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