How to Twist a Dragon's Tale

  Alvin sighed. “But I suppose if he failed me in killing YOU, Hiccup, he has also failed me in the second part of his mission.”

  “What was the second part of his mission?” asked Hiccup in surprise.

  Alvin’s hairless eyebrows lifted. “Didn’t he tell you?” purred Alvin. “I wonder why not? He was supposed to bring the FIRE-STONE to me, here, at the Volcano.”

  Camicazi, Hiccup, and Fishlegs all gasped and took a step backward, horribly aware that the Fire-Stone was lying only a few feet behind them, curled up in Camicazi’s waistcoat.

  “The Fire-Stone?” stammered Hiccup, playing for time. “What’s the Fire-Stone?”

  “You know perfectly well what the Fire-Stone is, Hiccup,” sneered Alvin. “The Fire-Stone has many powerful secrets, but one of its many riddles is that the Exterminators are terrified of it. So he who holds the Fire-Stone controls the Exterminators . . . and therefore the Archipelago. I wonder why Humungous didn’t tell you he was supposed to bring it to me.”

  Alvin looked with narrowed eyes at the three young Vikings, all trying to look unconcerned.

  And then Alvin smiled, as something occurred to him, a silky serpentine smile, revealing far too many teeth. “Perhaps it is because you were bringing it to me anyway!”

  Alvin started to laugh, throwing his head back in a singularly unpleasant gloating roar. “Oh, this is TOO GOOD!”

  He wiped his streaming eyes.

  “You’re a clever boy, aren’t you, Hiccup? Perhaps you worked out another of the Fire-Stone’s riddles . . . that it can stop the Volcano from exploding. So you have come here, three terrifying Viking Heroes, none of you taller than my armpit, bringing the Fire-Stone with you, hoping, praying, longing to prevent disaster at the last minute! How swe-e-e-et . . .” Alvin sneered.

  He moved a little closer to the three Vikings, like a malevolent spider, swishing his Stormblade and tut-tutting insincerely.

  “And you were so close,” he commiserated, “s-o-o-o-oo close to success! So near . . . and yet so far. What a shame. I do so hate to disappoint the little children in their charming little dreams.” He sighed. “But I’m afraid it can’t be helped. It’s my job.” A hint of steel crept into his voice. “Hand over the Fire-Stone, Hiccup.”

  “I don’t have the Fire-Stone,” said Hiccup stoutly.

  “Really?” asked Alvin in disbelief.

  Toothless had crept out from under Hiccup’s helmet and was listening with interest. “Oh y-y-yes you do!” he stammered. “It’s right over —”

  Hiccup hurriedly clapped a hand over his mouth. Alvin chuckled, for he understood enough Dragonese to know what Toothless had just said.

  “You’re a clever boy, Hiccup,” he said, “but you really should have learned by now to work alone, like me. Then you wouldn’t be let down by all the idiotically stupid creatures and people around you . . . HAND OVER THE FIRE-STONE BEFORE I LOSE MY TEMPER!”

  “NEVER!” yelled Hiccup.

  Alvin the Treacherous leaped at Hiccup. “YOU CATCH THE OTHER TWO, EXTERMINATOR, ALIVE, MIND YOU — I NEED THAT FIRE-STONE — AND LEAVE HICCUP TO ME!”

  The Exterminator swooped forward toward Camicazi and Fishlegs with a savage growl, and reared up on its hind legs, its ten sword-claws spread out in front of it.

  Hiccup held up his sword, Endeavor, in the very nick of time, and it caught the Stormblade as Alvin brought it down toward Hiccup’s chest with terrifying ferocity.

  Camicazi and Fishlegs were fighting a Great Black Monster with ten swords to their two. The Creature used its claws just exactly as if it were sword-fighting, and its fingers were so flexible and bendy that they moved like arms, thrusting delicately in and out.

  It wasn’t under orders to kill them, thank Thor, only capture them, and within about two minutes it had done just that to Fishlegs, with its left arm.

  One finger sent Fishlegs’s sword spinning up into the air to disarm him. With its left leg it knocked Fishlegs down, and then it pinned Fishlegs to the ground with its five sword-fingers, two above his shoulders, and two below his arms.

  It had more trouble with Camicazi, for Camicazi was a wonderful sword-fighter, and she chatted the entire time she fought, which was even more off-putting than the sword-fighting itself.

