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over his eyes) Toothless flew over the waving nails of the
Squealers. This was very brave of him, for if he looked
down he could see their horrible black bobby bodies with
the piranha teeth, and to a dragon as small as Toothless,
it was like wandering casually in front of a pack of lions
with open jaws.
Hovering above the casket, he was so scared that
for a moment his fireholes seized up, and he couldn’t
breathe out a single flame, only clouds and clouds of
bluey-grey smoke.
‘Relax…’ whispered Hiccup from the table.
‘Breathe deeply… no pressure… you’ve all the time
in the world…’ Hiccup was trying to sound as calm as
he could even though half the room was on fire.
‘All the time in the world…’ sang Hiccup
nervously. ‘Just relax… go to your happy place…’
The nails of the Squealers began to twitch as
they sensed the smoke.
‘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 the potato!’ Hiccup
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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 metre above 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…
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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 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-l-o-w-l-y backwards, 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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screeched the Squealers.
The noise they made was simply ear-splitting.
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
straight at Camicazi, dangling from her rope. Camicazi
saw the axe coming, and let herself drop.
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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 moustaches. 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 towards 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 towards him, swords,
axes and daggers drawn. The odds
were not on Hiccup’s side…
and Hiccup was completely and
entirely unarmed.
He had no bow and arrow,
no dagger. He did not even have
his sword, for Norbert the Nutjob
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had taken it from him earlier, if you remember. (Which
was a shame, because Hiccup was good at sword-
fighting.)
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 backwards, a sticky, dripping,
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 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 fat overripe tomato splattered in their faces assumed
that this was all just a merry midnight food-fight, and
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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 moustaches, 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 blonde Assassin in one-to-one
combat. She just wouldn’t stay still.
She met every lunge he made, carelessly singing
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.
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She talked CONSTANTLY.
‘I hope you don’t mind me
eating on the job,’ she said chattily,
easily deflecting his Grimbeard’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…’
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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.
‘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,
delightedly 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 round to find that Camicazi had apparently
vanished into thin air.
He whirled around again. She wasn’t there either.
How completely extraordinary…
Camicazi, swinging centimetres above Norbert
the Nutjob’s head, removed his helmet so gently, so
softly, with her pick-pocketing, burglaring fingers, that he
never felt a thing.
She then bashed him on the head as hard as
she could with the frozen potato. 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,
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and spraying three more with Home-made 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 towards 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.
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 leant 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.
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 bluey 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
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stampeding towards 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 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, good-ee,’ 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 harbour.
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
down the roof and sailing over the walls of the village on
board one of their s
ilver 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.
Hiccup had sledged before, but never on a hill
so steep that it was practically a cliff. And in fact the
exact 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
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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 Harbour.
‘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 harbour 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
towards the sleigh. One Eye came soaring down, and
they hurriedly hitched him up and set him going at a
brisk trot towards the Harbour Exit.
‘Oh my goodness,’ panted Camicazi, looking
back up at the Hysterical Village, where the Great Hall
was now a gigantic bonfire. ‘Those Hysterics are going to
be SO CROSS.’
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‘My congratulations,’ growled One Eye to
Hiccup, as he pulled them rapidly forwards. ‘You are
the first Human I have ever met who uses his brain
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse Page 9