ON WITH THE SHOW!
Nightfall, Part Five
Astrid is having a crisis of faith.
It's nagging at her like an axe with a loose head. Every time she tries to use it, it wobbles. Because dragons are evil – they're malicious predators at best and utterly noxious parasites at worst, but…
It loves him.
Astrid has never imagined that a dragon might care for and protect a human, even one who doesn't know he's human. Surely the creature can tell? He should smell like food to the thing, like an enemy. It must know!
And yet…the way it had let the dragonish boy nuzzle against it, that it had returned the gesture; it had protected him, guarded him; that he could curl up in its paws and be so comfortable around it that he could do something as human as draw even as he petted a fire-blast-spitting monster while it breathed down his neck with its teeth right there…it would only have to have flicked a claw and he would have been bleeding to death! But on the shore when he didn't dare approach her, he'd comforted it, and it had comforted him. He'd been so happy when she'd asked about it; she wonders if he knows how expressive his face is, even under all that ragged hair. Reconstructing the joy in his eyes as she considers it, she wonders, absently, if he really has that many freckles or if most of them are just dirt.
It loves him. It's unthinkable. It reverberates in her head like a broken axe in her hand.
She cannot reconcile that fact with what she has known for sure all her life, and yet she cannot deny it.
She cannot accept that the Night Fury – that tried to blast her to dust and ashes, that roars when she gets too close, that knocked over a tree because she'd climbed into it and seen it and its boy – could be the same as the creature that purrs and wraps the dragonish boy in its wing like a blanket and licks his hair like a kitten. Dragons aren't like that!
Either he'd done something to it, which would be a useful thing to know, or it had done something to him, which she would not put past a dragon.
Astrid wishes she could deal with the boy without the dragon, but they never seem to be far away from each other. She doesn't want to get anywhere near the dragon, but, for a number of reasons, she has already resolved to tame the boy. As she travels back to the village, she starts devising strategies to win his trust and figure out some way to talk to him, keeping an eye out all the while for Terrors, the nasty little lizard-like dragons that like to travel in groups. They're not particularly dangerous on their own, unless you happen to be a squirrel – or, she remembers, Tuffnut – but a flock can mob a human quite badly.
She doesn't actually care about the dragon-boy, not personally, she convinces herself, despite how different and sometimes amusing he is. The many times he's been terrifying or just dangerously impossible have more than cancelled that out. Whether or not he's actually Stoick's lost son isn't particularly important to her, partly because it's so unlikely. Although, it's obvious to her that her mentor truly wishes it to be so, and she thinks he deserves to have his son back if it's possible. (She doesn't think it's possible, not now that she's seen the boy move and act as if he is and has only ever been and only ever will be a dragon.)
It's the potential he represents that interests her. Stoick was right – someone who could control dragons could save their battered tribe.
If she could control him, they could win the war.
It also means she will have to face the Night Fury on a regular basis. Astrid is still disgusted with herself for being afraid of it. She refuses to accept her fear the same way she refuses to accept the way the Night Fury fawns over the dragon-boy. Both are signs that something is truly and fundamentally wrong with her world.
The Viking woman lives in an environment where uncertainty and unpreparedness means injury, loss, or death. She has to be strong enough to lead these people someday. She has to protect them; it isn't what she was born to do, it's more than that. It's a duty she's earned. How can she do that – how can she be worthy of the trust they're all placing in her – if she's afraid of a single dragon?
Going back once was not enough, she realizes. When she slipped out this morning to set out her bait after all but tearing the village apart all over again to find that much paper, she had been relatively sure she wouldn't encounter the dragon – there wasn't much point in setting out bait if what you were hunting saw you do it, and it was a Night Fury, it had to be at least partly nocturnal, right? She'd known – almost – that it wouldn't be watching her, just waiting to scorch her out of existence without warning.
Astrid should feel better about facing it down when she'd tried to give the single piece of paper to the dragon-boy. She hadn't realized he'd be smart enough to know the stack of paper was bait and avoid it. Some hunter she was – she'd underestimated her quarry.
Except she knows that when she had heard that whine and seen the light of the Night Fury's fire crackling in its mouth up close, the only reason she hadn't run had been because she was too scared. She had frozen again as badly – worse! – than when she'd accompanied Stoick to see the impossible pair.
