How to Train Your Dragon: How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse Page 10
and not just his muscles.’
‘If he really use his b-b-brain,’ complained
Toothless, catching up and collapsing, exhausted, on the
seat of the sleigh, ‘we not here in the first p-p-place.’
In that very same instant, over the brow of the
hill came the Hysterics.
They had put their helmets on and they were on
skis, howling the Hysterical Howl like a pack of speeding
wolves. They were already shooting arrows in their
direction, trying to hit the sleigh. But they were too late.
Once their skis hit the ice they travelled for a while, and
then came to a halt. Hiccup and Camicazi were nearly
at the Harbour Exit by now, and the arrows shot by the
Hysterics fell harmlessly on the ice.
Looking over her shoulder at the furious
Hysterics, Camicazi let out a whoop of joy as One Eye
galloped out of Hysteria Harbour.
‘We made it!’ she yelled.
‘We haven’t made it yet,’ said Hiccup nervously.
That sharp noise of cracking, like axes on a tree trunk,
was even louder now that they were on the ice. And
Hiccup was looking out for the Doomfang.
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‘Here’s the Vegetable,’ said Camicazi, handing
Hiccup the Frozen Potato with the arrow stuck in it.
‘And this other thing I found in the casket – I’m sorry, I
shouldn’t have taken it as well, but once you start burgling,
it’s difficult to stop.’
Hiccup took the Potato and the Other Thing, and
stuffed them in his breast pocket, not really concentrating,
for the great shadow of the Doomfang had appeared under
the boat, and was following them under the ice.
‘If we can just get to the Open Sea before the ice
cracks we’ll be all right,’ muttered Hiccup to himself. ‘The
Doomfang won’t leave the Wrath of Thor. The Doomfang
hasn’t left the Wrath of Thor in fifteen years…’
The walls of the cliffs raced past them on either
side. The Doomfang, dark and terrible, stretching out for
ever, swam slowly beneath them. And they reached the
edge of the Open Sea without the ice cracking.
‘You see!’ grinned Camicazi. ‘We did it!’
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15. THEY MIGHT JUST
MAKE IT, NOW
It seemed like they had INDEED done it, as they burst
into the Open Sea, One Eye pulling into that Great
White Wilderness at terrific speed, the Wrath of Thor left
behind them, the potato safely in Hiccup’s breast pocket,
and Berk only a three-hour sleigh ride away.
And then everything went wrong.
‘What’s th-th-that???’ stammered Toothless,
pointing with one wing to a shape on the ice behind them,
coming closer by the second.
That was an enormous, leaping Driver Dragon,
far bigger and faster than One Eye, pulling a gigantic
sleigh with one man in it. A very cross man, with an arrow-
wound in his bottom, a lump on his head, chewed-off
moustaches and a double-headed axe in one hand.
In fact it was Norbert the Nutjob.
Before Hiccup had time to think, Norbert was
upon them.
His sleigh drew alongside the galloping One Eye.
And then he reached over, and with one blow of his axe,
he cut the reins and tackle attaching One Eye to the
sleigh.
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One Eye bounded on, but the sleigh, and The
Hopeful Puffin behind it, came to a shuddering halt.
‘Oh, suffering scallops,’ moaned Hiccup.
There they were, as still as a stone, in the middle
of a Great White Desert that stretched for miles and
miles and miles. In front of them, Norbert the Nutjob
was pulling on his Sabre-Tooth’s reins to wheel his sleigh
round for the attack.
Below them was the Doomfang.
For the first time in fifteen years, the Doomfang
had left the Wrath of Thor.
It, too, had stopped when the sleigh stopped. In
fact the sleigh had come to rest right in the centre of its
terrible green eye, as if it were a target.
And a target it was, for Norbert the Nutjob.
Norbert leapt into their sleigh, tall and terrible
and COMPLETELY CRAZY.
‘AHA!’ roared Norbert the Nutjob, his
tic dancing for pure horrible murderous joy. ‘I’VE
CAUGHT YOU, YOU REVOLTING LITTLE
BLONDE ASSASSIN! AND NOW I SHALL
TEACH YOU NOT TO HIT PEOPLE ON THE
HEAD WITH THEIR OWN POTATO!’
Norbert the Nutjob raised his axe over Camicazi,
and he was about to bring it down, when Hiccup said
loudly, ‘I wouldn’t do that, Norbert.’
Hiccup felt in his breast pocket, and drew out
the potato with the arrow still stuck in it. It was warmer
this morning, and the potato, snuggled down the front of
Hiccup’s furry waistcoat, was no longer frozen.
Norbert glanced at Hiccup, and then gasped in
astonishment, as right in front of Norbert’s eyes…
… HICCUP PULLED THE ARROW OUT OF
THE POTATO.
For as Hiccup had suggested earlier to Norbert,
the arrow slid out perfectly easily now the potato had
defrosted.
