The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  The first one he got hold of was Jaakop, who was just then preparing to light the pyre. Grandfather grabbed him by the head, heaved him into the sky with him, and sank his fangs into the man’s neck. Jaakop fell convulsing back to the ground and within a moment he was dead.

  Then Grandfather grasped an ax tied to his belt and wielded it up and down several times. The villagers screamed and fled in horror in all directions.

  “Are you dead, Leemet?” shouted Grandfather.

  “No, Grandfather, I’m alive!” I shouted back. “Just tied up. Set me free!”

  Grandfather hovered down to me. His wings were as wide as an eagle’s, and the human bones were woven together with miraculous skill. Grandfather stretched out his long nails and cut through the cords with them.

  “When I saw you all bloody on the pyre, I thought you were dead and this was your funeral,” said Grandfather. “But now I understand that these rascals wanted to burn you alive. Come, boy, let’s do a little poisoning!”

  He took a long knife from his belt and tossed it to me.

  “Something for you to jab with,” he explained. “You don’t have proper teeth, poor child.”

  He tilted back his head and howled, and then rushed to attack the villagers. I leapt down from the pile of brushwood, my heart full of joy. This was just what I had been longing for. Grandfather had arrived just at the right time. Merely holding a knife was driving me mad with excitement. I whooped with joy when I got to kill the same bulky peasant who had slapped my mouth earlier, and I rushed on to catch others.

  The villagers didn’t put up resistance. They didn’t even try to fight; the arrival of my flying grandfather had caused such fear in them that they fled as fast as they could. We pursued them and ran them down in the tussocks, but while we were running after one of them, others were scurrying who knows where and it was no longer possible to find them. I searched everywhere for Elder Johannes and Peetrus, but they had vanished like a stick in water. Finally I stood panting, for all the village men had fled, and apart from Grandfather hanging in the air there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

  “Not bad!” shouted Grandfather when he saw me stopping in bewilderment. “The best view is from up here. Be prepared. There are iron men riding this way!”

  A moment later I could see them too. There were six iron men, in the middle of whom rode a fat man on an extremely fine horse and wearing clothes dripping with jewels, on his face a haughty, disdainful expression. This was undoubtedly some important lord, perhaps a bishop. I didn’t know. He couldn’t be the Pope at any rate, for Johannes had said that the Pope lived in the city of Rome. We weren’t very interested in who precisely he was. I went and stood in the middle of the road, knife in my hand, while Grandfather flew in a great arc up behind the iron men. They hadn’t noticed him yet, and they hadn’t wanted to notice me either; they steered their horses straight in my direction as if I were mere air through which they could calmly ride. Evidently they were hoping that I would humbly step aside, but I didn’t, and I met the enraged gaze of the mighty lord. He had noticed me, screwed up his face angrily, and made a movement with his arm as if to wipe me out of the way like rubbish or a fly. One knight drew a sword from his belt.

  Then I hissed—and the horses started to break their stride. Two knights fell right out of the saddle. The others managed to remain on their horses’ backs, but that was their misfortune, for then it was much simpler for Grandfather to strike them on the head with his ax. He came whirling and howling like that ancient bird whose picture I had seen in the Primates’ cave. Twice he struck with the ax, and two iron heads rolled along the ground. He turned right around, and set off again. Meanwhile, I stabbed to death the two knights who had tumbled from the saddle.

  The only one left alive was that proud lord in his costly garb. His expression was no longer lofty or scornful at all; now he stared in sheer amazement at the extraordinary winged monster of whose existence he had never heard. This monster looked truly horrifying, with wings made of bones, as well as a long gray beard and two aged, blood-red eyes, sharp crooked claws like a bird’s, and unnaturally short legs, actually mere stumps. This must have been a ghastly, unearthly sight in everyone’s eyes but mine, for whom this monster was my earthly grandfather.

  I stepped up to the proud lord and killed him. Grandfather flew to a nearby tree and perched on a branch of it. Now he looked even more like a bird.

  “All of them!” he said with satisfaction. “Pretty good for a start. Oh, my boy, how long I’ve waited for this day!”

  “What kept you so long?” I asked. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming after all.”

