The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  “Oh no, now that you’re back, I’m going to our own home of course,” replied Mother. “Being there alone was simply so sad, but with you it’s a different matter. You will be staying in the forest?” I thought for a moment. Moving back to the village seemed completely repugnant. Sitting here in the snakes’ lair, all of life there looked so foolish and alien. But I didn’t intend to give up Magdaleena and little Toomas. Especially Toomas. But also Magdaleena, I was as fond of her as before. I believed that Magdaleena would forgive me if in the future I only visited her—sometimes in the daytime, to engage with little Toomas, sometimes at night, to spend time with Magdaleena. After all, she did believe that I was a werewolf and a sage and whatever else. I had things to do in the forest; she had to understand that. “Yes, Mother, I’ll be living at home,” I said. “But I’ll still visit the village occasionally. I have a few things to do there.”

  Mother nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, yes, yes, of course, of course!” she concurred. “Do exactly as you want. You’re the only man in our family and you decide. Don’t be afraid. I won’t forbid you! If you have to, you can stay a longer time in the village. I won’t stand in your way.”

  “Mother,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve had it up to here with that village.”

  At that moment Ints nudged me with her nose and said, “Leemet, we have visitors. Your friends seemed to have tracked us down to the cave and are now prodding at the burrow.”

  “You mean—villagers?” I asked. “Won’t they ever leave me in peace?”

  “Yes, they will,” replied Ints, laughing soundlessly in her adderish way, jaws open and the strong fangs prominently on show. “I don’t believe they’ll get this far, so if you don’t want to see them, you can stay and wait calmly. We’ll go and settle this business quickly.”

  “No, I’m coming with you,” I said. “I want to see who it is. They might have Magdaleena with them … I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

  “Then come with us, because we don’t know your Magdaleena and can’t protect her,” said Ints. “Let’s take a look at our dear guests.”

  We crawled along the tunnel in the direction of the entrance, I on all fours and the adders slithering in front and alongside. Quite soon I heard voices. Someone said, “I don’t know how far we have to crawl.”

  “Quite horrible in this darkness,” said a female voice, which I thought belonged to Katariina.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said a third voice, apparently Andreas. “Whatever these snakes do to us, we are all wearing the holy cross. As soon as we see that king of the snakes, we’ll grab his crown off his head and take off.”

  “He might take off after us,” said the voice I’d heard first, which I now attributed to Jaakop.

  “He won’t,” replied Katariina. “The monk told us that if you pull the crown off the king snake’s head, he turns into a stone.”

  I let out a sigh. Poor idiot! To even think up such rubbish!

  “How will we divide up that crown?” asked Andreas. “Will each of us get a third?”

  “I should get more!” said Katariina. “I was the one who noticed where Leemet went off to with that nasty snake. I was the one who crept after them and saw how they wriggled down this burrow.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t dare to go after them alone. That’s why you asked us along,” said Jaakop. “So it should be divided equally into three. To you for finding it and to us for coming along to help you and taking the crown away. You’re a girl anyway; you wouldn’t dare rip the crown off the king snake’s head!”

  “I would!” argued Katariina. “Look, I’ve even got an ax with me. If the crown doesn’t come off by itself, I’ll chop the snake up and then yank it off.”

  “That’s the same girl that I stung today,” whispered Ints into my ear. “Never a good idea to waste good venom on a bare shin. If you’re going to bite, go for the throat.”

  And that is what she did. With lightning speed she rushed out of the darkness and sank her fangs under Katariina’s chin. All three crown hunters screamed, but Katariina’s scream died away quickly.

  “Take out the holy cross and brandish it!” yelled Andreas. “The holy cross …”

  In the next moment Ints’s father attacked. The powerful king of the snakes swung at Andreas like a falling tree and fixed on his face so that his fangs pierced Andreas’s eyeballs.

  Jaakop, who witnessed this, let out an unnatural scream and fled toward the mouth of the cave.

  A couple of young adders wanted to go after him, but Ints’s father said there was no need.