The fear and horror lurks in the back of her mind and the pit of her gut; the moment where her oath never again to run and her fright had combined into absolute panic mocks her. Astrid suspects that the only reason she's still alive is because – to her unconditional disgust and shame – she'd dodged as far as her oath would let her just before her knees had collapsed. She'd given her gods-sworn word not to run from the Night Fury, or any other dragon, ever again, but the only way she'd been able to hold her ground had been to crouch down and wait to die.
That she'd not only lived but discovered a new thing about communicating with the dragon-boy and demon dragon is, she is convinced, the gods' way of amusing themselves with bitter irony.
She's not sure which of them to pin that on, but she has suspicions. Unfortunately, no one with any sense draws the attention of a trickster with a malicious sense of humor, so she swallows her curses and shoulders the blame herself.
She will not let them fly into her life and terrify her in ways she hasn't felt since she was a little girl watching the fires in the sky and hiding from the creature they heralded. Astrid is going to beat the monster and the monster's pet one way or another, and if her chief has ordered her not to fight that creature and its freak then there are other ways to bring down a dragon than hitting it with an axe.
It means facing them. It means communicating. If that's what her duty and the gods demand of her, then that is what Astrid, future chief and guardian of Berk, will do to gain a weapon that could save her people.
Rehearsing their names repeatedly in preparation, she tries to find a version she can pronounce without feeling like she isn't saying anything at all or choking on her own tongue. The boy does seem to respond to the sounds ick-phuh. She can see why Stoick so deeply wants to hear the name Hiccup in there. Most of the sounds are the same, it's just that his pronunciation is so bad. She wonders how he can make so many impossible sounds when he's talking to the dragon – or screaming at her – and not say words in a human language any better.
Maybe if she uses the name Hiccup to and about him often enough, he'll be willing to accept the Norse version and Astrid will feel less like she is trying to cough something tasteless up every time she says it.
The dragon's name gives her more trouble; it's all hisses and clicks, completely devoid of vowel sounds. She tries saying it as three distinct sounds, which is easier: tt, th, ss. That she can manage; it's the closest she can get. Astrid wonders what it means, or if it means anything, turning the noises over and over in her head until, by the time she gets back to the village, they have all blurred together in strange combinations, inextricably merged and refusing to separate into their component sounds no matter how much she tries to make them do so, and she feels as if her head is buzzing with dragon-sounds.
Wanting to replace them with some human voices, she follows the general movement of people up towards the Great Hall. She can hear Stoick holding court even before she climbs the steps to the wide-open door – now there's something she can't do. Astrid is envious of what she thinks of as his chiefing voice, which can be heard over a room full of arguing Vikings and silence them all with a single roar the equal of any dragon's.
Unsurprisingly, the meeting seems to be about the Night Fury lurking on their western shore. People have shown up for this meeting who never show up for clan meetings, ever.
She must have come in by the middle of the meeting; arguments and sub-arguments are already breaking out among the edges of the tribe.
"I don't know who he is," Stoick bellows. He's gone so far as to stand on the seat of his great chair to see over everyone's heads as the unusually large crowd mills around. "He doesn't speak in a way that anyone understands. He could barely tell me his name, and I still don't know if I heard him right."
"But is it your son?" someone demands from the safety of the crowd.
"Are there others?" a woman calls out. Astrid recognizes her voice – her brother had been carried off by dragons and never seen again two years ago. Of course she wants to know.
"What's it doing here?" a third voice demands. "No one's ever seen a Night Fury in the Archipelago before!"
"No one's seen any others," Stoick roars back over the growing din at the woman. "And when Astrid and I find out what they're doing here, we'll tell you! Until then, stay away from the western shore! Understood? I don't want anyone going anywhere near them without my express permission. And if anyone does…"
Stoick casts around for a satisfactory consequence, and finds one. "…I'll throw them in the well!"
There's some laughter, breaking the argumentative mood as the joke – if it is a joke, he may well mean it – spreads across the hall. Over it, Fishlegs calls, "You'll have to fish the twins out of it first!"
"I let them out," Astrid shouts to him, getting involved from her place at the back of the room – it hadn't been worth wading through the mob of oversized Vikings to join Stoick. He'd been holding the floor perfectly well on his own.
Fishlegs stands on his toes, trying to see her, and replies, "They're back in."
Stoick sighs as the room quiets down a bit – the Vikings of Berk can smell a joke coming. "What did they do?" the chief asks resignedly.
"Nothing…well, nothing in particular. I think they decided they liked it and jumped back in themselves. Who knows why the twins do anything?"