  “I couldn’t get those last bones I needed from anywhere!” shouted Grandfather. “It was terrible! After you left, not a single person came to my island. I lay in wait for days on end by the seashore, but not a single ship came. The months passed; a whole year went by. I thought I would go mad. I had these wings nearly ready. You had brought me the windbag, and yet I couldn’t get going. There were animals on the island, but their bones weren’t right, although I did try for a few weeks with deer and goats. Nothing came of it. You know, boy, I tell you honestly so please don’t take offense, but if you and your girl had come upon me at that moment, I would have killed you and put your bones to use. So what if you’re my grandson and dear to me. I was completely blind; I was even thinking of ripping a bone of my own from my side and putting it on the wings, but there was nothing to take. In the end I wasn’t even eating or drinking; I was just sitting like a rock on the shore, staring at the sea. Ten days ago I finally saw, far out at sea, one ship, but it wasn’t sailing toward my island at all, but in the other direction. I jumped into the water, swam like mad, and caught up with the ship. I hauled myself aboard and killed the whole crew, crawling around like a crab, with a long knife in each hand. But then there was a new problem. How to steer the ship to the island? I was alone! Yes, I fumbled around and rowed and tried every trick, but still it took a whole week before I got home. Then I needed another couple of days to clean the bones and finish off the wings. My hands were shaking as I put those little bones in place. You know I had a sort of feeling, like a man who’s been starving for a long time, when finally a decent hunk of meat is put in front of him. Tears of joy came into my eyes. Finally the wings were ready. I tied the windbag on to them and took off. I screeched with joy and slaughtered a couple of seagulls just for the hell of it. I flew straight here and found you on the pyre. Why did they want to burn you?”

  “They thought I was a werewolf,” I replied. “A person who can change into a wolf.”

  “Why would a being in their right mind change into a wolf?” wondered Grandfather. “That would be stupid. I certainly don’t want to be ridden on or milked.”

  He laughed resoundingly.

  “Not that you could squeeze any milk out of me!” he roared. “What isn’t there isn’t there! I’m not a wolf, but a proper human, and I’ll carry on raging so the ground is black!”

  He looked at me inquiringly.

  “Are you coming with me?” he asked. “Are we going off to fight, as we’ve been doing? Or are you stuck to your woman and prefer to sit at home?”

  “I have no one to be stuck to,” I said.

  “Ah—that girl who came visiting me with you? Hiie, or what was her name? Didn’t you take her after all? She was pretty.”

  “She was, Grandfather,” I replied. “But she’s dead.”

  Grandfather hummed.

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “Well, now … A pity of course, but at least you’re free and you can do what you want. Are you coming with me? Of course, first we have to go home and say hello to your mother, my daughter. We can’t put that off, because who knows what the future may bring.”

  “Mother is dead too,” I said. “Just about everybody is dead, so let’s go right away, Grandfather. There’s no point in waiting.”

  Grandfather stared at me.

  “She’s dead too …” he repeate
d. “While I’ve been sitting on my island, you’ve been living your whole lives through. Well, what’s left to me but to get even. Let’s go, boy. We’re in a real hurry!”

  I stuffed the knife back in my belt and set forth, Grandfather floating overhead like a giant bat. The pile of brushwood lay behind us, as did a heap of dead bodies. In this way in the end the brushwood became an ordinary pyre after all; at least I hope it did. By the time the remaining villagers ventured out of their hiding places and started burning the dead, Grandfather and I were already far away.

  Thirty-Five

  e went to war. It was an odd crusade, because we had not the slightest hope of winning. In the end there were just the two of us against the whole wide world. We were like two aphids who could gobble up individual leaves voraciously, but with no possibility of felling the whole tree. We moved from battle to battle and had no place to turn back to after a successful strike, to rest and to report to those back home: We won! We were warring only for our own pleasure and because we couldn’t do anything else in the new world. We didn’t need anyone’s gratitude or a place to lick our wounds. We kept rushing onward, attacking everyone who stood in our way, killing, stinging, beating, and bashing. We were both burning with a crazed fever, and we knew that when the fever abated, it would mean death.

