Cressida Cowell_How to Train Your Dragon_04

by How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse

  But Toothless had smelled the Onion Soup on Hiccup's leg, and he gave it a lick. "Onion S-s-soup!" said Toothless accusingly. "You bin eating Onion S-s-soup!"

  "Yes, Yes," said Hiccup hurriedly, "I fell in the soup, but about the key --" But this was the last straw as far as Toothless was concerned. He was FURIOUS, and he swelled up to nearly twice his size with anger, and flew out of the cage like an infuriated little balloon.

  "SNOT fair! SNOT fair!" snorted Toothless.

  "You been stuffing yourself with Onion S-s-soup and poor T-t-toothless STARVING and now you want Toothless to f-f-face a whole load of Squealers with no food in his t-t-tummy? TYPICAL! Well, you can just WAIT, that's all...Toothless'll have his supper and THEN maybe he'll help you out ..."

  "TOOTHLESS!" whispered Hiccup, as loud as he dared, "THIS IS IMPORTANT! GET THAT REY RIGHT NOW OR I'LL...I'LL...I'LL..."

  "You'll what?" jeered Toothless cheekily, flapping out of Hiccup's way as he desperately tried to grab Toothless's tail through the bars of the cage.

  Sticking out his little pink forked tongue, Toothless hopped down onto the banqueting tables and tucked into the roast buffalo pie, ignoring Hiccup's furious, frustrated whispers from the cage swinging a couple of meters above.

  "Toothless can't hear!" sang Toothless through a mouthful of pumpkin. "Got s-s something in his ear!

  Oooooh, that rhymes ...Toothless ca-a-an't he-ar, got something in his e-ar! Toothless ca-a-an't he ar, got something in his e-ar!"

  And for the next five minutes, Toothless pretended to be quite deaf, and took his time hopping from plate to plate, gorging himself on deep-fried mackerel, turkey wings, and sweetcorn fritters.

  Eventually, he swallowed the last remains of the pie, took a big swig of the Homemade Nettle Champagne, burped, and rubbed his stomach contentedly.

  "That's b-b-better. Toothless can hear now. Wossat you saying?"

  "WILL YOU GET THAT KEY FROM NORBERT THE NUTJOB'S POCKET BEFORE HE MURDERS US?" hissed Hiccup at the top of his whisper.

  "S-s-say pretty please pretty please ...," sang Toothless.

  "Pretty please," whispered Hiccup through gritted teeth.

  "OK, OK, keep your hair on," said Toothless, and he took off (rather wobbly, because he had eaten so much), and crash-landed on Norbert the Nutjob's chest. Luckily, Norbert was so dead to the world he merely grunted, and hugged his axe a little closer.

  Giggling, Toothless snipped off both of Norbert the Nutjob's fancy mustaches with two bites of his sharp little gums, and then he staggered into Norbert's pocket and pulled out the key.

  Toothless marched across the banqueting table with the key in his mouth, spitting it out every now and then to make pointed remarks to Hiccup.

  "Is TYPICAL," snorted Toothless. "T-t-typical. Poor old starving T-t-toothless, woken up from his H-h-hibernation Nap just to save the day YET AGAIN."

  Toothless put the key back in his mouth, and this time, his large, overfull belly prevented him from seeing exactly where he was putting his feet, and he tripped over a knife lying in the middle of the table.

  Toothless lurched forward, knocking a candle off the table and onto the floor, where it promptly set fire to a polar bear rug. He did a couple of somersaults, spinning over and over until he landed bottom first in the wild boar stew, and ... swallowed the key.

  [Insert: gulp Gulp.]

  13. THE GREAT POTATO BURGLARY

  "AAAARGH! raged Hiccup, shaking the bars of his cage. "Typical! Five minutes ago I was just locked in a cage in a room full of Hysteric Warriors. NOW you've swallowed the key and set fire to the room! Flap up and wake up Camicazi and then PUT OUT THAT FIRE!"

  "S-s-say pretty please ...," choked Toothless defiantly.

  "PRETTY PLEASE!" howled Hiccup in the loudest whisper he could whisper.

  Toothless flew unsteadily up to the beam where Camicazi was sleeping, and woke her up by shrieking softly, "No key! No key!" in her ear, before flying back to deal with the fire.

