be a Chief again? And then he’d never have to tell
Valhallarama about this whole unfortunate episode.
She didn’t come home much after all. He could just
hide the Slavemark under his helmet, like Hiccup used
to do, and she’d never know anything about it…
Stoick closed his eyes and enjoyed this happy,
unrealistic little fantasy, for one blissful moment. And
then he opened his eyes again, and he was still there,
on those blasted red sands, with the wind trying to
blow him out of existence.
He looked up at the sun. ‘It’s a lovely bright
day… Good visibility! OK, perhaps we should split
into smaller groups. We’ll cover twice as much territory
that way. I’ll be hunting with Eggingarde and… er…
McBelly here,’ announced Stoick, to Hiccup’s surprise.
‘Let’s see if we can beat that streak of bad luck you’ve
been having, eh, Eggingarde?’
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Stoick gave Eggingarde a tired, encouraging
smile.
Eggingarde pulled the hood of her bearsuit down
so low she was a bit muffled. ‘I’m not scared,’ growled
Eggingarde. ‘That old Monster better be scared of me
though, because us Wanderers are scary.
‘Roarrr!’ roared Eggingarde, making her fingers
into claws.
Everybody pretended to be scared. ‘Woah!’
said Gobber, feigning falling over. ‘Careful there
Eggingarde, you nearly gave me a heart attack.’
What you could see of Eggingarde under the
bearhood looked pleased.
‘Has everybody got their whistles?’
Everybody nodded their heads. Around each neck
was a whistle made out of an elk horn. ‘You blow that
as soon as you are in any kind of danger, and we’ll all
come and help you. Keep your eyes out for You-Know-
What at all times and I’d say, we have, ooh,’ Stoick
squinted up at the sun, ‘four hours before the tide
comes in.
‘Now, remember, if anyone finds the Jewel, other
members of the team must stay together to protect the
winner. And keep working closely in pairs so that if
anything happens to your partner you can call for help.
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If we find the Jewel, our prize will be the greatest prize
of all, freedom itself!’
‘Freedom!’ cried the Company of Amber-
Hunters lifting their nets on their long poles. ‘We hunt
for freedom!’
‘Hang on a second,’ spluttered Snotlout, as they
all made ready their yachts. ‘Aren’t you even going
to leave somebody with me? We all know there’s
something out here.’ Snotlout’s eyes flicked nervously
over those endless scarlet sands. ‘Something that
takes the slaves… and MY life is too important to the
Wilderwest to lose.’
‘Oh you don’t need somebody with you, Chief
Snotlout,’ grinned Gobber. ‘You’re far too tough.
Nothing is going to want to eat YOU. You’re too
chewy.’
‘I order you to stay here!’ roared Snotlout, red in
the face. ‘I order you! Or I’ll… I’ll…’
‘Or you’ll what?’ Gobber raised an eyebrow.
In answer, Snotlout turned his yacht around and
sailed back as fast as he could in the direction of the
prison. ‘Or I’ll report you for mutiny and treason!’
The older Warriors on the sands threw
back their heads and laughed. Gobber let
Snotlout get a little ahead. And then in
a few leisurely strokes of his yacht he
caught up with the furious, enraged
Chief Snotlout of the Hooligan
Tribe, sledging for all his worth
out there in the middle of
nowhere.
Gobber reached
out a bear-like paw
and flipped the
yacht over, like he
was flipping over a
sea turtle.
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DOWN tumbled Snotlout, somersaulting
over and over. His yacht smashed, and he
somersaulted over the top of it and
got a mouth full of red sand.
‘How dare
you! You’ve broken my
yacht!’ spluttered Snotlout, spitting
out sludgy red sand, and bits of little eels.
YUCKY.
‘I have broken your yacht,’ said Gobber calmly. ‘And
now I’m going to break it some more.’ With one big
galumphing soldier step, he put his foot right through
the bottom of it. SMASH.
Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh! All the other yachts
came swooshing up and halted in a grinning ring
around Snotlout, deliberately showering him in arcs
of sand.
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‘Father!’ said Snotlout desperately. ‘Are you
going to let them do this to me?’
‘Am I your father?’ said Baggybum grimly.
Snotlout winced. ‘I thought I was just Baggy, an old
slave… Not really Chief material, I think you said…’
‘I,’ said Gobber the Belch, standing over the
fallen Snotlout, with his hands on his hips, ‘was once
your teacher. And you, difficult as I find it now to
believe, were once my star pupil.’ Snotlout flinched.
