The Man Who Spoke Snakish

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 that 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.

“Where are you going now?” asked Ints, crawling along beside me.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to the village?”

“No.”

“Are you coming to our place?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I would have liked to just keep going and fall off a precipice where the path met a cliff, just like that day when the wolf killed Hiie. Again it was all over, again it was all past, again everything had vanished.

“Come to our place first,” suggested Ints. “You should rest. You can lick some of the white stone and go to sleep.”

“And then?”

“Then what?”

“When I wake up?”

“I don’t know, Leemet. We’ll think about that later. Please, come with me.”

I didn’t argue with Ints. So be it, I would go to the snakes. Actually it didn’t really matter where I went or what I did.

We went back to the path that led to the snakes’ cave and went along for a while in silence. Then suddenly Ints hissed in alarm.

“I can smell smoke!” she hissed. “Hurry! Something strange is going on!”

I too could smell fire. I started running, and my self-confidence began to return. Smoke and flames blazing between the trees might mean that again I had the opportunity to fight, to bury my own dejection in blind rage for revenge. Who could be making a fire there? Maybe some monks and iron men? I took out my knife and fingered its handle greedily.

“That smoke is coming from our cave!” hissed Ints beside me, horrified.

We rushed onward and in a moment we were there. It was not iron men or monks at all. It was a group of villagers, with Johannes at their head, and Pärtel and fat Nigul and Jaakop and all the other men. They were standing in a circle around a huge fire that had been built right in front of the burrow leading to the snakes’ cave, and in the fire one could see several charred adders, which had evidently tried to get into the fresh air from the smoke invading the cave. The only thing they had achieved was to exchange death by choking for death by roasting.

My mother was in the cave too! And Ints’s father, the king of the snakes! And her children, whose crowns were only just starting to grow on their heads! They were all there and couldn’t get out.

Ints hissed in a horrifying voice and attacked the villagers from behind. One boy screamed and fell to the ground stung by Ints, then an old man roared, covered his face with his hand, and collapsed. Ints struck out to the right and the left, and fear and confusion reigned among the villagers.

“Help! Help!” they screamed. “A snake from hell has got out!”

I didn’t intend to let Ints fight alone. I summoned all the power in my lungs and rushed to help her. With my first blow I cut through fat Nigul’s throat and the greasy man fell down like a sack. I hit out heedlessly in all directions, and sometimes I had to close my eyes as the blood sprayed in my face and stung my eyes. There were too many people, and if I lunged in among them, I couldn’t defend my back. Someone flung a stone at my neck, my skull cracked, and I fell to my knees, spitting blood that came from I knew not where. The world revolved before my eyes, and before I had time to collect myself, I was bound up. Ints was lying beside me. She was still alive and moving slowly, but her backbone was broken.

I saw my old friend Pärtel bending over us, in his hand a heavy club.

“These snakes are actually not all that dangerous,” I heard him saying. “You just have to bash them in the middle of the back and they’re done for. It’s as delicate as a twig: one bash and the backbone is broken.”

“Pärtel,” I mumbled, spitting blood. “Don’t you remember? This is Ints! She used to be your friend!”

“A snake can’t be a Christian’s friend,” said Pärtel. “You’re the one who makes friends with snakes, because you’re a pagan. That’s why you’re going to be burned at the stake!”

“You’re a monster,” I said quietly. Pärtel’s words didn’t frighten me. They could burn me if they wanted to; everything was finished anyway, and now they had killed my mother and Ints’s whole family and all my old friends the adders. There was no one left, only Ints with her broken back; no doubt they were about to make an end of her as well. Very well, let them do it; it was painful for me to watch Ints wriggling helplessly in the dust like some miserable earthworm.

“Hold on, friend!” I hissed to her. Ints looked at me; she understood what I had said, but she was no longer able to answer. Spasmodic convulsions ran through her body. I could see she was in great pain.

“Shall we throw the snake in the fire?” asked Jaakop, stepping closer and shoving Ints with his foot.

“No, better to take it to an ants’ nest,” answered Pärtel. “Then you can see some fun; the ants will pick the flesh off the bones so clean as if the damn snake was boiled in a pot.”

