Read How to train your dragon Online

Authors: by Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III; translated from the Old Norse by Cressida Cowell

Tags: #General, #Children's Books, #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Dragons, #Mythical, #Animals, #Humorous Stories, #Medieval, #Vikings, #Fairy tales; folk tales; fables; magical tales & traditional stories

How to train your dragon (3 page)

27

"No ... dragon," repeated Fishlegs stubbornly.

"Oh, for THOR'S SAKE," snapped Hiccup.

He thrust his basket into Fishlegs's arms and grabbed the empty one from Fishlegs's back. "Have MINE, then. Wait here."

And Hiccup turned and went back through the narrow bit even though the roaring was getting louder and closer by the second.

"WHAT... ARE ,.. YOU ,,. DOING???" screamed Fishlegs, frantically dancing up and down on the spot.

Hiccup came back through the hole again precious moments later. Fishlegs grabbed hold of an arm to help haul him through.

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They could hear a horrible snuffling that sounded as if the nose of a dragon had entered the other end of the hole. Hiccup bunged a rock at it and it squealed indignantly.

They turned a corner and suddenly they could see light from outside at the end of the final tunnel.

Fishlegs went first, but, just as Hiccup was kneeling down to follow, a dragon pounced on him with a flap and a shriek. Hiccup hit it and it fell back enough for him to crawl toward the light. Another dragon -- or maybe the same one -- sank its fangs into Hiccup's calf. He was so desperate to get out he dragged the animal through with him.

As soon as Hiccup's head and shoulders were through into the light, there was Gobber. He grabbed Hiccup under the armpits and hauled him out, dragons pouring after him.

"JUMP!" yelled Gobber, as he stunned a dragon with one blow of his mighty fist.

"What do you
mean,
JUMP??" Hiccup hesitated as he looked down at the dizzying drop into the sea.

"No time to climb down," panted Gobber, banging a couple of dragons' heads together, and bouncing three more off his gigantic belly. "JUMP!!!"

29

Hiccup closed his eyes and leaped off the cliff.

As he plunged through the air, the dragon that was attached to his leg released its jaws with a squawk of alarm and flew off.

Hiccup was traveling at such speed by the time he hit the water that it didn't feel like water at all, more like something hard and painful, and so cold that he nearly passed out.

He spluttered to the surface, amazed to find that he didn't appear to be dead, and was immediately drenched by the gigantic splash of Gobber the Belch landing a couple of feet away from him.

Shrieking furiously, the dragons swarmed out of the cave and dive-bombed the floating Vikings.

Hiccup pulled his helmet as far down as it would go. There were horrible scraping sounds as dragons' talons raked across the metal. Another one landed, hissing, on the water right in front of Hiccup's face. It took off again with a screech when it felt how cold the sea was. The dragons didn't like flying through the snow and, with relief, Hiccup watched as they flew back to scream terrible dragon insults in Dragonese from the warmth of the cave entrance.

Gobber started to pull the boys out of the sea

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and onto the rocks. Viking boys are strong swimmers, but it is difficult to keep afloat when you have a basket full of trapped, terrified dragons on your back. Hiccup was the last to be saved -- just in time, as the cold was beginning to put him to sleep.

Well, at least that wasn't DEATH,
thought Hiccup as Gobber grabbed him by the neck to rescue him, nearly drowning him again in the process --
but it certainly wasn't GLORY, either.

31

Chapter 3 HEROES OR EXILES

The boys scrambled over the slimy pebbles at the edge of the beach and back up Madman's Gully, the gorge they had climbed through a couple of hours before. This was a narrow crack in the cliffs filled with large rocks. They tried to move as quickly as they could, but this is difficult when you are slipping and sliding over huge stones covered in ice, and they made painfully slow progress.

