given to poetry and divination, that is to say, she was a lady of the same class as Arianrhod, who was also a sorceress.[1] As she was one day sitting by her husband in his chariot, they passed under a thorn which had a good crop of sloes on it: she wished to eat of them, and Ailill shook the branch into the chariot, so that she had as many as she liked. They returned home, and she gave birth to Cian, a smooth, fair, lusty son; but he had the peculiarity that a sort of ridge of skin or caul extended over his head from ear to ear, and as he grew, that excrescence also grew. So when he became a man, he did not suffer those who shaved him to live to divulge the secret. At length he had a barber who came to his work prepared for him, and told him so. He undid the covering of Cian's head, and perceived the reason why he had his barbers killed; then he ripped up the abnormal skin on his head, whereupon there leaped out a worm, which sprang quickly to the top of the house, and subsequently twisted itself about the point of his spear. The barber and Ailill wished to have it killed at once, but Sadb, fearing lest Cian was fated to have the same span of life as the worm, prevailed on her husband to have a place made for it, where it should be supplied with plenty to eat. The worm then, like Fenri's Wolf, grew apace, and its house had to be enlarged for it; by the end of the year it had a hundred heads, each of which would have swallowed a warrior with his arms and all. Such was its voracity and the ravages it began to commit, that it created consternation, and Ailill obtained Sadb's consent to kill the monster; so the whole place was set on fire, in the
- ↑ See the Taliessin poem, No. 16; Skene, ij. 159.
