The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  “You should kill all those lords and ladies, starting with the hunchback,” I declared.

  “No!” replied the bears. “We love and admire them, especially our dear teacher. We don’t want to kill anyone at all; that’s an old-fashioned custom. They only still do that in the dark forest. Now we’re dancing bears.”

  “You should kill all those lords and ladies, starting with the hunchback,” I repeated pitilessly.

  “Oh no, we won’t do that!” came the reply. “Stop it! Who are you anyway, to be demanding such horrible things from us?”

  “I’m a man who knows Snakish,” I said, sibilating a very long and complex hiss. For once it was silent beyond the wall, and then some crazed roaring was heard. And so there should have been, for that Snakish word took away the bears’ free will and awakened their wild desire to kill.

  Without being able to see through the wall, I knew what was happening to the bears now. Their eyes were burning, they were foaming at the mouth, they were twisting their bars, biting their collars, and breaking with a roar into the castle. They were striking down every person who stood in their way, smashing up the rooms and flinging down the guards from the walls. The iron men were certainly putting up a resistance, trying to stop the unexpectedly crazed animals, calm them down, and if that failed kill them. They were battling with the bears, and when both parties were running with blood, when the bears had overturned the whole castle and murdered most of the iron men, Grandfather and I would come in and finish off the job.

  I could hear horrid screams from the fortress and I understood that the bears had attacked the humans. Maybe just now they were eating the piper with the red cap who had been teaching them to dance. Now he would be dancing between the paws of the flock of bears driven mad by Snakish words.

  I saw one guard flying headfirst down from the wall, and I realized that at least a few bears had got up there. I took a look at him—all was well; he’d broken his neck—and hissed to Grandfather. He had already realized that the time had come and came flying like a great owl.

  “Take hold of me. I’ll lift you up!” he shouted, and I clung to Grandfather’s hips and felt myself rising into the air. A moment later I was on the walls and a large bear was rushing toward me, its jaws open.

  I quickly hissed what was necessary, and the animal turned around to seek another victim, one who didn’t understand Snakish and couldn’t command it. It found an iron man and leapt onto him, but the iron man ran a spear straight into its heart, and the animal rolled down the stairs into the courtyard.

  A moment later it was followed by the victorious iron man, the useless spear still in his hand, for Grandfather had stung him on the cheek straight from the air.

  There was actually very little left for us to do, because the bears had ravaged savagely, and although their corpses also lay everywhere, they had killed off nearly all the residents of the fortress. We finished off the last ones.

  It only remained to calm the bears down. There were two left, and they were so enraged that they wanted to attack each other. One single Snakish word stopped them, and the bears looked around uncomprehendingly, astonished at the sight of their own bloody paws.

  “All right, bears!” said Grandfather. “Finished! The fortress has fallen and all the iron men and their women are dead. You can slip back into the forest.”

  The bears stared at us dumbly.

  “Didn’t you understand?” asked Grandfather. “Go back to the forest! You’ve been good; you did a lot of damage. You can keep the dead bodies if you like. Only the heads belong to me. I won’t give you those to gnaw on.”

  He hovered low over the courtyard of the fortress and fished out from the heap of corpses the body of a slightly built hunchbacked man, from whose head hung a red two-pronged cap. Grandfather ripped the cap off him.

  “Remarkable head, this one,” he said. “Knobbly like a tree root. This skull will make a splendid chalice.”

  “That’s the piper!” said one of the bears. “He taught us to dance and gave us sugar. What have you done?”

  “We haven’t broken a single bone in this little man’s body,” replied Grandfather. “There are a bear’s tooth marks on his throat. Maybe you bit him yourself.”

  He cut the piper’s head from the body and stuffed it in his pouch.

  “The head for me, the body for you,” he said cheerily. “Enjoy it!”

  The bears stepped slowly up to the piper’s dead body. They nudged it with their snouts. One of the bears took the red cap with the golden bells in its teeth and put it on the corpse’s chest. They licked the little man’s hands. They wept.

  “Eat up quickly, you fools!” shouted Grandfather from up in the air. “We’re going to set fire to this heap of lumber now! Boy, come down. I’m putting fire under the eaves!”

  A little while later the conquered fortress was blazing and a cloud of sparks rose to the moon. I strode along the road, lit up by the firelight, Grandfather flapping overhead, and I heard him saying, “It’s good that they built their house in the middle of a wide clearing, so there’s no danger of the forest catching fire.”

  I was just then wondering whether the bears had left the fortress or stayed to lick their teacher, who was able to play the pipe with his mouth and his arse. But then—what did it matter to me? Let them get scorched and perish if they wanted, together with their hunchback of the golden bells and his pipe.

  Who would pity this new world?

  “Grandfather, there’s another fortress!” I shouted, pointing ahead. “Now it’s its turn!”

  “Exactly!” replied Grandfather. “Let’s attack it now, while we’re still warm from the last commotion!”

