Written 22nd February – March 13th.
Edited March 13th – March 17th.
Published – April 12th, 2020. The story wouldn't go up on April 12th no matter how much I wanted it to, but I swear it was 12:03 AM when I pressed the button.
Two years ago to the day, I published this story. It was supposed to be finished twelve months ago, and yet April 2019 came and went, rose and fell, and another annum must need pass before I could say again that I had published on the anniversary of this.
There will be an epilogue, and at the end of that epilogue will be the announcement for the next story, for there will be a sequel. It is in the works. Stranded was the beginning, but not the end.
As for the riddle, twas an anglerfish. Stein the Tenth takes the cookie. I can assure you it is most delectable.
(::)
There aren't any more, not in Stranded 1. Pride, accomplishment? Some inkling of these things. I have so many more projects now than I first did, so many things done and doing and yet to do, but… I matured from this. I imposed a schedule upon myself and I came back to it, though oft it lay abandoned, near-forgotten in a ditch, till I would come back and pick it up and wipe it off again.
It's been good having you all. Those who reviewed heretofore were, - not including my extremely gracious guests:
Stein the Tenth.
Dragonrider's Fury – or formerly, ThatGuyWhoAlwaysSignsHisCommentsWithA":-D".
TheLastCookie23.
Kirika.
Obliviousbushtit.
ChaMeleonNinja812.
Markvg241.
Knightlawn.
Anonymous Noob the 2nd.
susanne skjoldedvardsen.
Meraki7734.
Thank you, so much.
And so it was in the last days of March that Stulte drew near the waters and the island of which Forster – Crimson now – had spoken, the high cliffs and long spine of it visible from dozens of miles away, and he used the wind to bring him to it, the wind created by the warm sun shining on his back.
There were wispy blue tendrils of smoke, curling upwards from the western end of the island; a wood fire, and that meant men. Would Ocean live in a place like that? Had they killed her?
Another island he knew near this place, nearer rather than farther – perhaps she had gone to that one in his winter absence. But this was Forster's island, and he knew what he was doing.
Success will find you in the depths of despair.
So he did a wingover, passing the cliffs where the breakers crashed, the land not yet pardoned by the sea, glided around and above it, saw the clearing and the line of firs, the rolling terrain carpeted with junipers. By the beachhead he swirled in the air, saw the tiny, cottage-like shelter of men in the lee of a great gray rock, saw at least one inhabitant looking up at him.
A man – but only one, only one, and then out of the trees burst another Nadder – but not the color of his Ocean. It sprung and shadowed the man beneath it with its wing, and perhaps he was witnessing a death, but no, the dragon pranced about on the ground, having not seen him.
He had seen those scales before, somewhere, sometime.
No!
He laughed aloud – it was true, it was really true! - his hunt over and done and gone, forever!
And floating on the air currents was another dragon, blue scales glinting in the sunlight, and then she landed in a clearing in the forest, Stulte not far behind.
Down went his talons, and thumped upon the firm ground of a knoll.
"Ocean? Is that really you?"
She turned, and all she did was stare, for that was all she was able.
She looked almost as she had when he'd last seen her, thought Stulte, though her scales were brighter, and she was taller than she'd been. She was everything he'd remembered her to be and more: her features sharpened by adulthood, and yet more graceful.
And she was probably wondering where he was, why he hadn't come back sooner, and he felt that it was his fault.
"I can… I can explain – the storm was really really bad and I lost track of you and I couldn't find you again and I spent all summer and fall and winter looking for you but then the weather got cold and – and -"
"You're here, aren't you?" she said, interrupting his babbling. "That is enough."
"You're taller than I remember," said Stulte, admiring the way her scales shone in good weather and in bad. Today just so happened to be good.
"And so are you," said she.
"I blinked and you changed," he said, and smiled, and then remembered he hadn't polished his teeth or his scales or anything. Ocean caught his self-awareness.
"You look like you went through more than I could imagine. For me."
He chuckled again. Oh, the impossibility of it all. Forster was right! - had always been right.
"I did, and a lot looks like it's happened since I've been away,"
"Nayla made it out," said Ocean, and she waved her head to the younger dragon; mature enough to let Stulte rejoin Ocean without interruption and childish enough to do a jig.
"And we found two men," said Nayla, giving a wing to one brown-headed adolescent and the tracks of another. Tracks. A golden-haired human vanished into the trees at a walk, and Stulte could still hear it muttering. "One's temperamental."
"Eccentric friends," said Stulte, and: "I'll take it."
If Ocean didn't mind them, he didn't mind them either. He went on. "So you mentioned you crashed. . ."