  Camicazi took charge of the situation from the moment she opened her eyes. She got up, calmly balancing on the beam, for all the world as if she was safely down on the ground rather than almost twenty meters up in the air.

  She unwound another rope from around her waist, and threw the metal end of it so that it wrapped around the beam from which Hiccup's cage was suspended. She pulled to check it was secure, and then swung out, clinging to the rope, and landed on the top of Hiccup's cage.

  Camicazi wriggled down the outside of the cage, and looked hard at the lock on the door. She felt in her pocket and brought out a long pin like instrument, and stuck it in the lock, wiggling it expertly from side to side.

  "That was so brave of you!" she whispered. "For a boy, of course.... Leaping down into the soup like that! We'd NEVER have found out where they kept the potato if you hadn't done that..."

  Hiccup considered telling her it had all been a total accident, and then thought better of it. "Oh, you know ...," he whispered modestly back. "It was nothing. I do that kind of... leaping all the time. What are you doing?"

  "Picking the lock," replied Camicazi airily. "Locks are nothing to us Bog-Burglars ... no prisons can hold us. We're as wriggly as eels. We're as jumpy as crickets."

  The lock suddenly clicked loudly, and the door of Hiccup's cage swung open.

  "Your exit, my lord," grinned Camicazi.

  Hiccup scrambled out of the cage, and dropped down onto the banqueting table below, unable to believe his luck.

  'And now," frowned Camicazi, "for the Vegetable-That-No-One-Dares-Name. We haven't got a lot of time."

  Indeed they hadn't.

  Toothless had tried to snuff out the fire on the polar bear rug by smothering it with his wings, and when that didn't work, he threw Homemade Nettle Champagne on it.

  The flames sprang up a meter high and the fire spread to a nearby chair.

  "Oh d-d-dear!" wailed Toothless

  "Toothless m-m-messed up...all Toothless's fault...ohdearohdear..."

  "Toothless," Hiccup ordered, "stop making that fire WORSE and come over here. We're going to need YOUR help to steal the potato."

  Toothless flapped over, his guilt making him unexpectedly obedient.

  "I want you to melt the ice in the casket," said Hiccup.

  "B-b-but tie Squealers?" whimpered Toothless.

  Hiccup wound his scarf around the little dragon's ears, to act as earplugs.

  "Wait until Toothless has finished melting the ice, just in case you DO set off the Squealers," he explained to Camicazi. "The sound could STUN a dragon as titchy as Toothless if he's too close."

  "T-t-titchy?" huffed Toothless. "Toothless not like tie word TITCHY."

  "You're looking at the burglary EXPERT," said Camicazi. "There's no way I'm going to set off those Squealers."

  By some miracle, all the Hysterics were so dead to the world that not even all this noise and commotion, and a large fire blazing in the middle of their Great Hall, had woken them up. They snored on, oblivious.

  Trembling with terror (and flying rather erratically because he was weighed down by his fur coat, his large meal, and the scarf around his head that was slipping 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 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 fire holes seized up, and he couldn't breathe out a single flame, only clouds and clouds of blue-grey smoke.

  "Relax...," whispered Hiccup from the table. "Breathe deeply... no ppressure... you've got 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.

&n
bsp; "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 tie potato!" Hiccup 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 meter 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 ...

  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-1-o-w-l-y backward, and then gathering speed, until the entire body crashed like a great tree trunk into the waving forest of Squealers down below.

  The noise they made was simply earsplitting.

  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.

  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 mustaches. 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 toward 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 toward 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 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 backward, 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 that 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 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 mustaches, 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 blond 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. She talked CONSTANTLY.

  "I hope you don't mind me eating on the job," she said chattily, easily deflecting his Grim beard'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 ..."

  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 around to find that Camicazi had apparently vanished into thin air.

  He whirled around again. She wasn't there either.
How completely extraordinary...

  Camicazi, swinging centimeters above Norbert the Nutjob's head, removed his crown so gently, so softly, with her pickpocketing, 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, and spraying three more with Homemade 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 toward 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 leaned 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 blue-grey of a seagull's back, and the sun was coming up fast from behind the Mazy Multitudes.