5 WHO IS THE MAN ON THE WHITE DRAGON

5. WHO IS THE MAN ON THE WHITE DRAGON? Stoick the Vast was Hiccup's father, and the Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe. He was a man built on generous lines, with a belly like a battleship, and a beard like an electrocuted Afghan hound. He had been having a peaceful after-lunch nap in the surprising warmth of the afternoon, when he was rudely awoken by a couple of his Warriors chattering on about a fire up on the Highest Point... and how the Pirate Training Program was up there herding reindeer. Stoick immediately feared the worst. Stoick wasn't normally of a fearful nature, but his fat-her-inlaw, Old Wrinkly, who was a soothsayer, had been warning Stoick for WEEKS that the omens were saying that Hiccup was in danger. Stoick had laughed this off, for Stoick was not a great thinker or worrier, even though for a small,

skinny boy who didn't amount to much, Hiccup DID seem to get into an extraordinary number of dangerous situations.* "CALL OUT THE FIRE BRIGADE!" bellowed Stoick, jumping out of bed and leaping for the door, dressed only in a rather fetching pair of hairy underpants that his wife Valhallarama had brought back for him from one of her Quests abroad. When you live side by side with dragons you have to have an extremely efficient Fire Brigade System. Even though most dragons TRY not to fire-breathe unnecessarily, the hunting and riding dragons were always accidentally setting fire to the furniture or the thatch, and on these occasions the Fire Brigade could be on the scene in two minutes flat. The Fire Brigade consisted of a whole fleet of Water Dragons, so called because their stomachs can distend to carry extraordinary amounts of water, ridden by Fire Warriors specifically trained in fighting fires. It took a little longer than two minutes on this occasion, for the Highest Point was some flying distance away from Hooligan Village, but within a relatively short space of time, the entire Brigade was there, the dragons swooping down into the seas below to scoop off huge amounts of water from the sea, and then shooting it out onto the blaze. Their efforts were pretty hopeless, of course,

because this wasn't a tiny little matter of a hunting dragon setting fire to a bedspread, but an entire burning mountainside, and by the time Stoick arrived, half naked on the back of his riding dragon, the fire was flaming as strongly as ever. Gloomily watching the blaze was a bedraggled

line of pupils from the Pirate Training Program, blackened and unrecognizable through the smoke. "Hiccup?" stammered Stoick, dismounting from his riding dragon, and wiping the smeariness from the face of the nearest boy in the pathetic hope that the soot-smothered young plug-ugly might be his son. "WHERE IS HICCUP? " Sadly, Wartihog shook his head and pointed a grubby arm at the mighty blaze in front of them. "NO!" shouted Stoick, tearing his beard, staring at the blazing woods. Out of the fire ran the Windwalker as fast as he could, and he came to a stop among the waiting Vikings. Hasty hands scrabbled at the cloak, unwrapping it with such speed that Hiccup fell out on to the heather. He found himself looking straight up into the anxious face of his father, Stoick the Vast, and the heads of several other Warriors. Behind those heads was the bright blue sky, and farther back even than that was the flaming Highest Point, a great funeral pyre for Goliath and the reindeer. But not for Hiccup—this time. As Hiccup tumbled onto his back, his helmet fell off and a hot, cross Toothless flew out.

"Mean, mean Master!" scolded Toothless. "Hiccup VERY LUCKY nice, kind Toothless not do a pee-pee on his head!" But then the little dragon forgot his anger immediately when he caught sight of the glorious burning bonfire. "OOOOOOhhhh, FIRE!" squealed Toothless in excitement, and he flapped off hurriedly to play in the flames. "He's alive!" bellowed Stoick the Vast in astonished delight. "How are you alive?" was Stoick's next, baffled question. Hiccup pointed to something standing quietly some way beyond Stoick's shoulder. The Man on the White Dragon, with Gobber sitting behind him. "He saved me," said Hiccup. Gobber clambered down from the White Dragon. He was totally black from eyebrows to toenails, apart from the small pink top of his bald helmetless head, which shone in the sunlight like a halo. "I can explain, Chief," stammered Gobber. "It was a perfectly harmless Herding-Reindeer-on-Dragonback lesson, nothing dangerous about it at all, and then we were attacked by these things... Goliath didn't make it."

"I am sorry, Gobber," said Stoick the Vast solemnly. Goliath had been Gobber's faithful riding dragon through many a terrible battle. "We shall take revenge on whatever did this, I assure you..." "He saved us," said Gobber, pointing at the Man. "Who is that?" asked Stoick. "Who is that Man?" "He can't be a man," pointed out Gobber. "Men don't walk through fire... He must be a god." "I'm not a god," said the Man on the White Dragon. His voice was rather muffled by a black suit that covered him from head to toe, even his eyes and mouth, and Hiccup was wondering how he could see through it. "I'm just a Hero—I mean an ordinary bloke, who happened to be passing," continued the Man. "In fact I'm in a bit of a hurry. I've got something important to do now, so I must be off... Lovely to meet you and everything... you seem like nice little people, in your way." "You're a Lava-Lout!" roared Stoick, staring at the Man. All the watching Hooligans gasped in horror, and drew their swords immediately. Lava-Louts were one of the Hooligan Tribe's deadliest enemies.