How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel

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How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel Page 15

by Cressida Cowell

little fist still clutched trustingly around the lobster

  necklace.

  ‘It was a summer’s day. But even summer’s

  days in the Archipelago can be changeable, and as

  we came out of the shelter of the bay, out of nowhere

  it seemed, the treacherous Archipelago wind blew in

  a southern storm and a thick smoky sea-mist so dense

  it was like a white blindfold. In a couple of flaps of

  our wings, we had lost sight of the baby…

  ‘We lost sight of everything...

  ‘Even OUR dragon eyes cannot see through

  mist. They cannot hear a sleeping baby.’

  Both Patience and Arrogance groaned at

  the memory.

  ‘We panicked – the baby! The baby! We

  screeched in alarm, trying to wake the baby up so at

  least we could hear him crying. But the baby did not

  wake up. We flew desperately from left to right, but

  it was no use, we did not know west from east or east

  from west. For an hour we flapped, so disorientated,

  so panicked and terrified, that we plunged from time

  to time into the ice cold sea… And when the mist

  rose, when the mist rose…

  ‘… the baby was gone.’

  There was an awful silence.

  ‘We looked for the baby for the next two

  weeks,’ whispered Innocence. ‘We searched every

  cove, every possible beach where the wind might

  have carried him to safety. And then, one dreadful

  day, we found the blue and white blanket floating in

  a bay far, far to the east. We took it as a sign that

  poor Termagant’s baby had gone to the bottom of the

  sea, like his father before him.’

  ‘What happened to the mother?’ asked Hiccup.

  The three heads sighed a sigh of infinite sadness.

  ‘We crept back to see her. We did not want to go.

  Just one sight of us, and she would have known the

  terrible news. But she had not made it through her

  illness. She had already died. But at least she died

  believing that her baby was safe with us on Hero’s

  End, and that would have made her happy.’

  ‘Termagant died?’

  ‘Our grief was so terrible,’ said Arrogance.

  ‘It was as if the sun had gone away.’

  ‘So what happened to you after that?’ asked

  Hiccup.

  ‘We could not go back to Hero’s End,’

  said Patience. ‘We felt so guilty. She trusted us

  absolutely, and we had broken our promise. We flew

  up into the Murderous Mountains where we had

  spent our childhood, and we tried to forget her. We

  tried to forget everything and live our life as a wild

  dragon again. Fourteen years is a long time… We

  began to forget, and then we heard the call of the

  Red-Rage and joined the Dragon Rebellion. THAT

  helped the forgetting all right. It was only when we

  saw the lobster necklace again, around your neck,

  that we remembered…’

  22. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  There was a pause on the red sands as the dragons

  finished telling their tale.

  ‘Well, I will tell you,’ said Hiccup, ‘what

  happened to the baby after you lost sight of him. He

  was washed up on Long Beach, and the Tribe built

  a hut for him to live in. A Long-Eared Caretaker

  Dragon looked after him, and he turned out to be my

  best friend, Fishlegs.’

  ‘You see?’ said Innocence. ‘I always said how he

  must have survived, and you two never believed me.’

  The three heads sighed.

  ‘I have to say,’ admitted Arrogance, ‘I never

  dreamed that there could have been a happy end to

  that story.’

  ‘There’s always hope,’ said Innocence.

  The Deadly Shadow’s three heads were lying on

  the sand, looking back into the past.

  And then, quite suddenly, Hiccup thought that

  the sand below his knees was feeling just a little wetter

  than it had before. He looked at the horizon. The tide

  was coming in…

  Patience put down his head and nudged

  Hiccup’s head upwards so that he looked at him. He

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  put one paw on one side of Hiccup’s head and looked

  straight into Hiccup’s eyes. They were so close, that

  you could just see the vague outline of the irises, the

  black of the pupils. Kind eyes.

  ‘I think perhaps, you should leave us now,’

  Patience said casually. ‘The Monster is coming, and

  the tide will come in, and so this is your last chance

  to go back on the sand-yacht. The Monster will not

  eat dragon-flesh. We are too tough for it.’

  How strange dragons are, thought Hiccup. This one

  can move from cruelty to selfless kindness in a heartbeat.

  ‘Leave us,’ said Patience.

  ‘Leave usss,’ repeated Innocence and Arrogance.

  ‘We won’t drown,’ Patience assured him. ‘We

  have gills.’

  Hiccup dropped his head from the mesmerising,

  hypnotising gaze and carried on working at the

  dragon-trap. ‘You lie. You’re not a Sea Dragon,’

  said Hiccup shortly. Trust Hiccup to know his dragon

  species. ‘You’re an Air Dragon. Those gills only work

  up to a certain point.’

