How to Train Your Dragon: How to Fight a Dragon's Fury Page 6
who may be annoying you…’ She rolled her eyes
significantly in the direction of the Dragonmarkers.
Alvin shook his bitten hand, cheering up
immensely. ‘Once I’m King, and I’ve defeated the
Dragon Furious with the Jewel, I could start the
executions immediately…’
He postponed his hook-sharpening for a moment,
to have a happy little daydream of all the people he
would like to execute in the first half hour of his reign.
(As it happened, his mother, the Witch Excellinor, was
rather high up that list, but luckily she didn’t guess
that.)
Only one little hour until he was crowned King.
One little hour, and then he would be told the
Secret of the Dragon Jewel, so now he came to think of
it, he wouldn’t even HAVE to wring Toothless’s neck.
He could just use the power of the Jewel to destroy
the dragons forever…
Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock went the
ticking thing, swinging from Alvin’s waist belt, ticking
down the minutes until Alvin was crowned King.
Would it be the humans or the dragons
who survived?
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Both camps were ready now. Both knew that
before this day was over, numberless unlucky ones
among them would die on the battlefield, just as they
imagined Hiccup had done two days earlier, and they
would not all be opening their eyes on another day
tomorrow…
Watching, waiting.
Only a few more hours now.
They knew that it was Doomsday.
But Doomsday for whom?
5. GETTING TO TOMORROW
‘We have to get to the island that the Wodensfang
was talking about, Hogfly… The island that is
called Yesterday or Tomorrow or something,’ said
Hiccup, checking with trembling fingers to see whether
the Wodensfang was awake. ‘And we’ve got to get
there FAST.
‘Wake up, Wodensfang! Wake up! Please
wake up!’ whispered Hiccup, desperately tickling the
Wodensfang behind the ears, under the arms, but no,
the Wodensfang snored on, extraordinarily loudly for
such a small and elderly dragon. ‘OK, he’s not waking
up. Hogfly, I’m afraid we’re going to have to do
this on our own. But that’s OK, right? We can do
it, can’t we? Only, we’ve not got much time…’ said
Hiccup, hurriedly putting the Wodensfang back in his
backpack.
Hiccup’s left side was feeling a little less numb,
and his brain seemed to have cleared a little, like the
mist lifting all around them. There is nothing like
MORTAL DANGER to clear the mind.
Right.
He staggered swiftly towards the sleeping
Spydragon, who was snoring almost as loudly as the
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Wodensfang. This was going to be painful, but
Hiccup had to do it. He held his forearm up to the
Spydragon’s snoring jaws, averting his eyes because he
didn’t want to see what would happen next.
‘Ow!’
The two teeth lifted out of Hiccup’s forearm with
a most repellent sucking noise and slid, like magnets,
back into the two gaps in the Spydragon’s mouth. Even
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if the Vampire Spydragon woke up, he wouldn’t be able
to track them now.
‘YUCKY,’ gulped the Hogfly.
Hiccup hurriedly wrapped the wound up with a
rag torn from his shirt, because it was bleeding quite
a bit. He stooped to pick up some of the Sand-Shark
darts and stuffed them into his pockets, and then
he half-ran, and half-hopped up the beach. As he
stumbled along, he tried to reassure the little Hogfly
in case he was worried. ‘It’ll be fine, Hogfly. I mean,
look at how we dealt with those Sand-Sharks, we can
do this…’
The Hogfly did not look worried. He was
practising flying upside down.
‘All we have to do is get to this Tomorrow
place. I’m sure the Dragon Rebellion dragons won’t
be able to follow us there…’
But which island was Tomorrow? Maybe it was
the big island just to the south of the Murderous
Mountains, the only island in sight not covered in
dragons.
‘Is that the island of Tomorrow, Hogfly?’ asked
Hiccup, pointing.
‘Ooh, are we playing a guessing game now?’
asked the Hogfly, eagerly turning the right way up, and
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frowning in a puzzled way at the outline of the island.
‘It’s a tricky one… I give up! Is it a pancake? Is it a
teacup? Is it your grandmother’s hat?’
‘Oh brother,’ said Hiccup.
He staggered on, up the sand dune behind the
beach. From the top, he could see the rolling ocean to
the west, and another larger island to the north, flatter
than this one, in the shape of the top of a question
mark. He could also see the whole of the tiny island of
Hero’s End laid out in front of him.
And it was extraordinary.
The entire island was covered in shipwrecks.
Not just one shipwreck, but the wrecks of thirty
or forty Viking ships, strewn out over the blasted
landscape in front of him.
