“Now he drinks wine,” I said.
“Makes no difference. There’s no order for him anymore; he’s given up on everything, and now he wants to rest alone.”
I thanked Uncle Vootele and set off. Uncle’s story had been very interesting, but the main thing was that it confirmed my belief in the ring. Meeme, the former bold warrior, could be the man to give me the key. He didn’t keep it for himself because nothing interested him anymore, not even the Frog of the North. This was hard for me to imagine. How could he give up even on the Frog of the North? How could he be so tired?
But that was not my concern. I hurried home and looked for my ring. I took it out of the pouch and stuck it on the end of my finger.
I had secretly hoped that some mysterious power would lead me by the fingers toward the cave of the Frog of the North if I simply ran fast enough while wearing the ring, but no such thing happened. The ring sat on the end of my finger as a ring always does, and I understood that the search for the Frog of the North would not be simple.
At any fate I was ready to make the effort. But I didn’t want to search alone. I couldn’t find Pärtel—he wasn’t at home—but I met with Ints and invited him along with me.
The adder agreed readily. Unlike the blooming fern, whose existence he vehemently denied, Ints thought it quite possible that the ring might lead us to the Frog of the North.
“I don’t know anything about rings and other man-made things,” he said. “If you think that’s the key, then let’s try and find out. How does it work?”
“I don’t know that,” I said. “We should simply keep walking, and the ring will lead us itself to the right place.”
We set off. We tried to move completely randomly, not choosing the paths we usually wandered. I even tried shutting my eyes, so as to walk blind, but that proved too complicated in the forest, for I kept stumbling into thickets and scratching my face.
“Open your eyes,” said Ints. “If the ring is really capable of anything, then you don’t need all this trickery and your skin will survive.”
To snakes, skin is very important. Every snake is proud of his skin. Even the smallest scratch they experience as painful, and if anything does happen, they wait patiently for the time when they can slough off the old skin and wear a new undamaged coat. After moulting they are very sensitive about their appearance, and they may fly into a rage if you happen, say, to drip roasting fat onto them, or touch them with fingers stained violet from eating berries. Toward their old moulted skin, torn in several places, they feel only disgust or even horror. In the long winter months, when snakes don’t leave their lairs, mother adders tell their offspring countless horror stories about moulted skins that move of their own accord in a mysterious way, chasing their former owners and wrapping themselves around them. The little adders shiver, and when Mother finishes the story they beg her: “Tell it again! Tell us about the skin again!”
So much for that. For a while Ints wore a still quite fresh and moist glossy skin; he crawled carefully among the tussocks and tried to avoid decaying leaves, which might smudge him. We kept moving forward, chatting with each other, till we came unexpectedly to the edge of the forest, where the trees ended and an open plain began, in the middle of which a narrow path meandered. And on that path a monk was walking.
When I was very small I thought that monks were the wives of the iron men, since they wore the same kinds of wide dresses that women do. True, they weren’t very good-looking, and I did wonder why the iron men had such ugly spouses. The iron men didn’t look nice either, and as a little boy I was sure that their faces were made of iron and that they had no noses or mouths. Only later did I see iron men taking their helmets off, and I understood that they were also human. Likewise, I also once happened to see a monk pissing, and I ran to Uncle Vootele, breathless with anxiety, my eyes burning in my head: “Uncle, Uncle! The monk has a willy!”
“Of course, all men have them,” answered Uncle Vootele.
“Is the monk a man then? I thought she was an iron man’s wife.”
Uncle Vootele laughed and assured me that wasn’t so. At first I couldn’t believe him and put forward some counterclaims.
“But they have tits. I’ve seen them bouncing under their dresses. And they’re pregnant too. Surely a man can’t be pregnant?”
“They’re not pregnant, and they don’t have tits either. They’re simply very fat, the fat runs around them like resin on a spruce.”
The monk who was now striding along the path was also fat. He noticed me and slowed his pace, but then obviously thought I was alone and didn’t present any danger. He didn’t see Ints, because he was hidden in the grass. But the monk did immediately see the ring on my finger. He stared at it and said something in his own language.
