The Amadan bade her good-bye, and set out to travel to where the Seven
Glens met at the sea. Here there was a precipice, and under the
precipice a cave. In this cave the Silver Cat lived, and once a day
she came out to sun herself on the rocks.
The Amadan let himself down over the precipice by a rope, and he
waited until the cat came out to sun herself.
When the cat came out at twelve o'clock and saw the Amadan, she let a
roar out of her that drove the waters back of the sea and piled them
up a quarter of a mile high, and she asked him who he was and how he
had the impudence to come there to meet her.
The Amadan said: "They call me the Amadan of the Dough, and I have
killed Slat Mor, Slat Man, Slat Beag, the Cailliach of the Rocks and
her four badachs, the Black Bull of the Brown Woods, the White Wether
of the Hill of the Waterfalls, and the Beggarman of the King of
Sweden, and before night I will have killed the Silver Cat of the
Seven Glens."
"That you never will," says she, "for a dead man you will be
yourself." And at him she sprang.
But the Amadan raised his sword and struck at her, and both of them
fell to the fight, and a great, great fight they had. They made the
hard ground into soft, and the soft into spring wells; they made the
rocks into pebbles, and the pebbles into gravel, and the gravel fell
over the country like hailstones. All the birds of the air from the
lower end of the world to the upper end of the world, and all the wild
beasts and tame from the four ends of the earth, came flocking to see
the fight; and if the fights that the Amadan had had on the other days
were great and terrible, this one was far greater and far more
terrible than all the others put together, and the poor Amadan sorely
feared that before night fell he would be a dead man.
The red woman was watching at the well in her garden, and she was
sorely distressed, for though at one time the honey was uppermost, at
another time it was all blood, and again the blood and the honey would
be mixed; so she felt bad for the poor Amadan.
At length the blood and the honey got mixed again, and it remained
that way until night; so she cried, for she believed the Amadan
himself was dead, as well as the Silver Cat.
And so he was. For when the fight had gone on for long and long, the
cat, with a great long nail which she had in the end of her tail, tore
him open from his mouth to his toes; and as she tore the Amadan open
and he was about to fall, she opened her mouth so wide that the Amadan
saw down to the very bottom of her stomach, and there he saw the black
speck that the red woman had told him of. And just before he dropped
he drove his sword through this spot, and the Silver Cat, too, fell
over dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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