Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

I stuffed the knife back in my belt and set forth, Grandfather floating overhead like a giant bat. The pile of brushwood lay behind us, as did a heap of dead bodies. In this way in the end the brushwood became an ordinary pyre after all; at least I hope it did. By the time the remaining villagers ventured out of their hiding places and started burning the dead, Grandfather and I were already far away.

e went to war. It was an odd crusade, because we had not the slightest hope of winning. In the end there were just the two of us against the whole wide world. We were like two aphids who could gobble up individual leaves voraciously, but with no possibility of felling the whole tree. We moved from battle to battle and had no place to turn back to after a successful strike, to rest and to report to those back home: We won! We were warring only for our own pleasure and because we couldn’t do anything else in the new world. We didn’t need anyone’s gratitude or a place to lick our wounds. We kept rushing onward, attacking everyone who stood in our way, killing, stinging, beating, and bashing. We were both burning with a crazed fever, and we knew that when the fever abated, it would mean death.

We were reckless and we didn’t retreat in the face of any opponent, for we had no thought of saving ourselves. It made no difference whether we fell now or later. We paid no attention to defense. We were indifferent whether an arrow pierced our chests or whether some iron man could run us through with his lance, and this carelessness was to our advantage. We overcame opponents who were several times our number in strength, and we left their corpses stacked on the road. The arrows they fired in our direction didn’t hit us; the sword blows swished past us. We roared with laughter; we howled like wolves and hissed like snakes. We never washed ourselves, and the spattered blood of our enemies covered almost our whole bodies, so that we looked like flayed carrion. We were no longer human, but the living dead, who had risen from death to harass the new world, and that new world could not rid itself of us.

On our travels we passed through villages, and if any villager stood in our way, we would lash out at him. We noticed how, when they saw us, they would abandon their rye fields, toss their scythes over their shoulders, and run for their lives, and we yelled abuse after them. I shouted to them that the Frog of the North had returned, and Grandfather took vigorous turns in the sky, at which the villagers fell to their knees and begged for protection from their new God against the forest-sprites. Nobody helped them and if we had wanted to, we could have bludgeoned them all to death.

I watched as they clustered together, trembling, and I recalled the time when Mõmmi and I went to peep at the beautiful village girls on the edge of the forest, secretly lusting after them, and how I hated the stupid village boys with whom the girls had mischievous conversations, while I, being so wise and understanding the ancient Snakish words, had to suck my thumbs on my own in the woods. I would sit at the edge of the forest, longing and ashamed, and I felt so lonely. And I felt the same now when I saw these same girls — or rather, not actually the same, but very similar — snuggling behind the thickheaded boys, looking to them for protection from Grandfather and me.

Protection from me! Ridiculous! What could be done to me by those miserable creatures whose tongues were too fat and blunt to pronounce Snakish words! How silly these girls were, and how deeply ignorant was their choice! All the same, sometimes I didn’t resist, and rushed into a village and killed as many men as I could, and Grandfather, who never shied away from combat, followed, hooting at me. Let these new people once again see the powerful Frog of the North. Never mind that it isn’t the real one. This will do! Let them feel one last time the force of his attack! But while the Frog of the North had once fought for them, now he was fighting against them, since they had changed sides and forgotten Snakish. The ancient memories, which in the meantime had degenerated into mere legends, were reawakened and proven to be true. You girls have made the wrong choice! This new world is weak; a bite from the old world will break it like a cobweb. Can all these new tricks save your thickheaded men? No, they are strewn across the ground, and in the evenings Grandfather makes drinking cups out of them by the fire. They wanted a modern life, but they ended it in an ancient way; people will drink water from their skulls, just as they did thousands of years ago.

Do you see how strong and powerful the old world is? Admire it. Love it, girls!

But instead they weep, yell, and flee without looking back. And they’re right, because the old world isn’t actually strong. Grandfather and I are just like an unexpected snowfall in summer, which in one night can destroy the buds and leaves, but that melts away in the next morning’s sun. We would kill and burn, but then we would leave a village. The girls would come from their hiding places and carry on living, finding new men for themselves and bringing forth children, none of whom understood Snakish.

I understood perfectly how useless our fighting was, and every time after destroying yet another village I had the same sick feeling. But I still had battle fever in my blood, and didn’t suffer for long.

In the end, who cares? Let the whole new world go to hell!

In the main we concentrated on the iron men. We invented new ways of hunting them. We made use of goats and deer, which we drove into the path of the knights using Snakish words. The iron men could never resist the urge to hunt, and they rushed on horseback after the animals. We would direct the deer and goats into a thicket, where we would lie in wait. And then we would make a quick end to the iron men.

In the evenings Grandfather would polish his skulls while I would roast goats over a fire, because the work of killing all day makes you tired and hungry. We didn’t have any use for the skulls, because we couldn’t take them with us; otherwise we wouldn’t have been warriors anymore, but a walking pile of beakers, our noses just poking out of the heap of beautifully carved skulls. Right at the beginning of our crusade I told Grandfather that there was no point in fussing over skulls, but Grandfather didn’t agree.

“It’s an old warrior custom that you don’t just leave your enemy’s skull lying around, but you polish it up nicely and make a cup out of it,” he said. “It’s polite. If you have enough time to kill a man, then you’ll find the time to polish his skull.”

“We can’t haul all these skulls around with us,” I argued.

“That’s true,” agreed Grandfather. “I didn’t say that we have to carry them with us. We simply make the cups ready and leave them on the road. Anyone who wants to can take them and drink from them.”

So Grandfather would spend the night making chalices out of all the dead people who passed through our hands, and in the morning we would leave them by the roadside, like a peculiar kind of droppings, which gave the message that two warriors from the old world had passed through.

One evening we came upon a wide clearing on a path winding through a forest, in the middle of which towered a stone stronghold of the iron men. Grandfather alighted on a branch and looked me in the eye.

“Shall we take them on, boy?”

“Of course, Grandfather!” I replied, and we croaked with laughter. It was a completely crazy notion for two men to attack a fortress, within whose walls dozens of mail-coated warriors were moving. Grandfather could of course fly over them, but in order for me to help him I would need at least a ladder, and before I could get over the tops of the walls, more arrows than a bird has feathers would certainly be fired into my body. What could Grandfather do alone up there if the iron men were able to go into hiding in the towers and pepper him with arrows? The decision to attack the fortress was mad, but we didn’t care.