The Man Who Spoke Snakish (8 page)

It was Ülgas the Sage.

“Where’s your sense, boy!” he asked angrily. “Don’t you know this lake is sacred? This is the home of the lake-sprite to whom I always sacrifice two squirrels when the moon is young, so that he will stay in the lake and not let our homes drown in its currents. You must not swim here. It would anger the sprite terribly! First he would pull you down under the water, and then he would flood the whole forest. Get dressed immediately and get out of here, your friend too. The lake-sprite loves silence. He must not be disturbed.”

“I’m sorry for that, but I want to catch that beast!” I said. Ülgas scowled at the louse splashing in the lake, and his face became pale.

“But that’s the lake-sprite himself!” he muttered, falling to his knees, as if at that moment his shinbone had broken in half. “The sacred lake-sprite is showing himself to us. What could it mean?”

He stared at the louse bobbing in the water, his eyes big with wonder.

“Boys, you’ve offended him in some way!” he thundered, raising his arms heavenward. “He came for you, and I must not let you go. The sprite has the right to a sacrifice.”

“That is a louse, not a sprite,” said Ints scornfully. Adders didn’t believe in sprites, just as they didn’t believe in blooming ferns. They knew the forest inside out, and they knew what lives there and what does not. They did not stop people from going to the sacred grove and bringing sacrifices, although in their eyes it was completely senseless. Adders never interfered in other beings’ affairs, as long as it didn’t affect them directly. In their view, everyone has the right to live their lives just as foolishly as they like.

Clearly, then, the sight of a snake did not exactly please the Sage of the Grove. He eyed Ints disdainfully and then looked again at the louse swimming in the water.

“What are you talking about? What louse?” he said. “Lice are small. That is the lake-sprite. I ought to know such things. Don’t make him even angrier!”

“It really is a louse,” I assured him, and I told Ülgas about Pirre and Rääk’s experiments. The mention of Primates didn’t make the sage any happier, because, just like the adders, the Primates didn’t believe in sprites, and never visited the grove. “In ancient times there weren’t any groves, and these sprites were only invented later,” they would explain. “In those days long ago, when the woods were still full of Primates, people would bow in homage to other beings than those, but sadly, we no longer remember who they were and how they were worshipped.”

At any rate Ülgas still didn’t want to believe that it was an ordinary, if oversized, louse swimming in the water, and not the lake-sprite. Unfortunately at that moment the bug managed to flounder closer to the shore, so that its legs reached the bottom and it clambered onto dry land. It was wet and drooping, shivering a little, and tried instantly to scuttle down into a pine root.

“Now you see that it isn’t a sprite,” I said. “Apparently it just looks like a sprite. I didn’t know that sprites look like big lice.”

Ülgas the Sage glowered angrily at the louse.

“Boy,” he said then, having turned his back decisively on the creature and putting his heavy hand on my shoulder. “I want to tell you that you have dishonored the lake-sprite by throwing that horrible animal into the water. The sprite’s domain is polluted and I will have to bring him many sacrifices to quell his rage. And you must help me, since you are most to blame for
angering the sprite. Come back here at midnight tonight and bring with you all the wolves from your barn. This time, squirrels’ blood won’t be enough! I must do everything in my power to stop the sprite from avenging this indignity.”

“Mother won’t let me have the wolves killed! They give us milk.”

“Your mother will have to get used to it, because her son has done evil!”

There was no trace left of the kindly old granddad; with his burning eyes and whiskers trembling with rage, the sage more resembled a rat standing on his hind legs. “A mother is responsible for her son. And she is guilty too, because if she went to the grove every week as she should, and took you with her, she would know that one has to be very respectful to sprites, and you would know that too. In the olden days people went to the grove every day, to show respect to the powerful forces of nature and to earn their goodwill and friendship. Then it wouldn’t have occurred to any brat that he could throw a filthy louse into a sacred lake. Leemet, terrible things will happen to you if you don’t respect the sprites! Even I can’t placate the nature spirits if you anger them with this shameless behavior. You really would be better off listening to me, instead of befriending Primates and snakes too much. They may be our brothers, of course, but they’re quite a different breed.”

