He didn’t make a sound; he just closed his eyes for the last time as gently as a baby, as soft as a sigh.
“Goliath!” cried Gobber in surprise, trying to lift up the great buffalo head in his bare arms. “What are you doing, you idiotic animal? This is no time for sleeping!”
“He’s not sleeping,” said Hiccup quietly, still sitting between the Bullrougher’s tail spines. He pointed to the terrible green wound on Goliath’s chest. “I’m afraid he’s dead, sir.”
Both boy and Master sat silently now, waiting for the fire to get them.
The great circle of flames burned high around their now-tiny patch of mountainside. A puff of wind could have blown the inferno across and snuffed them out in a heartbeat.
But perhaps it wouldn’t be the fire that got them in the end, after all.
Now that victory was certain, now that the end was so close, the enemy hiding in the fire was prepared, finally, to show itself, to enjoy the final strike.
There was something moving in the fire.
Panther-like shapes crept through the flames, prowling round them, hunting them, watching them as a cat watches its prey.
4. THE FIGHT
Round and round the shapes circled, closer and closer, growling to each other in contentment, delighted with their victory.
Until finally one pushed its head through the flame.
It was a dragon, but not any dragon that Hiccup or Gobber had ever seen before. A dragon created by a god in a bad mood.
Fire licked from its blood-streaked eyeballs, came smoking off its forehead and crackling out of its nostrils. Its skin was semi-transparent, so that you could see the black veins bulging furiously in its temples, like a thick, pulsing spider’s web.
It held its paws up in front of its face and . . .
ZING! ZING! ZING! ZING! ZING! ZING!
Six talons came shooting out of the ends of its stubby reptilian fingers, talons as long and broad and sharp as swords, and smoking hot.
Black saliva dropped slowly from its jaws. Green flames flickered up and down its talons. It bent down low in the fire, mouth agape, ready to spring at Hiccup, and . . .
. . . and an expression of acute surprise came across its face.
And it disappeared back into the flames as quickly as it had emerged. For another, even more terrifying figure had sprung up in the inferno.
The figure of a pure-white dragon, with a single horn set in the middle of its forehead, rearing up, wings stretched wide. Astride its back was a gigantic Man with a sword on either hand.
But what MAN could ride into a bonfire and live?
Perhaps, Hiccup thought, they had died and gone to Valhalla already, and this was Thor or Woden riding out to greet them.
The black dragons had fallen back in shock, but now they re-formed, growling hideously, and in front of Hiccup and Gobber’s disbelieving eyes, an astonishing fight began in the fire.
Hiccup had never seen a fight quite like it.
It was half dragon-fight, and half sword-fight, and the Man on the White Dragon was outnumbered six to one.
Hiccup had never seen a man fight quite like this Man. The black dragons used their talons like swords, springing at him from above, from aside, from below, slashing and thrusting.
The Man on the White Dragon had no shield, and he controlled his dragon with his knees alone. Roaring like a god, his arms moved so quickly that you could barely see them. His swords were there to meet every blow, every attack, every thrust.
“OK, Toothless come out now,” said Toothless, in a muffled way from beneath the helmet. “Toothless need to do a p-p-pee-pee RIGHT NOW!”
“It’s really not a good moment right now, Toothless,” said Hiccup nervously, holding his helmet firmly to his head. “You should have gone earlier . . .”
“Let me out! Toothless c-c-come out now or Toothless do a pee-pee on Mean Master’s H-H-HEAD!” screeched Toothless, furiously drumming his heels against the metal.
One second the Man on the White Dragon was parrying the lunges of twenty-four sword talons simultaneously. The next his arms shot out to the left and right and two black dragons lay dead in the flames.
And all at once the remaining four abandoned the fight, shooting up into the air like gigantic dark bats, and the Man on the White Dragon galloped out of the fire and into the circle where Hiccup, Gobber, and the Windwalker were crouching, and where Goliath lay dead.
“PERSON WITH THE ENORMOUS BELLY!” roared the Man, taking off his cloak. “Climb on the back of my dragon!”
“The boy must go first,” said Gobber the Belch.
“Can’t carry all of us!” bellowed the Man, above the roaring of the greedy flames, creeping nearer and nearer, “but the boy will be safe, you have my word for it!”