‘Talking of mutiny and treason, you yourself have
betrayed most of the people standing here now on this
sand. People who relied on you as their protector and
leader. And so I am now about to become your teacher
again. I hope you are not too old to teach. For I am
going to teach you a lesson about being a Chief.’
Snotlout swallowed. He didn’t think he was
going to like this lesson.
‘We are out here in the middle of nowhere,’ said
Gobber. ‘Your yacht is broken. It is too far to walk
back on foot. (That is why they gave us yachts in the
first place.) You will be overtaken by the tide before
you reach the prison.
‘Your only hope,’ said Gobber, ‘is that one of
us will save you by giving you a lift back on one of
our yachts.’
The dreadful nature of his present
situation began to dawn on Snotlout.
‘We are about to leave you here alone,’
said Gobber calmly. ‘So you will have plenty of
time to think. And what you should think about
is this: what have I done as a Chief that will make
someone here want to come back and save me?’
Silence. Absolute silence.
Snotlout looked up at a ring of cold,
hard faces.
‘Because,’ said Gobber conversationally, ‘it
will have to be something good. That person will
really have to want to save you. Your extra weight
will slow down their yacht.
‘Goodbye, Snotlout,’ said Gobber. ‘Think
about it.’
All the yachts shot away.
Leaving Snotlout alone,
with his sword drawn,
lying in the sand in
the wreck of his
broken yacht.
Thinking.
9. THE EVIL REACHES
So Hiccup and Stoick and Eggingarde set off to the
east, and w
ithin a surprisingly short time they were
on their own, the other members of the Amber-
Hunters Team merely specks on the distant horizon.
Oooh dear…
Already this was really spooky.
No birds called over those sands. Not one. Why
was that?
It must be because they sensed the danger that
was below.
It was a horrible feeling, racing over those
sands, because any minute Hiccup felt that
something might reach out of them unexpectedly,
and grab him by the ankle, like in Eggingarde’s story.
Eggingarde didn’t help his nerves either,
because every time there was a perfectly harmless
sucking noise, which was probably the draining of
the tide or the ‘glopping’ of a scallop, she would roar
at it, ‘ROAR!’, with a loudness and a suddenness that
made you practically fall off your sand-yacht.
(It probably rather alarmed the scallop too.)
The hood of her bearsuit was so low down over
her face that she couldn’t see where she was going.
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Hiccup would be sledging along and he’d suddenly
realise Eggingarde had sailed off in the other
direction so he’d have to go and collect her and put
her back on course.
Eventually Stoick slowed down and started
looking for amber.
Hiccup leaned out and scooped up something
glinting in the sand, and then brought the net up to
examine what it was. No, not amber at all, just a big
old bit of crab shell. He threw it over his shoulder.
He sighed, looked warily around him at those
bubbling sands to check there was nothing horrible
rising out of them and moved forward. Half an hour
passed, and he had found only three pieces of amber,
all quite small, and none of them the Dragon Jewel.
He was suddenly bowed down by the hopeless
ambition of what he was supposed to be doing. ‘How
am I, in this whole vast wilderness of sand, supposed
to find one single Jewel?’ whispered Hiccup.
‘Your heart must be in your Quest,’ said the
Wodensfang, which was all very wise and supportive,
but was actually also, to be honest, a little vague and
not particularly helpful.
Hiccup sighed and carried on hunting.
It was quite an odd situation, to be out there on
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the endless wilderness of the red sands with a father
who doesn’t realise you are his son.
‘Go on, Hiccup,’ whispered the Wodensfang
encouragingly from inside Hiccup’s waistcoat. ‘Talk
to your father. Tell him who you are, and why
you are here. Tell him about your Quest…’
‘It isn’t so easy,’ Hiccup whispered back.
He tried to push out of his mind the memory of
Baggybum saying to Snotlout, ‘I am ashamed to be
your father.’
Stoick wouldn’t say that would he?
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Perhaps he would, thought Hiccup. He felt
slightly sick.
First I’ll just try and get a sense of what he’s
thinking, Hiccup decided. I’ll just check that he’s not
too angry with me…
Eggingarde was off at a little distance, roaring at
scallops and picking up the amber with a pole nearly
twice as long as she was. But Stoick was examining
some amber a couple of feet away. Hiccup walked
up behindhim and said, as casually as he could, as
if he were just interested in an off-hand sort of way,
‘So, Chief Stoick, are you really the father of Hiccup
Horrendous Haddock the Third, the boy the witch is
searching the Wilderwest for? ’
Stoick threw a piece of amber over his shoulder.
