Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/45

 the magic? If ye had not spoilt me, I would have killed those kings and scattered their armies before now.'

As he spoke he seemed to be listening to something. Then his wife Emer said to him:

'O my first love and all men's darling, favourite of the poets of Erin, come with me and with Niav and Cathbad to the feast.'

Cathbad reminded him that it was unlucky for him not to accept an invitation to a feast. He rose up, therefore, but with a sick heart, and went in with them to the Deaf Glen.

'The enemy,' he moaned, 'will say that I came hitherto escape from them.'

'But they will not believe it,' said Cathbad.

He had got ready a vast mansion within the glen. At one end sat Cohoolin, with the poets on his right and Niav and the other women on his left; at the opposite end the singers and harpers and dancers performed; and it was full of laughter and music and glad faces. Outside stood Cohoolin's two horses, the Grey of Macha and the black, tended by his charioteer, Laegh the son of Riangabar.

At daybreak the daughters of Calatin came looking for Cohoolin; but they could not find him anywhere in Emania. Then they rose up into the air and flew this way and that like buzzards, their wings moaning and making a wind that supported them. They flew for a long time until the two horses standing in the glen betrayed Cohoolin. As on the day before, the witches took thistle-down and puff-balls and dead leaves and made them into an army covering the hills and valleys round about. Where a moment before there had been nothing, now armed men were swarming. It was as when a man turns up a spadeful of earth and suddenly all is alive with