“Swear,” said Gobber.
“I swear,” said the Man.
He threw Hiccup his cloak.
“Wrap yourself up in that, boy, and your own dragon can carry you out of the fire.”
Slowly, Gobber stood up. Carefully, he removed his helmet from his head, and placed it very gently on the chest of the dead Goliath.
And only then did he climb on to the back of the White Dragon, which immediately leapt into the air.
“Wrap yourself tight!” the Man called down to Hiccup. “It’s fireproof!”
Hiccup was alone in the circle of fire, so close now about him that his sleeve caught on fire.
The flames surged forward to swallow up the last little piece of unburned land as Hiccup leaped onto the Windwalker’s back, pulling the cloak over his head, with both his sleeves burning.
The flames snuffed out instantly.
The cloak was as cold as the ocean and smelled comfortingly of fish.
It was like wrapping
yourself up in the sea itself, and Hiccup gasped with the delighted shock of it.
He tucked the cool ends firmly around every part of him, so that not a finger, not a toe, not a morsel of his body would be exposed to the fire. He threw his arms around the Windwalker’s shivering back.
“Run, Windwalker, run,” whispered Hiccup.
And as the whole of the mountain was consumed with the flames, the Windwalker ran.
5. WHO IS THE MAN ON THE WHITE DRAGON?
Stoick the Vast was Hiccup’s father, and the Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe. He was a man built on generous lines, with a belly like a battleship, and a beard like an electrocuted Afghan hound.
He had been having a peaceful after-lunch nap in the surprising warmth of the afternoon, when he was rudely awoken by a couple of his Warriors chattering on about a fire up on the Highest Point . . . and how the Pirate Training Program was up there herding reindeer.
Stoick immediately feared the worst. Stoick wasn’t normally of a fearful nature, but his father-in-law, Old Wrinkly, who was a soothsayer, had been warning Stoick for WEEKS that the omens were saying that Hiccup was in danger.
Stoick had laughed this off, for Stoick was not a great thinker or worrier, even though for a small, skinny boy who didn’t amount to much, Hiccup DID seem to get into an extraordinary number of dangerous situations.*
“CALL OUT THE FIRE BRIGADE!” bellowed Stoick, jumping out of bed and leaping for the door, dressed only in a rather fetching pair of hairy underpants that his wife Valhallarama had brought back for him from one of her Quests abroad.
When you live side by side with dragons you have to have an extremely efficient Fire Brigade System. Even though most dragons TRY not to fire-breathe unnecessarily, the hunting and riding dragons were always accidentally setting fire to the furniture or the thatch, and on these occasions the Fire Brigade could be on the scene in two minutes flat.
The Fire Brigade consisted of a whole fleet of Water Dragons, so called because their stomachs can distend to carry extraordinary amounts of water, ridden by Fire Warriors specifically trained in fighting fires. It took a little longer than two minutes on this occasion, for the Highest Point was some flying distance aw
ay from Hooligan Village, but within a relatively short space of time, the entire Brigade was there, the dragons swooping down into the seas below to scoop off huge amounts of water from the sea, and then shooting it out onto the blaze.
Their efforts were pretty hopeless, of course, because this wasn’t a tiny little matter of a hunting dragon setting fire to a bedspread, but an entire burning mountainside, and by the time Stoick arrived, half naked on the back of his riding dragon, the fire was flaming as strongly as ever.
Gloomily watching the blaze was a bedraggled line of pupils from the Pirate Training Program, blackened and unrecognizable through the smoke.
“Hiccup?” stammered Stoick, dismounting from his riding dragon, and wiping the smeariness from the face of the nearest boy in the pathetic hope that the soot-smothered young plug-ugly might be his son. “WHERE IS HICCUP? ”
Sadly, Wartihog shook his head and pointed a grubby arm at the mighty blaze in front of them.
“NO!” shouted Stoick, tearing his beard, staring at the blazing woods.
Out of the fire ran the Windwalker as fast as he could, and he came to a stop among the waiting Vikings.
Hasty hands scrabbled at the cloak, unwrapping it with such speed that Hiccup fell out on to the heather.
He found himself looking straight up into the anxious face of his father, Stoick the Vast, and the heads of several other Warriors.
