“Quit belly aching and help me with this.”
Once the cellar waspacked with food and furnishings, dead bodies and live prisoners, Douglas’s men stood around the collection, their backs pressed against the dirty stone walls of the cellar. The pleading cries of the few who still lived sent chills down their spines.
Shabib brought kindling to James, who busied himself with it. He didn’t raise his eyes to the men as he spoke.
“Thomas, ye and Shabib lead the men out of here. Get as far back from the keep as ye can. Back to the tree line.”
The kindling James had been working caught and a slender orange flame lit his face and created a shadow around his head. A black halo.
“James, for the final time, are ye certain? This larder in your family’s cellar may haunt ye all your life. Your castle will be forever destroyed and your soul will never recover,” Thomas pleaded with him.
“I’d rather have a black soul and crumbling debris for a keep if it means the English can never use the lands against the Scots again. As for my soul, well, Thomas, ye well know this path I was on. My soul was already tainted. This will just complete it.”
James nodded to Shabib, who ushered the men up the steps and out of the keep. Then he waited, listening to the sobbing. He didn’t have to harden his heart against the sound, ‘twas already hardened, as black as jet, and he’d accepted that lot. With a flip of his hand, he threw the inflamed kindling into the larder of food and furnishings, and moved closer to the steps, waiting and watching. He wanted assurances that the flames were well entrenched before he left. The wine and mead caught the flames, bringing the fire to life.
Smoke became dense, and James backed up several steps out of the growing, choking cloud. The sobbing in the cellar became screams when those captured smelled the sickeningly thick smoke. Those screams would haunt his nightmares if James let them.
He closed his ears to those dire sounds. The flames in the cellar erupted in bursts, here and there, and his eyes reflected those flames, as if the fire were inside his head, not in the cellar. When he was assured the fire was well established and wouldn’t burn itself out, James ascended to the main floor and departed his childhood home, his birthright, his legacy, leaving it to burn to the ground.
Joining his men outside, he walked to the tree line and stared at the keep, steady with a keen patience only a man truly and unforgivably offended can maintain. The only sounds in the glen were of the popping flames and the low lamentations of those trapped in the cellar. His men drifted off, sat on the grass to eat, to rest, to wait for James to have his recompense. Shabib stood next to him the entire time.
Soon the flames licked out of the stones themselves, and the heavier rocks at the top of the tower slipped as the foundation crumbled to ash. Then the flames ate at those stones, charring them black, as black as James’s soul.
By the time the late afternoon rain started to fall, most of the keep and even some of the surrounding inner bailey had been destroyed. The smoke in the air was thick, so thick even the rain didn’t seem to be able to wash it away. Still, James watched with his arms crossed over his wide chest until the last flame’s light licked out.
“’Tis done,” Shabib told him. “You have destroyed your larder just as certain as the English had, and now they cannot use your castle against you. You must live with this the consequences of this foul deed. Do you feel any sense of remorse?” Shabib asked, his voice edged with a concern James had not heard in his friend’s voice before.
James kept his gaze fixed on the ruined, steaming remains of Douglas Castle. He’d hoped the dark, bleak fury toward the English might have lightened with the destruction of his castle and the men contained therein, but that fury yet lingered. To James, this was a beginning, not an end.
“I feel nothing,” James answered honestly.
Thomas, Gabe, and the other men had perked up at Shabib’s voice, and they moved closer to James, hopeful to learn what they would do next. Especially since it meant spending the night in the rain now that the tower was destroyed.
“Well, then, my Black Douglas,” Shabib asked, his eyebrows high on his forehead. “Did you have a contrivance forafterthis was accomplished?”
James uncrossed his arms, and with his hard-lined face, too hard for so young a man, he regarded each of those wretched souls who agreed to throw their lot in with him. ‘Twas time think beyond himself.
“We’ve eliminated the English leeches here, but like the fat bloodsuckers, they still suck away at the life of Scotland. Our work is far from done. We will salt the wells, throw any remains in them, too, and pollute it. We shall make the land a black reminder of what the English have wrought on our land. Then we are to join the Bruce.”
