6 The Axe of Doom Decides

6. THE AXE OF DOOM DECIDES Hiccup's mind raced desperately. He couldn't move, but inspiration suddenly struck… 'CAN YOU READ THE TICKING-THING, NORBERT?' screamed Hiccup. Norbert looked at the ticking-thing… Curses!… He couldn't… …but the axe was steaming towards the deck of the ship, and the Axe of Doom was never allowed to be wrong… So Norbert the Nutjob gave Verociously Violent a big shove so that Verociously got in between the axe and the deck, getting a nasty scratch on his arm in the process. 'NOW LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!' roared Norbert the Nutjob. 'OK, untie the

wretched little burglars!' Muttering with disappointed bloodlust, the Hysterics unwound the ropes tying Hiccup, Fishlegs and Camicazi, who fell on to the deck, deeply relieved to be the right way up again, but very dizzy. 'Follow me,' barked Norbert the Nutjob. Hiccup followed Norbert to the central tent in the middle of the deck. This tent was Norbert's cabin. Now, Vikings normally travelled very light on board ship. And they didn't generally have cabins at all, just maybe a couple of upturned landing-boats to shield them from the wildness of the wind. But Norbert was intending to sail to America FOR EVER, so he had packed this ship with every possible thing that a Future Emperor might need over there in a New World. Tables, chairs, chessboards, smashsticks-on-ice sticks, bashyballs, skis. The walls of this tent-cabin of his were covered with crazy drawings of Norbert's latest inventions, and also with maps. Norbert jabbed a fat finger at one particular map with some little squiggly numbers drawn on it. 'THIS was the Map my father Bigjob used to go to America,' said Norbert.

'He read those funny little numbers, and he checked the ticking-thing, and that would tell him which way to go.' Norbert handed Hiccup the map and the ticking-thing. There were nine arrows on the dial. The two little ordinary arrows told the time much

more accurately than Old Wrinkly's complicated candlesticks. The little fat arrow always pointed to the north, like the North Star. The one with the round circle on the end was a lie detector. Hiccup didn't yet know what the one shaped like a question mark did, or the funny little jagged one like a piece of lightning. But the remaining two told him how far to go upwards, and how far to go westwards.* This suggests that the ticking-thing contains a device for calculating LONGTITUDE (what Hiccup describes as 'going westwards'). It was previously thought that the first device for predicting longtitude was the chronometer created in 1773, but Hiccup's memoirs show otherwise. He sat there staring back and forth from the ticking-thing to the Map for such a long time that Norbert grew impatient, and roared: 'HURRY UP BOY, HURRY UP! We haven't got all DAY!' 'The quickest way to America, if such a place really exists, is in that direction.' Hiccup pointed over towards some distant storm-clouds to the north. 'But we'd have to go through the Ice Islands and there are some really unpleasant Ice-Dragons we could meet that way—'

'WA-HOOOO!!!!!' yelled Norbert the Nutjob, grabbing the map off Hiccup and running excitedly on to the deck. 'Man the main masts! Stoke up the steam-dragons! Put on your winter woollies and set the course the way the little weirdo is pointing! AMERICA, HERE WE COME!' All around the three small dripping Vikings, great burly Hysterics burst into rousing cheers, and began to pull on ropes and climb masts and grab steering wheels. Great belches of smoke poured out of the chimney tube, and filled the deck in a dense pea- green fog, as slowly, slowly, the enormous ship turned around like some great cumbersome whale or wooden sea ceature. It set its nose towards the north, and began to puff and breast the waves out of the Archipelago and into the Icy Seas.

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