Ülgas’s talk had scared me. Did I really have to bring all our wolves to the lakeshore, so that the sage could slit their throats and buy the friendship of the lake-sprite with their blood? What would Mother say? We needed the wolves. Of course we could get new animals—there were many abandoned wolves whose masters had moved to the village trotting round the woods—but
that kind of much-traveled wolf didn’t give much milk. It would take a long time for them to get used to a new pack. And anyway, replacing the wolves would be inconvenient and I had a very bad feeling in my heart. In the end I wasn’t to blame that the louse rushed into the water. I tried to explain that to Ülgas, but he said that it didn’t matter, since the lake-sprite was angry anyway, and that awful things would happen if he wasn’t given wolves’ blood. He commanded me to be at the grove with the wolves at exactly midnight, adding that in the olden days wolves alone would not have sufficed. In olden days the guilty party—meaning myself—would have had to be cut into pieces and thrown into the lake. But he, Ülgas, was such a skillful sage and such a great friend of the lake-sprite that he was able to placate the sprite with wolf flesh alone. Or at least he would try.

This kind of talk terrified me even more. What if his attempt failed and Ülgas decided to sacrifice me to the sprite after all? We sneaked away from the lakeshore, leaving Ülgas muttering some spells.

I had a very bad feeling, as any child would who has done something naughty and now has to go home to tell his mother. At the same time I knew that the sooner I got this horrible business off my shoulders the better. I wanted to pass the decision on to my mother. Let her tell me what to do: whether to go at midnight to the lakeshore with the wolves or not.

I asked Ints and Pärtel to take the louse back to Pirre and Rääk, while I ran home.

t home, Mother was waiting for me, her face beaming with pleasure.

“Leemet, guess what I’ve brought you today!” she asked conspiratorially, and immediately announced, “Owls’ eggs! Two for you and two for Salme.”

I felt even lousier. Owls’ eggs were my favorite food, and it was by no means easy for Mother to get them, because at that time she was getting fat, and climbing up a tree to an owl’s nest with a frame like hers was quite a feat. To tell the truth, it was always frightening to watch Mother climb, because you felt that at any moment the branch might break under her weight and she would fall and break her bones. Uncle Vootele had told Mother that she shouldn’t climb to the treetops like that, that I should go in her place, but Mother replied that she knew how to choose eggs, and anyway she liked being up in the trees.

“A bit of movement and exercise can only do me good,” she said, and I often heard her calls as I roamed around the forest and saw her gesturing from some terribly high top of a spruce, a broad grin on her face. Mother was astonishingly nimble when
it came to searching for delicate morsels for her children, and food generally.

All those dangers that Mother had to overcome in fetching owls’ eggs made the delicacy especially precious, and I was dreadfully ashamed that in return for the eggs I had nothing to offer except the news that her wolves would that night have to be taken to the lakeside and bled to death. I mumbled that I was terribly glad about the eggs, though I didn’t start eating them, but slipped quietly behind the table and waited for the opportunity to talk about the louse and Ülgas.

At the same time, sister Salme was enjoying the taste of the owls’ eggs, slurping greedily and licking her lips. I felt envious watching her, seeing that her brow with its white hair was not furrowed by trouble, unlike mine. Mother noticed my strange expression and asked if I was sore anywhere.

“No,” I said. “But … Look, I want to tell you something.”

“Eat up your eggs first,” Mother suggested. “And then I’ll bring you a cold flank of venison to the table; you can’t have eaten anything today. Where do you run around all day? Were you with the snakes?”

“Mother, I don’t want to eat now. I was at Pirre and Rääk’s today …”

“Why do you go there?” Salme interrupted me. “I think they look horrible. Why do they go around naked all the time? It’s obscene! I get sick in the tummy when I see that lot. That Rääk’s breasts hanging down to her navel, dangling like two great hairy oak leaves. And Pirre has such a big tool that when he sits he takes it in his lap; otherwise his willy lies on the ground like a tail and the ants get inside.”

“Salme, what are you saying?” gasped Mother. “Why do you stare at such things anyway?”

“How could I not stare, when he shows it off to everyone? That’s just why I’m saying it. I think it’s horrible! I get a pain in the tummy when I see those two. And then there’s their bottoms! They don’t even have hairs growing there! Completely bare and purple, like two big berries in a bunch!”

“Then close your eyes,” said Mother.

“Why should I close my eyes? Let those apes put something on their arses! My eyes don’t bother anyone, but their thingumybobs are completely gross! Other girls say it too. Just thinking about Pirre’s dick and Rääk’s tits makes you lose your appetite.”

