by Glen Craney
“I can answer only to my deeds,” James said. “Not to the color of my skin.”
The lady’s alluring smile suddenly gave way to a glare of disdain. She turned from him dismissively and announced to the Calatravans, “This man cannot be the Douglas of Scotland.”
Alfonso admonished her harshly in Castilian. Then, the king begged forgiveness from James. “Our women speak too freely. I pray you take no offense.”
James saw that his stunning accuser seemed unfazed by the scolding. In truth, she utterly entranced him. “It is I who owes the apology. I seem to have disappointed the lady.”
“Allow me to introduce Dona Leonor de Guzman,” the king said.
James nodded knowingly, having heard the bards in La Rochelle sing of the beautiful mistress who had scandalously replaced the older Queen Dona Maria of Portugal in Alfonso’s bed. Yet their flattering descriptions had not done her justice. Why was he quivering like a schoolboy? He had not felt such stirrings since … He bowed and kissed the back of her wrist.
She abruptly withdrew her hand, grazing his upper lip with the bevel of her garnet ring. She paraded before the celibate Calatravans, whose marred cheeks and jagged noses gave evidence of their past wounds. With a half-lidded look of derision, she turned back and found James’s eyes still watering from the sting of her ring’s scrape. “Your face bears no scars. No warrior who fought as many battles as the Douglas would be so unscathed.”
Sinclair bristled at the slander. “You see no marks because he was too quick for any Englishman.”
Dona Leonor drew a kerchief from her sleeve and staunched a thin seep of blood on James’s lip. “I fear I have given him his first.” She lowered her eyes to his hands, as if expecting a demonstration of their prowess. She slid her fingers down his forearm to test its strength.
His hand was quivering.
Greeting that discovery with a seductive smile, the lady called for a goblet of wine from an attendant. She brought the cup to James’s lips, coupling her fingers over his.
He tried to pull away, fearful that Alfonso would take offense to such a bold display of intimacy.
Amused by his modesty, the Dona savored another sip under his admiring yet disconcerted gaze—and dropped the goblet.
James lunged to catch it, too late. The goblet clanged to the floor, spilling the wine and coming to rest near the boots of the smirking Calatravans.
The Dona released his wrist with a flick of contempt and shot a haughty sneer at Sinclair. “Perhaps it is for the best that Scotland’s champion does not challenge the Moors. The infidels are much quicker than Englishmen with the sword.” With a sweep of her flared sleeve, she turned away and lamented, “Alas, there are no Roland and Oliver for our time.”
James had bent to one knee to retrieve the goblet. Hearing her muttered aside, he looked up at her with a start. “What did you just say, my lady?”
She turned back, appearing surprised by his interest. “Roland and Oliver. You would never have heard of them. They were gallant knights who came to our land years ago to defend God’s cause. The story is a mere fable, I fear. I see now that such chivalry is practiced only by Castilians.” She whipped her train to the crease of her elbow, lashing his face lightly in a taunt, and continued her exit. As she passed, the men watched her ravishing form, revealed and hidden with each flow of her clinging gown.
At the portal, she glanced at Alfonso and shared a private smile with him before disappearing into the darkness of the stairwell.
SHIELDING HIS DRY EYES FROM the brutal Andalusian sun, James searched the mountain range behind him to the north. Nearly ten leagues, away on the barren horizon, stood the besieged Castillo della Estrella—the Castle of the Stars—a formidable keep that reached so high on its rocky outcropping that the Moors believed it had once touched Heaven.
“The Calatravans should have come up by now,” d’Aumont warned him. “We had best turn back for Sevilla.”
James ignored the Templar’s advice and drove his contingent of nine knights deeper into another arid barranco whose burnt scape was broken only by a few patches of olive trees. Convinced that Dona Leonor’s invocation of Roland and Oliver was a divine sign, he had agreed to command a wing of Alfonso’s army. But the Castilians maneuvered so methodically that, after a week of campaigning, he had decided to press ahead, intent upon seducing the Moors and their leader Osmin into a trap, just as he had done to Clifford at Glen Trool.
If only the infidel coward would stop and fight.
The Saracen scouting party they had been chasing for two days had disappeared again into the blazing Spanish haze.
His throat was so parched that he could barely swallow. Their water skins were dry and the heat was so unrelenting that steam rose from the buckles of their hauberks. Through all of the hardships in the English campaigns, he had never experienced sunstroke. He felt as if his soul was being flayed. He prayed the frothing horses would make it to the next plateau, and reaching the thistle-plagued crest, he looked down into a hull-shaped vale rimmed by rows of dying pomegranate striplings. At its lowest point, three Moslem women stood shading themselves under a smattering of palm trees. Draped in black robes and hoods, they drew a bucket from an oasis well.
Black ravens circled above them—a certain sign of water.
He licked his cracked lips. Muttering a prayer of thanks to God, he led his men on their staggering mounts down the ridge toward the blessed discovery.
Seeing their approach, the women hurried away—all but one, the tallest. She peered through her gossamer veil, and held her jar aloft in an offer.
He removed his helmet in anticipation of wetting his swollen tongue.
The woman walked toward him with her black robes whipping in the hot wind. A few steps away, she dropped her veil and hood.
My God! Can it truly be?
He thought there could be no fluid left in his body, but tears streamed down his cheeks. Had the Almighty granted him the miracle he had long petitioned? Many of the returned crusaders had said their most fervent prayers were answered in reward for the torments they endured for Christ.
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 va
nished. 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-gre
en 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!”