A dragon that
hadn't
been put off by the snow came shrieking down into the gorge. He landed on Wartihog's back and started savaging him, sinking his fangs into Wartihog's shoulder and ripping red lines into his arms. Gobber bashed the dragon on the nose with the handle of his axe, and the dragon let go and flapped away.

But a whole wave of dragons replaced him, pouring into the canyon with awful, rasping cries, fire shooting from their nostrils and melting the snow before them, talons spread wickedly as they swooped downward.

Gobber stood, legs wide apart, and whirled his big, double-headed axe. He threw back his great,

32

hairy head and yelled a terrible primeval yell, that echoed down the sides of the gorge and made the hairs on the back of Hiccup's neck stick straight up like the spines on a sea urchin.

Individually, dragons tend to have a healthy sense of self-preservation, but they are braver when they hunt in packs. They knew now that they had the advantage of massive numbers, so they didn't check their flying for an instant. They just kept on coming.

Gobber let go of the axe.

Spinning end to end, the axe soared up through the softly falling snow. It hit the biggest dragon of the lot, killing him instantly, and then kept on going, landing in a snow-drift hundreds of feet away and disappearing.

This made the rest of the dragons think a bit. Some of them scrambled over each other in their haste to fly away, yelping like dogs. The others came to

33

a halt, hovering uncertainly, screaming defiance but keeping their distance.

"Waste of a good axe," grunted Gobber. "Keep going, boys, they could come back!"

Hiccup needed no encouragement to keep going. As soon as he got out of the gorge and onto the marshy land behind it, he broke into a stumbling run, every now and then falling flat on his face in the snow.

Some time later, when Gobber reckoned they were a safe distance from Wild Dragon Cliff, he yelled at the boys to stop.

Very carefully he counted heads again, to check he hadn't lost anybody. Gobber had spent an unpleasant ten minutes standing at the mouth of the dragons' cave wondering why there was such a terrible racket and what he was going to say to Stoick the Vast if he lost his precious son and heir for good.

Something Tactful and Sensitive, he supposed, but Tact and Sensitivity were not Gobber's strong points, and he took the first five minutes to come up with "Hiccup copped it. SORRY," and then spent the second five minutes tearing his beard out.

Consequently, although secretly mightily relieved, he was not in a Good Mood and, as soon as

34

he could get his breath back, he exploded all over the place, as the boys stood, shivering violently, in a bedraggled line.

"NEVER ... in FOURTEEN YEARS .,.

have I come across such a load of HOPELESS

BARNACLES as you lot. WHICH OF YOU USELESS MOLLUSKS WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR WAKING UP THE DRAGONS????"

"I was," said Hiccup. Which wasn't strictly true.

"Oh, that's BRILLIANT," bellowed Gobber, "just BRILLIANT. Our Future Leader shows off his magnificent Leadership Skills. At the tender age of ten and a half he does his best to annihilate himself and the rest of you in A SIMPLE MILITARY EXERCISE!"

Snotlout sniggered.

"You find something amusing about that, Snotlout?" asked Gobber, with dangerous softness. "EVERYBODY IS ON LIMPET RATIONS FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS."

The boys groaned.

"Smart work, Hiccup," sneered Snotlout. "I can't wait to see you in action on the battlefield."

"SILENCE!" yelled Gobber. "THIS IS YOUR

35

INITIATION, NOT A DAY OUT IN THE COUNTRY! SILENCE, OR YOU'LL BE LUNCHING
ON
LUGWORMS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES!"

"Now," continued Gobber, more calmly, "although that was an absolute mess, it wasn't a total disaster. I PRESUME that you do all HAVE a dragon after that fiasco . . . ?"

"Yes," chorused the boys.

Fishlegs took a sideways glance at Hiccup, who was staring straight ahead.