  “Take that, you Slowpoke, Serpent-Tongued, See-Through-Chested Hand-bag!” she cried, leaping through its swords and tweaking its whiskers. The Exterminator howled in pain and fury.

  “Crybaby!” cried Camicazi joyfully. “Does the ickle Dwagon-Monster want his ickle Mumsie to kiss it better for him den?”

  A look came into the Exterminator’s eyes, which said as plain as day, “Maybe I should kill this little gnat after all, WHATEVER my Leader says.”

  The Exterminator swelled up in fury and redoubled the slashing and thrusting of his five razor-sharp blades, and eventually he broke through her guard, picked her up, kicking and screaming, and pinned her down with his five sword-fingers plunged into the ground around her, just like he had done with Fishlegs.

  The Exterminator wasn’t so bothered by her insults now that she was at its mercy, and it lay down its gigantic, oozing, pantherish body in between Fishlegs and Camicazi, and folded up its great black wings to watch the fight between Hiccup and Alvin.

  “Humungous was right,” said Fishlegs to Camicazi gloomily. “There is no point in having me in the Team. I did TRY to make myself go Berserk, but it only works when I don’t want it to. At least you put up a fight, and you burgled the Stone and everything. I’ve done nothing helpful at all. I might just as well have run away like the others.”

  This wasn’t quite true.

  Sometimes we can be helpful in ways that are not totally obvious, and if Fishlegs had run away like the others, he would have taken his Running-Away Suitcase with him, and that Suitcase, as we shall see, was about to come in extremely useful.

  Alvin had been practicing his sword-fighting since the last time Hiccup fought him, on top of the mounds of Treasure in the Caliban Caves.

  But then Hiccup had been practicing too, and had been getting extra sword-fighting lessons with Gormless the Grim, because it was the only thing on the Pirate Training Program that he was at all good at.

  And although Alvin was taller and had longer arms than Hiccup, he did have the disadvantage of the ivory Sharkworm-tooth leg, which made him stagger about the mountaintop, cursing horribly, while Hiccup was very light on his feet and quick to dodge even the most violent of thrusts.

  It was very evenly matched. But Alvin had one other advantage over Hiccup, which was that he was a big CHEAT.

  It is not considered good sportsmanship, in Barbarian Culture, to make a huge swipe at your child-opponent with your hook while sword-fighting.

  Nor is it thought to be part of the Viking Code to trip the preteen up with your Sharkworm-tooth leg as he dodges out of the way.

  However, Alvin had never been a good sport, and he did both those things in quick succession, without so much as a twinge of guilt.

  Hiccup sprawled onto his backside, arms and legs flailing.

  With a howl of triumph, Alvin the Treacherous hauled the sword, Endeavor, out of Hiccup’s hand, and threw it far out of reach.

  As Alvin wrenched the sword from Hiccup’s hand and raised the Stormblade for the final blow, a flash of sunlight caught the bracelet writhing around Alvin’s good arm. This would have been the end of Hiccup’s Quest, had he not had the good fortune to have landed right in the middle of the spilled contents of Fishlegs’s Running-Away Suitcase.

  Still sprawled on his back, Hiccup grabbed hold of the nearest thing to him, which happened to be a box of Fishlegs’s tooth powder, and flung the entire contents of the box up into Alvin’s face.

  “Yoooooooooooowwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!” screeched Alvin. Fishlegs’s tooth powder was one of Old Wrinkly’s most popular medicines, a mixture of extract of seaweed, gull droppings, and spearmint for the taste. I don’t know what actual good it did for the teeth, but it certainly stung li
ke crazy as it worked its way into Alvin’s one good eye.

  While Alvin stood there, momentarily blinded, Hiccup jumped up and pulled the bracelet off Alvin’s arm. It took a few mighty tugs, for it was stuck fast to the Fire Suit, but Hiccup was desperate, and pulled with a strength he didn’t know he had. He threw the bracelet up to Toothless, shouting, “Take that to Humungous!”

  Toothless caught the bracelet, heavy as it was, and sank like a stone, nearly to the ground. Mouth full of bracelet, he began to stammer out “W-w-why???”

  “JUST DO IT!!!! DON’T ARGUE FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE!” howled Hiccup. “FAST!!!”