Laughter breaks out properly.
Because it causes the maximum amount of chaos and confusion, that's why, Astrid thinks but does not say. If they ever need proof that malicious trickster gods pay attention to Berk every so often, she will point to the twins.
A lesser man would bury his head in his hands – another perfectly good way of dealing with the twins foiled by their blockheaded inability to think past the moment! Stoick doesn't do so, but Astrid suspects he may have sagged a little.
A moment later, something occurs to him. "All right…anyone who goes near that beach, I'll throw them in the well with the twins!"
There's instantly a wholehearted and unanimous if piecemeal chorus of "Yes, Chief!"; "You got it!"; "Sounds good!"; "Off limits, yes sir!"; "Works for me!"
And similar sentiments.
Astrid listens to the rest of the meeting with the dragon-noises still bouncing around her head tumbling into each other like attacking Terrible Terrors. By the time most of the village has cleared out to go and do wherever and whatever they're planning to go and do, she's come up with something in Norse that's close to the sounds that the boy had made. It doesn't make any sense, but then neither do half the names around here.
Stoick has sat down on the edge of a fire pit with a tankard of ale, talking privately to the people who come to him looking for help, reassurance, permission, advice, or just a listening ear. When they've gone, she joins him and waits quietly as he drains the remainder of the ale.
"How did your bait work?" he asks her. She'd told him about her discovery last night as she was tearing around looking for people who would give her paper.
"Not the way I thought it would," Astrid admits. "He may not be able to talk, but he's intelligent. He knew it was bait, Chief. Avoided it completely." She relates the story of how she'd gotten the paper into his hands after all – partly.
She doesn't admit how frightened she was. That is her private shame. "I taught him my name. He can't say it right, but it was close enough that I think he was trying. He said it about the way he says yours. Oh…and I think he might be calling the dragon Toothless," Astrid says thoughtfully, "as a name." If she assumes the sounds have a Norse origin the way Stoick thinks the sound ick-phuh was originally Hiccup, it's the only word with all the right sounds that she can think of to run tt-th-ss back to.
The chief makes a disbelieving sound. "Nonsense. That thing has plenty of teeth."
His deputy shrugs, a movement across the hall catching her eye. "Makes as much sense as 'Fishlegs'," she points out. "Fish don't even have legs."
That makes Stoick laugh just a bit. Viking names almost never make sense if they can help it.
"I want to try talking to him," Astrid tells him decisively. "I think I can do it. If I can get him used to me I might be able to teach him a few words, enough to get on with, anyway. All we really need is for him to understand that we want the dragons to go away. We already know he likes to draw and he likes paper. Maybe there are other things he wants and we can work out a trade." She gets more excited as she presents the plan she developed on the way here, hoping for his approval. "I'm going to gather up some things from around the village and see what he reacts to."
Her mentor reminds her, fairly gently for such a large man who cares so intensely about what he's saying, "Not all, Astrid. Ending the attacks is important. Being able to use him could save a lot of our people's lives. But I need to know who he is…and where his mother is."
Stoick, at least, has decided for himself who the boy is.
"Yes, sir. Of course. I'll try to find that out too."
"Fine. I'll go with you."
"No," Astrid says before she thinks.
He turns a dark and glowering scowl on her that commands her to explain herself, now, and just in case she didn't get the message adds, "That could be my only son down there, Astrid, and I mean to get him back. Explain yourself."
"Um…you're too big," Astrid says reluctantly.
He repeats "Too big," as if he's never encountered the concept before. Maybe he hasn't – who tells a seven-foot-tall Viking warrior chief he's too big to do something he intends to?
"He was scared of me, or at least he and the dragon didn't want me to come too close. I guess I was threatening them. But once I sat down on the ground and I was smaller than him he wasn't as worried. And he approached me all on his own when I was sitting still and trying to draw my map, although I think he was more interested in the drawing than me. You're intimidating, Chief. Let me try."
Stoick doesn't like it, grumbling not unlike the dragon earlier.
"There is something you can do, though," she offers.
"Oh?"
"Can you draw it?"
"Draw what?"
"The dragon that took your wife and son. I know it was twenty years ago, but if you can remember and he recognizes it or even the species then we'll know it really is Hiccup."
"I've never forgotten a scale on that creature," Stoick says grimly. "I can certainly try."
By the next morning Astrid has a large basket full of objects from around the village that she drags off down to the western shore to try out on the dragon-boy and his terrifying companion.
