"A good man Mac cecht! an excellent man Mac cecht!
A good warrior without, good within,
He gives a drink, he saves a king, he doth a deed.
Well he ended the champions I found.
He sent a flagstone on the warriors.
Well he hewed by the door of the Hostel ... Fer lé,
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 Ingcél, and his two brothers Echell and Tulchinne, the "Yearling of the Reavers"--three great-grandsons of Conmac, and the two Reds of Róiriu who had been the first to wound Conaire.
Thereafter Ingcél 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."