  “Let him go to his village and tell them what happened,” he said. “Then they will know, and they won’t come back. Filth! So they want my crown! Are they really so hungry that they have nothing left to eat?”

  “They believe that it will give them the power to understand the language of birds,” I said dolefully. For some reason I was terribly embarrassed, as if I had been one of the crown thieves. In appearance they were deceptively like me, after all.

  “The language of birds?” wondered Ints’s father. “What foolishness! But it’s no wonder they get these peculiar ideas. They live in their own village. They have no one to talk to, because they don’t know Snakish … Then they gradually go mad from loneliness. Poor mites.”

  I was staring at Katariina, whom just that morning I had helped to cure from a snakebite. Now she was stung again, and this time I couldn’t have helped her. She was dead, and so was Andreas. I suddenly felt sorry for them. Why did they have to crawl in here? Why couldn’t they stay in the village with their rakes, bread shovels, and querns? If they had built a new world for themselves, they should have left the old one alone, forgotten about it. And yet apparently they couldn’t do that; they were still enticed by the king snake’s crown and the language of birds and all the other secret things that were strangely distorted in their memory and had taken on an entirely different, foolish importance. They had not got quite free of their own past—but when they really did come across something ancient, they didn’t know how to treat it. They were like little children admiring a spring, leaning in too far and falling headfirst into the water. So now here they lay, mortally wounded. The snake-kings could have been their brothers, but they became their murderers.

  “I have to go,” I said to Ints. “I’ll go to the village. Tell my mother that I’ll be back by tomorrow evening at the latest.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ints. “Are you sorry for them? They wanted to chop off my head with an ax. Should we have licked the soles of their feet?”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “They got what they wanted. I simply need to do a few things in the village before I move to the forest for a longer time.”

  “Might I be able to come with you?” asked Ints. “I’d like to see that boy that you want to teach Snakish. It’s nighttime now and people should be asleep, so I can perhaps get inside without any fuss.”

  “Come on then,” I said. “Let’s not hurry. I’d like to walk in the forest a little. I haven’t been here for so long.”

  We didn’t rush, and only got to the village in the middle of the night. We walked slowly up to Johannes’s house. I pushed the door open and whispered to Ints: “The child is asleep in the cradle. Have a look, then get away; I don’t want old Johannes to wake up and see you.”

  “I don’t either,” replied Ints and crawled over to Toomas’s cradle. She writhed up the side of it and looked down on the sleeping child.

  “Leemet!” she hissed a moment later, so loudly that I was sure everyone would wake up and there would be unpleasant confusion. “Leemet!”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I hissed back. “You’ll wake people up!”

  “Leemet, come here!” shouted Ints. “This child is dead!”

  I had a feeling as if someone had splashed scorching hot water in my face. I was at Ints’s side in an instant. It was so horrifying that I started screaming. The infant’s throat had been b
itten through. The whole cradle was full of blood.

  “Magdaleena!” I screamed at the top of my voice. “Magdaleena, what’s happened?”

  I rushed to Magdaleena’s bed, which for the past half year had been mine as well. But this night Magdaleena was there alone, lying on her back, her hair over her face, and her neck broken.

  I don’t remember what happened next. For a while I knelt in the middle of the room, and before my eyes Ints’s head was wavering; she had raised herself up and was hissing comforting Snakish words at me, the kind that make you sluggish and drowsy. I drew my hand over my face and looked around. The room was completely ransacked, the benches and table split to splinters, and the spinning wheel broken in two.

  “What happened?” I asked Ints, yawning, as the Snakish words were having their effect as always.

  “You went mad,” replied Ints. “You were yelling and roaring and you turned the place upside down like a trapped stag. You rampaged. You smashed everything to bits and overturned it all. You left only the corpses alone.”

  I cast a glance at Toomas’s crib. It didn’t reveal its gruesome contents in any way, but I felt my insides turning once again.

  “Should I calm you down again?” asked Ints, who could apparently see in my eyes that another wave was coming over me.