“You wretch, you beast, you turd!” I screeched on the ground, as Pärtel, accompanied by the village men, lifted Ints’s twitching body on a forked branch and took her away somewhere. I recalled how scornful Ints used to be about ants’ nests, and now she had to fall into such filth. Those same repulsive and stupid tiny insects would eat her flesh, carry her off bit by bit into their tiny passageways and leave only a white skeleton. Those wretched little creatures did not know Snakish — just like the villagers, thanks to whom they now had such an abundant meal to eat. The villagers had grown bold. They had summoned the courage to kill the adders, and now there was nothing left to impede the onslaught of the new world. To their deaf ears Snakish words were of no use; they offered no defense against something so crude as a stick, with which it is so easy to smash the delicate back of an adder.

Pärtel had said I would be burned at the stake, and I had expected to be thrown into the fire there and then. Evidently the village men had other plans. Johannes stepped up to me, looked at me seriously for a while, then bent over me, and said, “Now you see, Leemet, what happened to you because you rejected the sign of the holy cross. If you had let the reverend brothers christen you, the devil would not have got you in his power.”

“I am not in anyone’s power,” I murmured.

“But why did you attack us then?” asked Johannes. “Why did you kill so many honest Christians?”

“Because those Christians killed my friends,” I retorted. “Do you know, you stupid old man, that you murdered my mother today?”

“Your mother? We were destroying snakes, Satan’s most loyal servants. Yesterday evening those disgusting animals killed two of our village people, young Andreas and dear Katariina. That crime could not go unpunished, so we suffocated the whole damned lot of them in their own cave.”

“My mother was in that cave too,” I said.

“In the snakes’ cave?” cried Johannes, brandishing his cross. “Then she was like a snake herself — or worse still, a witch! In that case she got her rightful fate!”

“Old man,” I said. “Today I ripped out the guts of a fairy-worshipping misfit like you. I’d sorely like to plunge a knife into your belly too and yank your liver out, and then bash you in the face with it.”

“You talk like a wild animal,” said Johannes scornfully. “And that’s what you are. Your soul is so strongly in the grip of the devil that you have no hope of partaking of God’s mercy and appreciating his grace. You attacked us together with your friend, the diabolical snake, but God protected us and guided the hand of bold Jaakop, who threw a stone at you. Your demonic lord is powerful, but he can’t prevail against God. Soon, at dawn, we’ll burn you, up on the hill of swings. Magdaleena can pray for you, but I’m letting you perish. For too long I’ve allowed a henchman of Satan in my own house; I have been weak and sinful myself.”

I burst into bitter laughter, although I would rather have wept — but I had no more tears.

“Magdaleena won’t be praying for me,” I screamed into Johannes’s face. “Don’t you worry about that! Ah, so that’s why you weren’t at home when Death came visiting your house! You were in the forest, killing snakes! Indeed your God did keep and preserve you and led you out of great danger. Rejoice now, old man, and thank your merciful God, who loves and protects you so much!”

“What are you talking about?” asked Johannes uneasily. “When did Death visit my house?”

“In the night, of course!” I sneered, sobbing. “Death comes at night and asks, ‘Knock-knock, is Elder Johannes at home?’ But he isn’t. So where is he? The elder is cooking adders in the forest! He has much work to do; his God has chosen him for it! But Death doesn’t want to go home with empty hands; he wants to fill his mouth with something! There’s no Johannes, no Leemet. But Magdaleena and Toomas are at home! Oh how nice! A beautiful girl, a little boy! How tasty! The sprites and the dogs of the grove also want to eat! God is busy gobbling up the adders that Johannes is cooking for him; well then, the sprites and the dogs can taste human flesh. All these beings are so hungry! They have such big bellies they’re never filled!”

The last words I absolutely roared, rolling on the ground as if I were on hot coals. The villagers stood around me in astonishment, not knowing what to do. Johannes was trembling.

“Have you …” he stammered. “Have you done harm to my child?”

“Not I!” I bellowed. “It was the dogs of the grove, the sprites and the other gods! They drink blood. Not I! I only know Snakish, nothing else, and I’m the last one who does. The very last. For there aren’t even snakes anymore!”

I burst into laughter, and the next moment I tried to bite the leg of the man standing nearest to me. The man leapt aside in alarm.

“Don’t be afraid, you bastard! My teeth aren’t venomous; you won’t die of them!”

“He’s gone mad,” said Johannes, his face pale. “Let’s take him with us and go quickly to the village. I’m very worried about Magdaleena.”

“Too late, you old idiot, too late!” I brayed in a truly demented way, smashing my head against the ground. “Too late!”

“Faster!” screamed Johannes, tearing at his beard. “Faster!”