“Well, don’t think about them then!” exclaimed Mother. “I don’t think about them at all. I never see them; they don’t move around the forest much.”

“Luckily!” snorted Salme. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if Leemet invited them around here one day. He hangs around those apes all the time. Leemet, I’m telling you: if you bring those purple-arsed Pirre and Rääk around here, I won’t be sleeping or eating in this house anymore!”

“Oh no, Leemet won’t be inviting them,” Mother assured Salme. “And they wouldn’t come either. But what were you doing there, Leemet? What’s so interesting there?”

“They bred a louse the size of a goat,” I said. “And Ints and Pärtel and I took it for a walk.”

I took a deep breath, because now I wanted to get the whole horrible story off my chest, but Mother and Salme wouldn’t let me. For a while they debated why anyone would need to breed a louse the size of a goat, and whether such a louse would be
dangerous to humans, and whether Salme dared to go out in the forest at all.

“What can it do to you?” wondered Mother. “You can shout at it, or hit it with a pinecone. That’ll send it running.”

“You don’t know anything,” snorted Salme. “An animal like that wouldn’t be afraid of anything. Only an ape could invent such a stupid thing. But just you wait—I’ll tell Mõmmi about this louse, and Mõmmi will break it to pieces.”

“Who’s Mõmmi?” asked Mother, her voice now becoming icy and wary, because it wasn’t hard to guess what sort of animal was hidden by that very ursine name. “It’s a bear,” replied Salme reluctantly. She realized that she’d said too much, but now it was too late to bite her lip.

“How do you know him?” demanded Mother, and to my dismay I understood that now the conversation was taking a whole different direction, and it would be very difficult for me to come out with my own worries. Bears were a sore point with Mother, and if she feared one thing in this world, it was that her daughter would follow her bad example.

“I saw him one day in the forest,” said Salme. “We don’t really know each other; we’ve just seen each other a couple of times. Mother, don’t go on about it! I know you don’t like any bear, but Mõmmi’s very friendly, and actually I’m not going out with him. We just say hello when we meet.”

“Salme, you’re too young to be carrying on with bears!” said Mother, and sat with a frightened look on her face, as if lightning had just struck the roof of her shack and set fire to the whole place.

“I’m not carrying on! Did you hear what I said, Mother? We just say hello!”

“You don’t need to say hello either.”

“Well, how else—It’s polite! You have to say hello to those you know.”

“You don’t need to know anyone like that.”

“Mother!”

“Salme, bears think about only one thing!”

“Interesting. What thing?”

“You know perfectly well! Salme, I don’t want you to meet that Mõmmi anymore. Bears are very handsome and strong, but they bring trouble.”

Salme snuffled crossly.

“Maybe they bring trouble to you, but not to me! Mõmmi brings me strawberries and lingonberries!”

“Strawberries and lingonberries!” shrieked Mother, and burst into tears. “That’s just it. Strawberries and lingonberries were what they brought me too! That’s how it starts. They’re great ones for bringing strawberries and lingonberries! No, I knew it! If you’ve got a daughter in the house, there’s no getting away from bears. They swarm around like lizards in the sunshine! So what am I supposed to do? Where should I hide you? A bear will get in anywhere, climb up a tree or scratch a hole in the ground. Oh, those dreadful animals!”

Mother’s face flushed and Salme was likewise as red as a rowanberry. They scowled at each other, Salme’s expression full of defiance, Mother’s marked by desperate anguish. She must have felt that she was seeing her daughter for the last time—that soon a big bear would come and take Salme away to his lair. From her own experiences with bears, she knew that once you get to know one, he will pounce on you. For a while they fell silent, and I felt that now was my last chance to talk about what happened by the lake.

Mother listened unmoved at first, still eyeing Salme and thinking about the bear, but by the time I got to the end of my tale, she looked at me in dismay and said, “Now wait, Leemet! Tell me one more time! That’s horrible!”

I told her again. Mother looked by turns at me and at Salme, as if having to decide which child’s tale was more appalling. In any case mine was more urgent, as midnight was fast approaching, whereas nothing could be done at the moment about Mõmmi the bear. But in the state she was in, Mother could not do anything about my situation. Two pieces of bad news following each other had the effect on her of sitting dumbstruck, her arms folded, looking despairingly at me.

Salme, on the other hand, became furious on hearing my story.

“You’re absolutely impossible!” she screamed. “Poor wolves, what are they guilty of? They gave good milk. You’ll ruin us! Have you no shame?”