  “Are there any bears here?” I asked.

  “Can’t smell them,” answered Grandfather. “But what the hell, we can do it ourselves.”

  “Yes we can!” I agreed, feeling the blood rushing to my head. “Let’s go, Grandfather! Lift me up over the walls again like last time!”

  I grabbed hold of Grandfather and we flew. The fortress, which had seemed in the dark to be a fuzzy dark lump, was right here. I was ready to get into the thick of the iron men’s spears and swords, to struggle for my life, and if necessary even to perish. It was all the same to me, but looking at the building from above I suddenly realized that this wasn’t a knights’ castle but a monastery.

  “Grandfather, we’re in luck!” I yelled. “There aren’t any iron men here, only monks! Grandfather, this will be just like going mushrooming; just cut with your knife!”

  One monk was staring at me from down in the monastery yard. He raised his hands and shouted something in his incomprehensible language. The monastery bells started ringing. Not half an hour passed before they were silent again.

  Thirty-Six

  e took off our clothes and dried them by the fire, because capes wet with blood would get cold at night. Grandfather fiddled with his skulls, and when he’d got one mug ready, he threw it over his shoulder and started to make a new one. Chalices made from skulls were strewn across the forest floor like pinecones.

  I went to sleep, and when I awoke to the first rays of the sun, Grandfather was still awake, still occupied with his skulls.

  “Grandfather, you haven’t slept at all,” I said drowsily as I sat up yawning.

  “I don’t have time for that,” replied Grandfather. “I’ve been squatting too long on the island; if I wasted my time sleeping now, I wouldn’t get anything done. Boy, eat your fill and get dressed. I’ll soon finish off the last mug and then we’ll keep on going and give the iron men another thrashing.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” I said. “We’ll keep on going.”

  Yet it so happened that as we moved ever onward, so we were also moving backward, for the forest roads were circuitous, and we didn’t even try to keep moving in a certain direction, but wandered wherever our feet took us and where there was a chance of meeting iron men or monks. And so I discovered on one such evening that the surroundings were someho
w familiar, and having walked a while longer I recognized the place where the wolves had killed the villagers’ sheep, the place where I had met Magdaleena, and fallen in love with her for the first time.

  “Grandfather, we’ve come back home,” I said. “Our old shack isn’t far away.”

  “Do you want to call in there?” asked Grandfather.

  I didn’t.

  What would be the point. Mother wasn’t there anymore. Then it occurred to me that Salme should still be in her own cave with Mõmmi. I hadn’t seen my sister for ages. When Grandfather and I last set off from here, I didn’t have the time or the desire to say farewell to her. To tell the truth I hadn’t even thought of her, for in the terrible avalanche that had buried everyone dear to me in the course of one night, I had quite forgotten that Salme was still alive. “Grandfather, how would it be if we went and visited my sister?” I suggested. “You could get to know your other grandchild.”

  “The one who married a bear?” asked Grandfather. “Let’s go; you have to be close to your relatives. They’re your own flesh and blood after all.”

  We turned off the road into the forest. It wasn’t comfortable at all for Grandfather to fly there, for his wings were too wide and tended to get caught on branches. So he rose higher and hovered over the treetops like an eagle.

  “Give me a shout when you get there and I’ll come down!” he called from above.

  “I’ll do that,” I yelled back. “We don’t have much farther to go, that is if Salme’s still living in her old cave. Let’s hope she hasn’t moved out.”

  Grandfather didn’t reply; he was circling over the forest, swooping down and then rising up again with powerful strokes of his wings.

  “Boy!” he shouted. “There are iron men in the forest! I can see them! What do you think? Shall we give them a little flogging? Then you’ll have a few nice skulls as gifts to take, and a couple of shanks for the bear.”

  “Why not, Grandfather!” I shouted back. “Where are they?”

  “Over there!” he yelled, and in the next instant he was roaring in a terrifying voice, because from “over there” an arrow had come flying from a bow, and pierced his shoulder. Grandfather howled, grabbed the tail of the arrow in his teeth to pull it out, but only bit the arrow in two and fell tumbling out of the sky, catching his wings against the tree branches and ending up lying in the middle of a pile of bones formed from the wings.

  “Grandfather, are you alive?” I screamed and rushed over to him, but at the same time the horsemen galloped out from behind the trees, together with their bowmen. They had been hunting in the forest, and their hunt had succeeded, because although they hadn’t found a single deer or goat, they had hit my grandfather. It had been a really good shot, and I had to admit that the iron men’s weapons were effective. At that moment, of course, I had no time to admire their bows; I had to protect my helpless grandfather lying on the ground, and myself, because the iron men were already attacking. I hissed, and the horses started to bolt as always, and iron men tumbled from the saddle. I rushed at them, and in a few moments my knife was red with blood. But there were too many of them and Grandfather was no help to me. I killed at least half of them, but they were all around me, and at one moment I felt something terribly heavy and sharp falling on my head, my skull crackled, and before I lost consciousness I had time to think that my skull would not make a good chalice, because now it had a hole in it. I fell spread-eagled and didn’t remember anything more.

