Chapter 34: In Three Years

He did not raise his voice, he did not need to.

He told them what the nest was, without hurry, steady and confident.

He told them about the column of dragons going out at dusk and coming back loaded before dawn, wheeling round that peak in a spiral that climbed into the cloud.

He told them he had sat behind a rock for many days with a stub of charcoal trying to count them, and had given up.

"Thousands," he finished at last. "Every kind we know and some few we do not. All of them on one island."

Everyone, chiefs sat at the table, their most trusted warriors behind, and the crowd so thick it choked the vast great hall, none of them dared talk.

Stoick sold them his take on it.

"They do not nest on the north because there is nothing here to nest in. They live there, all of them, they come to us because our ancestral lands are the nearest and biggest tribes worth ransacking."

He put one thick finger down on the chart.

"Three hundred years of it. Every winter we kill nine or ten of them and call it a victory, and the next season there are always more. We have merely been swatting at the edge of the swarm."

The hall went very quiet.

"You want to burn the nest." Bertha frowned.

Her boots had come off the table at some point.

"I want to burn the nest, and everything in it," Stoick agreed, loud enough for the back of the room. "That is where they are. Not scattered over a hundred islands where we can never reach them. All in one hole in one rock, and now I know which rock."

His fist came down slowly on the chart.

"Kill them there and it is over. Not won. Over. Our grandchildren will not know what a dragon looks like. They'll be gone. Forever."

Some of them nodded, already convinced with those few words. Most of them said nothing at all.

Norbert of the Hysterics leaned forward on his elbows.

"I have a question, Stoick, take it seriously, because am' asking it seriously."

He tapped the chart thrice.

"Thousands, you ve' seen. Flying in the air, over and around their own rock."

"I did."

"Last year we killed a Nightmare. It took five of us on the ground, in our village, on our turf, with every advantage, with buckets to hand, we lost one man doing it."

Norbert spread his hands.

"You want me to put my people on open decks in the middle of the sea, fight a thousand of those wretched things, fighting in front of their lair." He scoffed. "Tell me, Stoick. What do you suggest we do when the sky becomes full and there is no roof to get under?"

He looked around, the eyes of the crowd grim, nobody had an answer.

The silence went on a beat too long.

Astrid, at the back, watched the Chief of the Hairy Hooligans quietly struggle to find the words, the angle, or the answer.

"I do not know yet," Stoick exhaled, finally. "I know it will not be axes we use."

That was when the old Meathead captain spoke.

He had sat through the entire explanation without opening his mouth. A grey-bearded man at Mogadon's shoulder with a face like a cliff, and the whole hall turned when the voice came out of him.

"Then answer me this instead."

Stoick waited.

"Every man of fighting age. Every hull that floats. All four of our tribes, in one place, on one day."

He did not raise his voice at all.

"What comes home to our islands, to our people if gods forbid, you are wrong?"

Stoick the Vast opened his mouth to answer.

"I will tell you," interrupted the old man. "None of us will return home. The next raiding season will arrive and all there will be no one to protect our lands will be women, and children, and old men."

He shut up and sat back.

"So we get one throw," muttered Bertha, into the quiet. "One. Ever."

"Yes," nodded Stoick.

"Then it is decided, we will not be sailing the next spring."

The three chiefs turned to look at her.

"You are all thinking it and none of you will say it. You want the dragons gone, we all do."

She jerked her chin at the chart.

"However, a year of preparation is too little. You all have raised good points." She chuckled, "We cannot afford to lose this. That only means we do not go until we are certain we will win."

The logic was sound, albeit simple, it slowly won the better part of the vast room.

She raised a finger.

"Timber. We do not got the ships for this and every one of you knows it. A hull built out of wood we cut this year will not do. Seasoning the wood to make good ships takes years. That is not an opinion, that is jus' carpentry."

A second finger.

"The iron. Norbert is right and none of you dick heads want to hear it. Fighting a cloud of flying dragons with axes will get all of us killed."

Her gaze went round the other chiefs.

"We will need some of those engines... The things that reach up and knock them out of the air before they are on top of us, and dozens of them, on every hull. Not one of us has that iron put by. We have no mines. So that means trade, and trade means lots of time, and coin."

Third finger.

"Then comes the grain. Am' not one of those matemagicians of south, however, it is sure that such a campaign will take vast," She gave a side eye to Stoick the Vast, obviously joking, "vast amount of grain, and other food that won't spoil on the travel."

