The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas

by Glen Craney

  “Damn you, Clifford!” Gloucester shouted, finally regaining control of his mount. He looked over to see Clifford’s fingers quivering at his side. “What in Hell’s name is wrong with you? Are you not well?”

  Clifford could not steady his hand sufficiently to sheath his blade. “I was well enough until you came up on me like scofflaws!”

  “Bohun requires your presence.”

  Clifford persisted in staring at his own traitorous fingers.

  “Did you hear me? I said Bohun—”

  “I am not a goddamned wet nurse!” Clifford spat to curse Henry Bohun, the king’s hotfoot brother-in-law, a poseur who had never come near even a tavern brawl, let alone a battle. He had wasted half his time on this invasion attending to that coxcomb’s complaints. “He can find his own way, by Christ!”

  Gloucester despised Clifford, but he agreed with the officer’s indictment of the stupefying manner in which this invasion was being conducted. Bohun was merely the most recent addition to the bloated influx of court dandies being brought north. Also in the slowly advancing retinue rode the king’s new favourite, Hugh Despenser, a dolt whose ambitions were exceeded only by his appetite. Although Despenser could not have been more different in appearance and temperament from Gaveston, Caernervon had somehow become convinced that the Gascon’s soul had returned to him in Despenser’s youthful but dissolute frame. He searched the path up ahead. “Where is Bruce?”

  Clifford squeezed his fist, finally regaining control of his hand. “North of this bramble wood, by my surmise. I can smell the piss trail from him wetting his pants with fright.”

  “His bed-warmer Douglas will be with him,” Cam Comyn reminded.

  Clifford shielded his eyes from the first morning rays piercing the tall pines. He was determined to avoid battle until the entire army had mustered on the same field. The van marching up from Falkirk would reach the outskirts of Stirling within the hour, but its arrival would present him with a new difficulty. He was coordinating a procession, not an invasion. Caernervon alone traveled with a thirty baggage wagons, and Humphrey Bohun was so certain that Stirling Castle would be his new residence that he had commissioned a small navy to transport his furniture up the coast. Clifford had begged permission to divide the army and come at Stirling from three sides. Yet Caernervon, an aficionado of theatrics, insisted that the Scots be forced to witness his thirty thousand men marching together for dramatic effect. This narrow path through the Torwood required bringing the troops north in a single line, three abreast. The second division, escorting the king, would not arrive before nightfall.

  Henry Bohun, bouncing in the saddle like a sack of apples, came galloping up with his splashy gaggle of thirty knights. Against orders, he and his band of ale-swilling blowhards had left the king behind and were now hurrying ahead, lusting for blood sport with their silk banners flapping. The portly Bohun lifted the visor of his shiny new bascinet and, unloosing his white whiskers that resembled tusks, advised Clifford, “If you don’t increase the pace, we will run out of daylight before we can scare off the Scots.”

  Clifford felt his hand shaking again. “You and your tourney poltroons will frighten them enough with those fox plumes flying from your scalps. Perhaps you might make more noise to alert them.”

  “The king wishes Stirling taken before dusk,” Bohun insisted.

  Clifford bristled at the man’s incessant name-dropping regarding his private confidences with the king. “The infantry can cover barely a league at three hours.”

  “Then we shall ride on.”

  “The Hell you will! I command this—”

  Bohun ignored Clifford’s demand to wait for the rest of the army and instead drove deeper north into the Torwood with his thrill-seekers.

  AN HOUR LATER, HENRY BOHUN outraced his comrades to a clearing at the northern edge of the Torwood. He rode out into a sun-drenched meadow below Stirling Castle in the distance and found the Scots practicing their battle maneuvers on the far side of the burn. He pranced his magnificent steed to give the foot-bound bumpkins a fright.

  Clifford, giving chase, galloped out from the tangle of brush and saw to his dismay that the London popinjay was about to ruin his careful plans for a coordinated surprise attack. “Bohun! Back, damn you!”

  Bohun ignored the command and strutted closer to the burn. On the far side of the stream, the astonished Scots stared wide-eyed at his caparisoned warhorse. He spied a Scot officer on a palfrey riding across their lines in a harried effort to set them in battle formation. Grinning, he turned over his shoulder and shouted at Clifford, “God’s blessing! That’s the Bruce!”

