Dogsbreath stood, pawing the deck in anticipation.
"KILL HIM, DOGSBREATH!" shouted Snotface Snotlout, Dogsbreath's friend and fellow bully.
Snotlout LOATHED Hiccup.
"I will," grinned Dogsbreath.
"This will be a massacre," hissed Dogsbreath's dragon Seaslug, an ugly great Gronckle with a pug nose and a mean temper. "My master will tear this Hiccup limb from limb and throw him to the gulls."
"D-d-don't bet on it," said Toothless, without a lot of conviction, and he gave Seaslug a sharp nip on the tail before scrambling for cover underneath one of the rowing benches.
Hiccup edged forward towards the hulking figure of Dogsbreath, swallowing hard. He tried to remember what The Hero's Handbook had said about swordfighting an opponent much bigger than yourself.... Something about ducking about, letting the enemy exhaust himself, using his own body weight against him....
22 23 "D-d-don't let him c-c-catch you!"advised Toothless, appearing for a moment from underneath the bench and then diving back into his hiding place as Seaslug lunged at him with a crunching crash of razor-sharp teeth.
Hiccup stepped forward lightly and calmly, looking Dogsbreath straight in the mean, piggy little eyes.
Dogsbreath grinned nastily at him, and aimed a huge flailing swipe at his head.
Hiccup ducked.
"Yay, HICCUP!" cheered Fishlegs. "That's the way to do it!"
Dogsbreath looked rather surprised. He swiped at Hiccup again, even more violently.
And again Hiccup ducked.
This time he was so quick about it that Dogsbreath staggered and nearly lost his footing.
"HIC-CUP! HIC-CUP! HIC-CUP!" yelled most of the boys. (Hiccup was popular with the other boys at the time because a month before he had single-handedly killed a Sea Dragon that threatened the whole Tribe.)* * See How to Train Your Dragon, the first volume of Hiccup's memoirs.
24 Hiccup felt a little bubble of happiness somewhere inside him.
This was great.
Now Dogsbreath was getting cross. He snorted furiously, and lunged forward straight at Hiccup's heart. Hiccup dodged nimbly out of the way and ... slipped on a slimy piece of the deck and ... Dogsbreath reached out one meaty fist and ... grabbed Hiccup by the back of the shirt and caught him.
This was not so great.
"Okay," thought Hiccup. "So he's caught me. What do I do now then?"
Toothless burst out from underneath the bench and hovered for a second or two, three inches from Hiccup's nose, shrieking, "S-S-SUBMIT! S-S-SUBMIT! S-S-SUBMIT!" at the top of his voice before zooming back to safety.
"I can't submit," said Hiccup indignantly.
[Image: Hiccup.] 25 "I'm supposed to be this Pirate Hero. Pirates don't submit."
"Oh goodee," said Dogsbreath happily before whacking Hiccup briskly on the helmet a few times with his sword. Hiccup tried to stop him, but each time he was too slow to protect himself.
"This is just embarrassing," thought Hiccup as Dogsbreath's sword clanged off his helmet for the third time. "Time to try a few moves."
He had a go at the Destroyer's Defense. He could see himself in his mind's eye, elegant, stylish. But when his brain tried to tell his arm what to do, his arm responded in this clumsy, fumbling way, and Dogsbreath grabbed hold of the fancy Swiftpoint Scaremaker and threw it over the side into the ocean.
There were hoots and jeers from the watching Vikings.
Fishlegs and Toothless winced. "Toothless can't l-l-look," moaned Toothless, with his wings over his eyes. "S-S-SUBMIT, you stupid human ."
[Image: A pirate.] 26 "What are you going to do, Hiccup?" sneered Snotlout. "Fight him with your bare hands? Or SUBMIT?"
"No way," said Hiccup stubbornly.
Dogsbreath moved in for the kill with a few breath-quenching jabs to the stomach. "Oh for THOR'S SAKE, Hiccup," yelled Gobber in exasperation.
"You're fighting like an infant. You're not going to get anywhere by lying on the floor groaning. Bite him on the ankle or SOMETHING."
"He's USELESS," crowed Snotlout gleefully. "Hiccup the Useless, didn't I tell you? All that Dragon-Killing last month was just a fluke. USELESS, USE-LESS, USE-LESS...."
Boys are very fickle. Hiccup's popularity vanished on the spot. They started chanting, "USE-LESS, USE-LESS, USE-LESS...."
The dragons joined in eagerly.
"Scratch his eyes out!" screeched Brightclaw.
"Tear his wings off!" howled Fireworm.
"S-s-submit," moaned Toothless.
With a snort of satisfaction, Dogsbreath threw away his own sword and got down to the business he really enjoyed, hand-to-hand combat.
Dogsbreath was 27 an artist in his own sweet way. He liked to get the feel of his victim's flesh in his bare hands, like a sculptor with his clay.
