The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  “Let him rest a little at least,” begged Mother.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, trying to put on a brave face. “And my tongue doesn’t hurt so much anymore. I can do it.”

  It would be wrong to claim that studying Snakish immediately killed all my dreams of a spinning wheel and a bread shovel. I still thought sometimes about the marvels I’d seen at the home of the village elder, Johannes, and his daughter, Magdaleena, and I even secretly tried to fashion a bread shovel myself. I couldn’t even contemplate trying a spinning wheel; that seemed like a contraption from another world that an ordinary person could never make with his own hands. Not even the shovel amounted to much; somehow it ended up crooked and splintered. There was nothing I could do with it. I didn’t dare to take my handiwork home, so it lay abandoned in the bushes.

  With Pärtel, naturally, I reminisced about our visit, and we conferred about whether to visit the exciting house again. Johannes the village elder had invited us back, but the sense of nervousness about the village had not diminished in our hearts, and Mother’s and Uncle’s stories had, at least for me, only strongly increased how alien it seemed. So I resolved to put off another visit to the village for sometime in the future, and Pärtel didn’t want to go alone. I did invite him to join me in learning Snakish with Uncle Vootele, but Pärtel said, screwing up his nose, that his mother was already teaching him, that it was disgustingly difficult, and he certainly wasn’t planning to take extra lessons. So I remained as Uncle Vootele’s only pupil.

  After the first painful weeks, during which my tongue swelled like a mushroom several times, my mouth muscles finally started to get used to the effort, and many of my hisses were beginning to sound sufficiently sibilant. If I had at first studied Snakish words mainly out of obedience and respect for my uncle, whom I loved very much, gradually I actually started to like the hissing. It was exciting to try out new sibilations and, when I succeeded, thrilling to see the eagles circling high in the sky and coming down to me, the owls in the middle of the day sticking their heads out of the tree hollows, and the mother wolves stopping on the spot and stretching out their legs, so as to be milked more easily.

  It was only insects that didn’t understand the Snakish words, since their brains were too small for that sort of wisdom, no bigger than a speck of dust. So Snakish words were no use against mosquitoes or horseflies, or to treat beestings. Crab lice couldn’t grasp the ancient tongue at all; they had their own disgusting whine. Even today I can still hear it when I go to the well for water, for although the Snakish words have now inexorably died away, the whining remains.

  But then, young and eager to learn, I didn’t pay any attention to insects and I simply swatted them when they attacked me. Crab lice didn’t seem to belong to the forest; they were like flying garbage. What entranced me were the changes I noticed in the forest thanks to the Snakish words. Whereas I had once simply scampered around in it, now I could talk to the forest. The fun seemed endless.

  Uncle Vootele was pleased with me; he was assured that I had a knack for Snakish, and when our meat ran out, he let me call a new goat to us. I hissed, the goat ran docilely toward me, and Uncle Vootele killed it, while Mother looked on, gratified. I was then nine years old.

  The best part of my studies, of course, was that I got to know Ints.

  The day I met Ints I was alone. Uncle Vootele had given me a few new hisses to practice and learn by heart and I was resting by the little well, hissing diligently, so that my tongue got tied. Suddenly I heard someone else hissing—loudly and in terror.

  It was a young adder being attacked by a hedgehog. I hissed my most forbidding injunction at the hedgehog, and it seemed to come out very well. The word I had hissed would make any animal freeze on the spot, but the hedgehog took no notice of my utterance. Then I understood that that same hiss had been used by the little adder, and that it was extremely silly of me to try to use Snakish words to help a snake. No matter what skill a human could manage with Snakish words, against a real snake it came to nothing. It was snakes who taught us the art, not the other way around.

  The little snake was expecting another kind of help from me. You see hedgehogs are the stupidest of all animals, and in the millions of years that their species has been running around, they have never learned Snakish. Therefore both my own and the young adder’s hisses were falling on deaf ears. Paying no heed to the hissing, the hedgehog had attacked the snake, and probably would have finished him off if I hadn’t given it a good kick into the bushes.

  “Thank you,” panted the young snake. “Those hedgehogs are endless trouble; they’re as stupid as pinecones and tussocks. You can hiss yourself to death and it does no good.”