  We were reckless and we didn’t retreat in the face of any opponent, for we had no thought of saving ourselves. It made no difference whether we fell now or later. We paid no attention to defense. We were indifferent whether an arrow pierced our chests or whether some iron man could run us through with his lance, and this carelessness was to our advantage. We overcame opponents who were several times our number in strength, and we left their corpses stacked on the road. The arrows they fired in our direction didn’t hit us; the sword blows swished past us. We roared with laughter; we howled like wolves and hissed like snakes. We never washed ourselves, and the spattered blood of our enemies covered almost our whole bodies, so that we looked like flayed carrion. We were no longer human, but the living dead, who had risen from death to harass the new world, and that new world could not rid itself of us.

  On our travels we passed through villages, and if any villager stood in our way, we would lash out at him. We noticed how, when they saw us, they would abandon their rye fields, toss their scythes over their shoulders, and run for their lives, and we yelled abuse after them. I shouted to them that the Frog of the North had returned, and Grandfather took vigorous turns in the sky, at which the villagers fell to their knees and begged for protection from their new God against the forest-sprites. Nobody helped them and if we had wanted to, we could have bludgeoned them all to death.

  I watched as they clustered together, trembling, and I recalled the time when Mõmmi and I went to peep at the beautiful village girls on the edge of the forest, secretly lusting after them, and how I hated the stupid village boys with whom the girls had mischievous conversations, while I, being so wise and understanding the ancient Snakish words, had to suck my thumbs on my own in the woods. I would sit at the edge of the forest, longing and ashamed, and I felt so lonely. And I felt the same now when I saw these same girls—or rather, not actually the same, but very similar—snuggling behind the thickheaded boys, looking to them for protection from Grandfather and me.

  Protection from me! Ridiculous! What could be done to me by those miserable creatures whose tongues were too fat and blunt to pronounce Snakish words! How silly these girls were, and how deeply ignorant was their choice! All the same, sometimes I didn’t resist, and rushed into a village and killed as many men as I could, and Grandfather, who never shied away from combat, followed, hooting at me. Let these new people once again see the powerful Frog of the North. Never mind that it isn’t the real one. This will do! Let them feel one last time the force of his attack! But while the Frog of the North had once fought for them, now he was fighting against them, since they had changed sides and forgotten Snakish. The ancient memories, which in the meantime had degenerated into mere legends, were reawakened and proven to be true. You girls have made the wrong choice! This new world is weak; a bite from the old world will break it like a cobweb. Can all these new tricks save your thickheaded men? No, they are strewn across the ground, and in the evenings Grandfather makes drinking cups out of them by the fire. They wanted a modern life, but they ended it in an ancient way; people will drink water from their skulls, just as they did thousands of years ago.

  Do you see how strong and powerful the old world is? Admire it. Love it, girls!

  But instead they weep, yell, and flee without looking back. And they’re right, because the old world isn’t actually strong. Grandfather and I are just like an unexpected snowfall in summer, which in one night can destroy the buds and leaves, but that melts away in the next morning’s sun. We would kill and burn, but then we would leave a village. The girls would come from their hiding places and carry on living, finding new men for themselves and bringing forth children, none of whom understood Snakish.

  I understood perfectly how useless our fighting was, and every time after destroying yet another village I had the same sick feeling. But I still had battle fever in my blood, and didn’t suffer for long.

  In the end, who cares? Let the whole new world go to hell!

  In the main we concentrated on the iron men. We invented new ways of hunting them. We made use of goats and deer, which we drove into the path of the knights using Snakish words. The iron men could never resist the urge to hunt, and they rushed on horseback after the animals. We would direct the deer and goats into a thicket, where we would lie in wait. And then we would make a quick end to the iron men.

  In the evenings Grandfather would polish his skulls while I would roast goats over a fire, because the work of killing all day makes you tired and hungry. We didn’t have any use for the skulls, because we couldn’t take them with us; otherwise we wouldn’t have been warriors anymore, but a walking pile of beakers, our noses just poking out of the heap of beautifully carved skulls. Right at the beginning of our crusade I told Grandfather that there was no point in fussing over skulls, but Grandfather didn’t agree.

  “It’s an old warrior custom that you don’t just leave your enemy’s skull lying around, but you polish it up nicely and make a cup out of it,” he said. “It’s polite. If you have enough time to kill a man, then you’ll find the time to polish his skull.”