“What should I do then, Mother?” I asked unhappily, ignoring Salme. Naturally I felt ashamed, so terrible that my guts ached. I would very gladly have curled up in a ball in a corner, but that wasn’t possible. Waiting by the lake was the angry sage, and I wanted my mother to take all the decisions; I didn’t want to undertake anything more myself. “Should I go to the lake or not?”

“I don’t know,” sighed Mother, utterly helpless. She was completely deflated. “All our wolves …”

“Why do you need to mess around with that disgusting louse?” yelled Salme. “Who’s going to give us milk now, you idiot?”

“And what about the cuddly bears?” I muttered, whereupon Salme almost exploded and hit me with a hunk of venison.

“Children, stop it!” begged Mother and started to cry. “All this news … all at once … I really don’t know what to do.”

“It will soon be midnight,” I insisted. “Should I go to the lakeside? Tell me!”

I tugged frantically at Mother’s sleeve.

“I don’t know,” repeated Mother. “It’s so horrible.”

She wept quietly, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

I started to cry too.

Salme had been crying a long time already, from her deep insult and anger.

Then Uncle Vootele arrived.

He always had the habit of stopping by in the evenings and listening to how the day had gone. This time he of course saw immediately that something was very wrong. He stood perplexed for a moment on the threshold, but I leapt up to meet him, pulled him inside, and started—prattling and sobbing—to relate the terrible misfortune that befell me by the lakeside. Uncle Vootele was my last hope, because Mother certainly couldn’t help me now. But Uncle was wise and clever. I told him everything—about the Primates, the louse, the sage, and the lake-sprite—and Salme studded my tale with some venomous interjections to show that she was much older and smarter, and would never have brought such a calamity on her own family. But I didn’t care about Salme; the important thing for me was the chance to speak. And when I finished, I looked appealingly at Uncle Vootele, with one single entreaty: please do something and save me from my responsibility!

“That’s a completely silly story!” said Uncle Vootele.

“I told you Leemet is completely silly!” Salme chimed in. “How can he let some disgusting thing swim in the lake?”

“The lake is a lake,” replied Uncle Vootele. “Anyone can swim there. I don’t understand why any wolves have to die for a lake. Ülgas has gone mad.”

“He’s a Sage of the Grove, though,” Mother interjected, wiping her tears, although it was evident that Uncle Vootele’s arrival had improved her mood. She blew her nose, got up, and started cutting meat for Uncle. “Might he be satisfied with just one wolf? I think that should be enough to satisfy the lake-sprite. There’s a lot of blood in one wolf.”

“What lake-sprite?” Uncle Vootele asked. “Have you ever seen a sprite in your life?”

“Well, it’s a sort of custom, you know, an old habit. Sacrifices are always being brought to the sprites. Otherwise why would there be a sage?”

“I’ve never really understood that exactly,” said Uncle Vootele. “But all right, there are habits and customs, which bring people together, and sometimes it’s pleasant to stand in the grove and watch Ülgas burning his stalks and singing something. But to kill a whole pack of wolves just like that, that’s plain stupidity. The blood will pollute the lake much more than one unfortunate louse. I’ll come with you myself, Leemet, and I’ll talk to Ülgas.”

“You could take one wolf with you, just in case,” suggested Mother.

“Not a single one,” said Uncle. “Let them rest in the barn. And let’s have something to eat now, and stop fretting. I see you even have owls’ eggs!”

“You can have them,” I said, looking at Uncle, positively enraptured. Suddenly my heart was as light as if a great stone had been cut out of me, and I felt ravenously hungry, as the hollow that had grown had to be filled. But I was happy to give
my owls’ eggs to Uncle, because he was my hero. Uncle thanked me with a smile.

“I’ll eat one; you have the other,” he said. “Nice to see you getting your human faces back. When I stepped in, I thought something really awful had happened.”

“I was really terribly shocked when I heard I had to sacrifice all my wolves,” said Mother. She was calm again, as always, and kept bringing more hunks of venison from the larder, although Uncle Vootele had long ago held up a restraining hand. “Now everything’s all right. Off you go and talk to Ülgas.”

“Yes, I’ll talk to him,” promised Uncle. I sucked happily on my owl’s egg and Salme seemed likewise pretty satisfied, since the latest events had chased Mõmmi out of Mother’s mind at least for a while.