  My Snakish was by no means good yet, but with clumsy hisses I managed to ask the young adder why he hadn’t stung the hedgehog.

  “That does no good either. As I said, they’re like pinecones and tussocks, completely dumb. Our poison has no effect on them; they just keep on doing their tricks. Once again, many thanks! By the way, your Snakish is pretty good. I haven’t met a human for ages who knows it so well. My father tells me that in the old days he had a lot of talks with humans, but now people don’t know any more than how to kill a goat with Snakish words.”

  I was slightly ashamed, because I had just recently used Snakish words for that very purpose, but I didn’t tell that to the little adder. I explained to him as best I could that I was being taught by Uncle Vootele, and I told him my own name.

  “I’ve seen that Vootele,” said the adder. “My father knows him well. He speaks our language really fluently. He’s visited us too. If you want, Leemet, you can pay us a visit. Why don’t we go straight away, and I’ll tell Mother and Father how you saved me. My snake-name is dreadfully complicated for your tongue, but you can call me Ints.”

  I agreed right away to go with the adder, because I had never before seen how snake-kings live. The fact that my new friends belonged to the Snakish royalty was self-evident. Snake-kings were much bigger than ordinary adders, and a tiny golden crown sparkled on the brow of a full-grown snake-king. Ints didn’t have one yet, but from his build and his intelligence there was no doubt that he was the son of a snake-king. Snake-kings were like queen ants who were surrounded by millions of tiny workers. I had seen them sometimes, but until now I hadn’t had a chance to speak to one. And snake-kings wouldn’t pay any attention to little boys; they were too grand and important for that.

  So I was very excited when Ints led me to a large hole and told me to squeeze inside. It was a bit creepy, but not as creepy as when stepping into Johannes the village elder’s house. The snakes were in their own home; they had nothing to be afraid of—but all the same I was a bit nervous. The passage to the snakes’ home was dark and pretty long, but Ints hissed encouragingly beside me and that reassured me.

  Finally we reached an open cave. There certainly were a lot of snakes there! Mostly ordinary little adders, but among them were about a dozen snake-kings, all with fine crowns on their heads like golden brier-roses. The biggest of them was evidently Ints’s father. Ints told him about how I had saved him, speaking so rapidly that I didn’t understand much of his nimble hissing. The great snake-king eyed me and crawled closer. I bowed and gave the greeting that Uncle Vootele had taught me.

  “I worry that you, my dear boy, will be the last human from whose mouth I hear those words,” said the snake-king. “Humans no longer care much for our language and seek a prettier life. Your uncle Vootele is a good friend of mine. I’m pleased that he has raised up a successor to himself. You are always welcome in our cave, especially since you rescued my child. Hedgehogs are the greatest nuisance to our kind. Coarse, wooden-headed creatures!”

  “A pity that humans are going the same way!” said another snake from a corner. “Soon they’ll be just the same.”

  “And no wonder,” added Ints. “Humans admire the iron men, but they seem just like the hedgehogs—with the same prickly covering. Humans have been feeding the iro
n men; I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon started pouring bowls of milk for hedgehogs.”

  At this they laughed heartily.

  “The iron man is not quite the same as a hedgehog,” said the same snake who had spoken before. “The hedgehog never takes off his spines, but the iron man does take off his coat. Our venom does nothing to a hedgehog, but I jabbed one iron man just the other day when he had stripped himself bare and stumbled straight toward me after swimming. Venom did affect that man; he started screaming in a dreadful voice and ran off.”

  I had never before heard of a snake stinging a human, and that story horrified me. Ints’s father noticed this and hissed soothingly at me.

  “A human who lives in the forest and understands our language is our brother,” he said. “But a human who has gone to live in the village and no longer understands Snakish words has only himself to blame. If he comes too close to us, then first we welcome him politely, but if he doesn’t respond to us, that means he’s no longer one of us. He is like a hedgehog or an insect and we don’t pity him.”

  “Why are you talking to the boy like that?” asked a third snake, who I later found out was Ints’s mother. “Why are you frightening him? It doesn’t concern him; he saved Ints’s life and we’re eternally grateful to him. He can come to us whenever he likes, and stay here as long as he likes. From now on he’s our son.”