"Well I shouldn't have," said Ocean. "The weather had better be good this year or I'm taking us south, where the temperature gets above freezing on spring nights and the fall storms don't unleash sudden life-changing downdrafts."
The weather, though amicable, made no promises.
"I should've waited to take us through," said Stulte. So careless. "It made sense at the time."
"So do most bad ideas, and maybe even some good ones."
And Stulte remembered how he had left his home and his good family and all that he had known on a whim.
"Her Ugliness was a Tyrant," he said now, "I know now, I should've figured it out sooner but…" The trappings of youth. "You got it through your head long before I did."
And Ocean looked out across the muddy gravel beds, bedraggled with the leaves of yesteryear, the trees, blossoming with the buds of tomorrow; the silver sands that gleamed at the little shores with the blood of the waters that bore her name; the great cliffs, majestic at sunrise and sunset, and said: "Out here we are free."
Stulte touched her with one wing. Who could argue with that?
There would be challenges, perhaps even a rift between them, but he had overcome the greatest adversity of his life today and he was on top of the world.
Afternoon wound down into evening, a quiet evening for the momentous happening the day had witnessed, golden light pouring down its rare blessings from the sky and sparkling brilliantly from the sea, so that a white lane seemed to shimmer away from the sun and lap at his feet, while the brown-headed boy (it was a boy, he was told) lay on the tiny dunes, fishing and listening, for now was a good time for both.
"Will we ever have children?" asked Stulte, looking out to the horizon before he raised the subject.
"I'll be an honorary godmother if you do," said Nayla. "The fun aunt, though the golden-haired girl here looks petrified enough at the three of us."
Ocean bobbed her tail at her friend's silliness. "Are you ready for the responsibility?"
"I know just where to raise them."
"And they wouldn't take after their father's adventurous tendencies?"
Stulte chuckled. "I already have myself to keep in check. How could I ever manage a son?"
But already he knew what he wanted.
"Nothing would make me more proud."
That humans and dragons would grow close was never an inevitable thing; both sides could have ignored each other, or easily come to blows over a conflict of ideals, an inability to communicate. That even they had stopped to look at each other for a moment and taken a time to think about the similarities between them instead of the ugly differences was a great stroke of luck.
So it was that three deadly nadders shared the same encampment as Hiccup and Astrid; went on the same hunts, practiced their marks on the same tree stumps and walked in the same earthy mud, and, so it was that Astrid shooed Nayla away for making a mudhole of the little alcove in which she went about her daily life. It was comical then, to see the blonde-haired girl prod away a great beast three or four times her height, and it would be equally comical, Nayla figured, if she were to give a prank in return.
The means came about in this way.
"So there I was," Ocean had said the evening before, "with her dangling off my snout, shouting and yelling at me for some reason as if her breakfast had gone down wrong."
"For some reason," agreed Nayla, eyes sparkling. "One can never be too sure with breakfasts," and: "That must've been funny."
"Not to her, so I let her down," said Ocean. "You wouldn't happen to be planning something like that, would you?"
And Nayla had said: "You wound me."
But the conversation had been a seed in the back of her mind, one that refused to go away.
So while Stulte and Ocean talked about Ireland and old acquaintances and what their friends and their parents might be doing (and how much they missed them), Nayla devised a plan. Maybe not the best plan, maybe a plan with less foresight than if it had been formed by a blind yak, but a plan nonetheless.
It was only three days after Stulte had arrived that she put it into action.
The morning dawned clear and chipper, the sun's light peering through gaps in the clouds, clouds now more puffy cottontails than the rarefied layers of gray or the wispy ice trails which had defined the weather for so long; the perfect conditions for a flight.
Astrid (for that was her name) had wholly recovered now, and oft she would walk around the eastern end of the island on leather boots and wearing her patched and re-patched jacket, and it was on one of these occasions that Nayla found her.
"Oh, it's you again," said she; not that Nayla could understand her.
And Nayla plucked her up gently with her teeth, let Astrid punch her in the chin until it got annoying, then flipped the girl onto a wing and shunted her onto dragonback. To the girl's credit, the panic ceased quickly, as if she'd gotten used to so many things by now that this was merely a matter of course.
And that was exactly what Astrid thought.
She hung onto Nayla's spines for dear life at first, eyes screwed shut to eclipse the yawning gap of nothingness to the ground a very long way down, her bow tangled in its straps as she wished off what seemed to be a very bad dream, till she cautiously popped her head offside of the dragon's long, yellow neck and looked beneath, and then life on the earth became the bad dream. The view from the hilltop was nothing compared to this vista; the sword-shaped island laid out in the sea with a handle like a billy club, a tiny wisp of dirty teal wood smoke reaching up and disappearing into the sky and giving the air a faintly acrid aroma.