  So the little dragon pointed himself down toward the tiny speck of The Peregrine Falcon floating in the bay, and shot toward it, the weight of the golden bracelet helping him sink through the air even faster.

  Meanwhile, Alvin could now just about see out of his streaming red eye and he was after Hiccup again, as mad as a snake with a toothache.

  Hiccup held up the suitcase as a shield as Alvin rained down blow after blow, finally cutting the thing practically in two. Hiccup rolled out of the way just in time.

  Alvin grabbed hold of his waistcoat, and Hiccup wriggled out of it, hitting Alvin on the nose with a sightseeing book called Visiting Rome for the First Time.

  “You should have learned a lesson from your silly old grandfather. He’s learned not to try and interfere with Fate. And he thought he was clever enough to hold the Fire-Stone!” snarled Alvin.

  “All HIS meddling, his silly Quests, achieved were to break his daughter’s heart . . . I wish you could have seen how Valhallarama cried when I told her that Humungous was dead . . . Oh, it was tragic.”

  “Liar! Traitor! Villain!” shouted Hiccup, dodging yet another of Alvin’s lunges and looking about him for something else that could be used as a weapon.

  “Oh, BOO-HOO,” sneered Alvin the Treacherous, creeping forward, his eye glittering, “stop, you’re going to make me CRY.”

  And then Hiccup threw one thing at him after another, the entire contents of Fishlegs’s Running-Away Suitcase, that were now lying all around them on the mountainside.

  Fishlegs’s belt, whose heavy gold buckle caught Alvin full in the forehead, six pairs of clean knickers, several pairs of trousers, a bottle of asthma medicine, which made both of them sneeze, and Fishlegs’s pillow, which burst on the end of the Stormblade, and showered the two of them in a rain of goose feathers.

  “Ow, ow ow!” screeched Alvin, as Fishlegs’s hairbrush landed bristle-side up on Alvin’s sensitive chin, and one of Fishlegs’s vests got caught around his ivory leg.

  But although Hiccup put off his defeat for vital minutes, particularly with a spirited fight using Fishlegs’s umbrella instead of a sword, the end was never really in doubt.

  Alvin was determined that Hiccup was not going to slip out of his fingers this time. Stumbling and staggering, his eye watering, and spitting out goose feathers, he chopped the umbrella in half and finally got Hiccup in a hold he couldn’t wriggle out of.

  “Now!” gloated Alvin, bringing the Stormblade down to Hiccup’s face. “Where is the Fire-Stone?”

  15. I DIDN’T MEAN TO COME HERE

  Meanwhile, Humungous had spent an anxious half hour down on The Peregrine Falcon, shading his hands over his eyes and trying to spot the progress of the three young Vikings as they slowly climbed the Volcano Mountain.

  What he discovered was that it was FAR more tense watching somebody else performing a Quest than it is to do the Quest oneself. He felt quite sick with nerves.

  Most of the time he was talking to himself as he peered upward, trying to convince himself he was doing the right thing.

  “Now, I was right not to tell Hiccup that Terrific Al wanted that Stone too, wasn’t I? And nobody could expect me to go with them, could they? . . . After fifteen years of slavery on this very island . . . but I guess nobody else is going to do it, but for Thor’s sake,” Humungous slung his bow and arrows around his shoulders, “a guy should get to retire SOMETIME, shouldn’t he? UP now, White Dragon . . . I mean, why is it always ME who has to be the Hero?

  “It’s . . . not . . . my . . . fight . . .” complained Humungous, taking his foot out of the stirrup again.

  He turned his face to the heavens and howled up to the uncaring sky, shaking his fist in frustration:

  “WHAT . . . SHALL . . . I . . . DO????”

  And as if in answer to his question, out of the clear blue sky, DOWN swooped an exhausted little Toothless, and dropped upon the deck a golden something.

  A something that rolled around the deck in ever-decreasing circles, and came to rest with a clatter.

  Humungous bent down and picked up the something.

  It was the golden dragon bracelet that twisted around Alvin’s good arm. He knew it well, for he had made it for Alvin himself, in the Jail-Forges when he was supposed to be making swords, as a thank-you after Alvin agreed to take the ruby heart’s stone to Valhallarama many many years ago. This was the first time in a long while that he had seen it close up.

  And as he picked it up, he thought, That’s funny, there’s something in the dragon’s eye. I didn’t put that there when I made it . . .