  “No, no need to,” I replied, and felt myself how my lips were curling into a ghastly grin. “There’s nothing here left to smash up.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ints. “I didn’t know these people, but I’m truly sorry. What an utter bastard!”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who’s the bastard? Tell me, Ints. Who put them to death? Some wolf? Again, some damned wolf?”

  “Not at all,” declared Ints. “You lost your head when you saw these corpses, and you didn’t look at the marks properly. No wolf has been here, and actually these are not tooth marks at all. No animal has teeth like this. Go and look for yourself!”

  “I won’t, Ints,” I said. “I don’t want to see them anymore. I can’t. Tell me who killed them, then I’ll go and grab the creature and torture it to death.”

  “Your old friend Ülgas the Sage,” replied Ints.

  I burst out laughing at this unexpected turn, and felt my whole body shaking with rage.

  “So he’s alive then?” I cried.

  “Yes, unfortunately he is,” replied Ints. “You cut off half his face, but that didn’t kill him. I’ve seen Ülgas a couple of times in the forest. The old man looks loathsome, but he’s alive. I think he’s become demented. He walks around naked, filthy from sleeping in the mud, and the last time I met him, he’d attached claws made of sharpened twigs to the sides of his fingers. He waved his arms about, snapped his false fingernails, and muttered something confused. Leemet, it’s those same wooden claws that have ripped these people’s throats!”

  “Then let’s go and find him,” I roared like a fanatic, leaping up and throwing myself against a wall so that the house trembled. Again I was seized by a strong urge to fling things around and smash everything in sight, but Ints’s calming hiss made my head a little clearer again.

  “So where is old Johannes?” I suddenly thought of asking. “Is he dead too?”

  I cast a glance at Johannes’s bed, but it was empty.

  “He can’t have been at home,” said Ints. “Interesting—villagers don’t usually roam around at night. Anyway it saved his life. Yours too. If you’d been sleeping here, there wouldn’t be much of your throat left either.”

  “That beast did go for my throat!” I said, opening the door with a bang. “The sacred grove! It’s the sacred grove that he can’t forgive me for, and it’s revenge for half of his face. Today he paid me for chopping off his whole face, but I’ve chopped off only half. I have to hurry and knock the rest of his block off. No job should be left half-done, and what is done today is not a care for tomorrow, as Uncle Vootele used to say. He was rotting beside me, Ints, and since that time there’s been a strange stink in my nostrils. I’ve never told you this before, but now you know; it’s a kind of smell as if I were rotting myself. But look. I’m not rotting at all. It’s everyone else who’s perishing! Everyone else around me! They’re dying and rotting, and I have to go on living with the smell. Well, what’s left for me, still alive!”

  I ran out of the room and stuck my knife into the trunk of a tree growing in front of the house.

  “I’m still alive!” I screamed.

  “Leemet, come on now,” said Ints. “Let’s go and look for Ülgas.”

  “Ülgas!” I growled. “Yes, he must be hunted down and killed, because he’s still alive, not dead as he should be, because I’m the last! I’m the last one, not he!”

  I bayed at the moon, as my grandfather on his island had done, and marched behind Ints into the forest, hacking with my knife at branches around me, blind with rage.

  Thirty-Three

  oming among the trees, Ints raised her head and hissed piercingly. She was calling other adders.

  After a few moments, snakes started crawling toward us. Ints put just one question to them all: “Where is Ülgas?”

  The first snakes that wriggled there were unable to answer. That didn’t matter; there were many adders, and nobody could move about in the forest without being seen by snakes.

  About the tenth adder nodded at Ints’s question and said, “I saw him just a few moments ago. He was huddling under that old linden tree, the one that was split by lightning two years ago, eating wood sorrel.”

  “Thanks very much,” said Ints. She looked at me.

  “Well, Leemet?” she asked. “Did you hear that?”

