The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Four

n the old days, they say, it was quite natural for a child to learn the Snakish words. In those days there must have been more skilled masters, and even some who didn’t get all the hidden subtleties of the language — but even they got by in everyday life. All people knew Snakish, which was taught in days of yore to our ancestors by ancient Snakish kings.

By the time I was born, everything had changed. Older people were still using some Snakish, but there were few really wise ones among them — and then the younger generation no longer took the trouble to learn the difficult language at all. Snakish words are not simple; the human ear can hardly catch all those hairline differences that distinguish one hiss from another, giving an entirely different meaning to what you say. Likewise, human language is impossibly clumsy and inflexible, and all the hisses sound quite alike at first. You have to start learning the Snakish words with the kind of practice you take with a language. You have to train the muscles from day to day, to make your tongue as nimble and clever as a snake’s. At first it’s pretty annoying, and so it’s no wonder that many forest people found the effort too much, and preferred to move to the village, where it was much more interesting and you didn’t need Snakish.

Moreover, there weren’t any real teachers left. The retreat from Snakish had started several generations ago, and even our parents were only able to use the commonest and simplest of all the Snakish words, such as the word that calls a deer or an elk to you so you can slit his throat, or the word to calm a raging wolf, as well as the usual chitchat, about the weather and things like that, that you might have with a passing adder. Stronger words hadn’t come in for much use for a long time, because to hiss the strongest words — to get any result out of them — would need several thousand men at once, and there hadn’t been that many in the forest for ages. And so many Snakish words had fallen into desuetude, and recently no one had bothered to learn even the simplest ones, because as I say they didn’t stick in your mind easily — and why go to the trouble, when you could get behind a plow and work your muscles?

So I was in quite an extraordinary situation, as Uncle Vootele knew all the Snakish words — no doubt the only person in the forest who did. Only from him could I learn all the subtleties of this language. And Uncle Vootele was a merciless teacher. My otherwise so kindly uncle suddenly became very gruff when it came to a lesson in Snakish. “You simply have to learn them!” he declared curtly, and forced me over and over again to repeat the most complex hisses, so that by the evening my tongue ached as if someone had been twisting it all day. When Mother came with a haunch of venison, my head shook in fear. Just the thought that my poor tongue had to chew and swallow, in addition to all the twistings of the day, filled my mouth with a horrible pain. Mother was in despair, and asked Uncle Vootele not to exhaust me so much and to start by teaching me just the simplest hisses, but Uncle Vootele wouldn’t agree.

“No, Linda,” he told my mother. “I’ll teach Leemet the Snakish words so well that he won’t know anymore whether he’s a human or a snake. Only I speak this language as well as our people have from the dawn of time, and one day, when I die, Leemet will be the one who won’t let the Snakish words fade into oblivion. Maybe he’ll manage to train up his own successor, like his own son, and so this language won’t die out.”

“Oh, you’re as stubborn and cruel as our father!” sighed Mother, and made a chamomile compress for my injured tongue.

“Was Granddad cruel, then?” I mumbled, with the compress between my teeth.

“Terribly cruel,” replied Mother. “Of course, not to us — he loved us. At least I think so — but many years have passed since he died, and I was only a little girl then.”

“So why did he die?” I persisted. I had never heard anything about my grandfather before, and only now I came to the surprising conclusion that quite naturally my father and mother couldn’t have just fallen out of the sky; they must have had parents. But why had they never talked about them?

“The iron men killed him,” said Mother. And Uncle Vootele added, “They drowned him. They chopped his legs off and threw him in the sea.”

“What about my other grandfather?” I demanded. “I must have had two grandfathers!”

“The iron men killed him too,” said Uncle Vootele. It was in a big battle, which happened long before you were born. Our men went out bravely to fight with the iron men, but they were smashed to smithereens. Their swords were too short and their spears too weak. But of course that shouldn’t have mattered, because our people’s weapons have never been swords and spears, but the Frog of the North. If we’d managed to wake the Frog of the North, he would have swallowed up the iron men at a stroke. But there were too few of us; many of our people had gone to live in the village and didn’t come to our aid when they were asked. And even if they had come, they wouldn’t have been of help, because they no longer remembered the Snakish words, and the Frog of the North only rises up when thousands call on him. So there was nothing left for our men but to try to fight against the iron men with their own weapons, but that has always been a hopeless task. Foreign things never bring anyone good fortune. The men were cut down and the women, including your grandmothers, brought up their children and died of melancholy.”

“Our father, of course, wasn’t killed in battle,” Mother corrected him. “No one would dare go near him, because he had poison teeth.”

“What do you mean, poison teeth?”

“Like an adder’s,” explained Uncle Vootele. “Our ancient forefathers all had fangs, but as time passed and they forgot Snakish, their poisonous fangs disappeared. In the last hundred years very few of them have had them, and now I don’t know anybody who has them, but our father did, and he bit his enemies without mercy. The iron men were terribly afraid of him and fled for their lives when Father flashed his fangs at them.”

“So how was he captured?”

“They brought a stone-throwing machine,” sighed Mother. “And started firing rocks at him. Finally they got him and stunned him. Then the iron men tied him up, with whoops of joy, cut off his legs, and threw him into the sea.”

“The iron men hated and feared your grandfather terribly,” said Uncle. “He had a really wild nature, and our ancestors’ fiery blood flowed in him. If we had all stayed like that, the iron men wouldn’t have stood a chance of building a nest in our land; they would have had their throats cut and been gnawed to the bone. But unfortunately people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language, until finally they’re bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a scythe.”

Uncle Vootele spat and glowered at the floor with such a horrible expression that I thought, My heroic grandfather’s cruel blood hasn’t completely gone from his son.

“Even amid the waves, Father bellowed in such a frightful voice that the iron men fled to their castle and closed all the window holes,” Mother said, concluding her woeful tale. “That was more than thirty years ago.”

“So isn’t that reason enough to learn Snakish?” said Uncle. “In memory of your brave grandfather. I can’t plant fangs in your mouth, but I can put a nimble tongue in there. Spit out that pap, and let’s get started again.”

“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 iron 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.”