For when the dreadful gales of the Winter Wind
of Woden blew unfortunate ships through Hero’s Gap,
those that weren’t blown out into the cold Atlantic
ended here, on the little isle of Hero’s End.
‘Maybe there’s something we can use as a
boat, something that isn’t completely wrecked!’
shouted Hiccup to the Hogfly with rising hope, and he
stumbled unsteadily towards the broken ships, as the
wind tried its best to pluck him out of the marsh and
send him bowling over into the sea.
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‘Look for a ship that might actually sail, Hogfly!’
shouted Hiccup to Hogfly over the shrieking wind.
Most of the ships had been sunk there for
centuries, their tattered sails rotting into the marshes
over hundreds of years. Some were more recent, but
they all had great holes in the hull, or were split in two,
and Hiccup knew they could not carry him across the
narrow strip of water to Tomorrow.
‘I’ve found one!’ squealed the Hogfly, pointing
both trotters at one.
‘No, Hogfly, it has to be one that hasn’t got a
hole in it…’
‘I’ve found another one!’
‘No Hogfly, it really, really does have to be one
with no holes in it at all…’
A little further on, Hiccup spotted the small
upturned bottom of a rowing boat, and hurrying
towards it, he realised with mounting excitement that
the boat was virtually intact, apart from a small section
bitten out of it by some large sea creature.
Perhaps a Leviathorgan? Or a half grown Woden’s
Nightmare, by the look of those tooth patterns… he
thought to himself. And then: Wow, I do seem to know
an awful LOT about dragons, imagine thinking about
/> natural history at a time like this…
The boat was small enough that Hiccup could
turn it over by himself, and panting hard, he dragged
it over the marshes by the end of a fraying rope, every
now and then sinking so deep into the soggy ground
that he thought he wouldn’t be able to get out again. A
little later, he had got the little boat into the sea, and to
Hiccup’s passionate relief, it floated, a little lopsidedly.
Everything seemed to be going Hiccup’s way.
The wind had even changed direction, so it was now
blowing a violent gale in the direction of the island
he hoped was Tomorrow. That wind would blow him
rapidly across the white-tipped waves and on to the
island, Hiccup was sure of it – as long as the boat
didn’t sink…
He pushed away from the shore of Hero’s End,
bailing out the water slopping over the shattered, bitten
side and steering as best he could with a broken oar
he had found inside the boat. The salt was in his eyes,
every bone ached, and his swollen arm and toes were
so cold that he could barely feel them.
Ah, the Final Test was a Test indeed, of heart
and body and mind and spirit. Hiccup was so very,
very weary, so cold, so confused, that some part of him
wanted to give up, just lie down in the bottom of the
boat and let it fill up with water and go down to the
quiet soft nothingness of the seabed, where the
pain would be no more. But something within
him made him carry on bailing that water, and
moving the oar with his numb and swollen
arm. He had to get to Tomorrow… He
had to get to Tomorrow…
He did not really know why he
had to get to Tomorrow, but still he
made himself move that oar, bail
that water, with what little strength
he had.
His heart began to lift a
little halfway across the causeway.
Maybe he would make it after all. Maybe he wouldn’t
be blown off course…
And then he looked up through his slightly less
bruised eye, and for a second, as the fog shifted, he
caught sight of a little army of dragons flying swiftly
towards him from the direction of the Murderous
Mountains, before the fog closed up again and
swallowed them from view.
Gorebreathers. Tongue-twisters. Hellsteethers, his
brain told him helpfully. Armed with poisonous gases,
arm-twisting tongues, jaws that leap out and get you…
Those Sand-Sharks must have told the Dragon
Rebellion where he was, and this was the Dragon
Furious sending more dragons to kill him.
Hiccup was so well informed about dragons that
he had noticed the exact flying speeds of each one, and
had already calculated that they would intercept him
before he got to the beach of Tomorrow, even though
it was now so tantalisingly close. How could he fight
these dragons, all on his own, with no weapons?
And it appeared that one of the dragons, at least,
was nearer than he thought.
There was a confused roaring noise, and
something swooped down out of the fog, and Hiccup
only just flattened himself on the bottom of the boat in
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time to avoid being swept up by it.
Oh for Thor’s sake! What was that?
Whatever-it-was was so well camouflaged that it
was invisible, but as it rose up and away from Hiccup,
its chameleon body slowly turned from the exact colour
of a foggy sky to its own natural colour, a breathtaking
sea green.
It was a Deadly Shadow, and a Triple-Header
Deadly Shadow at that. He could see all of its three
heads outlined against the fog. Deadly Shadows were
extremely rare, and exceptionally dangerous.
