Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

“Where do we start, Grandfather?” I asked.

“Let’s wait till night,” replied the old man. “I smell the scent of bears. They keep them inside the fortress. If the bears come to help us from inside, we’ll attack from the outside, and tomorrow I’ll have a lot of work polishing all the skulls that will fall our way today.”

We hid in the forest until the sun had set; then I crept to the fortress and hissed a few Snakish words. Those words can be heard through walls and simply must be answered, even when one doesn’t want to betray oneself, so it was no wonder that I immediately heard a weak and somewhat confused hissing, the sort that bears produce.

I crawled up to where the hissing was coming from and pressed myself against the wall.

“How many of you are there?” I hissed to the bears.

“Ten,” came the reply.

“Good!” I said. “We have a plan to capture the fortress and kill all the iron men. If you help us, you’ll be released from your prison and you can run back to the forest.”

“We’re not in prison,” came the response through the wall to my great surprise. “We like it here. The chief of the iron men feeds us well.”

“Idiots!” I hissed angrily. “Is there so little for you to eat in the forest? What fun can it be to sit in the cellar of a stone fortress behind bars! Don’t you long to see the sun?”

“We go for a walk every day,” the bears answered. “We all have a strong leather leash. Oh, how beautiful it is! It has silver studs on it, attached by colored ribbons. No bear in the forest has such a beautiful collar. They’re made over the seas, in foreign lands. No, we’re not going to escape from the fortress.”

I hissed a couple of insulting words to them, but the bears didn’t seem to care; evidently they were very satisfied to be able to tell someone of their incredible good fortune.

“It’s very fine here!” they explained. “All the women have terribly splendid dresses that make them so beautiful it could drive you mad. Sometimes they take us into the banqueting hall, where all the people eat and dance and we’re allowed to look on and we’re given bones. Not only that, they’re teaching us to dance! There’s a hunchbacked man here who wears on his head a big forked red cap, with a golden bell on each tip. He’s a foreigner, no doubt an important and famous man, who always talks the most at feasts and does somersaults on the floor. Then they all laugh and applaud him. At the feasts he plays on a pipe, and not just with his mouth. Oh no! He can even blow on the pipe with his bottom! Yes, he pulls down his pants, gets down on his back, shoves the pipe into his arsehole, and plays so prettily that all the other lords and ladies roar with laughter and clap their hands together. This same man is our teacher; he blows his pipe and shows us how to move in time to it. He’s very kind, and if our dancing goes well, he strokes us and gives us dainty things to eat. Of course we try our very best, because we appreciate that dancing is in fashion these days. All the great lords dance, although not as well as this hunchbacked man with the little golden bells. Oh, how we want to be like him! We want to learn to dance well, because then maybe we’ll get a forked red cap and golden bells that tinkle so prettily. We have one great dream. That is we’d like him to teach us to play on the pipe with our mouths and our arseholes, but we’re afraid that we’re too clumsy and inexperienced for that. We’ve lived too long in the forest. But who knows!”

“You should kill all those lords and ladies, starting with the hunchback,” I declared.

“No!” replied the bears. “We love and admire them, especially our dear teacher. We don’t want to kill anyone at all; that’s an old-fashioned custom. They only still do that in the dark forest. Now we’re dancing bears.”

“You should kill all those lords and ladies, starting with the hunchback,” I repeated pitilessly.

“Oh no, we won’t do that!” came the reply. “Stop it! Who are you anyway, to be demanding such horrible things from us?”

“I’m a man who knows Snakish,” I said, sibilating a very long and complex hiss. For once it was silent beyond the wall, and then some crazed roaring was heard. And so there should have been, for that Snakish word took away the bears’ free will and awakened their wild desire to kill.

Without being able to see through the wall, I knew what was happening to the bears now. Their eyes were burning, they were foaming at the mouth, they were twisting their bars, biting their collars, and breaking with a roar into the castle. They were striking down every person who stood in their way, smashing up the rooms and flinging down the guards from the walls. The iron men were certainly putting up a resistance, trying to stop the unexpectedly crazed animals, calm them down, and if that failed kill them. They were battling with the bears, and when both parties were running with blood, when the bears had overturned the whole castle and murdered most of the iron men, Grandfather and I would come in and finish off the job.

I could hear horrid screams from the fortress and I understood that the bears had attacked the humans. Maybe just now they were eating the piper with the red cap who had been teaching them to dance. Now he would be dancing between the paws of the flock of bears driven mad by Snakish words.

I saw one guard flying headfirst down from the wall, and I realized that at least a few bears had got up there. I took a look at him — all was well; he’d broken his neck — and hissed to Grandfather. He had already realized that the time had come and came flying like a great owl.

“Take hold of me. I’ll lift you up!” he shouted, and I clung to Grandfather’s hips and felt myself rising into the air. A moment later I was on the walls and a large bear was rushing toward me, its jaws open.

I quickly hissed what was necessary, and the animal turned around to seek another victim, one who didn’t understand Snakish and couldn’t command it. It found an iron man and leapt onto him, but the iron man ran a spear straight into its heart, and the animal rolled down the stairs into the courtyard.

A moment later it was followed by the victorious iron man, the useless spear still in his hand, for Grandfather had stung him on the cheek straight from the air.

There was actually very little left for us to do, because the bears had ravaged savagely, and although their corpses also lay everywhere, they had killed off nearly all the residents of the fortress. We finished off the last ones.

It only remained to calm the bears down. There were two left, and they were so enraged that they wanted to attack each other. One single Snakish word stopped them, and the bears looked around uncomprehendingly, astonished at the sight of their own bloody paws.

“All right, bears!” said Grandfather. “Finished! The fortress has fallen and all the iron men and their women are dead. You can slip back into the forest.”

The bears stared at us dumbly.

“Didn’t you understand?” asked Grandfather. “Go back to the forest! You’ve been good; you did a lot of damage. You can keep the dead bodies if you like. Only the heads belong to me. I won’t give you those to gnaw on.”

He hovered low over the courtyard of the fortress and fished out from the heap of corpses the body of a slightly built hunchbacked man, from whose head hung a red two-pronged cap. Grandfather ripped the cap off him.

“Remarkable head, this one,” he said. “Knobbly like a tree root. This skull will make a splendid chalice.”

“That’s the piper!” said one of the bears. “He taught us to dance and gave us sugar. What have you done?”

“We haven’t broken a single bone in this little man’s body,” replied Grandfather. “There are a bear’s tooth marks on his throat. Maybe you bit him yourself.”