The cliffs that had formerly reached up to the heavens now seemed glued to their foundations, majestic when the dragon swooped along the crags facing the light and their shadow danced a blur along the rocky coast where gulls called and the spray ran off the rocks in glimmering rivulets, their shadow, the speck against the sun's rays of Nayla, the cutting edge of her wing that bled the air and the girlish figure perched perilously atop as the air fought to rip her from her seat.
Then it was up, up up up to the fluffy clouds that curled about the dragon's wingtips like smoke whirls, and the mist felt cool against her skin and her hair, a golden quiff fluttering as the dragon flicked its tail and rolled upside-down and downside-up, till her head pitched back and she faced the glittering waves a hundred, a thousand feet below, pressed into the dragon-scales by an unseen force.
Nayla leveled out and they glided around the island in a lazy turn, till the dragon touched down with a thump that permeated her very being, let her down, dizzy, on one wing and gave her what might've been a smile that said 'You're welcome'.
Hiccup went into camp that afternoon with three haddock slung over his shoulder and a rabbit tucked under his arm, saw Astrid sitting dazed with no quarry in hand and sat down to warm his hands by the fire. Either the story would spill out of her on its own accord or her lips would be sealed, and until he gaged her mood he was in little hurry to provoke it out of her.
Astrid murmured something and Hiccup cocked an ear, flicked up eyes and saw two of the dragons fluffing about in the trees, going on excitedly in what must be that language of theirs.
"I went flying today," said Astrid.
"Pardon?"
"I went flying today," she said again, in a stronger voice.
Hiccup took this in stride, carved his catch with paring slices of the trusty old knife now that his fingers were pleasantly aglow and he could make himself useful.
"Are you alright?"
"Unhurt," said she, "except at the heartstrings."
"It wouldn't do to die of excitement," said Hiccup, remembering how the first dragon had hung him upside-down by his trousers. He still had a bruise from the toothed grip, and his voice was wry whenever he spoke of it.
He shifted and the wet ground squelched beneath his boots, the sparse brown grass spersed with patches of black earth and dirty sand grains.
"It was the yellow one. Plucked me up while I was hunting like that, tossed me on its back as if I were the quarry and leaped into the air."
"I should watch out for sudden kidnapping by dragon," said Hiccup, ensconced by the cool salted air. "Duly noted."
Coifs of last year's grass rippled in accord with the leaves titching in the woodpile; a cord now, and with a slanting roof that molted away the rain in brooks and kept fuel and woman from getting soaked, a tiny slice of civilization.
What would the shed look like from the air? She hadn't noticed.
"You must've liked it," said Hiccup, interrupting the reverie, "or you'd be fuming right now."
"It was an experience," said Astrid.
"I would've thought she was going to eat me."
"I knew I'd give her a bigger beating than I was worth."
"Kicked her in the jaw a few times?"
"Yep."
Hiccup finished with one haddock, moved on with the next, knowing the irony of dicing a fish to which his name paid homage. Then he stopped and laid back. "Everything we thought we knew about dragons is wrong."
"Then why -"
"Exactly, though we can do a great deal about it while we're stuck on this island with little way of getting home."
They both figured they might fly home on the dragons, but -
"Kill on sight," said Astrid, and Hiccup pursed his lips.
"That was what I was thinking too."
And what was the chance they'd go home instead of being taken to Ireland or somesuch on the back of a being that had a mind of its own?
"We could build a ship," suggested Hiccup, and: "Didn't I think of that before?"
"If we're stuck on this place for years on end," said Astrid.
A not-so-comfortable silence.
"If I asked nicely, the dragon'd give me a ride?" asked Hiccup.
"Stormfly, the second arrival or the third?"
The boy shrugged, ascribed a thoughtful look at the endearing lock of hair that mussed over his face and parted the strands with the knife till his vision was clear again.
"The third, cause he's a guy, the way he looks at Stormfly and she looks at him. It's obvious. We ought to give him a name."
They waited, till presently the blue Nadder in question came overhead, and then Hiccup waved, the great winged lizard making one, two descending orbits around camp before he flared and a ton of weight touched down on a boulder with all the impact of a dropped feather. Of all the expressions he could've had this one was bashful, as if somebody else had encouraged him to do it with an officious grin neither asked for nor greatly received.
Hiccup gazed up bravely at a living thing a score times his weight, shivered. The beach was endowed now with the quality that had marked it in the earliest days; a surreal tinge which made it hard to accept what was going on as truth, as reality, as anything other than a dream.
Climbing up by the spines, he felt a power in those scales; a great force dangerous and constrained by more than animal whim.