Behind those heads was the bright blue sky, and farther back even than that was the flaming Highest Point, a great funeral pyre for Goliath and the reindeer.
But not for Hiccup — this time.
As Hiccup tumbled onto his back, his helmet fell off and a hot, cross Toothless flew out.
“Mean, mean Master!” scolded Toothless. “Hiccup VERY LUCKY nice, kind Toothless not do a pee-pee on his head!”
But then the little dragon forgot his anger immediately when he caught sight of the glorious burning bonfire. “OOOOOOhhhh, FIRE!” squealed Toothless in excitement, and he flapped off hurriedly to play in the flames.
“He’s alive!” bellowed Stoick the Vast in astonished delight.
“How are you alive?” was Stoick’s next, baffled question.
Hiccup pointed to something standing quietly some way beyond Stoick’s shoulder.
The Man on the White Dragon, with Gobber sitting behind him.
“He saved me,” said Hiccup.
Gobber clambered down from the White Dragon. He was totally black from eyebrows to toenails, apart from the small pink top of his bald helmetless head, which shone in the sunlight like a halo.
“I can explain, Chief,” stammered Gobber. “It was a perfectly harmless Herding-Reindeer-on-Dragonback lesson, nothing dangerous about it at all, and then we were attacked by these things . . . Goliath didn’t make it.”
“I am sorry, Gobber,” said Stoick the Vast solemnly. Goliath had been Gobber’s faithful riding dragon through many a terrible battle. “We shall take revenge on whatever did this, I assure you . . .”
“He saved us,” said Gobber, pointing at the Man.
“Who is that?” asked Stoick. “Who is that Man?”
“He can’t be a man,” pointed out Gobber. “Men don’t walk through fire . . . He must be a god.”
“I’m not a god,” said the Man on the White Dragon.
His voice was rather muffled by a black suit that covered him from head to toe, even his eyes and mouth, and Hiccup was wondering how he could see through it.
“I’m just a Hero — I mean an ordinary bloke, who happened to be passing,” continued the Man. “In fact I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’ve got something important to do now, so I must be off . . . Lovely to meet you and everything . . . you seem like nice little people, in your way.”
“You’re a Lava-Lout!” roared Stoick, staring at the Man.
All the watching Hooligans gasped in horror, and drew their swords immediately. Lava-Louts were one of the Hooligan Tribe’s deadliest enemies.
“I am not a Lava-Lout!” protested the Man indignantly. “Lava-Louts are gorillas in trousers! And that’s a bit of an insult to gorillas.”
“You are so a Lava-Lout!” exclaimed Stoick. “Only low-down, double-crossing, mean-as-sharks Lava-Louts wear that kind of suit!”
The Hooligans growled in agreement, and pressed forward, waving their swords and checking the sharpness of their axe edges, while crying out, “Kill him! Kill him! Lava-Lout Vermin!”
“I get to kill him first, Chief!” yelled Baggybum the Beerbelly. “I haven’t had a Lava-Lout in ages!”
“Get to the back of the queue, Baggybum, you villain!” roared Tuffnut Senior. “You’re always pushing in front of everybody else!”
“I . . . AM . . . NOT . . . A . . . LAVA-LOUT!” howled the Man as loud as he could through his muffly headgear. “Oh, for Thor’s sake, you do a good deed, and see where it gets you! In the soup, yet again, why do I never learn? Bother this Fire Suit . . . I’ll take it off and then you’ll see . . .”
The Man got down from his White Dragon, and with both hands he pulled up the head section of the suit he was wearing. It was stuck very tight, and made rather a revolting squelchy, burpy noise as he peeled it up.
“There you see!” said the Man triumphantly, as with a final rude B-E-L-C-H he detached the headgear from his face. “NOT a Lava-Lout!”
Stoick walked slowly around and around the Man.
The head that he had revealed was clearly not the head of a Lava-Lout.
It was the head of a blond, bearded, handsome man, no, make that a very handsome man, slightly past the prime of middle age and currently looking a little bit cross.
Stoick put his sword back in its scabbard.
“Not a Lava-Lout,” pronounced Stoick with relief.
“But if not a Lava-Lout, then who are you?”
The Man looked extremely surprised.