“I don’t understand,” I replied, and hissed the same in Snakish, but the monk didn’t understand either language. He came up to me, squinting at my ring, looked around quickly, and seeing that the coast was clear, grabbed me with one hand by the scruff of the neck, while his other hand pulled the ring off my finger.
I hissed the strongest Snakish words into his face, but since the monk didn’t understand them, they had no effect on him. He was like the hedgehog who could calmly attack an adder, since his stupid head defended him from all the Snakish words. The monk gave me a smack on the back of the head and pushed me away, at the same time putting the ring in his mouth—apparently to hide and defend a precious thing from others.
I was hissing frantically and wanted to bite the monk, but Ints got in ahead of me. The monk screamed with pain and collapsed, with two bleeding spots on his shin.
Now he was much lower, and Ints managed to bite him on the throat. The adder jumped; the monk screamed and grabbed with his hand, but that didn’t help. Two little fang marks reddened on his neck, right on a vein.
“Thanks, Ints. But I want my ring back!” I said.
“Let’s wait until he dies, then we’ll take it from his mouth,” suggested Ints. We went back into the forest, for the monk’s painful yells and moans were disturbing us, and we stretched out happily in the cool of the trees, until everything went quiet. Then we came out of the forest. The monk was dead, but when I prized his jaws open, to my great disappointment the creature’s mouth was empty.
“He’s swallowed it,” said Ints.
“What shall we do now?” I cried. “He’s dead now, which means that he won’t shit anymore. Are we supposed to wait until he rots away?”
“Cut him to pieces,” suggested Ints.
“I don’t have such a big knife,” I said. “Just a little sheath knife, I’d be sawing all day with that. And I can’t drag him home; he’s terribly fat and heavy. And I can’t leave him here and go home for a knife, because meanwhile someone might come by and take him away or eat him up—and then I’ll be without my ring. But, say, Ints, couldn’t you squeeze inside him? He’s so big that there’d be easily room for you to crawl in. Then maybe you could bring the ring out in your mouth.”
“I don’t want to go in there,” replied Ints. “He’s bound to be terribly filthy inside. I’ll get covered in smudges, and my skin is so new and beautiful.”
“Please, Ints! You’re my friend, after all. Afterward you can go and wash yourself in the lake.”
“No, I’m not going inside all that mush. But I know what to do. We’ll invite a slowworm.”
Slowworms were not actually snakes, but simply legless lizards. Adders paid them no attention, since they thought that slowworms were trying to compare themselves with snakes, while being nothing like as clever, and therefore not deserving the name of snake. But they used slowworms to carry out irksome tasks, such as this one. Ints hissed, and pretty soon a long slowworm came slithering closer through the grass and lay submissively before the adder.
“Go inside that monk and look for a ring,” Ints commanded.
The slowworm nodded and wriggled nimbly into the monk’s mouth. Soon we saw the neck of the corpse bulging and the
n falling back; the slowworm had crawled through it.
For a while nothing happened. Finally Ints tilted his head and announced, “I think I hear the slowworm’s voice. Can you hear it?”
I had to admit I couldn’t hear anything, and no wonder. Adders have far sharper hearing. Ints crawled over to the monk’s stomach and listened intently.
“Yes, he says he’s found the ring, but can’t manage to bring it out. It won’t fit in his mouth. I think you’d better make a little hole into the monk with your sheath knife, then the slowworm will push the ring out through it.”
“Where exactly am I supposed to make the hole?” I asked, taking out the knife. Ints showed me the place. I started cutting. It was quite difficult, because apart from the skin of the stomach I had to also cut a thick layer of fat that covered the monk’s belly. The knife had almost vanished among the creases when finally Ints cried, “The slowworm says he can see your knife! Now make the hole wider.”
Now even I could hear the slowworm’s hissing. I twisted the knife in my hand, and in this way I prepared a hole through which the ring would fit.
“Now push!” Ints commanded the slowworm.