  “I did,” I said. I had been waiting impatiently, massaging my knife in my palm. I had even cut a wound in my own palm, but hadn’t felt the pain as the blood coursed down my fingers. “Ints, remember. I’ll kill him myself. Today I don’t need your fangs.”

  “I understand,” replied Ints.

  Then I ran to the burned linden tree, by the straightest path and as fast as I could, paying no heed to the branches poking my face, and Ints stayed at my heels.

  Ülgas was indeed there. If I hadn’t been blind with rage, his appearance would have moved me. The sage was naked and his skeletal body was covered by something like bark, formed of mud, with twigs and other rubbish that lay around the forest clinging to it. Half of his face was gone and the former wound was covered by a large scar, strikingly pink next to the brown skin, and somehow moist looking. To his fingers Ülgas had tied short whittled spikes; with these he was pulling wood sorrel from the ground and stuffing it, along with the soil, in his mouth, quietly mumbling to himself. Some of the wood sorrel had got tangled in the sage’s beard and hung from his chin like a green mold. This was not a human. This was a monstrous animal or even a plant, a tree from the grove come back to life, gobbling herbs and staring at me with a single crazed eye. He recognized me and screeched, “You! You chopped down the sacred grove! The dogs of the grove won’t forgive it. They’ll chew you to a pulp!”

  He raised his hands threateningly, stretched out his wooden-clawed fingers, and barked.

  “You see, the dogs of the grove know your scent!” he squealed. “They’ll come and bite you to death!”

  I noticed that the wooden claws were brown with caked blood. No doubt this beast had ripped Magdaleena’s and little Toomas’s throats with these same spikes. I felt the world going hazy before my eyes. Hatred was choking me; I stepped closer and with a single stroke lopped Ülgas’s left hand off. The sage squealed shrilly, but didn’t retreat; he tried to grab me with his right hand. I jumped out of the way and the wooden claws groped at the air without hitting me. A moment later the other hand fell among the wood sorrel. I stepped on it and screamed, “These aren’t dogs, you son of a bitch! They’re your own hands, with which you killed two innocent people! You’re a beast, a beast!”

  “I wanted to kill you!” screeched Ülgas, pressing his blood-dripping stumps against his belly. “I spied on you and lay in wait, but just th
at night when I came after you with my faithful dogs, you weren’t at home. But the dogs wanted to eat. The sprites had promised them blood, and so they quenched their thirst. No one can oppose the sprites; they are all-powerful!”

  This tale was so horrifying that I pulled Ülgas upright, and with one stroke split his stomach open. He let out a whine and collapsed to the ground.

  “Bastard!” I panted. “Understand once and for all that there are no sprites and no dogs of the grove; there’s just your sick brain. Why didn’t I kill you before? All this is my fault!”

  I put my hand inside Ülgas’s wound and pulled out his intestines. The sage roared and howled. I tied the guts to the old linden tree and kicked the old man in the face.

  “Now crawl around your own sacred tree, you villain!” I screamed. “Crawl until all your guts are twisted around it! Crawl, you hear me, crawl!”

  And he did start to crawl! A bloody and loathsome trail formed behind him, the long slimy entrails hung out from his belly and stretched ever longer. The wood sorrel beneath the tree turned brown from Ülgas’s blood. His tongue, now blue, hung from his mouth, as he drew himself slowly forward, wheezing, his single eye bulging and lifeless. Having done two circuits around the linden, he was drained of blood.

  “That is obscene,” said Ints, turning her head aside in disgust.

  “Come and eat and enjoy your feast, honorable sprites and dogs of the grove,” I screamed at the top of my voice. “The table is set! Come and have a good taste; this dish should please you! Be sure to come, for today you’re being fed for the last time! Tomorrow no one will remember you. From tomorrow you’re condemned to oblivion and starvation! Last chance, respected sprites! Dogs, aoouu! Where are you? Come and gobble!”

  Only flies flew there at my bidding, a great cloud, and soon Ülgas’s corpse was covered in a humming black crust.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Ints. “This is making me sick.”

  I spat on the flies and the remains of the sage, turned around, and marched away.