Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

She shook her head so excitedly — this tiny, elderly, shriveled woman — that I didn’t have the heart to laugh in her face and say that there are no sprites, and that if she did save us, it was thanks to her heart, which Ülgas’s legends hadn’t managed to taint. Her husband’s heart had been turned by these endless tales of the sprites into a lump of mud. Mall had still remained a human being and a mother. She was looking at us with such a simple and yet saintly gaze that I pitied her. Let her believe in her sprites, then, if she can’t do anything else. I bowed before her, kissed both her hands in turn, and said, “Mother, I’m taking Hiie to be my wife now.”

“I’m pleased,” replied Mall, smiling timidly and stroking my head with her fingertips. Quite certainly she couldn’t have forgotten all the stories that Tambet had told about me, and she must have felt a certain dread seeing me here in her house. I was a strong opponent of the so-called sprites, ever since the business of the swimming louse. You can’t become beloved overnight, but I wasn’t so interested in that either. It was Hiie I was marrying, not her mother, and I really didn’t care what Mall thought of me.

“Could I perhaps talk with Ülgas …” began Hiie’s mother, but she felt clumsy, because even she knew that neither I nor Hiie had good relations with Ülgas. “But … I suppose you don’t want to invite Ülgas to the wedding?”

“No,” I replied. “He’s hardly likely to come and bring us together. Yesterday I ripped off one of his ears and a cheek, and I promised that if he comes before me again, his head will fly off.”

Mall looked at me in amazement, swallowed, and turned her eyes helplessly to Hiie.

“Where will you marry then, if not in the sacred grove?”

“We’ll get married anywhere, but not there,” replied Hiie. “Mother, the last time I was there Ülgas and Father tried to kill me! I’m never going there again and the only wedding present I request from Leemet is that he razes the whole grove to the ground and burns down the trees.”

“Dear child, don’t talk like that!” begged Mall. “Our ancestors have visited it for thousands of years bringing sacrifices! A sprite lives in every tree in the grove. Those trees are sacred!”

“No tree is sacred!” said Hiie. “The trees in the grove will do just as well for making a bonfire and cooking meat as any other beam or branch. Yes, we’ll celebrate our wedding with a big fire! We’ll set light to all those disgusting old trees in the grove; we’ll roast a deer and dance around the fire. Leemet, that’s the kind of wedding I want, and no other!”

“Very good,” I said. “I’ll go today and raze the grove and I hope I manage to raze Ülgas to the ground too!”

“Children!” squealed Mall. “Children!”

She looked at us in terror, as if she were afraid for our lives.

“Mother, enough of this silliness,” said Hiie. “Father is dead, Ülgas is probably running around now bleeding to death, and we have no more need for these senseless pieces of timber, which don’t mean a thing. There are so few of us left here in the forest that we could at least try to live honestly, without tricks and lies. Mother, if you want to believe in the sprites, then believe. The forest is full of trees to worship and adorn, but I want that disgusting grove, where I was led like a hare to the slaughter, to burn at my wedding and crumble to ash. I hate those trees! Understand, Mother?”

“Child, that talk is horrible!” said Mall. Her whole body shook. “You’re inviting misfortune. If the sprites hear you … And they certainly will, for they hear everything!”

“They don’t,” I said. “Mother, calm down! There’s no point despairing over some half-rotten tree. The important thing is for us to have a beautiful fire and a nice wedding, that we get to eat nicely roasted brown meat and we have fun!”

“I’m afraid for you,” said Mall. “I’m afraid something terrible will happen. The sacred grove … Please don’t destroy it!”

“I won’t live in the same forest as that abomination!” declared Hiie. “If Leemet doesn’t chop it down, I’ll take an ax myself, the same one that Father forced me as a child to chop hares’ heads off with.”

“No need,” I said. “I’ll do it. With pleasure.”

One might fear that razing the sacred grove was hard work, but it wasn’t. The enormous old linden trees were rotten to the core. They were just decaying corpses, into which you only had to make a cut and each giant would collapse of its own accord. In places the trunks were so soft that the ax got stuck in soggy material as if I were chopping mud. It was a miracle that those trees hadn’t collapsed earlier. As they fell down they broke into hundreds of little pieces, collapsed into decayed wood pulp, and all kinds of insects that had laid their white eggs in the trees were now scurrying stupidly around, unable to understand why their soft sludgy home was suddenly split apart.

“Those are the sprites,” I said to Hiie, showing her the alarmed centipedes and other insects that were running headlong into the grass in search of new nesting places.

“They’ve bored out the insides of the trees so empty and gnawed them so soft that we won’t be able to get a proper bonfire here. The deer will remain uncooked if we make a fire only from the sacred grove. We’ll have to bring more good dry wood. These linden trees will only hiss and fume.”

We piled up the rubbish that was left of the grove’s trees into one big stack, and looked for dried branches, which burned well and weren’t sacred at all. I had hoped that the razing of the grove would bring forth Ülgas too, to try and defend his nest from us, giving me the chance to have at him once more with my knife, properly this time, so that a third attack wouldn’t be necessary. The Sage of the Grove didn’t show himself, however, but must have been suffering somewhere, nursing his hacked cheek — or hoping that the sprites would make him whole. Maybe he was even stalking us somewhere in the bushes, rustling indignantly in the grass like the other beetles whose home had been the old grove. In any case, no one tried to obstruct us.

By evening all the trees in the grove had been chopped down and the pyre was ready. There was no point in killing a deer before the morning, so now Hiie and I could rest. We had planned to go and visit Ints, as we had promised that morning, but suddenly I saw Meeme. He had appeared just as quietly as always, supporting himself against a tree and sipping on his wineskin. Seeing that we had spotted him, he beckoned to us lazily.

“Tell me, how do you always manage to creep up without anyone hearing?” I challenged him. “You lie around here, you lie around there, and yet I’ve never seen you coming. What’s the trick of it?”

Meeme giggled.

“You have Snakish words in your mouth and you’re terribly smart for your age, but you don’t know everything, and you can’t either,” he smirked. “Yes, understand it or not, how does old Meeme move around so quietly from one place to another so that even your sharp ear doesn’t hear him?”

“I can’t be bothered to work it out,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me. By the way, I’m getting married tomorrow. You’re invited to the wedding.”

“I’m here already,” replied Meeme. “The last wedding here in the forest will be a thing to watch. It’s as if, just before dying, someone was polishing the stumps of their old teeth to a shine, as if it mattered whether you burn on the funeral pyre with clean or dirty fangs. If there is anyone left to set it alight, that is.”