Early Irish Myths and Sagas - Jeffrey Gantz [24]
They returned north and did that. As they were tearing down Síd Breg Léith, they saw Mider coming towards them, and he said ‘What do you have against me? You have not played fair with me, and you have imposed great hardships upon me. You sold your wife to me – do not injure me, then.’ ‘She will not remain with you,’ said Echu. ‘She will not, then,’ replied Mider. ‘Go home – by the truth of the one and the other, your wife will return to you by the third hour tomorrow. If that satisfies you, injure me no further.’ ‘I accept that,’ said Echu. Mider secured his promise and departed.
At the third hour of the following day, they saw fifty women, all of the same appearance as Étaín and all dressed alike. At that, the hosts fell silent. A grey hag came before them and said to Echu ‘It is time for us to return home. Choose your wife now, or tell one of these women to remain with you.’ ‘How will you resolve your doubt?’ Echu asked his men. ‘We have no idea how,’ they answered. ‘But I have,’ said Echu. ‘My wife is the best at serving in Ériu, and that is how I will know her.’ Twenty-five of the women were sent to one side of the house, then, and twenty-five to the other side, and a vessel full of liquid was placed between them. The women came from one side and from the other, and still Echu could not find Étaín. It came down to the last two women: the first began to pour, and Echu said ‘This is Étaín, but she is not herself.’ He and his men held a council, and they decided ‘This is Étaín though it is not her serving.’ The other women left, then. The men of Ériu were greatly pleased with what Echu had done, and with the mighty accomplishments of the oxen and the rescue of the woman from the people of the Síde.
One fine day, Echu rose, and he was talking to his wife in the centre of the house when they saw Mider coming towards them. ‘Well, Echu,’ Mider said. ‘Well,’ said Echu. ‘It is not fair play I have had from you,’ said Mider, ‘considering the hardships you imposed upon me and the troops you brought against me and all that you demanded of me. There is nothing you have not exacted from me.’ ‘I did not sell you my wife,’ said Echu. ‘Will you clear your conscience against me?’ asked Mider. ‘Not unless you offer a pledge of your own,’ replied Echu. ‘Are you content, then?’ asked Mider. ‘I am,’ Echu replied. ‘So am I,’ said Mider. ‘Your wife was pregnant when I took her from you, and she bore a daughter, and it is that daughter who is with you now. Your wife is with me, and you have let her go a second time.’ With these words, Mider departed.
Echu did not dare unearth Mider’s síd again, for he had pledged himself content. He was distressed that his wife had escaped and that he had slept with his own daughter; his daughter, moreover, became pregnant and bore a daughter. ‘O gods,’ he said, ‘never will I look upon the daughter of my daughter.’ Two members of his household took the girl, then, to throw her into a pit with wild beasts. They stopped at the house of Findlám, a herdsman of Temuir; this house was at Slíab Fúait, in the middle of a wilderness. There was no one in the house; the men ate there, and they threw the girl to the bitch and its pups that were in the house’s kennel, and they left. When the herdsman and his wife returned and saw the fair-haired child in the kennel, they were astonished. They took her from the kennel and reared her, though they knew not whence she had come, and she prospered, for she was the daughter of a king and a queen. She was the best of women at embroidery: her eyes saw nothing that her hands could