Movement could be seen under the hole, and after a while the luster of gold began to appear from inside the monk. The ring emerged into the daylight. I caught it by the fingers and in a moment the ring was in my hand. It was slimy and bloody, but I rubbed it clean against the grass and popped it onto my finger.
“Come out now!” said Ints to the slowworm. “Everything’s all right.”
After a little while the slowworm became visible, but he didn’t come out of the monk’s mouth but out of the fringe of his dress.
“I didn’t turn back,” he hissed.
“Thank you so much,” I said. “Come by our place another time—my mother will give you a haunch of venison.”
“With great pleasure!” promised the slowworm, and disappeared into the forest.
“Did you notice how he looked?” Ints asked in a whisper. “Horrible! I couldn’t imagine crawling through all that. What would be left of my skin? No fountain could ever wash off that filth.”
“The slowworm is the color of shit anyway, so it doesn’t look too bad on him,” I said.
We considered continuing the search for the Frog of the North, but evening had fallen by now, and we both had empty stomachs. We decided to go home and eat, and look for the Frog of the North some other time.
“Anyway I don’t believe this is the right ring anymore,” said Ints when we had set off homeward. “A real ring would never have ended up in a monk’s stomach. The Frog of the North doesn’t live in anyone’s intestines!”
“That was just unlucky!” I said, but Ints shook his head doubtfully.
Seven
e went in search of our fortune with the ring a few more times, but it was no use. The Frog of the North could not be found. Each time our journey ended with us at some point not wanting to go on any farther, and just stopping to eat blueberries.
Finally I came to the conclusion that the ring I received as a gift was not the right ring, or if it was, its use required a lot of effort and the sort of knowledge I didn’t have. I lost interest in the ring, stuffed it back in its leather pouch, and got on with other things.
In my search for the Frog of the North I had often come upon the Primates’ hut. Naturally I already knew them, because quite a few of us humans had remained in the forest. And Pirre and Rääk were actually human, though hairier than any of us. That was plain to see, since they didn’t wear animal skins, but walked around stark naked. They claimed that that was their ancient custom, and that the decline of our people hadn’t started with moving to the village or eating bread, but with putting on alien creatures’ skins and adopting iron tools stolen from ships. There wasn’t a speck of metal in their home, just hand axes made of stone. These were clumsy and almost shapeless, but Pirre and Rääk assured us they sat comfortably in the hand and were healthy to use.
“It’s our own stone, not some foreign iron,” they said. “When you take a stone like this in your hand, it gives you strength, massages your palms, and calms your nerves. In the olden days, with these stone axes you did all the work; you were in a good mood and nobody got upset.”
Unlike Tambet, who also held sacred the ways of his ancestors and tried steadfastly to walk their well-worn paths, Pirre and Rääk were very mild. They didn’t demand anything of anyone. They didn’t want other people to bare their bottoms, and they never quarreled when they saw someone with a knife in their belt or a brooch on their jacket. If anyone had visited Tambet carrying a piece of bread, he might have set his wolves on that person as punishment for their impertinence, or at least cursed such a village lickspittle in the strongest terms. Pirre and Rääk, on the other hand, never spoke ill of anybody. They were friendly and hospitable, and were not offended even when a visitor declined to eat the half-cooked hunk of meat they offered them. “Well, you’re not used to it,” they would say kindly and laugh, their yellow fangs glistening. “You eat burned food. Doesn’t matter. How about we char this bit of meat till it’s black for you, if you like it better that way. But it isn’t healthy for you. The olden people all ate half-cooked meat; it’s good for the digestion. You don’t want any grubs? What a waste; they used to be our people’s favorite delicacy! Look, you take a grub, squeeze it empty onto your tongue. Mm! Delicious!”
They screwed up their eyes with pleasure and licked the grub mash off their lips, and yet their display of ecstatic enjoyment didn’t ever convince me to taste this delicacy. Pirre and Rääk didn’t impose their preferences on me, though. They roasted my piece of meat blackish brown and wished me a good appetite, laughing sunnily. Then they let me eat in peace, while they combed through each other’s hairs and picked out spruce needles, ants, and spiders.