  Clifford wheeled on hearing that cry. In his bumbling haste, Bohun had caught Robert Bruce on a transport pony without a stint of armor. The Scots around Bruce were in disarray, with a gap between their flank and the burn. He tensed with anticipation. Fortune had finally shined on him. He and his arriving knights would stare Bruce down and freeze the unprepared Scot levies in place until the first column of his English infantry came up. Then he would launch a flanking charge and order his archers to finish them off. At last he would gain his due glory, even before Caernervon even reached the field and—

  Bohun slammed his visor and galloped toward the burn.

  “No!” Clifford shouted.

  JAMES SHOUTED FROM ACROSS THE the field. “Rob!”

  On the near ridge, Robert turned on his palfrey toward the Torwood and saw the first elements of the English cavalry trickling out from the thick brush. A lone English knight had splashed across the burn and was now bearing down on him. He sat exposed on the open ground with no weapon.

  James reached behind his back for his Dun Eadainn ax. Too far to intercept the onrushing knight, he galloped up and heaved the weapon toward Robert.

  Robert caught the ax and held it on his pommel, restraining his frightened palfrey as the Englishman kicked his charger into its final approach. Bohun lowered in the saddle on the gallop and took aim at Robert’s exposed right pectoral. Seconds from impact, Robert reined his palfrey left, rearing it to its hinds, and shifted the ax to his right hand. Bohun swept past without finding his target. Robert drove the ax into the Englishman’s helmet—the handle splintered, but the blade impaled the crease of Bohun’s visor.

  Bohun dropped his lance and slumped against the cantle. His head dipped, his plume fluttering in the wind as his charger pawed for direction. With a sudden heave, he careened to the ground, crashing with a great clang of metal.

  Blood seeped from the slits of his bascinet.

  A stunned silence fell across the field.

  Several of the Scots in the ranks rushed up to pull off Bohun’s helmet. They found the Englishman’s head crushed between his bloodied side-whiskers.

  AT THE ENTRY TO THE Torwood, Clifford scrambled to form a battle line with the hundreds of his knights pouring into the clearing. Across the burn, he saw a dark-faced officer point toward the mounted English ranks and then lead a screaming charge down the slope.

  Was that Douglas’s banner with its field of robin-egg blue flying above them?

  Clifford reined his horse back a step. The Scots were hurling themselves at him like savages. Damn that fool Bohun! He signaled Gloucester and fifty knights forward, but when Cam Comyn held back, he demanded of the Scot, “Are you going to fight, or just watch?”

  “I’ll fight,” Cam said. “On my terms, not Douglas’s.”

  Halfway to the burn, James halted his Lanark men and back-stepped them into a slow retreat.

  Clifford laughed at their sudden loss of courage. Stoked for the easy kill, he signaled for his mounted knights to double their pace and charge the fleeing Scots. In an act of sheer luck, Bohun’s festoonery had seduced the undisciplined Scot mob into giving battle too soon. He was about to give the order for his archers, now rushing forth from the brush, to finish the Scots off when he saw Gloucester and his knights plunge into the earth. Confounded by their disappearance, he stood in his stirrups to search the terrain for
his cavalry.

  One by one, his dazed English knights climbed out of the holes that had been hidden with sod. Their mounts, impaled on the caltrop spikes, writhed and whinnied in agony. Gloucester staggered across the piles of mangled horseflesh in a frantic effort to rally his survivors.

  The Scot retreat had been a sham.

  Clifford watched, stunned, as Douglas turned and led his Lanark men back into the valley. With bloodcurdling yells, the Scots descended on the confused English knights and hacked at them with their clubs and claymores. Rattled, Clifford rushed his Welsh archers to the front and gave orders to fire. The sergeant of the archers delayed, fearful of hitting their own men, but Clifford nodded grimly for the enfilade to proceed. Commanded to the task, the archers reluctantly drew their bows and unleashed a hail of missiles that darkened the sky.