  “We can’t haul all these skulls around with us,” I argued.

  “That’s true,” agreed Grandfather. “I didn’t say that we have to carry them with us. We simply make the cups ready and leave them on the road. Anyone who wants to can take them and drink from them.”

  So Grandfather would spend the night making chalices out of all the dead people who passed through our hands, and in the morning we would leave them by the roadside, like a peculiar kind of droppings, which gave the message that two warriors from the old world had passed through.

  One evening we came upon a wide clearing on a path winding through a forest, in the middle of which towered a stone stronghold of the iron men. Grandfather alighted on a branch and looked me in the eye.

  “Shall we take them on, boy?”

  “Of course, Grandfather!” I replied, and we croaked with laughter. It was a completely crazy notion for two men to attack a fortress, within whose walls dozens of mail-coated warriors were moving. Grandfather could of course fly over them, but in order for me to help him I would need at least a ladder, and before I could get over the tops of the walls, more arrows than a bird has feathers would certainly be fired into my body. What could Grandfather do alone up there if the iron men were able to go into hiding in the towers and pepper him with arrows? The decision to attack the fortress was mad, but we didn’t care.

  “Where do we start, Grandfather?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait till night,” replied the old man. “I smell the scent of bears. They keep them inside the fortress. If the bears come to help us from inside, we’ll attack from the outs
ide, and tomorrow I’ll have a lot of work polishing all the skulls that will fall our way today.”

  We hid in the forest until the sun had set; then I crept to the fortress and hissed a few Snakish words. Those words can be heard through walls and simply must be answered, even when one doesn’t want to betray oneself, so it was no wonder that I immediately heard a weak and somewhat confused hissing, the sort that bears produce.

  I crawled up to where the hissing was coming from and pressed myself against the wall.

  “How many of you are there?” I hissed to the bears.

  “Ten,” came the reply.

  “Good!” I said. “We have a plan to capture the fortress and kill all the iron men. If you help us, you’ll be released from your prison and you can run back to the forest.”

  “We’re not in prison,” came the response through the wall to my great surprise. “We like it here. The chief of the iron men feeds us well.”

  “Idiots!” I hissed angrily. “Is there so little for you to eat in the forest? What fun can it be to sit in the cellar of a stone fortress behind bars! Don’t you long to see the sun?”

  “We go for a walk every day,” the bears answered. “We all have a strong leather leash. Oh, how beautiful it is! It has silver studs on it, attached by colored ribbons. No bear in the forest has such a beautiful collar. They’re made over the seas, in foreign lands. No, we’re not going to escape from the fortress.”

  I hissed a couple of insulting words to them, but the bears didn’t seem to care; evidently they were very satisfied to be able to tell someone of their incredible good fortune.

  “It’s very fine here!” they explained. “All the women have terribly splendid dresses that make them so beautiful it could drive you mad. Sometimes they take us into the banqueting hall, where all the people eat and dance and we’re allowed to look on and we’re given bones. Not only that, they’re teaching us to dance! There’s a hunchbacked man here who wears on his head a big forked red cap, with a golden bell on each tip. He’s a foreigner, no doubt an important and famous man, who always talks the most at feasts and does somersaults on the floor. Then they all laugh and applaud him. At the feasts he plays on a pipe, and not just with his mouth. Oh no! He can even blow on the pipe with his bottom! Yes, he pulls down his pants, gets down on his back, shoves the pipe into his arsehole, and plays so prettily that all the other lords and ladies roar with laughter and clap their hands together. This same man is our teacher; he blows his pipe and shows us how to move in time to it. He’s very kind, and if our dancing goes well, he strokes us and gives us dainty things to eat. Of course we try our very best, because we appreciate that dancing is in fashion these days. All the great lords dance, although not as well as this hunchbacked man with the little golden bells. Oh, how we want to be like him! We want to learn to dance well, because then maybe we’ll get a forked red cap and golden bells that tinkle so prettily. We have one great dream. That is we’d like him to teach us to play on the pipe with our mouths and our arseholes, but we’re afraid that we’re too clumsy and inexperienced for that. We’ve lived too long in the forest. But who knows!”