"HA!" puffed Toothless furiously, practically disappearing he was making so much steam.
"Toothless's h-h-happy place! Happy place N-N-NOT here!" And to Hiccup's intense relief, Toothless's final indignant snort ended in a big breath of fire that engulfed the entire casket.
"Don't set fire to tie potato!" Hiccup reminded him.
"S-s-set fire to this! DON'T set fire to that!" complained Toothless. "Mister Hiccup just stop being such a B-BOSSY-BOOTS and give a dragon a chance!"
But he made his flame smaller, and directed it steadily at the ice around the potato, and slowly, surely, the ice began to melt.
Meanwhile, Camicazi climbed back up to the ceiling again, and wriggled along the beams until she was directly above Norbert's Papa.
She let herself down on another rope, so that she was hanging, like a little spider, about a meter above
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the casket, and then she wound the rope around her ankle and flipped upside down.
She waited until Toothless had finished melting the ice, and had flapped off back to the safe distance of Hiccup's shoulder.
Right in front of Norbert's Papa's frozen staring eyes, Camicazi reached into the casket and carefully, delicately, removed the potato with the arrow stuck in it from the bed of ice.
Hiccup held his breath. If the casket was booby-trapped, this would be the moment that something might happen ...
But there did not seem to be any booby traps.
Camicazi swung there, potato in one hand. Norbert's Papa wobbled for a second on his stand, but he was still grinning ferociously, his eyes staring straight ahead at nothing. (He was DEAD, after all.) The snores of the sleeping Hysterics rumbled peacefully through the quiet Hall.
Camicazi put the potato in her pocket.
"She's done it, she's done it, she's done it...," whispered Hiccup to himself.
Camicazi was about to turn herself the right way
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up again and climb the rope, but then she spotted something else in the casket.
"Uh oh ...," whispered Hiccup.
Camicazi couldn't resist. She reached in and picked the something else out of the casket...
For one second it seemed like it still might be all right again.
But it turned out that the frozen body of Norbert's Papa was very carefully balanced, and when this second weight was removed from the casket, it began to tip s-1-o-w-l-y backward, and then gathering speed, until the entire body crashed like a great tree trunk into the waving forest of Squealers down below.
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[Image: People.]
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screeched the Squealers.
The noise they made was simply earsplitting.
The glass of the frozen casket shattered into pieces, and the ice inside fell to the floor.
All over the room, the Hysterics sat bolt upright as if electrified, blearily opening their eyes and saying "Wossat? Wassgoing on?" to each other. Even with the scarf and Hiccup's hands over his ears, poor old Toothless nearly fainted from the loudness of the noise.
"Watch out, Camicazi!" yelled Hiccup. Norbert the Nutjob woke up, and threw his double-headed axe
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straight at Camicazi, dangling from her rope. Camicazi saw the axe coming, and let herself drop.
The axe missed, and Camicazi landed on the floor, or, more precisely, on the gigantic wobbly stomach of a Hysteric who was so dead to the world he didn't even wake up.
Norbert the Nutjob ran to drag his frozen father out of the mass of shrieking Squealers. Stiff and ice-cold as he was, they still tried to eat him, blunting their teeth on his hard frozen legs, slashing their horrible long nails on his solid-frozen mustaches. Once he had pulled his Papa to safety, the Squealers stopped screaming as abruptly as they had begun. Norbert the Nutjob drew his sword and strode toward Camicazi, with a murderous expression on his face ...
"GET OUT OF HERE!" screamed Camicazi. "I'll be all right; don't worry about me!"
Hiccup was standing right in the middle of the table. About twenty large Warriors were already advancing toward him, swords, axes, and daggers drawn. The odds were not on Hiccup's side ... and Hiccup was completely and entirely unarmed.
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He had no bow and arrow, no dagger. He did not even have his sword, for Norbert the Nutjob had taken it from him earlier, if you remember. (Which was a shame, because Hiccup was good at sword-fighting.)
[Image: Men.]
So, in absence of his sword, Hiccup picked up two large, sloppy, creamy pumpkin pies, and crashed them like cymbals on either side of another Warrior's face. The Hysteric fell backward, a sticky, dripping,
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pumpkin mess, and promptly sat down on the smaller Warrior behind him.
