How to Twist a Dragon's Tale Page 11

  And so when the others did finally haul him out, Hiccup was calm and relaxed.

  “Are you hurt?” asked Stoick anxiously.

  “No,” smiled Hiccup. “I burned my heel, but that’s it.”

  “THANK THOR!” bellowed Stoick. And then with a great roar of pride he enveloped Hiccup in a stifling hairy embrace. “MY SON! I am sorry that I doubted you! We didn’t let those Extermina-whosits beat us, did we? NO, by Woden and the lovely flowing armpits of Freya, we whopped their little Extermi-wotsit BOTTOMS; they never knew what hit them. THAT’S the spirit of the Horrendous Haddocks in you, NEVER SURRENDER! And by Thor’s thighstrings we DID NOT. I can’t wait to tell Valhallarama . . . Humungous, I have to admit, I owe you a great debt.”

  He smiled, only a trifle reluctantly, at the irritatingly perfect Hero, sitting bloodstained but content on the deck. “What a wonderful idea of mine it was to make you Hiccup’s Bardiguard!”

  Humungously Hotshot was looking happier than Hiccup had ever seen him before. A great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He rolled up the helmet of his Fire-Suit, and ruffled his slightly-thinning-but-still-handsome golden hair.

  “WELL, I’d forgotten what fun Questing could be; I really enjoyed myself there,” beamed Humungously Hotshot the Hero breezily. “And I thought I didn’t do too badly, considering I haven’t done that sort of Hero Work for over fifteen years. A smidgen out of practice, but not a bad effort, on the whole . . .”

  “You were MARVELOUS!” said Hiccup enthusiastically. “STUPENDOUS! BRILLIANT!”

  Stoick the Vast’s smile froze behind his beard. But he had to admit that the guy had saved Hiccup’s life. A Chief should give credit where credit was due, whatever his personal feelings. “It was a fine piece of Bardiguarding, Humungous. You must name your price as your reward. Anything I have is yours, anything at all, Humungous, you just have to say the word . . .”

  “Well it’s terribly kind of you,” said Humungous. “If you INSIST upon rewarding me, there is one thing I would like from you, Stoick . . .”

  “Yes?” said Stoick.

  “Your boat, The Peregrine Falcon,” replied Humungous. “I plan to start a new life for myself, right here and now, and what I need is a good fast boat like this one so I can get away from here as quick as I can.”

  “Are you quite sure?” asked Stoick. He had mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, he was secretly rather relieved that this annoyingly brilliant Humungous wasn’t going to be hanging around much longer, but on the other, The Peregrine Falcon was far and away Stoick’s favorite boat.

  “I’m quite sure,” said Humungous firmly. “If you’re going to start a new life, you might as well start it NOW.”

  Humungous smiled at Hiccup and patted him on the shoulder.

  “Thank you, Hiccup,” said Humungously Hotshot, “for finding my stone for me. It has meant a great deal to me in the past, but now I am looking to the future, and I would like you to have it.”

  He leaned over and pulled the bracelet with the ruby heart’s stone in it off his arm and gave it to Hiccup.

  “I’m back in the Hero Business!” he said, happily swinging his sword from side to side, juggling it with his axe, balancing it on one finger, and then thrusting it back in its scabbard again. “I’d forgotten how good it feels!”

  Humungous took a big deep breath of the fresh sea air.

  “I must say,” said Humungous, “it’s a great day to start a new life.”

  Humungous called across the waves between the two boats, and he was so far away now that Hiccup could only just catch the words.

  “Send my regards to your mother, Hiccup!”

  Hiccup shouted back to say that he would.

  “And thank you for giving me back my gift!”

  “Your gift?” Hiccup shouted back.

  “The singing!” called Humungous. “It’s such a pleasure to be making music again!”

  And then Humungous began to sing.

  It wasn’t the song that Hiccup’s mother used to sing to him as a child.

  It was a new song.

  Humungous threw out his chest and really belted it out at the top of his lungs, wildly out of tune and sounding like a couple of warthogs in a catfight.

  Hiccup, Toothless, Camicazi, Fishlegs, and the Windwalker had heard Humungous’s novel way of singing before, and all five of them had stuffed their fingers or wings over their ears before he even started.