Fires electric lightning bolts as well as flames… one
of the rarest and most frightening attack dragons in the
Archipelago…
Hiccup picked himself up from the bottom of
the boat, and gripped his pathetic broken oar in one
trembling hand, swivelling around to see where it might
attack from next. But there was nothing to be seen but
fog, fog and more fog.
‘Woof! Woof! Woof!’ barked the Hogfly
warningly.
The Deadly Shadow swooped down again, and
this time as it dived, Hiccup aimed at it with the oar,
but missed and fell over.
And as it swooped that second time, just before
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he fell over, Hiccup saw two wild-looking human
figures sitting on the Deadly Shadow’s back, screaming
at him. The smaller of the two had a lot of blonde hair,
and was yelling at the top of its voice, and brandishing
a sword above its head.
The three heads of the Deadly Shadow appeared
to be arguing with each other. Hiccup glimpsed two
other dragons flying beside the Deadly Shadow: a black
Windwalker dragon and a yellow hunting-dragon that
Hiccup saw too briefly to work out what species it was.
‘Trust nobody,’ the Wodensfang had said.
These must be the humans that the Wodensfang
said would be hunting him too… And they looked
ferocious.
The third time the Deadly Shadow swooped,
Hiccup was ready.
There was the same roaring noise, and as the
highly camouflaged creature dived, and Hiccup
could see the dim outline of its gigantic outstretched
claws, he ducked again before stretching up and
WHACKING the claws as hard as he could with his
splintered oar, which nearly split in two.
Then Hiccup took out two of the Sand-Shark
darts, and threw them as hard as he could with his
good hand, and one of them sank into the shining
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flanks of the Deadly Shadow, and the other one hit the
smaller yellow dragon next to it.
The Deadly Shadow soared away into invisibility
again, leaving the boat rocking so violently that it nearly
sank, and water came pouring in one of the sides,
and poor Hiccup tried to bail it out with his cupped
hands…
This was all rather unfortunate, to say the least.
For of course, the three heads of the Deadly
Shadow were Innocence, Arrogance and Patience.
(Patience was the middle head, because that was what
he had to have.) And the people on the back of that
Deadly Shadow dragon were Fishlegs No-Name and
Camicazi, Heir to the Bog-Burglars. And the two
dragons flying with them were Stormfly, Camicazi’s
little golden Mood-Dragon, and the Windwalker,
Hiccup’s very own riding-dragon.
They were Hiccup’s very best friends in all the
world, and with Hiccup, Wodensfang and Toothless
they formed the Ten Companions of the Dragonmark.
But of course, Hiccup hadn’t a clue who
they were.
6. IT’S DIFFICULT TO RESCUE
SOMEBODY WHO DOESN’T
WANT TO BE RESCUED
Camicazi and Fishlegs had spent a long and weary
night on dragonback, searching for Hiccup through the
fog.
They may have looked a little crazed to Hiccup,
but that was because they had been up all night without
so much as a wink of sleep.
Throughout the night, they hunted through that
terrible blinding mist, hiding when they suddenly came
across the Dragon Furious’s search parties, looking,
looking, looking for Hiccup. They had travelled all
around the coast of Tomorrow, north to the isle of
Grimbeard’s Despair, south to the Lava Lout Islands,
shouting until their throats were cracked and sore:
‘Hiccup, where are yo-o-ou?’
It had been a long night indeed.
What Fishlegs really wanted to be in life was a
bard, so these kind of ‘Total War’ situations weren’t
where he was at his best. Every now and then he would
drop off to sleep on the Deadly Shadow’s shoulder
and have a little dream about happier times on the
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little isle of Berk, with him and
Hiccup sitting down in the green
grass chatting about poetry or
something restful like that.
And then he would wake
up with a start, and he was in
the fog, and all the grass on
Berk had been burnt to a crisp,
and his cheeks were streaked with
tears, and Hiccup was probably dead.
The only thing that gave him any
comfort was being on the back of the Deadly Shadow
dragon. There is something vaguely soothing about the
presence of an enormous invisible three-headed Deadly
Shadow, who has sworn to stay by your side forever
and protect you with his life.
‘Face it, Camicazi,’ Fishlegs said
very sadly at about five o’clock in the
morning. ‘They brought his helmet
back up from the sea. Hundreds of
people saw him die. It’s impossible
for him to be alive.’
Unlike Fishlegs, Camicazi
was a good person to have by your
side in a ‘Total War’ situation,
because she loved a good battle, and she was incurably
optimistic. But even she was beginning to doubt