Night Terrors Chapter 6
As Hiccup and Toothless winged their way south, correcting their course with their tails every few moments, Toothless called, "We ought to put some distance between us, so we can search more effectively."
"I'd rather stay close together," Hiccup replied, "because I want to talk to you. I've always wanted to talk to you! I want to know where you came from, and what kinds of crazy things you've seen, and what your hopes and dreams are. Finally, you can tell me! And if you want to know more about me, then you can finally understand me when I tell you."
"I do, indeed, wish to know more about you, my friend. Much more!" They began telling each other their life's stories, constantly interrupting each other to ask questions or offer comments. It turned out that they had even more in common than they had realized. Hiccup barely remembered his mother and had never had any kind of relationship with his father, while Toothless had never even met his own father and hadn't seen his mother in years. As the only dragon of his kind in the nest, he had always felt like an outcast, so he could easily understand how Hiccup had felt in the years before the two of them had met.
Toothless was describing how it felt to serve a queen dragon who ate her under-performing subjects when he spotted something ahead and to their left. "I think it might be the sail of a ship," he decided, "but it is slightly blurry. Curse these Terrible Terror eyes! With my own eyes, I could easily see details at a great distance."
"Let's check it out," Hiccup suggested. They banked to the left and closed the distance to the unknown ship. It wasn't going very fast, seeing how it was headed south and the wind was out of the east. As they drew closer, they could see two people in it, an adult man holding the tiller and a young blonde woman bailing out water with a bucket. An assortment of leather straps were nailed to the deck in various places, with a bulging leather sack in the middle of them.
"Those straps must be for holding a Night Fury down," Hiccup decided.
"I wonder how they planned to do that if the spell wore off while they were asleep," Toothless mused.
"What I wonder is, how did they plan to make the Night Fury hold still while they fastened all those straps?" Hiccup returned.
"Then we are agreed – they did not plan this kidnapping very well," Toothless nodded.
"Bud, I think we agree on just about everything," Hiccup replied.
"Except about bringing baby Typhoomerangs into the house," his friend said archly.
"And about whether it's a good idea to fight a Whispering Death," Hiccup shot back. "But aside from a few little details like those, we think pretty much the same."
Toothless nodded somberly. "It will be sad, in a way, when the spell wears off and we can no longer communicate. I badly miss my own body, and my tail fins, and my eyes, and everything else that makes a Night Fury special. But this chance to talk to you and listen to you has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I am glad I was able to enjoy."
Hiccup sideslipped and tapped Toothless' wingtip with his own. "I hear you, bud. I'm going to miss this, too. But there's one thing we can still do together, no matter what – fly into battle!"
"Yes!" Toothless snarled happily. "We are going to flame their sail, correct? You hit the lower-left corner, and I will hit the lower right." They passed next to the ship from the stern toward the bow, their flight paths a mirror-image of each other.
Arngrim noticed them as they flew by. "Hey, Skuld, what are those Terrible Terrors doing way out here? I thought you said they couldn't learn to fly fast enough to catch us."
"They can't," she reassured him. "Nobody could learn to fly on their own in one day. Those must be wild Terrors, just checking us out to see if we have any fish."
A moment later, both Terrors passed the ship, turned back, and flamed a stretch of the bottom of the ship's one sail. The flames spread and climbed upward hungrily along the dry fabric. "Cut it loose!" Arngrim shouted. "Cut it away before it falls and sets the whole ship on fire!" They both worked with their belt knives and managed to cut the sail down, and then used the loose ends of the ropes to pull it over the side.
"Do you have an extra sail on this ship?" Skuld asked him as she looked around. "The right answer would be 'yes.' "
"The true answer is 'No,' " the Northlander explained lamely. "I wanted to fill the ship with furs for trading, and I left behind anything that took up too much space. Besides, it's not the stormy season, so I didn't think I'd need any extra sails."
She grunted in exasperation. "Please tell me you didn't leave the oars behind, too!"
"No, I'm not that stupid, girl!" he burst out. "And I'll thank you for watching your tone of voice when you speak to me. I am the chief of my tribe, I bankrolled this expedition, and I –"
"And you left us with no way of moving except two oars, one for each of us!" she nearly shouted. "It will take us a week to reach the nearest safe land, and we're going to run out of food in three days!"
"At least I held up my part of the deal," he retorted. "Those Terrors couldn't have picked a better way to slow us down than to shoot the base of our sail, and they were perfectly coordinated when they did it. And they didn't even try to smell us for fish! Wild Terrors, you say? Not likely! Those are some of our dragon's friends, the ones you promised could never follow us in time!"
"I still don't think they could," she answered, "but fighting about it won't get us any closer to land. I've got my oar; you take yours and we'll work out a rowing rhythm."