  And as he held it closer, a blast of lightning lit up the sky, and the flash of light caught the bracelet, and the dragon’s eye winked at him.

  One small, sly, red wink, as if it were amused.

  The dragon’s eye was his ruby heart’s stone.

  In that single moment the Truth rushed upon Humungous all at once.

  She had loved him.

  She had never got the message.

  Terrific Al had never given it to her.

  He had kept the ruby heart’s stone . . . he had even had the cheek to fit it into the bracelet that Humungous had made him, which he had then been wearing right under Humungous’s nose the entire time. . . which made him a whole lot less Terrific than Humungous had thought.

  Maybe it even made him the Treacherous Villain that Hiccup had been describing . . . and perhaps throwing him to the Sharkworms was a THOROUGHLY good idea and what a shame they had only taken his leg and hadn’t gotten rid of him completely.

  A fifteen-year-old memory popped into his head.

  It was a memory of his Love, handing him this very stone so very many years ago.

  With these words:

  “When you hold this stone, you hold my heart. But if you find yourself captured or in trouble, send me this stone in the mouth of your hunting dragon, and I will come and rescue you.”

  Humungous gave a half laugh, half cry, as he looked first at the heart’s stone, and then down at Toothless, collapsed on the deck in exhaustion.

  Isn’t Fate artistic?

  But what this all meant was that Hiccup was in trouble up there on the mountain, and that Hiccup had never in his life been more in need of his Bardiguard.

  Humungously Hotshot the Hero pulled the bracelet onto his own left arm.

  He leaped onto the back of his White Dragon, drawing his sword and shouting, “Come on, Windwalker! Hiccup needs us! This IS our fight! TO THE VOLCANO!”

  “Oh, b-b-brother,” moaned Toothless, sprawled on the deck, “we aren’t going up again, are we?”

  The Windwalker swallowed hard, and picked Toothless up in its mouth, and took off up to the Volcano after Humungously Hotshot.

  16. ANOTHER FIGHT

  “AT LAST!” gloated Alvin the Treacherous, smiling down at the petrified Hiccup.

  “Now, see where your precious Heroism has gotten you. DEAD before you even get your first chest hair. Where is the Fire-Stone, before you die?”

  Hiccup looked straight up into Alvin the Treacherous’s murderous, scarred face.

  Now that he knew he was about to die he wasn’t scared at all, and he wasn’t going to give Alvin the satisfaction of thinking that he was frightened.

  Hiccup began to sing.

  And for some reason the first song that came into his head was that ridiculous song that
was one of Stoick’s favorites, which just happened to be the lullaby that Hiccup’s mother Valhallarama used to sing to him as a baby, when she was rocking him to sleep, snuggled up to her armored breastplate.

  It was a song that was said to have been made up by Great Hairybottom himself, many, many centuries before, when he first settled in the Archipelago.

  “I didn’t mean to come here . . .

  And I didn’t mean to stay . . .

  It’s just where the sea wind blew me

  One acci-dental day . . .”

  Alvin nearly dropped Hiccup, he was so surprised.

  Alvin expected a person facing death to beg, cry, plead for mercy.

  He didn’t expect them to start singing songs as if they were casually sitting around a campfire.

  “. . . I was on my way to America

  But I took a left turn at the Pole

  And I lost my shoe in a rainy bog

  Where my heart got stuck in the hole . . .”

  Above them the thunderclouds were so dark they were almost blue, and lightning crackled between them. Below them the Volcano rumbled ominously in reply. It was almost as if the small boy’s voice was trying to placate the storm from above and the storm from below.

  “What are you doing?” hissed Alvin in baffled and furious astonishment, his arm holding the Stormblade hesitating above his head. “What ARE you babbling about? You’re about to DIE here, you fool . . .”

  Beyond Alvin’s shoulder, Camicazi and Fishlegs, pinned under the swords of the Exterminator, joined in the song:

  “. . . I’ve heard that the sky in America

  Is a blue that you wouldn’t believe

  But my ship hit a rock on these boggy shores

  And now I’ll ne-ver leave . . .”

  Alvin began to bring the Stormblade down, furious that Hiccup was going to die while apparently happily singing and enjoying himself, rather than afraid and alone, and as his arm carrying the wickedly sharp Stormblade swung down . . .