  But after a minute he called out to Camicazi,

  who was patrolling around them with her fiercest

  Bog-Burglar expression, two swords drawn.

  ‘Camicazi,’ he said as casually as he could,

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  ‘maybe you ought to go back on that sand-yacht and

  fetch help.’

  ‘What kind of an idiot do you take me for?’

  Camicazi yelled back, extremely affronted. ‘I’m not a

  five-year-old! And I’m not leaving until you’re leaving.’

  Hiccup worked on, shivering now, in the cold

  wind, fingers numb, his dragon-suit pathetically stained

  with red.

  On, on, Hiccup worked.

  Ten minutes had passed. The sand was definitely

  wetter now, the sea on the horizon was gleamingly

  near.

  Fifteen minutes gone…

  But he was so close now, he could feel it, so

  close…

  And oh joy!

  The pieces of the locks fell apart in his hands, and

  the trap sprang open.

  It is such a wonderful moment when that

  happens.

  ‘Just in time,’ Hiccup gasped.

  The Deadly Shadow let out three roars of

  triumph, beat his mighty wings and launched into the

  air and hovered there.

  He reached out to pick up Hiccup off the sand.

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  Hiccup reached out his own hands towards the

  now airborne dragon, and he felt a horrible clammy

  something grab him with dreadful force around the

  ankle…

  ‘Hiccup!!!!!’ screamed Camicazi…

  … as a gigantic dragon claw, with huge eyes

  on the end of it, dragged Hiccup down,

  down, down, below the sand.

  23. SOME DRAGONS REALLY

  ARE MONSTERS

  If you or I had felt a claw creep around our ankles in

  such a situation, we would have screamed.

  But Hiccup had been in
so many terrifying and

  dangerous adventures in his short life that he did not

  scream, for he knew he did not have time. He took a

  great breath of air instead, and held his nose, as the

  unknown creature dragged him downwards through

  the sand.

  DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!

  Just as Hiccup thought he was going to pass

  out, the creature pulling him below seemed to break

  through some sort of wall, and Hiccup landed with a

  bone-crunching jolt on something hard and his hand

  flew off his nose and he took a great involuntary

  breath…

  … not of sand, but of air – rancid, stuffy dank

  air that caught in the throat like slug breath. And he

  coughed and gasped, sand pouring out of his ears

  and from his hair.

  As he tried to open his eyes, gritty with grains of

  sand, he could see blurrily through streaming tears,

  sand still pouring down from a hole.

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  But the Monster with the eye-claws was shooting

  flames upward in continuous bursts of hot, then

  freezing, flame. This turned the sand pouring through

  into something that looked like glass, sealing the hole.

  They seemed to be in some sort of cavern,

  and the Monster moved its head this way and that,

  reinforcing the glass walls of the tunnel.

  The flames stopped.

  Hiccup could hear the Wodensfang’s little

  quavery voice in his head, ‘Now, now, Hiccup, dragons

  are not Monsters you know…’

  But the thing is, just as some humans can be evil,

  some dragons really are Monsters.

  You should never judge a book by its cover,

  but on this occasion, Hiccup felt he was on fairly

  safe ground. This Monster’s primitive and ghastly

  appearance told him there would be no point reasoning

  with it (however optimistic the Wodensfang might be

  about the possibility of dragons evolving consciences

  and complicated things like that).

  This Monster couldn’t evolve a conscience in

  the next thirty seconds, and it was unlikely to be a

  sympathetic audience.

  There is such a huge variety of dragon species,

  you see.

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  Some dragons, Sea Dragons like the Wodensfang,

  have copied humans to such a large extent that they

  can use language fluently. They are able to reason, to

  think.

  Others that Hiccup had come across like

  Darkbreathers, and Monstrous Strangulators, are

  not capable of complicated thinking processes.

  These are dragons that have spent most of their lives

  underground or in the depths of the ocean. All that

  time alone in the dark does not help the development

  of an appreciation for the finer things in life.

  Six months of living on his wits had sharpened

  Hiccup’s ability to weigh up deadly situations like this

  in an instant.

  He couldn’t reason with this dragon. So he would

  have to fight it. He thought fast – very fast – as he

  scanned his enemy.

  Fifteen feet of well-armed muscled dragon.

  Ten eyes. Huge claws. An interesting snakey aspect

  that suggested it might be related to a Slitherfang,

  which also lived under the sand.

  Quickly glancing the other way, he assessed his

  chances of escape.

  The cavern was bare with only one immediate

  escape route.

  And judging from the bulging leg muscles, the

  Monster would reach it first.

  This was a tricky situation.

  His only chance was to hope that this creature

  really was a primitive relation of a Slitherfang, and to

  use his knowledge of Slitherfangs to fight it.