Meanwhile, dodging Hysteric sword-thrusts, Hiccup grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a gigantic half-eaten TURKEY carcass, and shoved it over the head of the closest Warrior. The Hysteric's arms were pinned by his sides; muffled shouting noises came from within the turkey; and he staggered off, like a grotesquely large dead chicken with human legs.
Hiccup was getting into the swing of things. He tipped an entire bowl of maple syrup on the floor, sending the Hysterics slipping and sliding all over the place. He winded another Warrior with a watermelon.
He pelted them all with onions. Now that the Squealers had stopped squealing, Toothless flew down from the roof to join in the battle. He found a bowl of chestnuts, sucked up a whole mouthful so that his cheeks were bulging like a hamster, and zoomed over the heads of the Warriors, spitting out fire and red-hot roasted chestnuts like a barrage of flaming bullets.
Chaos reigned in the Great Hall. Vegetables flew in all directions.. Hysterics who had been woken by a
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fat overripe tomato splattered in their faces assumed that this was all just a merry midnight food fight, and enthusiastically attacked their fellow Hysterics.
"Hurry up, Camicazi!" screamed Hiccup, slapping another opponent around the cheek with a large flat flounder, and running up the other end of the table.
Camicazi had problems of her own. She was defending herself against Norbert the Nutjob, who was livid with rage and lashing out at her with his sword.
Norbert the Nutjob had had a trying couple of days. His bottom was still throbbing from the arrow wound, Hiccup had made a fool out of him in the Ordeal-by-Axe, somebody appeared to have bitten off his beloved mustaches, and the Hooligans were even now stealing his Papa's American Vegetable.
And they hadn't even had the decency to send some proper adult Assassins! This third Assassin was even smaller than the first two. To add insult to injury, he, Norbert the Nutjob, noble Chief of the Hysteric Tribe, and Master Swordsman, was finding it difficult to defeat this tiny little blond Assassin in one-to-one combat. She just wouldn't stay still.
She met every lunge he made, carelessly singing
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the Bog-Burglar national anthem as she did so. She performed cartwheels between moves. She even picked up a piece of wild boar sandwich off the floor and started to eat it, while still fighting. She talked CONSTANTLY.
[Image: A man.]
"I hope you don't
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mind me eating on the job," she said chattily, easily deflecting his Grim beard's Grapple sword-thrust, and throwing in a Piercing Point of her own. "I know it's rather rude to fight with my mouth full, but I'm absolutely STARVING, haven't eaten a thing all evening ..."
Norbert the Nutjob gave a grim smile and sprang forward with a particularly violent sword-thrust.
She dodged it, leapt up, swung on his beard while she wiped her sticky fingers on his shirt-front, and sprang back down again.
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"I'm going to KILL you ..." panted Norbert the Nutjob, his eyes watering with the pain of having his beard pulled. "First with my sword, and then with my axe, and then I'm going to feed you to the Squealers."
"You clever, clever boy!" sang Camicazi, de
lightedly spotting her rope dangling just behind his head. "But you'll have to CATCH me first, you know..."
And with that, she somersaulted right between his legs, came up the other side, and squirmed up her rope with astonishing speed, pulling the end of it up behind her.
Norbert the Nutjob looked down at his legs for a dazed moment, and then through them, and then he swung around to find that Camicazi had apparently vanished into thin air.
He whirled around again. She wasn't there either. How completely extraordinary...
Camicazi, swinging centimeters above Norbert the Nutjob's head, removed his crown so gently, so softly, with her pickpocketing, burglaring fingers, that he never felt a thing.
She then bashed him on the head as hard as she could with the frozen potato.
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Norbert staggered a bit, swayed this way and that, and then fell to the floor, unconscious. As he lay prone, Camicazi dropped back down to the ground again and patted him reassuringly on the shoulders.
"Practice, Norbert, that's what you need," she said condescendingly. "You're never too old to learn."
"CAMICAZI!!!!!" shrieked Hiccup from the banqueting table, knocking out a Hysteric with a leg of roasted buffalo, shoving a carrot up the nose of another, and spraying three more with Homemade Nettle Champagne. "GET OVER HERE!" Camicazi swung across and landed on the table beside him.
Most of the table was now in flames, and the fire had spread to ALL the polar bear rugs.
Most ominous of all, the Squealers were actually MOVING to get out of the Hall. Squealers are so lazy that they only move when they are in mortal danger. They wriggled toward the door like disgusting fat, bloated slugs, their nails waving frantically, leaving a trail of snotty slime.
