So I was in quite an extraordinary situation, as Uncle Vootele knew all the Snakish words — no doubt the only person in the forest who did. Only from him could I learn all the subtleties of this language. And Uncle Vootele was a merciless teacher. My otherwise so kindly uncle suddenly became very gruff when it came to a lesson in Snakish. “You simply have to learn them!” he declared curtly, and forced me over and over again to repeat the most complex hisses, so that by the evening my tongue ached as if someone had been twisting it all day. When Mother came with a haunch of venison, my head shook in fear. Just the thought that my poor tongue had to chew and swallow, in addition to all the twistings of the day, filled my mouth with a horrible pain. Mother was in despair, and asked Uncle Vootele not to exhaust me so much and to start by teaching me just the simplest hisses, but Uncle Vootele wouldn’t agree.
“No, Linda,” he told my mother. “I’ll teach Leemet the Snakish words so well that he won’t know anymore whether he’s a human or a snake. Only I speak this language as well as our people have from the dawn of time, and one day, when I die, Leemet will be the one who won’t let the Snakish words fade into oblivion. Maybe he’ll manage to train up his own successor, like his own son, and so this language won’t die out.”
“Oh, you’re as stubborn and cruel as our father!” sighed Mother, and made a chamomile compress for my injured tongue.
“Was Granddad cruel, then?” I mumbled, with the compress between my teeth.
“Terribly cruel,” replied Mother. “Of course, not to us — he loved us. At least I think so — but many years have passed since he died, and I was only a little girl then.”
“So why did he die?” I persisted. I had never heard anything about my grandfather before, and only now I came to the surprising conclusion that quite naturally my father and mother couldn’t have just fallen out of the sky; they must have had parents. But why had they never talked about them?
“The iron men killed him,” said Mother. And Uncle Vootele added, “They drowned him. They chopped his legs off and threw him in the sea.”
“What about my other grandfather?” I demanded. “I must have had two grandfathers!”
“The iron men killed him too,” said Uncle Vootele. It was in a big battle, which happened long before you were born. Our men went out bravely to fight with the iron men, but they were smashed to smithereens. Their swords were too short and their spears too weak. But of course that shouldn’t have mattered, because our people’s weapons have never been swords and spears, but the Frog of the North. If we’d managed to wake the Frog of the North, he would have swallowed up the iron men at a stroke. But there were too few of us; many of our people had gone to live in the village and didn’t come to our aid when they were asked. And even if they had come, they wouldn’t have been of help, because they no longer remembered the Snakish words, and the Frog of the North only rises up when thousands call on him. So there was nothing left for our men but to try to fight against the iron men with their own weapons, but that has always been a hopeless task. Foreign things never bring anyone good fortune. The men were cut down and the women, including your grandmothers, brought up their children and died of melancholy.”
“Our father, of course, wasn’t killed in battle,” Mother corrected him. “No one would dare go near him, because he had poison teeth.”
“What do you mean, poison teeth?”
“Like an adder’s,” explained Uncle Vootele. “Our ancient forefathers all had fangs, but as time passed and they forgot Snakish, their poisonous fangs disappeared. In the last hundred years very few of them have had them, and now I don’t know anybody who has them, but our father did, and he bit his enemies without mercy. The iron men were terribly afraid of him and fled for their lives when Father flashed his fangs at them.”
“So how was he captured?”
“They brought a stone-throwing machine,” sighed Mother. “And started firing rocks at him. Finally they got him and stunned him. Then the iron men tied him up, with whoops of joy, cut off his legs, and threw him into the sea.”
“The iron men hated and feared your grandfather terribly,” said Uncle. “He had a really wild nature, and our ancestors’ fiery blood flowed in him. If we had all stayed like that, the iron men wouldn’t have stood a chance of building a nest in our land; they would have had their throats cut and been gnawed to the bone. But unfortunately people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language, until finally they’re bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a scythe.”
Uncle Vootele spat and glowered at the floor with such a horrible expression that I thought, My heroic grandfather’s cruel blood hasn’t completely gone from his son.
“Even amid the waves, Father bellowed in such a frightful voice that the iron men fled to their castle and closed all the window holes,” Mother said, concluding her woeful tale. “That was more than thirty years ago.”
“So isn’t that reason enough to learn Snakish?” said Uncle. “In memory of your brave grandfather. I can’t plant fangs in your mouth, but I can put a nimble tongue in there. Spit out that pap, and let’s get started again.”
“Let him rest a little at least,” begged Mother.
“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to put on a brave face. “And my tongue doesn’t hurt so much anymore. I can do it.”
It would be wrong to claim that studying Snakish immediately killed all my dreams of a spinning wheel and a bread shovel. I still thought sometimes about the marvels I’d seen at the home of the village elder, Johannes, and his daughter, Magdaleena, and I even secretly tried to fashion a bread shovel myself. I couldn’t even contemplate trying a spinning wheel; that seemed like a contraption from another world that an ordinary person could never make with his own hands. Not even the shovel amounted to much; somehow it ended up crooked and splintered. There was nothing I could do with it. I didn’t dare to take my handiwork home, so it lay abandoned in the bushes.
With Pärtel, naturally, I reminisced about our visit, and we conferred about whether to visit the exciting house again. Johannes the village elder had invited us back, but the sense of nervousness about the village had not diminished in our hearts, and Mother’s and Uncle’s stories had, at least for me, only strongly increased how alien it seemed. So I resolved to put off another visit to the village for sometime in the future, and Pärtel didn’t want to go alone. I did invite him to join me in learning Snakish with Uncle Vootele, but Pärtel said, screwing up his nose, that his mother was already teaching him, that it was disgustingly difficult, and he certainly wasn’t planning to take extra lessons. So I remained as Uncle Vootele’s only pupil.
After the first painful weeks, during which my tongue swelled like a mushroom several times, my mouth muscles finally started to get used to the effort, and many of my hisses were beginning to sound sufficiently sibilant. If I had at first studied Snakish words mainly out of obedience and respect for my uncle, whom I loved very much, gradually I actually started to like the hissing. It was exciting to try out new sibilations and, when I succeeded, thrilling to see the eagles circling high in the sky and coming down to me, the owls in the middle of the day sticking their heads out of the tree hollows, and the mother wolves stopping on the spot and stretching out their legs, so as to be milked more easily.