Even as a little boy I had visited Pirre and Rääk now and then, at first with Uncle Vootele, later alone or with Pärtel. But while searching for the Frog of the North I got to know the Primates better. A couple of times I even stayed the night with them, when an all-day hike through the forest had worn me out, and I didn’t have the strength to go home in the evening. My mother knew that nothing could happen to me in the forest, because I already knew the Snakish words well, and thanks to them I had nothing to fear. So she didn’t worry if I didn’t turn up at home for the night. Sometimes I slept at Ints’s snake nest, sometimes at Uncle Vootele’s place. But lately I had liked being at the Primates’ home, because there were lice there.
Pirre and Rääk were breeding them.
Lice were their pets. The Primates had no children, so they directed all their tenderness and care to lice. The lice lived in specially built cages; there were plenty of them and a whole range of sizes and shapes. There were quite ordinary gray lice, but also frog-sized ones, creatures that were specially bred and fed, which Pirre and Rääk would sometimes take in their laps and stroke with their hairy hands. Most interesting of all, all these lice obeyed their masters. As I have said, insects don’t generally understand Snakish words. You can talk to an ant as much as you like; you will make no headway. A grasshopper disturbing your sleep with its chirping will crackle into song regardless of your having repeatedly yelled words of Snakish at it that would have immediately struck any other creature dumb. It isn’t possible to make a spider or a ladybird understand Snakish; they are born idiots. Lice are also actually extremely obtuse creatures that would normally never obey your will. All the more remarkable, then, that Pirre and Rääk had trained them up like clever fighting wolves.
The lice did exactly what their master and mistress commanded. They would approach closer, lie down, get into line, climb on each other’s backs, roll along the ground like fox cubs. If you stretched out a hand to them, they would politely offer you a paw.
All of these tricks they would do only at Pirre’s and Rääk’s command. If I tried to force them to do anything, they wouldn’t move a muscle. I was very disappointed, because I knew I s
poke Snakish very well, no worse than the Primates did. When I asked Pirre and Rääk why they didn’t comprehend my Snakish words, the Primates laughed heartily.
“Ordinary Snakish words aren’t enough,” they said. “Listen carefully to the way we speak to them; we pronounce Snakish in the old Primate way. Long ago, when our ancestors were still living in caves and didn’t know fire, they had power over insects. How else would they have survived the attacks of the gadflies and mosquitoes that could freely get at them, without campfire smoke to scare them away? Nowadays their ancient pronunciation has been forgotten. Even we can’t speak it as they did tens of thousands of years ago. Of all the insects, we can only communicate with lice, which have lived in the fur of animals for a long time and learned a few things from them. But it’s beyond our powers even to scare away blackflies. It’s sad that the old skills die out.”
It was a pity for me too, because I myself would have liked to keep mosquitoes and gadflies away from me using Snakish. They were disgusting creatures and they bit painfully. Now I was trying to at least learn how to talk to the lice, but it was too hard a nut to crack. No matter how much I practiced, I just couldn’t pronounce the Snakish words like Pirre and Rääk. The difference was minute, but whether I liked it or not, my tongue slipped back into the old furrow.
Pirre and Rääk said I shouldn’t bother myself, since it wasn’t possible to learn Primate pronunciation.
“It must be inborn, just as your forefathers had inborn fangs,” they told me. “You can sharpen your teeth as much as you like, and rinse your mouth with any sort of infusion, but your teeth won’t ever become poisonous. That’s how it is with our language. You are not a Primate. Our families are related, yes, but our ways parted long, long ago. You don’t have a tail, either.”
Indeed I did not have a tail, unlike Pirre and Rääk, who had a soft little bulge growing out of their behinds. So I no longer tried talking to the lice, and only wanted to know whether they were able to command only their own trained lice, or whether they could manage with an unfamiliar louse as well.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish Page 6