She is gradually getting the idea that she is going to be very familiar with this path.
The shoreline is devoid of dragons when she gets there, so she has plenty of space to spread her things around. Despite really, really wanting to, she has not brought any weapons. If the boy who might have once been named Hiccup is clever enough to spot a potential trap in a stack of paper, then he's definitely clever enough to recognize a weapon, and she has no desire to antagonize his dragon-shadow any more than she already has.
Speaking of…the paper is all gone.
"You did understand," Astrid says, satisfied. She hadn't liked not being able to communicate something as basic as the paper is for you.
Across the sand, she scatters things that might be interesting to a boy who has never really been human – Stoick had told her that his son had been barely six months old when he was taken. There's a small and only slightly warped glass bowl that she had had to beg to borrow (and she owes the owner at least one piece of information about the Night Fury and the boy that she has to tell her first!, which was the price of it for a single day. She suspects the price might go up the longer she retains the bowl).
She's brought a hairbrush from her own home – he's clearly never seen one – and a rope, and a toy cart with big wheels. She has two chicken eggs, and a piece of canvas left over from a new sail that was being made to replace one the dragons had burned a few days ago.
She'd found a completely shapeless lump of glass that is, for some reason, a bright clear blue. She's gone heavily for shiny things, including a bronze wrist cuff with a complex knotted pattern that must have been traded for or stolen – they don't make designs like that here.
Other things include a pair of boots (new-made, never-worn, and borrowed for the day), a small cauldron, a sheep-bladder ball that hasn't gone flat yet and that she borrowed from some children, two beeswax candles, and a whittled figure of a dragon. It's probably the only one in the village not depicted either in agonizing pain or obvious menace, which is why she'd brought it.
The small bundle left in the basket is her lunch, in case she's here all day – nothing more complicated than some bread and cheese and smoked meat, with a flask of clear water to wash out the sea air.
Astrid sets her back against the cliff face in the same place she'd tried to draw a map not long ago and sits down to wait, staring out to sea past her array of curiosities.
After almost an hour and a half she wonders if the boy and the dragon can be still asleep, or if they have slunk away in the night, or if the Night Fury's wing has suddenly and spontaneously healed and they've flown away back to whatever dark corner they came from to begin with. Or off the edge of the world. Whichever. She's patient and in good shape but at some point she's going to have to get up and stretch her legs.
As a prelude to such, she stretches out her legs, scooting away from the cliff a little bit so she can stretch her arms out behind her in turn and lean back.
Her eyes open halfway through this maneuver, as she's facing all but straight up, and to her embarrassment she shrieks in sudden surprise.
The dragon-boy perched on the cliff face far above her tips his head curiously, perhaps because the noise she makes is closer to something a dragon might sound like than anything else he's heard her do.
"How long have you been there?" she demands, knowing even as she does that he doesn't understand the question.
He knows it's a question, though – his head tips the other way in response.
"Uh st-t-t-t-tt," he says, and she recognizes the garbled version of her name he'd managed yesterday. Then his face moves in a way she doesn't understand – he opens his mouth and pushes his tongue half-out, keeping the tip of it behind his teeth, then follows it up with a mishmash of quorks and chattering noises.
Astrid suspects that he's laughing at her.
There's no good way to confirm that, and it wouldn't help if she did. Instead, she swallows her annoyance and presses a hand to her chest both to reinforce the meaning of the word and to catch her breath.
"Yes," she says clearly, and smiles, keeping her lips pressed together to avoid showing her teeth.
The dragon-boy whistles and croons a liquid and incomprehensible response at her. Then he sits back on his heels, raises his head, and shrieks something else. The maneuver looks terrifyingly precarious to Astrid, as the ledge he's balanced on is not very large and he's not holding on to anything beyond the gauntleted hands braced almost in the same space as his booted feet. She wonders where he got those, and then wonders where any of the armor had come from – had he made it?
He gets a reply almost instantly – a complementary sequence of cries from the general direction of the sea-cave now completely hidden from view after the destruction of her climbing tree. The Night Fury, Astrid thinks, and summons up her courage enough to point at the rock fall and say "Toothless?" experimentally.
The boy on the ledge snaps his head down to look at her, a single sharp movement that makes her flinch a little inside. He's so very barely balanced up there. If he falls –
Astrid doesn't even want to think about what the Night Fury will do to her if that happens. She is absolutely sure it will blame her.
