Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

“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!”

“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.”