  Racking his brain, Hiccup tried to remember

  everything he could about Slitherfangs. What did he

  know?

  What had he written about them in his notebooks?

  The Monster had a small weak spot right in the

  middle of its forehead. There was only one way he

  could reach that small vulnerable spot, given that

  the Monster was so heavily armed with talons and

  teeth.

  If he could get the creature to believe that he was

  dead, it would want to swallow him immediately.

  He would then have to allow the creature to

  swallow him whole and look for the opportunity to

  attack the creature’s only vulnerable spot.

  He’d have to be patient. He’d have to let the

  Monster swallow him at least up to the knees, so that

  it would be harder for it to react when Hiccup reached

  down and plunged his sword into the weak spot.

  Thank Thor he had a sword on him, or rather,

  thank Camicazi. If she hadn’t stowed away in his sand-

  yacht and given him her spare sword, he wouldn’t even

  be able to carry out this totally desperate and ridiculous

  plan.

  The success of Hiccup’s plan depended on one

  crucial point. The creature would have to swallow him

  from the right end, that is, starting with his feet. There

  wasn’t a lot he could do if it started swallowing his

  head.

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  This was a fifty-fifty chance, which isn’t normally

  a good proposition when your life depends on it, but

  sometimes you just have to give yourself up to the

  fickle hand of Fate, the toss of a coin.

  It wasn’t very hard for Hiccup to pretend to be

  dead, frankly, for he very nearly WAS dead.

  He made himself go limp, even though every

  nerve in his body was screaming at him to run away.

  He forced his body to go limper and limper, and his

  head to loll backwards.

  He kept his eyes open, just the tiniest, smidgiest

  of cracks so that he could see what was going on.

  He forced himself to lie still as he felt something

  yucky slide up over his body. It took all of his powers

  of concentration to stop himself from moving, from

  jumping up, from shaking off the sand that was gritting

  all over his body and that disgusting dragon hand that

  he could see through the cracks of his eyelids.

  He had to stop himself from crying out in horror

  at the sight of the two monstrous claws – five fingers,

  each with an evil dragon eye perched on the end just

  above the talons. The dragon’s face was blind, with

  two ghostly hollows where its eyes should have been.

  But the ten dragon eyes were blinking down at him

  from the end of the creature’s claws.

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  BLINK BLINK.

  They were shark’s eyes, dead.

  The creature felt its way along Hiccup’s body.

  Its long tail had wrapped its way round Hiccup’s torso

  and was squeezing the life out of him.

  Maybe I AM dead, after all, he thought semi-

  dreamily, and it was almost as if his spirit left his body

  for a moment to look down on his own unconscious

  body as it lay strangled by the horrible Monster in the

  glass maze, squeezing, squeezing.

  All twenty eyes stopped at Hiccup’s chest area.

  You have to remember, that w
hen Hiccup

  had prostrated himself on the sand earlier on, he

  had soaked himself in the broken bottle of Old

  Wrinkly’s Asthma Potion, and that

  potion was a deep

  crimson red colour, exactly the colour of human blood.

  So he really looked a very limp and gory sight

  indeed, covered from top to toe, but particularly on his

  front, in lashings and lashings of bright red blood. The

  Monster gently wiped the sand off him, and even the

  Monster knew that humans could not lose this much

  blood and live.

  ‘He’s dead…’ mused the Monster to itself,

  very disappointed. ‘He won’t squeak for me,

  however hard I squeeze. And dead men start to

  smell…’

  Like many underground creatures, Slitherfangs

  like to keep a tidy burrow, and dead things do indeed

  smell, a smell that is magnified if one is buried

  suffocatingly some way underground.

  ‘I’ll have to EAT it right now and here,’ the

  Monster decided.

  So the first part of Hiccup’s plan was a success,

  at least.

  Although it might seem to be a strange sort of

  success.

  The Monster thought he was dead, and had

  decided to eat him.

  The Monster, who was a picky eater, blasted

  Hiccup with sea-water to get off all the sand (‘Too

  gritty’), rolling him over and over. And then the

  Monster began to coat him with some revolting

  greasy substance to make him go down the easier.

  Aha, thought Hiccup, with infinite relief. I was

  right, it is like a Slitherfang. It wants to swallow me

  whole. That was a weight off his mind, because it

  would mean there would be no teeth involved in the

  process, no chewing.

  And then the Monster picked up Hiccup by one

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  leg, and blasted the ground underneath him with fire

  and sea-water to make a nice clean glass surface to eat

  off, because like Slitherfangs, it seemed to be very

  pernickety about such things, and laid him down

  carefully, arranging his arms by his sides.

  Then there was a pause, during which Hiccup

  was absolutely dying to open his eyes, and a horrible,

 

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