His ascent was rather more pedestrian than Astrid's, if a sudden leap into the air could be called pedestrian, yet the jump-beat caught him by surprise and he ducked, expecting the wind to take his head off his neck, which it didn't, though his fingers dug into the minute chinks in the scale and his ragged old shirt billowed and lost threads. Presently, getting a feel for this unfamiliar dragon, he sat up and gazed around.
The earth would never seem the same; majestic it was, the long shadow reaching for leagues until it ceased at the sharp boundary between dark and light, and this mighty island was yet swallowed up by the sea so that it became a mite upon the surface of the World. He shrank beneath the unblinking glare of the sun's rays against ocean waves that opened a floodgate through his eyes and rushed a torrent through the gap destined for his soul.
Beauty, yet beauty man had not yet been allowed to see.
Stormfly swept alongside, parting the stiff air with the thin leading edge of her wings, banking and sinking beneath him till she rose on his right, and she said something, though he had little idea what, and the dragon at his palms spoke back, perhaps to the effect of "I feel like a pack animal."
And this was exactly what the dragon had said, though Hiccup did not know it, would ponder the language for much of his life.
A slow bank brought them over the guard of the longsword; the headlands which protruded into the sea and were splattered by the breakers for intruding on what belonged to the water, as if the ocean wished to reach up and reclaim this place.
He shivered, the way a foundation which had been so solid became ephemeral.
The dragon had no need of him; that much was clear. There was little bond of friendship and mutual reliance to be shared, only collective respect, for here he was a burden to these graceful creatures.
If only he could design a machine that could fly -
But that was a thought for later. For now he let the sights fill him to the brim, till finally the dragon dipped a wingtip beneath the taut horizon and sliced a path through the invisible, sustaining essence, drawing near to the sand and swiftly cutting above the beach, flaring the descent with a strong beat before there was the heavy click and scratch of claws meeting stone and a thump, like the thump that cascaded through his body when he jumped down from the loft to the upstairs floor back at Berk.
Now the strength fled from his muscles, and when the dragon courteously offered him a wing to save him the fall he did little more than slide down limp and stumble to the rock, the hairs on his arms standing up like the brush of a little meadow on white skin that had lost little of its paste with the sun.
And seeing this Stulte chuckled and flew off and remarked to Nayla a little later that the boy looked more than a little worse for wear.
So the end of their coexistence drew near, whether Hiccup knew it or not, for the dragons grew restless on the small island and wished an away as they had before, and Ocean grew more pensive whenever she came into camp, for she knew she would be going soon, though, unwittingly, she had left an indelible mark upon the two young consciences hardly erodible by the passage of time nor wounded by the culture from which they had come.
Ocean took to the air more often now, would wing away and fly a lap around the horizon to rebuild her endurance, the little dot marking her existence a hard pick for dragon eyes and lost to the blue-green swells for all but Astrid, who remarked – on calm days – a little speck on the taut line that separated their place from the rest of the world, perhaps a boat, yet moving faster than any boat, and then the truth would come to her and she would laugh and wave on till she lost sight of it and went back to building up the smoker.
"Will you come with us to Ireland?" asked Ocean of Nayla on that day, Nayla having joined her on the wheel spoked on Sword.
And Ocean fluttered and did a half roll this way and that.
"I might go south," said Nayla. "The weather."
"There's a south in Ireland," said Ocean. "It's the ends of the earth practically."
"But does it have nice weather?"
On the horizon they saw a white dot passing by, going north, a reminder that other men existed besides the two stranded on the isle. They turned away from it and orbited closer to the shores.
"Oh, you'd have to ask Stulte for that."
"Maybe I will. Make a home, live nearby, come and visit every so often and see how the family's doing."
This time it was Nayla that did the half roll.
"You go and say that as if we already have children," said her friend.
"I wouldn't mind being an aunt."
"Don't want to bother raising a set yourself?"
"Ha! No. If they all had my temperament I wouldn't be able to control the little munchkins."
They both smiled and went on.
Goodbye, when it came, was heartfelt though it was nonverbal. Somehow the humans knew, even before Ocean landed, that this was the last time they would see each other for a long time, perhaps even forever, though they would remember the countenances of the dragons and the dragons would remember the faces of Hiccup and Astrid even for that time.
A hum, a scale-scratch, a playful nip, and then they were off, making a great circle around Sword in a final salute, till finally they banked and headed to the east, their shapes bobbing in a line till they became dots, and then specks, till they were swallowed up by the swells and they were really gone.
"We're alone on this island now," said Hiccup.
"Maybe for the first time," came my words. "I can't believe I miss them."