He let a hundred angry retorts die on his lips. There would be time enough to settle with her later, after they met up with Viggo Grimborn and sold their dragon and got the money. For now, she was right about rowing. He grimaced as he gripped the oar. "Stroke!" he called. "Stroke!" With only two rowers, the heavy ship was barely moving. The pair of Terrors was still circling them, but there was nothing he could do about that.
One of those Terrors suddenly whipped across the deck, circled the leather bag once while chirping something in Terrible Terror language, and rejoined his friend. The two of them banked away and headed north.
"I think Berk might be closer than three days away," Arngrim decided. "Maybe we should turn around and go back there before we starve."
"Back to Berk?" Skuld echoed. "Back to the place where I did magic on the chief's son, and you helped me do it? We're better off starving than falling into Stoick's hands! Keep rowing!"
"Don't give me orders, girl," he rumbled. But he kept rowing.
A quarter of a mile away, Toothless turned to Hiccup. "What did you say to them when you crossed their deck, that was worth the risk of them striking you down?"
"They had oars in their hands, not weapons, so I felt pretty safe," the Hiccup-dragon replied. "And I wasn't talking to them. I was telling Astrid to be brave, because we were coming to rescue her."
"Did you hear her say anything in reply?" his friend asked.
"I'm not sure because she sounded muffled, but I think she said, 'Just get me out of here, and I'll rescue myself!' That's a very typical thing for Astrid to say. I guess that means she's all right in there."
"Then let us get home and organize everyone," Toothless concluded. "Tomorrow morning, we will mount a rescue mission, and you will look like a hero to your future mate!"
"I don't care that much about the 'hero' part," Hiccup sighed. "I just want Astrid back. Hey, why don't we just flame the leather bag and get her out that way?"
"I fear that the smoke would kill her before the bag burned enough to let her out," Toothless said.
"Yeah, I guess you're right," Hiccup replied. "Not only that, but she doesn't know how to fly, and the two of us can't carry her by ourselves, so letting her out wouldn't do her much good."
The other four were already back in Berk when Hiccup and Toothless arrived. "We didn't find any ships at all," Fishlegs said.
"We found some fishing boats from another tribe," Ruff added with a vicious grin, "and we took some target practice on them!"
"You did WHAT?!" Hiccup nearly exploded.
"Hey, we didn't hurt anybody, so it's okay, right?" Tuffnut clarified. "We just burned their sails a little, and burned their nets a little, and burned their rudders a little... but we didn't burn them, so it's like, 'no blood, no foul,' right?"
"Right!" his sister smirked.
"Wrong!" Hiccup retorted. "Do you want to start the wars between humans and dragons all over again? The next time those fishermen see a Terrible Terror, they'll throw spears first and ask questions later! Then the Terrors will fight back, just like any dragon will fight when people attack them, and the other dragons will take their side, and the next thing you know, we're back to midnight dragon raids and losing all our fish and seeing our houses go up in flames! You don't want to see those bad old days come back, do you?"
Tuff scowled. "Well, what good is it to be a fire-breathing dragon if we don't actually do it?"
"You'll do it tomorrow," Hiccup reassured him. "We found Arngrim's ship, and we're going to rescue Astrid in the morning. Arngrim and Skuld will fight back, and that's when you'll get your chance to breathe some fire."
"Is there a way we can make it up to those fishermen so they won't be mad at all the dragons?" Fishlegs wondered.
Toothless considered that. "If Vikings are like dragons, then you can bribe them with food."
Hiccup thought fast. "Well, Vikings aren't exactly like dragons, but we do like our food. We'll take Toothless' idea and run with it."
"Bringing food to a bunch of fishermen doesn't sound like fun," Ruffnut fussed.
"We won't bring them food. We'll bring them fish," Hiccup explained. "When they see some of us carrying a fish to them and dropping it on their decks, they'll realize that not all Terrible Terrors are fire-breathing pests," and he glared at Ruff and Tuff when he said that. "They won't know what to think of us after that, but at least they won't be openly hostile, and that's the best we can hope for."
"We still don't know how Terrible Terrors catch fish," Toothless noted.
"Maybe the locals will teach us in exchange for part of our catch," Hiccup thought out loud.
"I heard that!" called the red female from just inside the nest. "Sure, I'll give you fishing lessons in exchange for a couple of fish. Just watching you guys trying to learn is worth it."
"Okay, we've got a plan," Hiccup decided. "In the morning, we'll rescue Astrid. In the afternoon, we'll learn to fish, and we'll pay off those fishermen so they won't be angry at dragons."
"What happens after that?" Fishlegs asked.
"I guess that depends on how long it takes before we turn back into people," Hiccup replied. "I don't know."