Dawn was just a grey suggestion on the western horizon when the boats came sweeping in to shore. Their long prows, carved into the leering faces of beasts and dragons cut through the dark waves as they rolled ashore. The shallow drafted longboats came most of the way up the beach before sand and gravel began to crunch underneath the hulls and they beached themselves.
No sooner had they come to a halt then men in dark scale mail leapt down, splashing their way through the shallow surf towards the shore line. In their hands were broad, two-handed axes, short leaf-bladed swords and broad, round shields. Cold, cruel eyes glanced up from under thick, conical helms towards the heights overlooking the beach. The dark shadow of the convent loomed high in the early morning gloom.
The sisters of the convent had never worried before about their safety. The only guard they kept was one sister keeping watch at the gate to the grounds and she was there more to let in late arriving travelers then give any sort of warning. At this early hour, she was seated on a stool, dozing contentedly, when the first grapnels flew over the wall. She’d just begun to stir when a quartet of burly raiders swarmed over the convent wall. Before she raise any sort of alarm, two of them had seized the startled woman, getting a hand over her mouth to silence her cries. While the other two unlocked the gate, the others took rope in hand and began to bind their first prisoner of the day…
The next people the raiders encountered were a small group of sisters saying the early morning prayers in the chapel. They leapt to their feet in alarm as the doors of the chapel burst open and a mob of heathen raiders charged in, weapons drawn. Shrieks of terror and strange war cries replaced prayers in the sacred space. Confronted with such a terrifying spectacle, the sisters were quickly subdued.
Keeping their momentum, the raiders surged into the dormitories where the rest of the sisters were sleeping. A few had begun to stir, roused by the strange noises of alarm coming from elsewhere in the convent. For other, deeper sleepers, they were roused from their pleasant slumber to be confronted with the angry, barking face of a heathen raider, as they were roughly hauled from their comfortable beds and thrown to the floor. Their hands were wrenched behind their backs and tied, cruelly tight with rope. Bands of cloth cut from bedsheets and shifts silenced their cries of terror, their sobs and frantic prayers.
In less then an hour from the crafts beaching, nearly all of the sisters of the convent had been rounded up. Hand tied, gags in their mouths, the stunned women were herded into the main courtyard of the complex and pushed to their knees. More were brought over as the last few sisters were hunted down in cellars and storerooms and behind wood piles and dragged from their hiding places.
With the women rounded up and secured, most of the raiders turned to looting the convent of anything of value. Gold altarpieces, icons and lamps were callously torn from their places in the holiest areas of the convent and carried off by the heathen men. Meanwhile, a few remained behind to guard their captives.
Bored, their eyes turned to the kneeling, trembling women, most still clad in the thin shifts they’d worn to bed, ripped and torn in the chaos of their capture. The raiders grinned, sharing lustful looks with one another. By silent agreement, two of them reached down, seizing two of the younger, prettier of the sisters.
The young women squirmed and fought, but were helpless before the cruel men. They squealed through their gags in shame as their clothes were torn from their bodies, leaving them naked. Carrying them over to a hitching post near the courtyard gate, the raiders bent their chosen victims over the rough wooden beam, preparing to take them from behind. The girls sobbed, murmuring frantic prayers for delivering into their gags. The other women moaned and sobbed in terror, partly in sympathy for their sisters’ imminent rape and partly from the awful knowledge that they were likely to be in the same situation soon enough…
Just then, the leader of the raiding party came in, an armload of looted silver plate in his arms. He dropped it in the growing pile and hurried over. “No!” He ordered sharply, grabbing the closest of the raiders and pulling him back from the trembling sister. “This is an order of Holy women! They are sworn to be chaste and pure!” Bent over the beam, the two would-be victims started to groan in relief, before he continued. “That means they’ll fetch a better price on the slave market. Their future owners will pay a premium to be the first to take that chastity!”