Chapter 27: Empty Handed

The morning was the fifth of the storm, and there was no morning about it.

The great chamber under the eastern slope was thick with people, every soul on that island stood around the young man standing up next to the fire with his hands shaking so badly he had to hide them behind his back.

His eyes found Haaland's. Only then could he make himself speak.

"It was not firewood," Eivind said.

The chamber was half asleep. It stopped being that very quickly.

"The night Torvald died. It was not a fight about firewood."

He swallowed. His voice kept climbing out of his control and he kept hauling it back down.

"There were four of them. They went to him together. It had been decided before they got there."

He did not point. He did not have to. Three of the four were standing in the firelight where everybody could see them, and every soul there could count.

Somebody said his name from the crowd, low. A warning.

He kept going.

"I was fifteen paces off in the dark and I heard all of it."

He looked at the ground, and then made himself look up, and when he did it was not at the crowd. It was at the man himself.

"Rum told him it was what came of talking."

Close to a hundred people turned their heads at once.

Rum was sitting on the cut step at the head of the chamber with a bowl in his hands, and he did not stand up, which was the first mistake.

"The boy is upset," he growled.

"He argued with you." Eivind's voice came out louder than he had ever used it. "That is all he did. He said the weapons were not yours to hand out and the say was not yours to have. He said it loud, and he kept saying it, and he told people they should go back to Haaland."

His voice broke properly then.

"The next night he was cold on the stones with his guts out."

Rum shook his head. "You are grieving and you are hungry and you have been listening to the girl-"

"Answer it," someone demanded from the crowd.

Rum put the bowl down and stood up.

He explained that Eivind had not seen what he thought he saw. That the night plays tricks. That the cold gets into a young man's head and puts things in it that were never there.

It very nearly held.

Then somebody near the front asked, reasonably enough, why he had told them at the time that Torvald had drawn first.

"He did draw first," Rum said. "There are men who will swear to it."

"Then the boy was not imagining anything. He was there."

Both could not be true, and every person under that roof did the arithmetic in the same moment.

It was one of Rum's own men who broke. A big slow one at his shoulder who had been watching the crowd's faces instead of Rum's.

"He told us where to stand," he said.

"Everything I have done, I have done to keep us alive."

Rum looked round at them, and he was not lying, and every person there could tell that he was not lying.

"You were freezing and you were leaderless. You were going to eat each other inside a month. I took the weapons because somebody had to. I hunted the thing because somebody had to. I made hard choices while better men stood about being decent."

His jaw set.

"You are alive. One day you will thank me for it."

Nobody moved.

Then a woman near the front, one of the fishing crew, said quietly:

"Who is next, then?"

Rum did not have an answer for that.

And here was the part nobody in that chamber wanted to look at straight.

Rum had been good at this.

That was the truth of it, and every soul there knew it, and it was exactly why the silence sat so heavy on them.

He had been right that a hundred freed slaves needed weapons, and right that somebody had to hand them out. He had been right that the thing on the hill burned their only road home and never once explained itself, and that a creature which does that has earned nobody's trust.

On the worst night of their lives he had stood up and said the frightening thing out loud, and then done something about it, which is more than most men manage.

They had not followed him because they were fools.

They had followed him because he was useful.

And they would have gone on following him. For years, most likely. Through this winter and the next, through the hunger and the cold and the long miserable business of building something out of nothing, because a hard man who is right often enough is worth a great deal to frightened people.

But Torvald had disagreed with him. Out loud, more than once, about a thing he had every right to hold an opinion on.

And Torvald had died on the stones with his guts out.

That was the sum every person in that chamber was working through behind their eyes, and it did not take one of them very long, because there was nobody standing there who had not argued with somebody about something in the last month.

Rum could have kept them through anything. Any winter. Any hunger. Any monster on any hill.

He could not keep them through that.

Haaland watched Rum feel the ground go.

He almost pitied him. Almost.

Because Haaland had seen men lose a room before, and it had a look to it, and the look was always the same.

Rum was still talking. His voice had not cracked and his shoulders had not dropped, and to a stranger he would have seemed exactly the man he had been the day before.