The rope that snaked up to the chimney in the ceiling, the other end of which was attached to One Eye's great leg, dangled between Camicazi and Hiccup.
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They both grabbed hold of it, coughing from the smoke, and tugged three times.
Just the second before One Eye dragged them up and out of danger, Hiccup leaned down and picked up a metal food tray from the table.
And then they were up and away, the Hysteric swords just brushing their heels as they rose swiftly to the ceiling and out through the hole in the roof.
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14. THE POTATO-BURGLARS' RUN
They appeared, blinking like moles, into the daylight, for night had turned into morning while they were in the Hysterical Great Hall; the sky was no longer black but the blue-grey of a seagull's back, and the sun was coming up fast from behind the Mazy Multitudes.
Down below they could hear the roar of the Hysterics, the loudest of all being Norbert the Nutjob shouting, "MY VEGETABLE! THEY'VE GOT MY VEGETABLE!"
The Hysterics were already stampeding toward the door, in pursuit.
Hiccup knew they hadn't a hope of getting away on foot, and they didn't have time to find their skis again.
In such situations, being tough is not necessarily the way to stay alive, because however tough you are, if there are five hundred Hysterics on skis and only FOUR of you, you are not going to win the battle.
What you need in THIS kind of situation is a
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Clever Idea, and luckily Hiccup was good at Clever Ideas.
Hiccup put the food tray down on the roof and sat on it.
"Come on, Camicazi, you sit behind me," ordered Hiccup.
"Oh, goody," said Camicazi, her eyes lighting up.
The roof of the Great Hall hung slightly over the village walls. From there a steep slope ran all the way down to the harbor.
[Image: A dragon.]
So when the Hysterics poured out of the doors of the Great Hall in a shouting, angry river they had an excellent view of Camicazi and Hiccup tobogganing
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down the roof and sailing over the walls of the village on board one of their silver food trays.
"AAAAIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!" screamed Hiccup and Camicazi as they soared through the air.
By some miracle they landed the right way up on the slope below.
And then the lightning descent began.
Take it from me, there is nothing on earth that moves faster than two children going down a practically vertical slope on a highly polished silver food tray.
[Image: A man and a woman.]
Hiccup had sledded before, but never on a hill so steep that it was practically a cliff. And in fact the exact
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descent that they made has now become an annual competition on Hysteria. It is known as the Potato-Burglars' Run, and it follows the same route that Hiccup and Camicazi took, starting, as they did, on top of the roof of the Great Hall, and ending, less than two minutes later, in Hysteria Harbor.
The Potato-Burglars' Run is the most dangerous toboggan run in the Inner Isles, and for those brave enough to try it, accidents are common.
Hiccup and Camicazi were lucky not to break their necks. They screamed down that hillside, wildly out of control, yelling at the tops of their voices.
One Eye and Toothless couldn't possibly keep up with them, for it was like trying to catch a speeding arrow.
When they hit the ice of the harbor two bottom-bruising, hair-raising, eye-popping minutes later, they were going so fast that they wildly overshot the sleigh they had left there, and The Hopeful Puffin patiently waiting for their return.
They scrambled off the food tray and raced toward the sleigh. One Eye came soaring down, and they hurriedly hitched him up and set him going at a brisk trot toward the Harbor Exit.
"Oh my goodness," panted Camicazi, looking
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back up at the Hysterical Village, where the Great Hall was now a gigantic bonfire. "Those Hysterics are going to be SO CROSS."
"My congratulations," growled One Eye to Hiccup, as he pulled them rapidly forward. "You are the first Human I have ever met who uses his brain and not just his museles."
"If he really use his b -b-brain," complained Toothless, catching up and collapsing, exhausted, on the seat of the sleigh, "we not h ere 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 traveled for a while, and then came to a halt. Hiccup and Camicazi were nearly at the Harbor 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 Harbor.
"We made it!" she yelled.
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"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.
"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 forever, 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 th
ey 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 mustaches, 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.
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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.
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 Saber-Tooth's reins to wheel his sleigh around 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 center of its terrible green eye, as if it were a target.
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And a target it was, for Norbert the Nutjob. Norbert leaped into their sleigh, tall and terrible and COMPLETELY CRAZY.
How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse (The Heroic Misadventures of Hiccup the Viking) Page 8