It was at this crisis that two physicians, Miach, the son, and Airmid, the daughter, of Diancecht, the god of medicine, came to the castle where the dispossessed King Nuada lived. Nuada’s porter, blemished, like himself (for he had lost an eye), was sitting at the gate, and on his lap was a cat curled up asleep. The porter asked the strangers who they were. “We are good doctors,” they said. “If that is so,” he replied, “perhaps you can give me a new eye.” “Certainly,” they said, “we could take one of the eyes of that cat, and put it in the place where your lost eye used to be.” “I should be very pleased if you would do that,” answered the porter, So Miach and Airmid removed one of the cat’s eyes, and put it in the hollow where the man’s eye had been.
The story goes on to say that this was not wholly a benefit to him; for the eye retained its cat’s nature, and, when the man wished to sleep at nights, the cat’s eye was always looking out for mice, while it could hardly be kept awake during the day. Nevertheless, he was pleased at the time, and went and told Nuada, who commanded that the doctors who had performed this marvellous cure should be brought to him.
As they came in, they heard the king groaning, for Nuada’s wrist had festered where the silver hand joined the arm of flesh. Miach asked where Nuada’s own hand was, and they told him that it had been buried long ago. But he dug it up, and placed it to Nuada’s stump; he uttered an incantation over it, saying: “Sinew to sinew, and nerve to nerve be joined!” and in three days and nights the hand had renewed itself and fixed itself to the arm, so that Nuada was whole again.
When Diancecht, Miach’s father, heard of this, he was very angry to think that his son should have excelled him in the art of medicine. He sent for him, and struck him upon the head with a sword, cutting the skin, but not wounding the flesh. Miach easily healed this. So Diancecht hit him again, this time to the bone. Again Miach cured himself. The third time his father smote him, the sword went right through the skull to the membrane of the brain, but even this wound Miach was able to leech. At the fourth stroke, however, Diancecht cut the brain in two, and Miach could do nothing for that. He died, and Diancecht buried him. And upon his grave there grew up three hundred and sixty-five stalks of grass, each one a cure for any illness of each of the three hundred and sixty-five nerves in a man’s body. Airmid, Miach’s sister, plucked all these very carefully, and arranged them on her mantle according to their properties. But her angry and jealous father overturned the cloak, and hopelessly confused them. If it had not been for that act, says the early writer, men would know how to cure every illness, and would so be immortal.
The healing of Nuada’s blemish happened just at the time when all the people of the goddess Danu had at last agreed that the exactions and tyranny of Bress could no longer be borne. It was the insult he put upon Cairpré, son of Ogma the god of literature, that caused things to come to this head. Poets were always held by the Celts in great honour; and when Cairpré, the bard of the Tuatha Dé Danann, went to visit Bress, he expected to be treated with much consideration, and fed at the king’s own table. But, instead of doing so, Bress lodged him in a small, dark room where there was no fire, no bed, and no furniture except a mean table on which small cakes of dry bread were put on a little dish for his food. The next morning, Cairpré rose early and left the palace without having spoken to Bress. It was the custom of poets when they left a king’s court to utter a panegyric on their host, but Cairpré treated Bress instead to a magical satire. It was the first satire ever made in Ireland, and seems to us to bear upon it all the marks of an early effort. Roughly rendered, it said:
“No meat on the plates,
No milk of the cows;
No shelter for the belated;
No money for the minstrels:
May Bress’s cheer be what he gives to others!”