  But this was new to Stoick the Vast.

  His mouth flopped open for a few astonished minutes.

  And then a great grin spread across his face.

  What a delightful surprise!

  It seemed that even Humungously Hotshot couldn’t be good at EVERYTHING.

  “WELL,” said Stoick, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction, “I think we can do better than that, boys, can’t we?”

  “WE CERTAINLY CAN!” roared Gobber.

  And there were cries of “YOU BETCHA!” and “COULDN’T ANYBODY?” from Baggybum the Beerbelly and Nobber Nobrains.

  “ALL TOGETHER NOW!” cried out Stoick.

  And the whole Tribe put their hands on their chests, and sang their hearts out, all together, the words rolling out into the peaceful afternoon, in deep and gorgeous harmony:

  And The Blue Whale, carrying Stoick, Fishlegs, Hiccup, Toothless, the Windwalker, and the Hooligan Warriors, turned its nose toward the east.

  Sailing along the rays of the sun toward the little Isle of Berk, a small, quiet, marshy little island that nobody notices much, but one on which there will be Hooligans for as long as Great Hairybottom’s shoe is buried in that bog.

  Their song was echoed by that of the Bog-Burglar Warriors, sailing with Camicazi and Big-Boobied Bertha in The Big Momma, toward the Bog-Burglar lands to the south, getting fainter and fainter as they got farther and farther away from The Blue Whale:

  Hiccup did not join in the singing. He stood on the deck of The Blue Whale, Toothless asleep on his head, the Windwalker pressed to his side, watching as the tiny dot of The Peregrine Falcon got smaller and smaller, traveling toward the WEST, toward new lands, and new adventures, and feats of strength, and daring Sagas that Hiccup felt sure he would hear about sometime in the Future.

  And even when The Peregrine Falcon was so small that it was a tiny moving speck on the horizon, Hiccup still fancied that he could hear the faint, out-of-tune noise of Humungous’s singing.

  “THE HERO CARES NOT FOR A WILD WINTER’S STORM

  FOR IT CARRIES HIM SWIFT ON THE BACK OF THE WAVE

  ALL MAY BE LOST AND OUR HEARTS MAY BE WORN . . .

  BUT . . .

  A HERO . . . FIGHTS . . . FOR-EVER !”

  Humungously Hotshot was back in the Hero Business.

  THE OLD MAN IN THE HOLE

  Some hours later, an old man was sitting in a hole of his own making.

  He had heard the sounds of the Volcano exploding far in the distance, and a distant thunderstorm, but of course he could not see what was happening.

  He sat in the darkness, praying that it would all be all right.

  Please, let it be all right . . . Please, let it be all right . . . Please, let it all be all right . . .

  For hours he sat quietly.

  And then to his relief the heads of a smiling man and a smiling boy appeared in that circle of blue.

  The boy said: “You can come up now, Grandpa. I told you that I would make it all right.”

  “I knew you would,” said the old man, at last able to speak. “At least . . . I think I did . . .”

  And the boy helped him up the ladder and into the light.

  EPILOGUE BY HICCUP HORRENDOUS HADDOCK III, THE LAST OF THE GREAT VIKING HEROES

  Human hearts are not made out of stone.

  Thank Thor.

  They can break, and heal, and beat again.

  I never spoke to my mother about Humungously Hotshot, and she never once mentioned his name.

  I watched her very closely wh
en she returned from her Quest, and my father was bustling all around her, chatting excitedly all about the Volcano, and how the Barbaric Archipelago was nearly wiped off the planet by “those wretched Extermi-thingummys, you’d have given them what for, Vally my darling, oh my goodness, we could have done with your help, but we remembered what you always say, Never Surrender! And we didn’t, did we, Hiccup?”

  When my father got to the bit about how Humungous the Hero had appeared out of nowhere after all those years when everybody thought he was dead, just at exactly the right moment to save the life of her only son, my mother bent down very quickly to adjust the leg straps on her armor.

