Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

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.