"They were endearing to both of us," said Hiccup. "I miss them too."
I lay awake that night, my mind in a loop, unable to remove itself from the image of a dragon giving a toothy grin, and of the ground as it appeared from high above, from the sky, where I did not belong, seeing the isle in its entirety and wondering how we'd spent a whole winter on that rock. Blessed was sleep when it came, and blessed was the morning when it came, the earth blue and the sky dark and the clouds red and purple mosaics.
Food was no longer a struggle to obtain, and breakfast was almost… normal, so much so that I stopped chewing for a moment when I felt a wave of nostalgia. How long had I been here, that merely eating in the morning brought back memories of when I had sat here before, instead of memories of sitting beside my brother in preparation for the day's chores in Berk?
"Do you think we'll be castaways forever?" I asked, when the meal was done.
"I hope not," said Hiccup. "Some ship ought to come along sometime and take us home. If one doesn't, and if the dragon doesn't let you ride her again. . ."
He trailed off.
"There's something I wanted to say in the event of that happening."
"What?"
"Well, it wasn't… um. I guess it's not important. A raft?"
And somehow I knew that that was not what he'd been wanting to say, but there was no way of knowing what it'd been, and so I left the subject. "Not big enough I don't think, and we can't finish anything bigger than that before the winter storms. A sloop?"
"Yeah," said Hiccup. He went to the beach and knelt in the sand, his hands clenching to it in balls, though it seeped through his fingers. "Suppose we do stay two years."
"If we stay we stay," I said. "I like being in control of my fate, but…"
Hiccup finished the thought. "Maybe this is out of our hands."
"After all we've been through."
Hiccup whispered something.
"Yes?"
He said it again, still quietly.
"I love you."
And then I realized how much I did too. And then I saw something on the horizon. "Is it?"
"What?"
"Sail."
"You… want me to sail?"
"I see a sail."
"It's probably a white petrel," said Hiccup, but he leaned forward nonetheless and held his hand over his brow. Then he stood. "It is a sail!"
"If that captain passes us by - !"
"Put some leaves on the fire. Boughs, pinecones, anything for some smoke," said Hiccup. The morning was no longer contemplative.
The cavalry was here.
Soon the fire poured out billows of blue-gray smoke, and ashes and sparks spit like droplets do from a pot of boiling water, twice as hot and twice as red, and every so often I would stop in the middle of gathering brush to look at the white point, now a square instead of a mere round dot, and in the brush would go and up the soot would come.
"Do you think it's getting closer?" asked Hiccup. "It's not like our hopes and dreams ride on it or anything."
The boat drifted left, passing on the eastern side of us, towards the sun and away from Sword.
"They might think we're a settlement," I said.
"Smallest settlement I ever heard of."
Then the smoke thinned and it was back to work setting the fire to roaring.
Like a dove the sail hove; white and pure, bearing the bough of hope and the promise of salvation to weary hearts, the very symbol of the lifelines of civilization, of freedom in open sea and resuscitation to land. Close at hand was the fulfillment of the trust we'd held in our home, the faith in our rescue which had driven us on, day after day, and provided a rock onto which our spirit clasped to in the better times and the worse.
The ship saw the roiling water of the waves breaking over the rocky shoals, hesitated, spun around till its hull was broadside on to the true wind, and men scurried up the mast and balled up the sails in running ropes, the better to proceed on oar power alone. Then she circled like a turtledove in search of its nest, giving the cragged banks a wide berth so as not to run aground because of the suction.
I ran down to the beach and stood in the soft sand. What a shabby figure I must outline, my boots lopsided and my clothes patched time and time again with animal fur till the material from which it was made was choked out.
I could see the Vikings now individually, their beards and their axes and their complexions, and one among them stood out as he always had, ruddy of face and shaped like a barrel, his hair red and his helmet-cap perched on the top of his head.
Unreal.
I stood, numb, as they lowered the dingy into the water with a splash, and Stoick rowed double for the excitement.
Hiccup was next to me now, and they took us in and we sat in the middle of the boat, and we sat upright, blinking, hardly comprehending what was happening to us.
"Hiccup!"
Stoick hugged both of us in turn, and his eyes watered when he embraced his son, his young son who had been a boy and was now closer to a man.
Someone reached down their hand and pulled me up into the ship, and then we were clothed and fed and given some time to rest before doubtless they would ask us all sorts of things.
I pushed my way to the top deck and leaned on the railing and watched them weigh anchor, watched the sails come down and the island glide away until it was nothing more than a speck on the blue waves, and then it was gone. Hiccup joined me then, deprived of his usual wit, and hove a deep breath.
"We're going home."