He sailed on, checked the sands all around him to see
that there was nothing alarming rising out of them,
and Hiccup followed him.
‘Why do you young people ask all these
questions?’ grumbled Stoick the Vast, putting out
his net and scooping up amber, examining it, and
throwing it over his shoulder again.
‘OK!’ gulped Hiccup, his voice sliding up from a
gruff to a squeak, because it had been behaving in that
uncontrolled manner quite a lot recently. ‘I’ve changed
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my mind! You don’t
need to answer
my question!’
But Stoick
seemed to need to
get something off his
chest.
‘When I was young
I never asked questions,’
boomed Stoick. ‘I just did
what I was told, I followed
the traditions, I stuck to the
Barbaric Code. I walked in the
path of my own father, and my
father’s father, and my father’s
father’s father.’
For five minutes he worked
in silence, seeking the amber,
grimly.
‘I tried to bring up my son by the
same Code,’ said Stoick. ‘Even though
he was so different, and he always asked
so many questions.’ Stoick sighed and
shook his head. ‘But it is not always easy
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being a parent. You do your best, of course…’
I know what he means, thought Hiccup, thinking
of how hard it was training Toothless.
‘So when my son asked the question, “Father,
if you were King, would you free the dragons?” I told
him the right answer. The only answer. The answer
a King should give. Free the dragons? Nonsense! It
strikes at our very livelihood, the world that we grew
up in!’
Stoick shook his head, incredulously.
‘But what does my son Hiccup do? He rejects
my answer, beats his father in a swordfight! And
goes over his father’s head and asks for
freedom for the dragons on his own!’
Stoick was waving his arms around furiously,
walking so fast, that Hiccup found it hard to keep up.
‘And see what happens! The Archipelago is in
flames around us! My honour, my reputation is gone,
the ships I sailed in turned to ashes, my Chiefdom
lost. All our villages burnt, the Dragon Furious
rampant, the old order broken, the world at war.
‘And all, all,’ said Stoick firmly, coming to a stop,
and looking deeply into Hiccup’s eyes. ‘All… because
of my son Hiccup and his questions.’
Silence.
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‘Can you blame me for being angry with my son?’
Hiccup did not say anything. He just walked
forward miserably.
‘Is it going well?’ whispered the Wodensfang
hopefully, because he couldn’t quite hear through the
wind and the waistcoat.
No. It wasn’t going well.
His father blamed him for everything… His
father would never forgive him… He was ashamed that
Hiccup was his son…
‘And yet…’ said Stoick, looking into the distance.
And yet.
The pause that followed was very, very long.
‘If you were to ask me now, the question,
if I w
ere King, would I free the dragons, I might
answer you quite differently,’ said Stoick at last.
‘The experience of being a slave myself has strangely
changed my mind.’
Stoick began to walk on, slowly. ‘And now I ask
myself… Was my son Hiccup actually brave to ask this
question? Was he right to ask this question? Was it,
even, a question worth losing a world for?
‘So the answer to your question, McJelly, is yes,
I am the father of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the
Third. I am hoping against hope that somewhere out
there he is safe and well. And I am proud to be his
father,’ said Stoick the Vast. ‘Even though I do not
always agree with his questions, and I do not yet know
whether they were worth the loss of the world I loved.’
It was the longest speech Stoick had ever made
to Hiccup, and he did not even know that he was
speaking to his son.
For the first time in six months, Hiccup’s heart
was lifting with a tiny glimmer of hope.
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Is my father saying he might be able to forgive me? Is he
even saying that he thought maybe I did the right thing?
How typical somehow, that Hiccup happened
to be wearing an eye patch, an aromatic smell, and a
large fake wart on the end of his nose for this most
emotional moment.
Hiccup was about to say something… about
to take off the eye patch, and the wart… about to
say who he was… when two things happened that
interrupted him from doing it.
PPPAAAARRPPPPPPP! came the very distant
sound of a bugle.
‘ROAR!’ roared Eggingarde in surprise.
Up beyond the horizon where the Prison
Darkheart was, one of those exploding Things rocketed
into the air to tell them it was time to return before the
tide came in.
At the same time, the sand crumbled below
Hiccup’s stationary sand-yacht, and the yacht tipped
into an indentation in the sand.
Hiccup looked down, saw what it was, gave a
start of horror, and said, ‘Fa— I mean, Stoick the
Vast! I think we should be making our way back to
Darkheart, don’t you?’
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel Page 8