"Tt-th-ss!" the dragon-boy cries. The joy and pure love in his tone is obvious, and that expressive face all but glows. He makes the same expression from earlier.
Oh – it's a smile. He's smiling at her.
"Uh st-t-t-t-tt !" His hands are preoccupied with keeping his balance on the little ledge, but as she watches he twists his head to one side agilely and snaps at something on his left shoulder, pulling it free from his scale-coated armor. The dragon-boy shakes the thing in his teeth and she hears a faint rustle. Then he drops it.
On purpose, Astrid realizes immediately – he watches it float down with interest, making a continuous noise that alternates between a stuttering purring sort of sound and a whistling shriek. Or maybe a shrieking whistle. Some combination of the two.
It's one of the pieces of paper she provided him with.
When it hits the ground, Astrid looks between the dragon-boy on the rock and the paper almost at her feet. She reaches for it, and checks with him.
He chirps.
She decides to take that as a yes and picks it up.
One side – the one she sees first, of course – is blank.
Then she turns it over and gasps.
Astrid hasn't seen herself very often. If she's been really over-industrious in polishing her favorite shield she can see her basic outline and if her braid needs redoing.
Still, even in rough charcoal, she recognizes herself.
It's somewhat crumpled and there are bite marks in one corner from the dragon-boy's teeth, but the image is still clear. Picture-Astrid is kneeling on a rock – this rock, she figures out immediately – leaning over something – her map – with a stick in her hand – drawing. She can even make out a bit of the expression on picture-Astrid's face, which is concentrating intensely as she focuses on the picture-paper. She's got a hand twined in her braid as if pulling on it, which she only does when truly intensely annoyed and doesn't think anyone's watching – she should have grown out of that bad habit ages ago.
"Oh my gods," she says involuntarily.
"Uh st-t-t-t-tt," the dragon-boy above her head says smugly.
She tears her eyes away from the picture just in time to see him execute one of those impossible leaps from tiny lip of rock to a scrubby tree, barely more than a bush, growing out of the rock wall. He only stays there for a moment, just as long as it takes for him to get his feet under him, before vaulting down to a boulder, careening agilely to the beach a safe distance away from her, completely ignoring her menagerie of objects.
When he's on solid ground, he lifts his head and calls out a long and complex chain of sounds, bouncing up and down and around and across a scale with no known connection to anything else Astrid's ever heard.
The Viking woman has a good idea what it might mean, though, at least some of it. Thus prepared, she holds her ground as the Night Fury slithers over the edge of the cave's mouth and down the remnant of the avalanche that they can climb but no human can. It keeps one sharp green eye on her all the way down.
As does the boy, she realizes, still clutching her picture. They seem to have decided to go around her for now.
She watches, still in utter disbelief, as the boy crouched on the beach by the splashing water wraps both arms around the dragon's neck and nuzzles his face into a point under its jaw. She thinks she can hear him talking to it, but can't tell. Based on what she's heard from him already, he probably is.
The dragon shuffles slightly, bringing its hindquarters under it so it can sit down, then uses that improved stability to wrap one foreleg around the dragon-boy's back and pull him into what Astrid can only describe as an honest-to-goodness hug.
The unlikely pair stays there for a few minutes; scraps of sound drift over to Astrid, but nothing clear. When the dragon-boy eventually pulls away, he flaps his left hand at the black dragon in an obviously beckoning gesture, whistling.
They wade into the seawater and stay there a while. She can't tell if they're swimming, or fishing, or just floating.
Astrid is having a very weird day, and it's not yet noon. She looks again at the charcoal picture in her hands, stunned all over again. He must have drawn it from memory – he certainly hadn't had any paper when she'd been sitting like that.
But why had he…
She tries to think like a dragon-boy and doesn't even know how to begin. She knows how to fight dragons, not act like one. She knows how to think like a dragon only to the point of predicting where the one in front of her might strike next. Astrid has no idea what dragons do when they're not attacking her people.
So maybe she should think like a human…
Maybe she should think like a child.
Why would he give her a drawing? A picture of her drawing on paper…
"Huh," she says finally, to herself more than the boy in the ocean. He and the Night Fury now seem to be doing their very best to fish by jumping at things. It seems to be working, though, because the boy has climbed to the saddle on the dragon's back and is eating something raw and possibly, she thinks, squinting, still moving.
"You're welcome, Hiccup."
To be continued.