Free The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk Page B

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 ofyour 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 spoke 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.
    “We think we could,” replied Pirre and Rääk. Incidentally, they always spoke together, one saying one word, the other the next, so it wasn’t possible to understand with which Primate you were talking. In fact it wasn’t possible to imagine them apart; they were always together,