The Man Who Spoke Snakish (32 page)

Mother had grown older, but otherwise was much the same. She fell on my neck when I squirmed into the snakes’ cave, squeezed me as much as she could and then let me go, took a look at me amazed, cried “oy!” and ran away.

“Mother, what’s wrong?” I called after her. “Where are you going?”

I tried to follow her, but Mother had vanished. She had rushed out of the cave and it wasn’t possible to find her among the trees.

I went back into the cave to talk to the adders, to look over Ints’s children and praise them for how much they’d grown, and after a while Mother came back.

“Mother, where did you go?” I asked—and then I noticed that Mother’s cheek was bloody and her clothes torn in places. “What happened?” I cried in astonishment.

“Nothing, nothing!” Mother protested. “Everything’s all right.”

“All right, when your cheek’s gashed? Did someone attack you?”

“Oh, it’s just a little graze,” said Mother, trying to wipe the blood off with her sleeve. “Nobody attacked me. Who would do that? This is my home forest! I simply fell over.”

“Where did you fall?” I wondered.

“Out of a tree. My foot slipped on a branch you see. I must be getting old,” said Mother, almost apologetically. “I used to climb like a squirrel; no tree was too tall for me.”

“But Mother, why did you have to climb a tree? I don’t understand. I haven’t seen you for a long time, and when I come, you climb a tree.”

“I wanted to fetch you some owls’ eggs,” replied Mother, taking two beautiful big eggs from her pocket. “They were your favorite when you were a child, and all the time you were away I was constantly thinking that when my dear boy comes home I’ll offer him owls’ eggs, as I used to when you were still small. Now you’ve come, and I didn’t have a single owl’s egg! I was embarrassed, so I ran to fetch them. There’s an owls’ nest just near here, but you see I was so excited that I stumbled and tumbled out of the tree. Lucky I didn’t have the eggs in my pocket yet, otherwise they would have broken. So I climbed again and got the eggs anyway. There you are, son. These are for you.”

I took the owls’ eggs from Mother’s hand and simply held them for a while, unable even to thank her. Mother was still rubbing her cheek; the wound was deep and the blood kept on oozing.

“Now look, my son comes visiting after a long time, and like a fool I’m bleeding,” she muttered, almost angrily. “Oh, I’m useless! I’m sorry, Leemet. I know how horrible it is with my torn cheek …”

“Mother, what are you saying!” I cried. “I should be asking your forgiveness that I haven’t shown my face for so long. You understand …”

“I understand!” interrupted Mother. “Leemet, I understand it all. My poor child …”

She sat down beside me, took me by the waist, sobbing, and asked, “But why don’t you eat your owls’ eggs? Don’t you like owls’ eggs anymore? Are the village foods better?”

“Mother, what do you mean!” I said. “How can you even ask that? Nothing compares to owls’ eggs!”

“So suck them empty then!” Mother pleaded. “They’re at their best right now.”

I knocked a hole in an egg and sucked the yolk out. Mother looked at me with mournful satisfaction.

“At least I can still offer you owls’ eggs, dear child,” she said. “When everything else is gone, you can always eat your fill at your mother’s house.”

She drew her sleeve once more over her bloody cheek and got up decisively.

“Suck the other egg out and come and eat,” she said. “Roast venison is waiting for you, darling.”

t really is ridiculous how persistently everything in my life has gone awry. It reminds me of a bird that builds itself a nest high in a tree, but at the same time as it sits down to hatch, the tree falls down. The bird flies to another tree, tries again, lays new eggs, broods on them, but the same day that the chicks hatch, a storm comes up and that tree, too, is cloven in two.

If I looked back at my life now and didn’t know that all these events actually took place, I would say it wasn’t possible. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be. But that’s just it: I haven’t lived an ordinary life. Or rather, I tried to, but the world around me changed. To put it metaphorically: where there was once dry land, the sea now splashed, and I had not had time to grow gills. I was still gulping air with my old lungs, which would not serve me in this watery new world, and therefore was always short of air. I tried to get away from the encroaching water and burrow a hole for myself in the shoreline sand, but every successive wave obliterated my efforts. What could I do about it? Nor is the bird to blame for always failing to hatch when its tree collapses. It acts as all birds
have acted for thousands of years, and it chooses to nest in the same oak trees in whose crowns its ancestors have always hatched their young. How is it supposed to know that time has run out for those trees, that they are rotten from within and that even the smallest gust of wind can split these once-mighty giants?

That day in the snakes’ cave really showed me that once again I had found a little patch of dry land that was not reached by the flood. Mother was beaming with joy; she kept bringing me delicious venison, a food I had not tasted for so long. Moreover this was not just ordinary roast venison, but Mother’s roast venison—and I couldn’t wish for anything tastier. Ints and the other adders were with me. We chatted as friends, and for the first time in over half a year I heard myself laughing.

“Mother, will you be staying here to live with Ints?” I asked.

“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 bitten 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!”