f, for he heard the crash of falling timbers and the
noise of the magic hosts, and he smelled the strong smell of fire in the
palace.

He sprang up. "It seems to me," he cried, "that hosts of demons are
around the house, and that they are slaughtering my people, and that the
house of Cletty is on fire." "It was but a dream," the witch maiden
said. Then he slept again, and he saw a vision, to wit, that he was
tossing in a ship at sea, and the ship floundered, and above his head a
griffin, with sharp beak and talons, sailed, her wings outspread and
covering all the sun, so that it was dark as middle-night; and lo! as
she rose on high, her plumes quivered for a moment in the air; then down
she swooped and picked him from the waves, carrying him to her eyrie on
the dismal cliff outhanging o'er the ocean; and the griffin began to
pierce him and to prod him with her talons, and to pick out pieces of
his flesh with her beak; and this went on awhile, and then a flame, that
came he knew not whence, rose from the nest, and he and the griffin were
enveloped in the flame. Then in her beak the griffin picked him up, and
together they fell downward over the cliff's edge into the seething
ocean; so that, half by fire and half by water, he died a miserable
death.

When the King saw that vision, he rose screaming from his sleep, and
donned his arms; and he made one plunge forward seeking for the magic
hosts, but he found no man to answer him. The damsel went forth from the
house, and Murtough made to follow her, but as he turned the flames
leaped out, and all between him and the door was one vast sheet of
flame. He saw no way of escape, save the vat of wine that stood in the
banqueting hall, and into that he got; but the burning timbers of the
roof fell upon his head and the hails of fiery sparks rained on him, so
that half of him was burned and half was drowned, as he had seen in his
dream.

The next day, amid the embers, the clerics found his corpse, and they
took it up and washed it in the Boyne, and carried it to Tuilen to bury
it. And they said, "Alas! that Mac Erca, High King of Erin, of the noble
race of Conn and of the descendants of Ugaine the Great, should die
fighting with sods and stones! Alas! that the Cross of Christ was not
signed upon his face that he might have known the witchdoms of the
maiden what they were."

As they went thus, bewailing the death of Murtough and bearing him to
his grave, Duivsech, wife of Murto