  My head hurt terribly. It was the only thing I was aware of. I would have liked to faint again, to be rid of this pain, but I wasn’t allowed to. Someone hurled cold water on my face. I opened my eyes with difficulty and saw the grimacing face of an iron man before me. He said something and laughed.

  Seeing that I was conscious, he grabbed me by the collar together with another man and forced me upright. I saw that my clothes were covered all over with blood from my head wound. I was very weak and couldn’t even stand up, but I didn’t need to. The iron men tied me to a tree and the ropes kept me from falling.

  Now I could look at my surroundings. We were on the seashore—at about the place where my sea journey with Hiie once began, which took me to Grandfather’s island. Back then, the shore had been full of angry wolves, and somewhere in the waves the malevolent Tambet had stood yelling curses at us. Now instead there were iron men. There were many of them and they were all looking toward me conversing among themselves and seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Boy, how are you doing?” asked a hoarse voice. I turned my head as far as the cords allowed and saw Grandfather. He was also tied to a tree, standing upright for the first time since he lost his legs. His clothes were bloody. The broken end of the arrow still stuck out of his shoulder and one of his eyes was poked out.

  “Now they’re going to make an end of us,” said Grandfather. “Shitty maggots they are! I got badly bashed when I fell, and when I came around, these badgers had already tied me up. I still managed to bite some of them, so they died on the spot. Then they poked one of my eyes out and bludgeoned me in the mouth to make my fangs fall out—but they have strong roots. Finally they called some fat man with big tongs to pull out my teeth, but I stung him in the hand, and they didn’t approach me anymore. Now I’m going to die with my fangs, as I’ve lived with them. Boy, you and I have had fun. We got properly stuck into these shitbags. A pity that I got this stupid arrow in my shoulder, otherwise we could’ve given them even more pain.”

  “Never mind, Grandfather,” I consoled him. “It all had to end some time anyway.”

  “I didn’t get to see your sister,” he continued. “That’s a real pity. There are so few of us left and, well, not even those few can get together.”

  He was silent for a while, stared at the iron men and hissed loudly. Farther off, some horses tethered to trees started whinnying and trying to tear themselves free.

  “No use in Snakish words either,” said Grandfather. “The horses might bolt, but these shitbags won’t sit in the saddle.”

  Drums started to roll. Two men came up to us. They had in their hands a leather strap, with which they tied Grandfather’s mouth shut, probably so that Grandfather couldn’t use his fearful fangs. Grandfather whined bitterly. The men untied him from the tree, and without legs Grandfather collapsed onto his stomach. The iron men laughed and hooted with pleasure.

  “Hold out, Grandfather!” I said. “You know I’m very proud of you. If there were more men like you, the Frog of the North would be flying in the sky by now and would gobble up these grinning idiots like a swallow eating a gnat.”

  Grandfather looked at me and winked his only eye. Then he was dragged away.

  On a little mound had been built something like a wooden floor. That was where Grandfather was taken. His clothes were ripped off him and he was shoved onto his stomach. Then his hands were chained to the edge of the floor and one man sat on his stumps, to keep his lower body in place.

  Then one of the men took a large knife and cut through Grandfather’s back, starting at the neck and ending at his buttocks.

  Grandfather snorted with pain and wriggled.

  The man with the knife put his hands inside the wound and rummaged there. Grandfather’s eyes turned inside out, but he did not lose consciousness. Blood flowed across the wooden floor and dripped down onto the sand.

  The man on his back had found his ribs. He took a small ax and started smashing them up.

  Then he grabbed hold of them and pressed them outward, so that the ribs bristled out of Grandfather’s back like birds’ wings.

  The iron men on the shore fell to whinnying approvingly and shouted something, flailing their arms as if trying to take flight.

  Grandfather was still alive; he hit his head against the floor. Suddenly the strap holding his mouth shut broke. Grandfather roared and sank his teeth into his tormentor’s leg, which he had inadvertently left in front of his face.

  The man shrieked in a strangely shrill voice and co
llapsed beside Grandfather. The others rushed to his aid, but after several rapid convulsions the bitten man fell silent. He was dead.

  At the same time Grandfather hissed frantically, lashing out with his jaws in all directions and spitting dark blood.

  One of the iron men leapt up angrily, grabbed a sword, and chopped Grandfather’s head off. It rolled down off the wooden floor and, since it was wet and viscous with blood all over, it was quickly covered with sand, so that it might simply be seen as a large sandy rock.

  Grandfather’s trunk was lying contorted in a pool of blood. The body lacked legs and bony wings grew out of the ripped back. These were human bones, and therefore quite suitable for flying; they lacked only a windbag.

  But of course there was no longer anywhere to get that from.