Irishmen get their hands on the Stone?”
“The Sons of Light were not Irish by birth,” the bishop explained. “They came from the East and taught the mysteries of civilization to many nations before settling in Ulster. They knew from their study of the stars that a great flood would soon inundate the world.”
“Drunken Ulstermen,” James scoffed.
The bishop smiled knowingly. “Drunk with wisdom. The Sons divined by second sight that only those dolmens down in that vale down there would survive the coming deluge. When the Druids arrived here from the mainland, many years later, they heard the stones whispering the prophecy.”
James ran a hand across the wrinkled rock, trying to imagine the Stone of Destiny resting on its base. “You’ve heard the Stone speak?” When the bishop did not answer him, he became more intrigued. He knelt and pressed his palm into the ancient footstep. “This is why you brought me here? To see a pile of old slags?”
“Your education is now my duty. If you wish to help me save Scotland, you must know what is truly at stake. William Wallace is a good man, but he has no understanding of the shrouded reason we must fight this war.”
James gazed south past the shimmering waters of Loch Fynne, unable to make sense of it all. Longshanks had already stolen the Stone of Destiny. How long would it be before he pilfered these sacred menhirs, as well? “It’s clear to me why we’re fighting. To drive out the English.”
Lamberton sized up his new student, as if judging whether he was capable of keeping a confidence. Deeming the risk worth the price, the cleric asked him, “You have heard of the Culdees?”
“The wizards who cower in the Highlands?”
Lamberton bristled at that slander spread by the Roman monks. “The Culdees are not pagan soothsayers. They are descendants of the first saints in this land, disciples who brought Christ’s teachings back to these shores long before the conniving Italians had ever heard an Apostle’s sermon.”
“Back here? What do you mean?”
“Our Lord came to this land as a young man.”
“Why?”
“To study with the Druids. Christianity was not brought to this Isle. It was born here.” Seeing James frown skeptically, the bishop persisted. “Do you know the name of the Druid god?” He did not wait for an answer. “Hesus. The name meant ‘He who survived death upon a tree’”
“I thought St. Patrick brought the Holy Word.”
The bishop scowled to belie that myth. “Rome claims to be the ordained ruler over all Christians, but the Culdees knew the truth. Their lineage reached back to the first believers in Jerusalem. When the missionaries from the Roman abbeys in France crossed the Channel, they discovered that the Culdees had been teaching Christ’s message for centuries
. Rome tried to destroy the Culdees, but some of them survived by hiding in the caves and forests.”
James regarded him with renewed intrigue. “How do you know this?”
After a hesitation, Lamberton revealed, “I am one of them.”
James’s jaw dropped.
Lamberton smiled with cold revenge on his lips as he gazed across the sacred horizon. “Aye, I wear the robes of the Roman church. I have no choice. But I carry on the Culdee fight to preserve God’s truth. That cause and Scotland’s freedom are bound together. Until our countrymen understand this, we will never be rid of our slavery to the Pope or to England. For now, it is a war that must be fought in the shadows.”
James wondered if this bishop had gone bampot in the head. “I still don’t see what this church dispute has to do with our rebellion.”
“There is always a deeper principle at stake than the one told the common soldier. Scotland is the last refuge of a much older faith, one that knows all men to be gods in the example of Christ the teacher.”
“That’s blasphemy!”
“Did Our Lord not promise that we would perform miracles even greater than His? Did He not say that we would only find Heaven by asking and seeking? His was not a command for blind allegiance to dogma, but a quest for one’s own truth.”
Confused, James shook his head. “And that is why England seeks to conquer us? To suppress Christ’s true teachings?”
The bishop rubbed his fists to ease the aching ague that had twisted his meaty fingers. “Longshanks lusts for dominion over France. He will do the pope’s bidding so long as Rome wields the balance in diplomacy. If we are to survive, and the true Church of Scotland is to survive with us, we must find a king with the heart of Wallace and the wiles of Edward Plantagenet.”
“What man could manage all of that?”
The bishop stood from his sitting and, with a tight-lipped smile that suggested he indeed had a candidate in mind, began walking back down the crag.