Hiccup pushed it in and out of the potato several
times just to drive the point home.
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Norbert the Nutjob dropped his axe.
‘My father’s Prophecy!’ screamed Norbert the
Nutjob, his head in his hands. ‘I don’t believe it…
It can’t be true! You… you revolting little Hooligan
Vegetable-Burglar… you… are the Chosen One? … You
will lift the Curse and rid us of the Doomfang…?’
Hiccup nodded solemnly, thinking, nutty as a
fruitcake.
At that very moment, the sun came over the
horizon…
Rays of sunlight bounced off the snow and ice all
around them, and off the Doomfang’s Great Green Eye
and dazzled Hiccup, so that he had to fling up an elbow
to shield himself from the glare.
A sound like a million whips rang out, or a trillion
axe blows, or a thousand of Thor’s thunderbolts rolled
into one.
The ice cracked from side to side.
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16. THE DOOMFANG
A great jagged split appeared in the white frozen sea,
a split that ran all the way from the Outcast Lands to
the north, down to the Bog-Burglar islands in
the south.
The world broke open like a
big white egg.
‘Aaaaaargh!’ screamed
Hiccup. ‘Quick! Get into The
Hopeful Puffin!’
Norbert the Nutjob, Camicazi and
Hiccup bolted out of the sleigh, and leapt into
the little boat, the ice giving way beneath their feet.
‘LET DOWN THE SAIL!’ screamed
Hiccup, cutting the rope tying the boat to the sleigh.
The sail flopped down and the wind caught it,
sending it billowing outward like a plump cushion. There
was another enormous CRACK! and the ice in the
Sullen Sea splintered into millions of tiny pieces. The
sleigh slip
ped gently into the grey-green water and was
seen no more, and The Hopeful Puffin was afloat.
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Through the jagged jigsaw of ice, between them
and the Isle of Berk on the horizon, up rose the
Doomfang.
It reared out of the sea, showering The Hopeful
Puffin with water and shards of ice, telescoping upwards
to its immense height, which was impossibly,
RIDICULOUSLY high, blotting out the newly risen sun.
The SOUND it made was unutterably awful, a
sadness so extreme it made you want to weep yourself,
a sound that crept up the spine like spiders’ feet,
and scuttled over the scalp, sending each
individual hair on Hiccup’s head prickling
upwards like the spines on a hedgehog. It
was the glossy black of a gigantic, muscly
panther, and when it opened its awful
Cavern jaws to roar, its serrated teeth were
as green as its eyes, and the
yellow frothy scum of its
saliva steamed and
smoked in the cold
morning air.
Indeed, its whole body seemed boiling hot, and
like the flanks of a horse that has galloped for miles,
great clouds of smoke rose up from its tremendous
gleaming bulk and into the sky.
‘It’s come for me…’ moaned Norbert the Nutjob,
in a tremble of fear.
‘No it hasn’t,’ said Hiccup. ‘It’s come for ME.’
And the Doomfang did seem to be looking
directly down at Hiccup.
It was as if Hiccup had always known that
this was going to happen, that somehow he was never
going to get in and out of Hysteria without meeting the
Doomfang face to face.
‘Don’t look into its eyes,’ warned One Eye.
You should never look into a dragon’s eyes. But
in this case it was difficult not to – they were so large
and so close, like a couple of green suns. Hiccup was
hypnotised for a moment, and his head spun so that he
nearly lost his balance and dropped off the boat.
‘What do you WANT?’ Hiccup yelled
desperately in Dragonese.
The Dragon opened its great mouth and tried
to speak. But all that came out was a terrible unearthly
howl of horror and SADNESS, and the foam dripped
from its jaws in a revolting bubbly waterfall. It tried
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again, and the terrible sound came out again, only
louder.
‘What is it?’ asked Hiccup.
But the creature could not say, and its struggle to
speak made it angry, and it began shooting out with its
blue flames, nearer and nearer to Hiccup. ‘What does it
want me to do?’ asked Hiccup frantically.
‘We’re done for,’ despaired Norbert, wringing his
hands.
Camicazi patted the moaning Norbert soothingly
on the back. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she repeated over and
over again, ‘we always are, Thor only knows how…
Hiccup’ll have a Cunning Plan…’
‘Oh that’s right,’ remembered Norbert. ‘Of
course! My father’s Prophecy! He is the Chosen One,
and he alone can rid us of the Doomfang!’
But for once in his life, Hiccup did NOT have a
Cunning Plan.
‘What do you want?’ asked Hiccup again, more
to himself, this time.
The Doomfang made one last terrible attempt to
communicate, coming out with a truly dreadful, garbled
cacophony of noise, and then opened its jaws wide,
sucking in its breath.
Hiccup did not know what they had done for the
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creature to have it in for them.