But the crowd had stopped leaning in.

People who had spent a month facing him were facing each other instead, murmuring sideways, and the small grunts of agreement that used to follow his sentences simply were not coming any more.

That was all it was. A hundred people quietly declining to make a sound.

And it was enough, because there had never been anything underneath the man except that sound. He had gathered up all their fear and pointed it at the heights and stood in front of it, and for one month that had made him the biggest thing on this rock.

Now the fear had got up and wandered off somewhere else, and Rum was left standing on a cut step with nothing holding him up at all.

Then Haaland watched him reach for the only thing he had left.

"Then we finish it," Rum said.

He raised his voice and turned it on the crowd, and it steadied as he went, because this was ground he knew how to stand on.

"You want to talk about who killed who? Fine. Let us talk about the devil that burned our road home and has kept us on this rock for a month."

He swept an arm at the mouth of the cave, at the white beyond it, at the heights somewhere behind all that.

"You are eating its meat. You are hanging its coat up like a holy relic. And now you are talking about it as though it were one of us."

His eyes went round the crowd.

"It killed nineteen men on that beach. You saw the pieces. Nothing that does that is your friend, and nothing that does that feeds you for free."

"It saved my son," said one of the mothers.

"It saved a boy so that you would put down your sword," Rum roared. "And it worked."

He looked round at them, and for a moment, one bad moment, Haaland felt it move.

Because it was not a stupid argument. It was the argument, and there was no proving it wrong.

"Tonight," said Rum. "All of us. Every blade. It sleeps in the deep ruins and we know where. We finish it, and we build a boat, and we go home."

He stepped down off the plinth and started for the weapons.

About a dozen people went with him.

A dozen out of a hundred.

Haaland counted them without meaning to. They were the hard core. The three who had walked out with Rum the night Torvald died, who had nowhere to stand if he fell. The ones who had been loudest for a month and could not climb down now. A handful of the truly frightened.

The rest of that chamber stayed where they were.

Those dozen were dangerous even so, because they had the weapons.

Every sword in the camp had been stacked under Rum's watch since the split, and when the storm came his men had carried the whole stack down through the mouths with everything else, and set it against the wall of the second chamber, and stood over it. That was the first half of it.

Haaland's own had gone back onto that stack four days after the parley, when two of Rum's men came and asked for it, politely, in front of everybody. He had handed it over rather than be the man who started something over a blade.

He had thought about that decision a great deal since.

The second half took him a moment longer to work out, and when he did, he had to admire it, the way a man admires a well set trap he has just put his boot through.

Rum was not taking all twelve up the hill.

Seven of them would go hunting at dusk. The other five walked over to the storerooms, took up positions in front of the salted fish and the last of the grain, and stood there with their blades drawn, not threatening anybody in particular.

"Nobody eats out of turn until this is finished."

And there it was.

The hunt was the smaller half of Rum's problem, and Rum was not stupid. He had just been named a murderer in front of the whole camp, in a room nobody could walk out of.

If he marched every man he had up into the storm tonight and left the rest of them down here unwatched, then whatever came back through those mouths in the morning would be coming back to a camp that had spent the whole night rearranging itself around Haaland, and no amount of dead demon was going to fix that.

So he split it. Seven out into the weather to settle the thing on the heights. Five on the stores to settle the thing down here.

And going out into that at all was the measure of how badly he needed it. The storm had eased on the fourth day and come back on the fifth and eased again, never long enough to be worth anything, and a man who walked out into the gaps between was gambling on the white not coming down while he was in it. Rum knew that. Every man he picked knew it. They went anyway, because there was nothing left down here for any of them to stand on.

It cost him nothing and bought him everything.

Nobody had to be threatened. Nobody had to be dragged anywhere. He simply put five armed men between a hundred hungry people and their next meal, and every hour that passed the arrangement did his arguing for him.

If the hunt worked, he came home with a monster's head and nobody would ever say Torvald's name again.

If the hunt failed, he still held the food.

Haaland stood there unarmed, with eighty-eight frightened people packed in behind him and twenty paces of firelit rock between himself and every blade on this island, and understood exactly how dangerous the next few hours were going to be.