"Lucky for you," said Gobber, ominously. "So you have all passed the first part of the Dragon Test. There are, however, still two parts that you have to complete before you can become full members of the Tribe. Your next task will be to train this dragon yourself. This will be a test of the force of your personality. You will assert your will over this wild creature and show it who is Master. Your dragon will be expected to obey simple commands such as "go" and "stay," and hunt fish for you in the way that dragons have hunted for the Sons of Thor since anybody can remember. If you are worried about the training process, you should study a book called
How to Train Your Dragon
by

36

Professor Yobbish, which you will find in the fireplace of the Great Hall."

Suddenly Gobber looked very pleased with himself. "I stole that book from the Meathead Public Library myself," he said modestly, regarding his very black fingernails. "From right under the nose of the Hairy Scary Librarian . . . He never noticed a thing . . . Now THAT'S burglary for you. . . ."

Wartihog put up his hand. "What happens if we can't read, sir?"

"No boasting, Wartihog!" boomed Gobber. "Get some idiot to read it for you.
Yout
dragons will begin to go back to sleep, because this is still their hibernation time" -- some of the dragons had, indeed, gone very quiet inside the baskets -- "so take them home and put them in a warm place. They should wake up in the next couple of weeks.you will then have only FOUR MONTHS to prepare for Initiation Day at the Thor's-day Thursday Celebrations, and the final part of your Test. If, on that day, you can prove that you have trained your dragon to the satisfaction of myself and other elders of the Tribe, you can finally call yourself a Hooligan of Berk."

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The boys stood very tall and tried to look like proper Hooligans.

"HEROES OR EXILE!" yelled Gobber the Belch.

"HEROES OR EXILE!" yelled eight boys fanatically back at him.

Exile,
thought Hiccup and Fishlegs sadly.

"I. . . hate . . . being . . . a . . . Viking," panted Fishlegs to Hiccup as they stumbled back through the bracken to the Hooligan village.

You didn't really
walk
on the island of Berk, you
waded
-- through heather or bracken or mud or snow, which clung on to your legs and made them difficult to lift. It was the sort of country where the sea and the land were always falling into one another and getting mixed up. The island was shot through with holes burrowed by the water, a maze of criss-crossing underground streams. You could put your foot on a solid-looking piece of grass and find yourself disappearing up to your thigh in black, sticky mud. You could be making your way through the ferns and suddenly find yourself fording a river, waist-high and icy cold.

The boys were already soaked to the skin with

38

seawater, and now the snow had turned to horizontal driving rain, blowing in their faces with the strength of one of the gale-force winds that were always shrieking across the salty wastelands of Berk.

"A narrow escape from horrible death first thing on Thursday morning," complained Fishlegs, "followed by complete rejection by the junior half of the Tribe . . . Nobody's going to talk to me for YEARS after this -- except for you, of course, Hiccup, but then you're just a weirdo like me -- "

"Thank you," said Hiccup.

"And on top of everything," continued Fishlegs bitterly, "a two-mile run carrying a deranged dragon on my back" -- the basket on Fishlegs' back was plunging wildly from side to side as the dragon inside tried

39

manically to get out -- "and only a dinner of horrible limpets to look forward to at the end of it."

Hiccup agreed that it wasn't a delicious prospect.

"You can have this dragon back if you like, Hiccup. I warn you, they're filthy heavy when they're wet and angry," said Fishlegs, miserably. "Gobber is going to go off like a typhoon when he finds out you haven't got a dragon."

"But I HAVE got one," said Hiccup.

Fishlegs stopped and began to take the basket off his back. "I know it IS yours REALLY," he sighed wearily. "I think I'll just go straight past the village and keep on running till I reach somewhere civilized. Rome perhaps. I've always wanted to go to Rome. And I haven't got a hope in Valhalla of passing Initiation anyway, so --"

"No, I've got
another
one, in my basket," Hiccup insisted.

Fishlegs' jaw dropped open in disbelief.

"I got it when I went back into the tunnel," explained Hiccup.

"Well, blister my barnacles," said Fishlegs. "How in Thor's name did you know it was there? It was so dark you couldn't see the horns in front of you."

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