  Shouts of warning shook the field, and James and his men fell in unison, retracting their legs under their shields. The English knights who had survived the pits now suffered the impact of the arrows from their own archers. The vale filled with screams and the pings of iron points. Gloucester dodged the enfilade as he fought his way back to the Torwood.

  James and his men sprinted toward the forest to finish off Clifford’s unhorsed knights, but they were halted by hundreds of English infantrymen flooding out of the Torwood onto the Roman road. Only a few yards from Clifford, James found himself surrounded by Yorkshire pikemen. Outnumbered, he fought his way out and led his men back across the burn. Edward Bruce’s schiltrons broke ranks to provide him cover. The hellish maze of pits and wounded men slowed the English infantry, which finally gave up its chase and retreated to the Torwood. The Northern Scots mobbed their returning comrades and lifted James onto their shoulders.

  “You gave them a bonnie taste of Lanark steel, Jamie!” Randolph shouted.

  The risky charge had given Robert time to retrieve his armour from Coxet Hill, and now he rode down the lines on his battle charger. “To your squares!”

  Sobered by that warning, James ordered the celebration to cease and reformed his men to meet the inevitable English counterattack.

  IN THE TORWOOD, CLIFFORD MARCHED up to Bohun’s mangled body and kicked it so hard that some swore they saw it twitch. In the span of mere minutes, the London upstart had managed to destroy what had taken Longshanks two decades to gain: Scot fear of heavy cavalry. For the first time, those clan savages hooting and hollering beyond that burn had witnessed one of their own vanquish an English knight on an open field.

  Clifford looked across the rising ground that ran through the Bannock village. This opening skirmish had allowed Bruce time to set his defenses. The Scot right flank, commanded by Edward Bruce, appeared strong and fixed against the dense foliage of New Park, and Douglas was now stationed in the center. But Randolph’s division sat farther north, overlooking the road to Stirling. Bruce’s nephew would command Northern men, many who were deserters and disaffected conscripts from Comyn’s old army. Clifford smiled grimly as he traced the battle line toward Stirling Castle. Bruce had been forced to stretch his reserves so thin that he had left a gap in the crease between the divisions led by Douglas and Randolph.

  There was their soft underbelly.

  “We should renew the attack before they mass,” Gloucester advised.

  Clifford mounted. “Wait here for the king to arrive.”

  Gloucester tried to capture Clifford’s reins to delay him for an explanation. “Where in Hell’s name are you off to now?”

  Clifford brushed the baron aside and disappeared into the Torwood.

  AFTER POSITIONING HIS TROOPS ATOP the high ground overlooking the Carse, James hurried toward a brae below Coxet Hill, where the royal standard had been planted on a borestone. In the three hours since the morning fight, a disturbing calm had descended on the vales. Roiling clouds were now gathering in the west, making it look more promising that his prayer for rain might yet be answered. If he and his men held off the English until dusk, they could move back off the ridge during the night and find shelter in the New Park. Yet it was that turn of season when the light lingered well after midnight, affording Clifford time yet to launch another frontal assault.

  At the borestone, he found Robert pacing the summit, guarded by Keith’s light horse of five hundred, the only cavalry in their army. He reported to Robert, “The English still won’t make a move.”

  “Where is my brother? I ordered him up here an hour ago!”

  “No doubt parlaying with Caernervon for another truce. Perhaps this time he’ll hand over Edinburgh.” He knew how to light Robert’s fuse; Edward was loyal to be sure, but the hotheaded Bruce brother had become increasingly jealous of Robert’s stature. Denied the Scottish throne because of his birth order, Edward was now so obsessed with invading Ireland and declaring himself that isle’s monarch that James suspecting him of agreeing to suspend the Stirling siege to hasten the decisive battle that would free him to pursue his Irish fantasies.

  “Leave off him, Jamie,” Robert ordered. “I have enough to worry about without the two of you constantly wrangling.”

  “If he crowds my division,” James warned, “I’ll kick him back to Ireland.”

  Robert fixed his worried gaze on the old Roman road that disappeared into the Torwood. “Why does Clifford wait?”

  Before James could offer a guess, screams came from their rear. He and Robert turned toward the sounds of battle and saw five hundred English knights making fast for Stirling below the brow of the Carse, east of St. Ninian’s kirk.