  “Yes, he is,” agreed Ints’s father. “Our son. And if my friend Vootele allows, I’ll be glad to teach him some Snakish myself. In the olden days humans and snakes used to be close together. At least in our own lifetime we could continue that old custom. Whatever happens in times to come.”

  Five

  nts became a great friend of mine. I introduced him to Pärtel, who was not as adept at Snakish as I was, but could hiss a little. That was enough for him to grasp Ints’s more simple conversation, and for the more complicated bits, I interpreted. In the course of time Pärtel’s skill also improved, because if you have to deal with snakes all day long, some of it rubs off on even the dullest learner. And it was natural, too, that we spent a lot of time with Ints, since all games are better with three than with two.

  Then of course there was Tambet’s daughter, Hiie. She was bigger now—no longer falling on her bottom after every step—and we would have been glad to accept her into our gang. But she wasn’t allowed. Hiie’s father, Tambet, was simply that sort of man. For a start he didn’t approve of me, because I was born in the village and Tambet thought it wasn’t right for his daughter to play with a boy like that. Second he thought there was no need to play at all; one should do work.

  Tambet was the sort of person who stubbornly refused to admit a fact that was evident to everyone—namely that the forest was almost empty and was destined to get ever emptier. He was always rambling on about some Estonian Golden Age, when all the peoples of the world trembled before our Frog of the North, and the woods were full of wild hissing men, who rode on wolves’ backs and swilled their nutritious milk. He still kept a hundred wolves in his barn, milked them, and trained them, without grasping that for a long time past there had not been enough people in the forest to ride on such beasts, just as there was nobody who would drink up those huge amounts of wolves’ milk. Other people had been reducing their flocks of wolves and letting the animals out into the forest—for why would a lone old woman keep dozens of wolves if she didn’t have a single child or grandchild? One animal to milk would be enough for her. But that was not what Tambet did; he did the opposite. He regarded letting wolves go free into the forest as an unprecedented act of treachery, a betrayal of an age-old way of life.

  “In our forefathers’ day, not a single wolf ran free around the forest,” he would say indignantly. “They all stayed in their barns, milked and ready to carry people.” Tambet was not interested in the fact that no one went to war any longer; he did not seem to understand that, and sometimes seemed to regard real life as just a thick fog that leads fools astray, one through which only he could clearly see. He was absolutely sure that this fog would soon lift, and then people would start living as they had once done. Therefore he would not reduce his pack of wolves, but on the contrary increased it, catching whole groups of wolves, which he said were not created to trot around the forest with their tails up, but to serve men. Naturally looking after such a herd of wolves took up enormous time and effort, and that was one reason why Hiie did not manage to slip out and play with us. She had to milk the wolves and throw food to them, even though she was only a child. My mother thought this was terribly cruel, and often came home cursing Tambet and his wife for torturing their daughter with such hard work.

  “Today I came past Tambet’s place and I saw poor little Hiie killing hares,” she said. “It’s a terrible pity to look at her. A great number of hares had been driven into the corner of the yard, frozen in the spot by Snakish words, and little Hiie was just chopping off their heads with an ax. And you’d think that Tambet would give her a nice little ax, but no. The ax was bigger than the child! Hiie is so tiny; she could scarcely lift the great whopping thing! She chopped and chopped, tears in her eyes from the great strain. When they were all chopped off, she started throwing the hares in front of the wolves. Now why would anyone need to keep so many of those great strapping wolves in the barn? Let them trot around the forest and find their own food! That Tambet is a heartless man, and downright crazy! He tortures his own child. And that Mall is even madder. What kind of mother is she, letting her own daughter do a slave’s work! I wouldn’t let anyone torment my child like that! If my husband forced you to chop up hares like that, I’d have a good chop at him myself on the …”

  At this point Mother fell silent, because she recalled her own sinful love with a bear, and how my father was left without his own head, and she grew embarrassed. But it was true that Tambet and Mall took very little care of their daughter. For them the most important thing was to live as their forefathers had. As if the sun had stopped moving in the sky, ceased setting and rising, as if the forest had not been drained of people in the meantime and the whole world had not changed. In the name of leaving that impression, they would sacrifice everything. They would work till the blood ran out of their nails, and force their own daughter to do the same.