  She was down there for quite a while, adjusting those leg straps, but when she straightened up again, her face, though a little red, was perfectly calm, and she smiled at my father, and kissed him on the cheek, and she said, “You are quite right, Stoick, my dear. Never surrender. Shall we go in for dinner?”

  Who knows what she felt, that long, long time ago, when Humungous first failed to come back from his Quest. Whether she, too, used to watch from her window, out to the sea, yearning and yearning, waiting and waiting for him to come sailing back to her.

  And he never came.

  Many, many years later, when I was a tall grown-up man, and my mother was an elderly woman, my mother was climbing onto her riding dragon, getting ready to go off on yet another of her Quests, and this was a bit trickier for her now because despite being a grandmother she still insisted on wearing full body armor.

  She wobbled onto the dragon’s back, creaking horribly at the joints, with two poor Warriors trying to assist her, and with her snapping at them, “I don’t need your help; I am perfectly capable of climbing up here on my own.”

  Did I dream it or, as she swung unsteadily upward, did something really come loose from around her neck, and drop for a moment into the sunlight? Did it catch a sun-ray, and wink at me, one small red wink?

  I think I saw the ruby heart’s stone, hanging around her neck on a fine golden chain.

  It was only for a second, that wink of her heart that she normally kept so guarded, because as soon as she got herself settled on the dragon, she picked up whatever-it-was and stuffed it back inside her armor again.

  Then she pulled down her visor so that her lined, old-woman face disappeared, and all you could see peering out was her eyes. Time had not aged those eyes; they were the same bright blue that once gazed out at Humungous all those many years ago.

  “Yoicks!” my mother cried out in youthful excitement, anticipating the fun of the Quest ahead, and she kicked her dragon’s flanks with her heels and flew off into the heavens.

  I watched her go, a tall armored figure sitting upright on her dragon, her white hair flowing out from under her helmet, her sword still steady in her hand, getting smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the clouds entirely, and all I could hear carried to me on the wind was the last echoes of her voice crying out:

  “Into the Battle!”

  I never saw her again.

  She was killed on the battlefield that very afternoon, seventy-six years old, and still fighting.

  She was a Great Hero, my mother.

  THE BRACELET

  I set my mother’s half of the ruby heart’s stone in the other eye of the dragon on the bracelet. So now both halves of the stone are together again.

  I did wonder whether I should wear something that had been worn so long by Alvin himself.

  But then I thought, my fate and Alvin’s fate have been so entwined around each other, in an endless tangled knot, that it is impossible to pick them apart.

  If Alvin had not stolen Humungous’s heart’s stone, the hearts of Valhallarama and Humungous would never have been broken.

  My mother would never have married my father.

  And I, the hiccup, the accident, WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BORN.

  And, by a curious, unexpected turn of Fate, I, Hiccup, also just happen to be Alvin’s nemesis. So that all that Alvin’s busy evildoing achieved was the accidental creation of his own downfall.

  You see how good and evil are twisted together?

  Like a golden dragon bracelet snaking brightly about a person’s arm.

  The dragon bracelet that Humungous created, out of misplaced love and gratitude, in the hellish nightmare of the Lava-Lout Jail-Forges is exquisitely made, for he was a far better goldsmith than he was a singer.

  It curls around my arm, its shining wings folded back, as if about to unfurl and take off, and now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying.

  It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at their darkest.

  I have worn that bracelet every day of my life.

  Surely, SURELY, that was the last that we shall see of Alvin the Treacherous?

  For surely even ALVIN couldn’t swim back to life through the burning waters of the earth’s core?

  Or could he???

  I have this funny feeling that we may yet be seeing more of this undefeatable villain . . .

  Watch out for the next volume of

  Hiccup’s memoirs . . .

  * Hiccup was the only Hooligan who could understand Dragonese, the language that dragons spoke to each other. (back to text)

  * sometimes completely; it depends on the dragon (back to text)

  * see How to Train Your Dragon, How to Be a Pirate, How to Speak Dragonese, and How to Cheat a Dragon’s Curse. (back to text)

  * The Thing was a meeting of all the local Tribes. (back to text)

  * To find out about Alvin and the Sharkworms, please read How to Speak Dragonese. Another excellent book. (back to text)