  Clifford was attempting to outflank them.

  Stationed there to prevent such a ruse, Randolph had failed in his duty. He spurred up Coxet Hill in a sweat and cried, “They stole on us under cover!”

  Stunned, Randolph spurred up Coxet Hill in a sweat. “They stole upon us under cover!”

  Robert made no attempt to hide his anger at his nephew for failing to protect their left flank by keeping the far bank of the burn scouted. “A rose has fallen from your garland, Thomas!”

  Randolph came to a ragged halt, crushed by the king’s condemnation.

  “We’re all to blame,” James said. “We had equal vantage.”

  Robert had no time to soothe Randolph’s injured pride. “Jamie, hurry to Tom’s aid before the lads break!”

  As James rushed his fifteen hundred men toward St. Ninian’s kirk, Randolph galloped back to his division and led his Northern men into the low ground in a last-ditch attempt to intercept Clifford’s knights. Despite Robert’s orders, James held his troops back while he watched Clifford form his cavalry into a broad line for an assault against Randolph’s schiltron. Now dismounted, Randolph steeled his men to remain steadfast in their square. The first ranks dropped to their knees and lowered their pikes just seconds before Clifford’s knights crashed into them. Randolph’s schiltron wavered but held, repulsing the first onslaught.

  Robert cantered with rising agitation across the brow of Coxet Hill. He shouted at the Lanark men, “To him now, Jamie!”

  Yet James stood back, monitoring the grinding shifts of momentum between Randolph’s schiltron and the English knights. If Randolph could turn back Clifford without his assistance, it would do more for their army’s morale than a thousand new recruits. Fixed to his stance inside the hollowed square, Randolph saluted him in gratitude for the show of confidence.

  Despite his repeated assaults, Clifford could not break the Scot square, and his knights, growing frustrated, began throwing their maces into the schiltron in wild attempts to pick off Randolph. James and his Lanark men shouted encouragement to their northern comrades as Clifford and the knights regrouped for one last assault. Randolph’s men buckled under the impact, but they regrouped and threw off the skittish English chargers yet again.

  Exhausted, Clifford and his surviving knights finally retreated down the muddy banks of the Carse and headed back toward the Torwood.

  James led his men into the valley to embrace Randolph’s lads and offer water skins to slake t
heir thirst. Arm in arm, James and Randolph looked toward St. Ninian’s kirk, hoping for some gesture of commendation, but Robert had disappeared behind Coxet Hill.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, BLESSED DARKNESS finally fell over the village of Bannock.

  In the Torwood to the south, Clifford’s camp was chaotic and tense. The fresh English troops marching up the old Roman road from Falkirk had expected to find a comfortable bivouac. Instead, they now stumbled into an infernal mash of wounded and exhausted men who lay amid the stinking dead bodies of their comrades killed in the day’s disastrous charges. Scuffles broke out as a cold rain began to fall and turn the ground into a muck of manure and urine.

  A commotion of horns and heralds drove the slumbering soldiers off the road to make room for a squealing caravan of baggage wagons. Caernervon climbed out of the lead carriage. Accompanied by Amery Valence, D’Argentin, Richard de Burgh, and Hugh Despenser, the king marched toward a litter that had been hoisted on poles.

  The soldiers lowered the canvas sheet to display Bohun’s bloodied corpse.

  Staggered by the grisly sight, Caernervon flung his hands to his head. “How did this happen?”

  “He gave battle against orders,” Gloucester said.

  Caernervon took a slobbering swallow from a wine skin to steel his jangled nerves. “He charged to avenge my honor! And where were you?”

  “After the initial assault, I deemed it prudent to wait for the full army.”

  Caernervon flung aside his new helmet, which was crowned with a sculpture of a coiling leopard. “All you have ever been is prudent! You allowed Bohun to be ambushed by your own kinsman! And you walk away without a scratch?”

  “I will not be slandered—”

  “You will speak only when ordered!” Kicking at anything within his reach, the king grabbed at Clifford’s breastplate and ranted, “Why am I not sleeping this night in Stirling?”