  Hiie had another problem too, apart from having to feed wolves all day long and chop up hares with a big ax. She didn’t drink wolves’ milk—and that was extremely bad, in Tambet’s opinion. Think of the pack of wolves squatting in the barn, lactating rivers! What was to be done with all that milk? Naturally it had to be drunk, and every family member had to make a contribution. Apart from that purely practical reason, Tambet was deeply convinced that every true Estonian ought to drink wolves’ milk; it was wolves’ milk that had given our forefathers and foremothers their boundless strength. So refusing wolves’ milk was a terrible crime, a betrayal of old customs, and in Tambet’s opinion nothing was more heinous.

  But what was most unpleasant was that such resistance was taking place in his own family. It had to be overcome! Milk was forced into Hiie’s mouth, but when the girl began to vomit, Tambet’s face went red and he yelled like a roebuck. He couldn’t think of any new punishments for Hiie; he had tried everything, but the girl just cried and asked to be allowed to give up the milk. Tambet would not hear of it, and his wife, Mall, banged the table with her long sturdy finger and demanded: “Do as your father says!”

  Finally Tambet went to talk with the sage of the sacred grove, thinking that he should be able to help. Ülgas examined Hiie, smoked a few plants around her, smeared her knees with martens’ blood, and commanded the girl to suck on the brain of a live nightingale. When her disgust at that made Hiie vomit all over again, Ülgas declared to Tambet that the sprites had bewitched the girl.

  “But don’t worry. I have power over the sprites and I’ll make her well again!” promised Ülgas. Hiie had to go to the sacred grove every day, and the martens’ blood flowed in streams, the stinking smoke of the plants rose to the skies,
and Ülgas kept stuffing more and more nightingales’ brains under the girl’s nose.

  None of this helped. Hiie still couldn’t drink wolves’ milk. Actually she could hardly eat at all anymore, for the nightingales’ brains had driven away all her appetite, and the suffocating smell of Ülgas’s spells stayed in her nostrils and made every kind of food horrible. Ülgas became angry, because he had promised to subjugate the sprites and tried to feed Hiie in new, even more disgusting ways. He took the girl at night deep into the forest to a lonely spring and left her alone with a tub of milk, assuring the girl that at midnight a sprite would rise up out of the spring and strangle her if she had not drunk up the milk by then. Hiie didn’t drink it, but poured it onto the moss, and of course no sprite came up out of the spring.

  Finally Ülgas got tired of Hiie’s fussing and told Tambet that he had freed the child from the sprites’ spell, but the girl would only start drinking milk in ten years’ time; that was how long the sprites’ curse on her would last. Obviously Ülgas hoped that in ten years’ time Hiie would be drinking milk for some reason, or had died anyway by then, or even that Tambet had died by then, and the fulfillment of the sage’s promise could not be verified. After all, ten years is a long time, and anything can happen in that interim.

  In any case Ülgas the Sage inadvertently saved Hiie’s life, because if the torture of the girl had continued, she would have given up the ghost. Now Tambet was reconciled by Ülgas’s words and no longer forced poor Hiie to drink milk. But he could not love a child who did not behave as the ancient order had prescribed, so he hardly spoke to Hiie at all, and always looked at her with a vague sense of revulsion, as if there were some fault in her.

  My lessons with Uncle Vootele continued. We didn’t practice Snakish so much anymore, as I was quite skilled at it, but we wandered in the forest, sometimes the two of us, sometimes with Ints too, draped like a ribbon around my neck, chatting about the land and the weather. Uncle Vootele talked about everything that had once been and was now gone forever. He pointed out overgrown shacks in the bushes, whose residents had either died or moved to the village, and told me what mighty old men and stern old women had once lived out their lives in those structures. Hundreds of years ago nobody could have imagined that one day those hovels would lie empty, their walls crumbling and their roofs caving in. We broke through the undergrowth and toured the ruins of these abandoned shacks, finding lots of traces of the former owners. Often we encountered a whole preserved household—crockery, knives and axes, chests of animal skins, and other chests full of gold and precious stones. In ancient times they had been plundered from the ships that used to sail our coasts, whose crews were destroyed by the Frog of the North. It was strange to touch brooches and precious stones that had once come under the giant shadow of the Frog of the North. It felt as if something of the warm flames that came from his mouth was still preserved in them.