Twenty paces. That was the thing about a cave. There was nowhere in it to be far away from anybody, and nowhere in it to go.

Hiccup had heard most of that.

He had spent a couple of weeks lying up on the heights within reach of the camp, listening. Mostly because there had been little else to do with himself.

They were a dozen men.

Loose formation, no coordination worth the mention, about twenty paces of open floor between the pillars, there nothing anywhere in that chamber for anybody to get behind.

He could be on the ground and onto them before a single one had finished turning. Nobody else would even be hurt.

Yet he dismissed the idea, because being careless now would cost him everything.

He had spent weeks painstakingly building good will out of a desperate situation: Every deer. Every fish. Every stack of firewood. The robe hanging on the stone by their fire, still untouched.

As much progress as he'd made. The situation was very delicate.

If he went ahead and laid a hand on any of them all the goodwill would turn to ash. These people would go back to being a camp under siege with the monster confirmed, and the opportunity would never come back. Not ever.

So he could not go down there and tear any of them apart. Not even if they were murderers.

No.

In this situation he had to prove better than that.

Be better.

Hiccup clenched his fists and looked at the sky. The storm had gone off somewhere over the sea to gather itself again. For the moment there was a hard flat daylight on the snow and no wind to speak of. However, it would not last.

He turned.

"You are going to stay here," he chuckled.

Toothless's head came round, the look he got was flat and unimpressed.

"I know."

The dragon made a low rumble in his chest as if unconcerned by the pesky two legs bellow.

"I know that too. But if you come down that slope behind me, you will frighten them, and they will never hear a word I say."

He put his hand on the broad black skull and held it there a moment.

"They are frightened of you. That is my fault and not yours. Stay up here where you can see the mouth. If it goes wrong you will know."

The dragon leaned his weight into Hiccup's chest, hard enough to move him half a step. It was not affection. It was an argument, made with his special sort of vocabulary.

"I know," Hiccup whispered, quieter. "I would not either."

So Hiccup walked down the eastern slope in broad daylight, alone, with his hands empty and his ribs still aching and no plan at all beyond a flat refusal to solve this one the way he had solved everything else.

And then in slipping through a hidden mouth of the cavity, and in seconds out of the glare and into the smoke, in full view of every person there, with the whole of the outside behind him and a hundred people between him and it.

The effect was immediate and enormous.

Somebody shrieked in surprise.

The whole chamber came up off the ground in one motion. The dozen who had yet to part for the hunt came round with their swords. The unarmed scattered backward between the pillars and into the dark at the back, dragging children with them.

For a few heartbeats Hiccup was quite certain this was the stupidest decision of his life.

Yet he kept walking. Slowly. Hands open at his sides.

He walked to the middle of the floor, to the dead centre of the open ground between the pillars, where every single person there could see him and nobody had anything at their back.

He sat down on the cold cut stone.

Nobody had been expecting that. He heard the confusion go through them, a hundred people's worth of it.

"My name is Hiccup," he failed to project his voice loud enough for all to hear.

I am making an absolute fool of myself.

It had come out thin. He could hear it himself, and so could they, he could feel the whole lot of attention on him going brittle in his hands.

Still, he went along the ring of them.

Hard faces. Frightened ones. A man holding a spear wrong. Another woman with her boy pulled in behind her skirts.

And then, back by the pillars on the northern side, small and blonde and perfectly still while everything around her moved, Emerald.

It was good that she hadn't fallen ill after cold she took for those kids.

She was looking at him, she did not wave and she did not smile. She only held his eye, steady as a post, and gave him the smallest.

Go on, then.

Hiccup drew a long breath and let it out, and the shaking in his hands stopped being something that mattered.

It is going to be fine.

His voice carried further this time.

"I am not going to stand up. I am not going to come any closer. You can all see my hands."

He turned them over.

"I have come to talk, because I have run out of other ideas, and I am not very good at this, so I would ask you to bear with me-"

He couldn't even finish before a sword came up and leveled at his head, and Rum roared.

"Kill that thing!"