The Man Who Spoke Snakish (33 page)

“Then let’s go and find him,” I roared like a fanatic, leaping up and throwing myself against a wall so that the house trembled. Again I was seized by a strong urge to fling things around and smash everything in sight, but Ints’s calming hiss made my head a little clearer again.

“So where is old Johannes?” I suddenly thought of asking. “Is he dead too?”

I cast a glance at Johannes’s bed, but it was empty.

“He can’t have been at home,” said Ints. “Interesting—villagers don’t usually roam around at night. Anyway it saved his life. Yours too. If you’d been sleeping here, there wouldn’t be much of your throat left either.”

“That beast did go for my throat!” I said, opening the door with a bang. “The sacred grove! It’s the sacred grove that he can’t forgive me for, and it’s revenge for half of his face. Today he paid me for chopping off his whole face, but I’ve chopped off only half. I have to hurry and knock the rest of his block off. No job should be left half-done, and what is done today is not a care for tomorrow, as Uncle Vootele used to say. He was rotting beside me, Ints, and since that time there’s been a strange stink in my nostrils. I’ve never told you this before, but now you know; it’s a kind of smell as if I were rotting myself. But look. I’m not rotting at all. It’s everyone else who’s perishing! Everyone else around me! They’re dying and rotting, and I have to go on living with the smell. Well, what’s left for me, still alive!”

I ran out of the room and stuck my knife into the trunk of a tree growing in front of the house.

“I’m still alive!” I screamed.

“Leemet, come on now,” said Ints. “Let’s go and look for Ülgas.”

“Ülgas!” I growled. “Yes, he must be hunted down and killed, because he’s still alive, not dead as he should be, because I’m the last! I’m the last one, not he!”

I bayed at the moon, as my grandfather on his island had done, and marched behind Ints into the forest, hacking with my knife at branches around me, blind with rage.

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!”