stel ... Fer le,
So that a spear is against one hip.
Good should I be to far-renowned Mac cecht
If I were alive. A good man!"

After this Mac cecht followed the routed foe.

'Tis this that some books relate, that but a very few fell around
Conaire, namely, nine only. And hardly a fugitive escaped to tell the
tidings to the champions who had been at the house.

Where there had been five thousand--and in every thousand ten
hundred--only one set of five escaped, namely Ingcel, and his two
brothers Echell and Tulchinne, the "Yearling of the Reavers"--three
great-grandsons of Conmac, and the two Reds of Roiriu who had been the
first to wound Conaire.

Thereafter Ingcel went into Alba, and received the kingship after his
father, since he had taken home triumph over a king of another country.

This, however, is the recension in other books, and it is more probably
truer. Of the folk of the Hostel forty or fifty fell, and of the reavers
three fourths and one fourth of them only escaped from the Destruction.

Now when Mac cecht was lying wounded on the battle-field, at the end of
the third day, he saw a woman passing by.

"Come hither, O woman!" says Mac cecht.

"I dare not go thus," says the woman, "for horror and fear of thee."

"There _was_ a time when I had this, O woman, even horror and fear of me
on some one. But now thou shouldst fear nothing. I accept thee on the
truth of my honour and my safeguard."

Then the woman goes to him.

"I know not," says he, "whether it is a fly or a gnat, or an ant that
nips me in the wound."

It happened that it was a hairy wolf that was there, as far as its two
shoulders in the wound!

The woman seized it by the tail, and dragged it out of the wound, and it
takes the full of its jaws out of him.

"Truly," says the woman, "this is 'an ant of ancient land.'"

Says Mac cecht "I swear to God what my people swears, I deemed it no
bigger than a fly, or a gnat, or an ant."

And Mac cecht took the wolf by the throat, and struck it a blow on the
forehead, and killed it with a single blow.

Then Le fri flaith, son of Conaire, died under Mac cecht's armpit, for
the warrior's heat and sweat had dissolved him.

Thereafter Mac cecht, having cleansed the slaughter, at the end of the
third day, set forth, and he dragged Conaire with him on his back, and
buried him at Tara, as some say. Then Mac cecht departed into Connaught,
to his own country, that he might work his c