Perhaps it had gone crazy and turned into a Man-
Eater? It had certainly killed Norbert’s Papa, fifteen years
ago, and was it now going to kill them too?
Because now it was aiming directly for them, and
Hiccup braced himself for the Monster to breathe out its
flames and set the boat alight like a little barbecue.
But what shot out of the creature’s mouth was not
a Terrible Burst of Fire, not the frozen flames that would
have sent all three of them, and Toothless too, straight to
Valhalla in a heroic bonfire.
Curling and unfurling, quick and flexible as a
gigantic muscly snake, out of the Doomfang’s mouth came
the Doomfang’s TONGUE.
One hundred metres long, pink and pulsing, the
Doomfang’s TONGUE sped straight to Hiccup’s
left hand, and the wriggling, squirming,
revoltingly WET forked end of it
burrowed its way into his palm
and wrapped itself round
the potato.
Hiccup nearly dropped the potato there and
then. But then he realised what the creature wanted.
He dropped the arrow, and grabbed hold of the
potato with both hands. The juices of the Doomfang’s
tongue foamed disgustingly over his hands.
Hiccup p-u-l-l-e-d.
The Doomfang p-u-l-l-e-d.
There was only one potato, and both of them
wanted it. Both of them NEEDED it. Desperately,
Hiccup tried to get a better grip on the potato, slimy and
greasy with the yucky bubbly saliva. He wasn’t going to
lose the quest, and Fishlegs’s life, NOW, not when they
were so close to home, not when the shadow of Berk
was so tantalisingly near.
He leant
right back, pulling with
a might he never knew he had. But the Doomfang
pulled too, and the chances of Hiccup, not more
than four stone, winning a tug of war against a Dragon
numberless stones heavier were very tiny indeed.
Not im-POSSIBLE, but, let’s face it,
im-PROBABLE.
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Hiccup did not let go. He would never have let
go. He would have stood there all day and all night, if he
could have.
But one fork of the Doomfang’s tongue unpeeled
Hiccup’s desperate fingers, one by one, and the other
fork gave a horrible squirm, and with a final terrible
wrench, the Doomfang’s tongue wrested the potato out
of Hiccup’s hands.
As Hiccup fell backwards into the bottom of the
boat, he saw with more despair than he had ever felt
before in his short adventurous life, the revolting tongue
retreat with a flick as quick as a toad catching flies, back
into the Doomfang’s mouth. The jaws shut over it with
awful finality.
The Doomfang swallowed the Potato.
The quest was over.
17. THE QUEST IS OVER
Tears pouring down his face, Hiccup watched as the
Doomfang threw back its head and screamed as loudly as
if it had been shot with a gigantic spear.
It sent a great sheet of freezing blue flame like an
uphill waterfall shooting up into the sky. These flames
shot so high they hit a small cloud up above, instantly
freezing it, and turning it bright blue. And then, just
like that, the Doomfang sank slowly beneath the waves,
leaving nothing behind but a whirlpool of gigantic ripples,
spreading wider and wider.
>
They spread towards The Hopeful Puffin, rocking
it violently up and down. They spread wider still, and
lapped the shores of Hysteria itself, and carried on down
the Wrath of Thor.
Hiccup sat in the bottom of the boat, unable
to believe that the Doomfang wouldn’t rear up again,
and maybe spit out the potato, or give it back in some
way. But eventually the ripples got smaller and vanished
entirely, and so too did Hiccup’s last hope.
This really was the end.
The nearest potato was now thousands and
thousands of miles away, in the great country to the west,
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known as America to those who believe in such a place.
‘Issa g-g-g-gone!’ whispered Toothless in
amazement.
Up on the clifftops, the long line of watching,
silent Hysterics began to shout: ‘THE DOOMFANG IS
GONE! THE DOOMFANG IS GONE! HURRAH
FOR THE WEIRD LITTLE RED-HAIRED BOY,
THE DOOMFANG IS GONE!’
And softly, and silently, snow as blue as Gobber
the Belch’s nose rained down from the frozen cloud
above Hiccup’s head.
The blue snow rained down like confetti at a
coronation, settling in Hiccup’s hair, and on One Eye’s
white back, and in between Toothless’s horns.
‘YOU are the Chosen One,’ said Norbert the
Nutjob, still unable to believe it. ‘YOU have rid us of
the Doomfang. YOU have lifted the Curse of Hysteria?’
Hiccup was suddenly furiously angry.
Not with Norbert, but with the gods.
For six long months he had been longing for
spring to come, praying to Thor for the ice to melt, and
now, just when he and Camicazi had been through
so much, and nearly achieved the impossible, just at
precisely the wrong moment, Thor had made the ice
crack and freed the Doomfang.
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And this ridiculous blue snow was just the icing on
the cake. What was it Snotlout had said?
The snow will turn as blue as Gobber the Belch’s nose
before YOU become the Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe.
The gods were laughing at him now, playing with
him for their sport.