Chapter 31: Dragon Island

Gobber came by that night, the way he did.

He let himself inside and dropped into the other big chair. He had brought bread and a wheel of hard cheese and ate most of both.

These days he preferred not to dine in the great hall, it was too loud.

Gobber and him always talked, they talked about many things, about the fishing, about the new sail that had come through, about the next season of raids.

That night they did not talk much, they simply drank.

Why was that. Why did he feel so hollow today. Why did he feel so gods dammed awful. Today of all days? This last few weeks he'd been given more time to reflect than he would have wanted.

Stoick looked into the fire. The heaviness in his heart had not enough space to settle, so he simply let it.

"I was not a good father to him."

Gobber went still and quiet, which was the wisest thing the man had done in many nights.

"I have had years to work it out." He let out a long breath, his voice flat. "I never asked what he was making. Not one time, Gobber. Fifteen years and I never once asked what any of it was."

"Stoick-"

"I put him in your forge to get him out from under my feet."

He turned the horn slowly in his hands. The ale swirling.

"When the chiefs came for the moot I would bring him out and say, this is my son, and then excuse him. Every time. Every single time. I apologised for him while he was standing there, listening."

The fire popped.

"I had fifteen years of him. I spent every one of them waiting for him to grow up."

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Perhaps that was for the better.

"They will tell you that beast got into his head," Stoick muttered at last. "Half the village says it. I have let them say it for years, because even that is easier to carry than the truth."

"And what's the truth, then."

"That it did not have to work very hard."

He was quiet a moment.

"He was lonely, Gobber. My son was lonely in a house with his own father in it, and I never went up those stairs to see about it. Then something came along that was pleased to see him, and it was the first thing in his life that ever was."

He drank, all in one gulp.

"If I had listened to him. Just the once. He would have had no reason in the world to go and play friends with a dragon."

He set the horn down, letting out a heavy sigh.

"I did not raise a hand against my son. I did not kill him. I only failed to be his father."

Gobber did not tell him it was not his fault.

"Aye," he nodded at last. "That's about it."

Then he took his horn away, and put the bread within reach so he would not fill the ale another time, and stayed until the morning.

For most of those years, Stoick had not been home at all.

It had to be at least three or four voyages a season, he was gone weeks at a time, out into the northern water in weather no sensible man sails in.

They called it the chief's old obsession, and they were half right.

His father had died looking for the nest, his grandfather before that. His wife had been taken by dragons, his soon too, in a way. So it was truth that the hunt ran in his blood.

That's why he sailed, and sailed, and sailed again.

He sailed until his crews grumbled and his stores ran thin and the ice came to freeze the seas so he wouldn't sail again, which only forced him to stay back and drink through the winter and then sail again in the spring.

He lost men doing it. Many men.

He carried every one of those names, he knew them by heart, and he would getting to know more anyway.

There was no cleverness to it. Only stubbornness.

Three generations of chiefs that had tried to find that cursed nest by seamanship and had all died at it, yet what finally worked was a piece of cruelty a child could have thought of.

They took a Nadder alive on a raid.

Netted, roped, hauled onto the deck with its wings bound. They kept it in a cage on that deck for thirteen days and thirteen moons giving it nothing but water.

It was the moment they sailed into the mist, that they cut its ropes and let it go.

A starving dragon goes home.

That was the whole of the plan.

They followed the trail of the Nadder for days, they lost the Wave Bear to the rocks inside the first hour, in fog so thick a man could not see the mast from the tiller, they lost eight men with her, and they kept going because Stoick would not turn.

They lost the Fenrir's Tooth the same night, they did not even see it happen. One moment there were two ships. Then there was one, it was barely a sound over the water, and then nothing.

They found nine of her crew alive at first light, strung along a spar and blue to the shoulders.

The others were never found at all.

Yet on the third morning the mist opened. Stoick would never be able to describe what his eyes saw. Some mountain spewing molten rock. With a grey heaven above, impaled by a plume black as the depths of hell.

The nest of dragons dwarfed the scale of his worst nightmares.

They were everywhere. On every direction.

Coming, going, shrieking.

This as not the few dozen that came screaming over the Viking settlements on a raid night.

This was thousands of them, in a column, going in and coming out, wheeling round it in a slow living spiral that climbed until it disappeared into the clouds.

Every kind he knew, and a dozen he did not.

Carrying sheep, cattle, fish, whole nets of it, in through the mouth of the mountain.

Stoick the Vast put the ship in behind a sea stack and watched for many days.

He sat in the lee of that forsaken rock with a stub of charcoal and made a mark for every hundred that went in, and gave up somewhere past the second sheet of hide.

Thousands. There was no better word for it and no need for one.

They went out at dusk in flights and came back before dawn heavy with what they stole, there was never a moment when the sky over that peak was empty.

He learned that they did not fight each other.

That they went in through the mouth of it and did not come out again until the next dusk.

He did not go closer.

Stoick wanted to. He remembered to this day, the pull of it. Standing on the deck of his ship looking at the beasts that had dug every grave on his island, his blood, and his family.

It was good enough he found the nest.

Whatever hatchlings, or eggs, or puny breeding ground lay inside the mouth of that thing, was too far inside. He could not see it from the water and he was not going to find out with one ship and some few dozen men.

He gave the order to come about.

Part of him did not want to.

Standing on that deck looking at the place that had eaten his entire life, some tired piece of Stoick the Vast had wanted very much to sail straight in and be done with it.

He couldn't, however.

So Stoick steered his one ship back home. He made the crew swear to say no word until he had spoken, and he sat up every night of that voyage drawing the same chart over and over from memory until his hand knew it.

That was many days ago.

Tonight the fire had burned down, and the horn was still where he had set it. It was still full.

He had not touched it.

Stoick sat at his own table with the chart weighted flat under a whetstone and a candle, and looked at the shape he had drawn, and found that his head was clearer than it had been in a great many years.

He took vellum, which was expensive, and ink, which was worse.

Taking in a long breath, at last he began to write.

One to the Meatheads, whose chief's nose he had broken back when he was a young man.

One to the Hysterics, who could not be trusted with a herd of sheep, let alone a fleet.

One to the Bog-Burglars, who would most definitely steal the pen and ink he was writing with.

Old rivals, every one of them. A long history of grudges and thieving and the occasional quiet murder. But they had an enemy in common, and that would have to do.

'I have found the nest.

There are thousands of them and they are all in one place.

Come to Berk in the spring and I will show you the charts.'

Stoick sealed the letters and set them to his most trusted sailors that next morning.

Only once he saw their ships vanish in the horizon, only then, did at last the fury come up in him. All of it. All he had bottling since he laid eyes on that cursed, wretched, forsaken nest.

It was an old fury.

He knew it well by now. They were old friends.

It was the same that had stood over that fire pit two years ago and burned his boy's whole life a handful at a time. Last time it had cost him everything he had left of his son, and yet it had not cooled so much as a breath since.

Only now, at last, there was something worth pointing it at.

Stoick went back to his chair by the hearth and sat down heavily.

And the small chair sat where it had always sat, at its wrong angle to the fire, and the chief of the Hairy Hooligans did not pain himself looking at it anymore.