English literature -- Scottish authors; Scottish literature
Maoliosa himself, stood in death transfixed to the mast. With a scream
the monks swept their oars backward. Then they leaped to their feet, and
changed their place, and rowed for life.
The summer-sailors sprang into their galley. Sweno the Hammerer was at
the bow. The foam curled and hissed. The birlinn of the culdees grided
upon the opposite shore at the moment when Sweno brought down his
battle-axe upon the monk who steered. The man was cleft to the shoulder.
Sweno swayed with the blow, stumbled, and fell headlong into the sea. A
culdee thrust at him with an oar, and pinned him among the sea-tangle.
Thus died Sweno the Hammerer.
Like a flock of sheep the white-robes leaped upon the shore. Yet Olaus
was quicker than they. With a score of vikings he raced to the Church of
the Cells, and gained the sanctuary. The monks uttered a cry of despair,
and, turning, fled across the sands. Olaus counted them. There were now
forty in all.
"Let forty men follow," he cried.
The monks fled this way and that. Olaus, and those who watched, laughed
to see how they stumbled, because of their robes. One by one fell,
sword-cleft or spear-thrust. The sand-dunes were red.
Soon there were fewer than a score--then twelve only--ten!
"Bring them back!" Olaus shouted.
When the ten fugitives were captured and brought back, Olaus took the
crucifix that Maoliosa had raised, and held it before each in turn.
"Smite!" he said to the first monk. But the man would not.
"Smite!" he said to the second; but he would not. And so it was to the
tenth.
"Good!" said Olaus the White; "they shall witness to their God."
With that he bade his vikings break up the birlinn, and drive the planks
into the ground and shore them up with logs. When this was done he
crucified each culdee. With nails and with ropes he did unto each what
their God had suffered. Then all were left there by the water-side.
That night, when Olaus the White and the laughing Morna left the great
bonfire where the vikings sang and drank horn after horn of strong ale,
they stood and looked across the strait. In the moonlight, upon the dim
verge of the island shore, they could see ten crosses. On each was a
motionless white splatch.
Once more, for an instance of the grafting of Christian thought and
imagery on pagan thought and imagery, I take a few pages of the
introductory part to the story of "The Woman with the Net," in a later
volume.[6] They tell of a young monk who, inspired by Colum's holy
example, went out of Iona as a missionary to the Pictish heathen of the
north.
When Artân had kissed the brow of every white-robed brother on Iona, and
had been thrice kissed by the aged Colum, his heart was filled with
gladness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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