10 Does Anybody Recognise This Lobster Pot

10. DOES ANYBODY RECOGNISE THIS LOBSTER POT? 'Helloo-o-o-o-o-o! Is there anybody in thee- e-re????' Somebody is knocking on my helmet… thought Hiccup woozily. No, that's not possible… I must be dreaming… But the knocking continued, like impatient knocking on a metal door, and the banging rang through Hiccup's sleepy brain. Hang on, I'm coming, don't knock so loudly, he thought, and he answered the call, opening leaden eyelids… Somebody was indeed knocking on his helmet. The Somebody's face was only two inches away from Hiccup's nose, which gave him quite a start. A grinning human Somebody, with a face so heavily tattooed with storms and shipwrecks and trees and giants and serpents that barely a patch of flesh could be seen in between the blue ink.

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Hiccup sat up, his head aching with a thumping that now seemed to be knocking from within, and his shoulder tingling with a pins-and-needles numbness. He was sitting on the floor. Around him in a circle stood huge figures, men and women, vast and muscled, and as crazily tattooed as the man who had been knocking on Hiccup's helmet, and all with great manacles around their wrists, and chains around their legs from which they dragged stones and heavy weights. They were weighed down further by the astonishing amount of weaponry they were carrying, bows and spears and great leaden swords bristling all around them. BERSERKS, thought Hiccup, and they were indeed. Fishlegs was lying beside him, similarly trussed up in chains, and he was just waking up. They were lying on a great wooden platform in the centre of what looked like the Berserks' treetop village. Behind them, the Windwalker and the Chickenpoxer were chained to a tree. The village was the first treetop village Hiccup had ever come across. Every Berserk house had a mast, and a crow's nest, and a rolled-up sail. The Berserks made their way across the green sea

of the jungle canopy by way of a maze of rope bridges that stretched their way across the entire island, forming a gigantic, fragile web. From out of one of the largest of the tree-houses, two men came running so swiftly across the rope bridge that Hiccup's heart was in his mouth for fear that the swaying bridge might snap. They were carrying a shield between them, on which there balanced an extraordinary figure, a giant of a man giving a gigantic yawn as he sat bolt upright on the shield, so trussed up with chains and padlocks that he looked for all the world as if he were in a metal straitjacket. His padlocked arms were bound close about his chest, his legs were chained in a crossed position, his eyes were closed as if in prayer, his back was ramrod straight. The shield-bearers placed the shield carefully on the wooden platform, and one of the shield- bearers unlocked the many padlocks festooning this extraordinary man. Chain after chain fell down, clattering on to the wooden bridge. The man still sat there in the legs-crossed position, eyes closed, as if he were a statue. Then, very slowly, he began to uncross his legs, still wound with many ropes of chains but now no longer bound together.

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He got to his feet and planted them firmly apart, to the gasps and cheers of the watching crowd. Slowly, slowly, he raised his fists, with the chains still trailing from them like the wings of some great bird or dragon.