Chapter III: The Army Encounters Cúchulainn

Summary

The Galeóin

On the first stage of the march the army goes from Cruachan to Cúil Silinne, at Carrcin Lake. Ailill’s tent is pitched, with Fergus mac Roich, Cormac Connlongas, Conall Cernach and Fiacha mac Fir Febe in a row beside it. Medb’s is on his other side, with their daughter Finnabair next to her.

Medb inspects the camp in one of her nine chariots and says it would be foolish to go on if the three thousand Galeóin come with them. She finds no fault with them. They are fine soldiers: they had roofed their camp and made their meal while the others were still clearing space. They would get the credit for the army’s triumph. They cannot come, she says, and they cannot stay either, since they would seize the lands in the army’s absence. Ailill asks what is to be done with them.

“Kill them,” Medb says.

Ailill calls it a woman’s thinking and a wicked thing to say. Fergus says the Ulster exiles will take that advice over their dead bodies. Medb lists her force, her seven sons the Maine among it. Fergus answers that the seven Munster kings, his own three thousand and the Galeóin could be set against her. He proposes instead to scatter the Galeóin through the whole army, as an eighteenth troop among seventeen. Medb agrees, as long as they break up their order.

Next morning at Móin Coltna they slaughter eight score wild deer, and the Galeóin get all but five.

Dubthach’s vision

At Trego Plain, as they get their meal ready, Dubthach chants a vision of the war. He sees a dark march toward Ailill’s wife’s White Horn, and one man worth a whole host guarding the herds of Murtheimne. The river Cronn will rise and bar the way until that warrior’s work is done at Mount Ochaine, and there will be man’s meat everywhere the Warped Man can reach.

The war-spirit Nemain assails them at once. Dubthach’s outcry breaks their sleep, and Medb has to go round and calm them. They spend the night in Gránaird in North Tethba.

The hoop

Fergus sends a warning to Ulster from Gránaird, out of old friendship. The Ulstermen lie prostrate in their pangs, all but Cúchulainn and his father Sualdam, who set up watch at Iraird Cuillenn. Cúchulainn tells Sualdam to go and warn Ulster, since he has promised to spend the night with Fedelm Noichride. Some say it was with her bondmaid, set aside for his use. Before he leaves he makes a spancel-hoop of challenge, cuts an ogam message into its peg, and leaves it on a standing stone.

Fergus is given the head of the army and makes a great detour south to give Ulster time. Medb notices and asks in verse what kind of road this is. Fergus answers that he is trying to miss the mighty man who protects Murtheimne Plain.

At Iraird Cuillenn, Err and Innel and their charioteers Foich and Fochlam, the four sons of Urard mac Anchinne, are out in front, keeping their cloaks from the dust. They find the hoop and the marks of grazing: Sualdam’s horses had bitten the grass out by the roots, and Cúchulainn’s had licked up the clay as well. Fergus reads the ogam. No one is to come further unless he has a man who can make a hoop like this with one hand out of one piece, and Fergus is excluded. The druids say a great champion made it as a trap.

Fergus warns the army that the man who cut the ogam will kill one of them before morning. Ailill decides to go through the neck of Fid Dúin forest instead, and the men cut it down before the chariots. The place is now called Slechta, the Hewn Place.

The snow and the ford

They pass the night in Cúil Sibrille, now Cenannos, in a snow that reaches the men’s belts. They cannot get food ready. Cúchulainn gets up late from his woman, and later still when he has scrubbed himself and found the army’s track. He wishes they had not betrayed Ulster by letting it through. Laeg cannot reckon the tracks, and Cúchulainn takes a long time over them too. He makes it eighteen troops of three thousand, the eighteenth divided out among the rest, which is what muddles the count.

At Ath Gabla he cuts a tree fork with one stroke of his sword and sticks it in the middle of the stream, so that no chariot can pass either side. That is how Ath Gabla, the ford of the forked branch, got its name. Err and Innel and their two charioteers come upon him, and he cuts off their four heads and tosses them onto the four points. Their horses go back to the army with their coverings crimson, and everyone thinks a battle-force waits at the ford. A troop sent to look finds only one chariot’s track, the fork, the heads, and ogam on the fork’s side: nobody is to go past until one of them, not Fergus, does the same.

Fergus says the wonder is the fork: struck from its trunk by one stroke, driven in with no hole dug, thrown one-handed from a chariot. Medb tells him to get it out. Fourteen chariots break up under Fergus before he brings it onto dry land, and they see the base is a single cut.

Who it was

The text says this is where the army first heard of Cúchulainn’s exploits. The page breaks off at “Ailill said:” and the next begins with answers, so what Ailill first asks is missing.

Ailill asks if it was Conchobor, and Fergus says no, Conchobor never comes to the border without a full battle-force. Nor Celtchar mac Uthidir, nor Eogan mac Durthacht. The man who did this is Cúchulainn, who came to the border with only his charioteer.

Fergus gives his years. In his fifth he went to the boy-troop in Emain Macha in quest of arms. In his seventh he went to study the arts of war with Scáthach and courted Emer. In his eighth he took up arms. He is now in his seventeenth. Medb asks if he is the hardest in Ulster, and Fergus answers with a long praise: no raven more flesh-ravenous, no one of his age a third as good, no one with the battle-feat “nine men on each point”. Medb says he has only one body, can be wounded, and has his manly deeds still to come. Fergus says his acts were already manly when he was younger.