“What do you mean . . . WHO AM I?” said the Man. “I’m HUMUNGOUSLY HOTSHOT, of course . . .”
Humungously Hotshot was one of the greatest Viking Heroes of recent times, who had completed such great Quests as “the Slaying of the Rude Rippers” and “the Fetching of the Weird Stone.” He had completely disappeared without a trace fifteen years before, and everybody had rather assumed he was dead, which was an occupational hazard of being a great Viking Hero.
“No! Not Humungously Hotshot the Hero!” stammered Stoick the Vast in awe.
Suddenly, Stoick was rather aware of the fact that he was standing in front of one of the greatest Heroes of the Age, dressed only in a pair of hairy knickers and one rather ancient blue sock.
He sucked in his tummy, and tried to look his most dignified and Chiefly.
“But we all thought you were dead!”
“Yes, well,” said Humungous, frowning bitterly. “I was on this Hero Quest in Lava-Lout territories and got caught red-handed by those Snakes-in-Helmets, the Lava-Louts. They slung me into one of their Jail-Forges, and so I’ve spent the last fifteen years underground forging swords for them. Which is why I’m wearing one of their Lava-Lout Fire Suits. It’s made out of dragon skin, which means it’s totally fireproof.”
“They’re evilly clever, those Lava-Louts,” said Stoick the Vast, shaking his head. “How, by the great Hairy Thumbnails of Thor, did you ever escape?”
“Oh, I didn’t escape,” explained Humungous. “NOBODY escapes from the Lava-Louts. They evacuated the island. The Exterminators were hatching.”
“What ARE Extermi-whateveryousaid?” said Stoick. “I’ve never heard of them before.”
“Exterminators are the Creatures who’ve made this little mess here,” explained Humungous, waving a hand at the scene of scorched devastation and fiery chaos behind him. “They haven’t been seen around these parts for centuries because their Eggs can only be hatched by the gases and lava given off by an exploding volcano. The Volcano on Lava-Lout Island has been grumbling away for a while now, getting ready for a really Massive Explosion, and when it does, all the Exterminator Egg
s will hatch.”
“So you’re saying they were EXTERMINATORS that attacked us just now?” asked Hiccup.
“That’s right, I’d say about six small ones, baby Exterminators, you know, they were quite sweet really,” answered Humungous cheerily.
“And how many Exterminator Eggs are there left on Lava-Lout Island?” asked Hiccup.
“Oh . . . no more than about nine hundred thousand, I’d say,” Humungous said, nodding.
“All of this reminds me, I am in a bit of a hurry to get out of here. I’m so sorry to leave . . . you’ve all been so kind . . . and if I were you, I’d leave too, and pretty quickly. You don’t want to be around when they hatch.”
“What are you talking about?” bellowed Stoick. “LEAVE? There’s no question of leaving. This is our HOME. The Archipelago has been home to the Barbarians ever since Great Hairybottom, the First Barbarian of all, got off his ship and sank into the bog right up to his thigh . . . He lost his boot on that occasion . . . They never found it again . . . And that was when he said those immortal words —”
“‘There will be barbarians in the Archipelago for as long as my boot is in that bog.’” Hiccup finished up the story, for he had heard it before. “Yes, Father, I know, Father, but AT THE TIME Great Hairybottom didn’t have NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND Exterminator dragons about to fly down on the island and turn it into desert.”
“That’s not SO many,” roared Stoick the Vast. “And they’re only dragons, after all. We shall STAY, and we shall FIGHT! I shall bring it up at the meeting of The Thing* which is in a week’s time on Sun’sday Sunday, so that we can prepare to join together, and arm ourselves for the Battle to come.
“Oh how I wish your darling mother was with us now,” sighed Stoick.
Hiccup’s mother Valhallarama was a truly magnificent Warrior, but she was off Questing again.
“My little muscly sweetheart would CRUSH those Extermi-thingummys with one flick of her plaits,” said Stoick.
“WE WILL FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES!” he yelled. “WE WILL FIGHT THEM IN THE BRACKEN! WE WILL FIGHT THEM IN THOSE BOGGY MARSHY BITS THAT ARE SO DIFFICULT TO WALK THROUGH WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SHOES! WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”