Dogsbreath began by sitting on Hiccup, to the huge cheers of the rest of the boys. He followed this by scrunching Hiccup's face into the deck and twisting his ear at the same time.
"Oh suffering scallops," said Fishlegs, shutting his eyes. "I can't watch this. YOU CAN STILL DO IT, HICCUP!" he shouted. "USE HIS BODY WEIGHT AGAINST HIM,!"
"And just how," inquired Hiccup out of one corner of his mashed mouth, "am I supposed to do that with him sitting on top of me?"
While everybody was concentrating on watching this massacre, Snotlout sneakily picked up Dogsbreath's sword and removed the wooden case.
"SUBMIT! SUBMIT! SUBMIT!" yelled Dogsbreath, gleefully bouncing up and down.
"No," said Hiccup.
"Maybe ickle Hiccup is going to start cwying," crowed Snotlout.
"USE-LESS, USE-LESS, USE-LESS," chanted the boys.
28 [Image: A pirate and a dragon.] 29 Toothless emerged from beneath Wartihog's bench. He looked left and right for any sign of Seaslug. And there, only inches away, was Dogsbreath's gigantic quivering bottom. It was too tempting. Toothless unlocked his jaws as wide as they would go.
As his name suggests, Toothless was entirely fang free. But his hard little gums could slice through the shell of an oyster and crush the claws of a crab....
He leapt forward and BIT that wobbling rear end as hard as he could.
"OOOOOOOOW!" howled Dogsbreath, letting go of Hiccup, who scrambled out of his way as quickly as he could.
Now Dogsbreath was really, really mad.
He grabbed hold of his sword, not realizing or caring that it no longer had a wooden case on it, and lunged wildly at Hiccup. Hiccup leapt out of the way, but the sharp point of the blade pierced his shirt and tore a neat slice out of it.
"Uh-oh," said Hiccup, suddenly realizing he was in Big Trouble.
"Dogsbreath, your sword has lost its ..."
But Dogsbreath wasn't listening. He gave a roar of maddened fury, and made a great slashing swipe at Hiccup's head. Hiccup ducked and the wickedly sharp 30 blade buried itself in the mast of the boat, slicing the top off one of the horns on Hiccup's helmet in the process.
"STOP!" cried Hiccup from behind the mast, as Dogsbreath tugged furiously at his sword to pull it free. "Your sword has lost its case, you're going to KILL ME,,.," But Dogsbreath was so angry he could not hear a thing. He gave a great heave with his mighty muscles and the sword jerked free so suddenly that the poor brute sat down heavily on his bottom, just on that tender spot where Toothless had taken a big chunk out of it.
"YOOOOOOOOOW!" yelled Dogsbreath.
"HA HA HA HA HA!" laughed the boys.
[Image: Storm.] Dogsbreath staggered to his feet, as mad as a harpooned whale. He threw himself at Hiccup with great bellows of fury. Although Hiccup managed to avoid him again, this time he slipped over in the process. Dogsbreath pinned him down with 31 one giant hand, and he lifted his sword above his head with the other.
"DON'T DO IT!" shouted Hiccup desperately, but Dogsbreath's eyes were full of the joys of battle and he began to swing the blade down towards Hiccup's chest.
[Image: Storm.] And that would have been the end of Hiccup if it hadn't been for the extraordinarily lucky 32 coincidence that at that very moment the ship lurched queasily upwards on the next giant wave, rolled for a second on the brim, and plunged hysterically downwards ... straight onto a large floating object that instantly holed the boat.
"Abandon ship!" shrieked Fireworm, and thirteen dragons rose into the air like gigantic bats. (Dragons are only loyal to their Masters up to a certain point.) The ship split into two pieces on the spot, spilling the Vikings out into the sea. It then sank, with a sigh of relief, to the bottom of the ocean bed in about ten seconds flat.
One minute Hiccup was in the not-so-loving embrace of Dogsbreath the Duhbrain, the next he was doing the doggy paddle in water so breath-quenchingly, spine-numbingly, heart-stoppingly cold that it was difficult to think of questions like: "What in Woden's name do we do now?"
Something landed with a bump on the top of Hiccup's helmet. Toothless's eyes peered into his, upside down.
"N-n-nice fighting, Master," he said. "N-n-now, where's my l-l-lunch?"
"You may not have noticed," said Hiccup, 33 swallowing a big chunk of seawater as the weight of Toothless pushed him under the surface, "but I'm having a bit of a crisis here. Now flap off, will you, and see what's happened to Fishlegs. He can't swim."
Hiccup could swim but the waves were mountainously rough. He really had to struggle to keep afloat.
Toothless returned a moment or so later looking anxious.
"F-f-fishlegs d-d-definitely needs you help, Master, B-b-big trouble.
Follow me."
And he disappeared again.
Hiccup was just thinking, "Well, I don't know what in Valhalla he thinks I can do about it," when a miracle occurred.
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