Stoick chuckled.

Norbert frowned, doing some thinking in that head of his before speaking, "Those engines, if we build them, would change things." He paused, finally looking at the other Chiefs, nodding. "We will need eat a little less every winter between now and then and store what we can. One harvest will not be enough. Three might."

Bertha finally sat back, not before saying another piece:

"More important than any of that': My people and Mogadon's have been robbing each other since before our grandparents were born. You cannot make an army out of that on a year."

That was a fair point.

Stoick stroked his beard, "That is true, crews have to sail together a long while before they can properly fight together. Or else they will be watching each other instead of the dragons."

Silence.

"Three years," decided Stoick, and nodded.

It was the first time in a very long time, that there was something burning behind the chief's eyes that was not grief, and was not the haze of ale.

"We sail in three years."

It took a few more days of shouting to settle the rest of it. The hows, the whens, the ifs.

What each tribe would build.

What each tribe would provision.

How they would train joint crews through the spring and the summer and most of the autumns.

The occasion was used for a great many other things too. Meet ups of these scales among Chiefs were indeed rare, so the occasion was used for many other things, some trades for iron, cattle, and grain for the winter, a few hostages exchanged,

many marriages were arranged across the table.

Snotlout Jorgenson and Heather of the Hysterics were engaged.

Snotlout. Their Snotlout.

The betrothal caught everyone, and that meant everyone, by surprise. Snotlout had improved, he was a good person, responsible, strong. The Heir to the Hairy Hooligans in all but name.

Still, no one expected him to bag Heather of all people.

Though on hindsight she had to admit it was kind of obvious, it explained how the both of them had been all flirty and touchy with each other.

Over the next few days the pair of them were kindly brought out in front of the great hall to stand next to each other and be looked at.

Which had Snotlout go the colour of a boiled beetroot.

They were kind of cute together... actually.

Either way, the girl bore it with an expression of such flat patience that she would probably do rather well out of the arrangement and Snotlout had no idea whatsoever what was about to happen to him.

That was just the tip of the iceberg, though.

It was arranged for Mogadon's youngest would go to foster on Berk and a Berk boy went to the Hysterics. Some other exchanges as well.

The example was set by the Bog-Burglars.

When Bertha gave her own daughter.

That was not a small thing. In fact, it was the biggest thing, save for marrying, that a Chief could arrange to strengthen ties. Every Chief at that table knew.

Camicazi or something similar was the girl's name, she was Bertha's heir.

The Bog-Burglars gave nobody to anybody, as a matter of principle and long standing practice.

"You have been risking those hopeless expeditions to Helheim’s gate for decades. Your father, your grandfather before him.", she explained when she made the offer.

For once there was no insult anywhere in her voice.

"You kept trying to find that forsaken nest when the rest of us had long surrendered our hopes. You must have lost many, many men, hundreds of ships, all while we sat on our halls managing and counting our dead and calling it war."

She shrugged.

"You paid for that chart, Stoick. So my heir will sleep under your roof until this is done, and if my people break faith, you have her. It's the least my tribes owes you for your sacrifices."

Nobody had anything to say to that either.

Camicazi turned out to be about sixteen years old, roughly the height of a fence post, entirely incapable of remaining in a room she had been told to remain in, a rather... strong personality.

Maybe that was the reason her mother had arranged to get rid of her for some years.

Either way, inside a week she had been up every roof in the village. Inside a day she had picked the lock on the great hall's store and been found sitting in it eating dried fish, entirely unrepentant, and had been all too eager to explain exactly how she had managed to do it.

Stoick found her funny.

Well, at least someone did. Astrid did not find her funny:

Astrid, who had been given the explicit job of keeping an eye on the girl during training hours all because she was the one person on the island responsible enough for it, found her about as funny as a splinter under a fingernail.

Three years of this.

Astrid, seventeen years old and standing at the back of that hall, thought it was the longest span of time she had ever heard a Viking lay plans for.

They turned out to be the longest three years of her life.

Berk became a shipyard in the blink of an eye.

Word was that so had every other harbour in the four tribes.

That first summer they felled timber nobody would touch for years and stacked it in long open sheds to season, and set guards and watches on it against any dragon fire, lest they burn.

They laid keels in the autumn that would not be caulked until the third year.

They started trading for iron with anybody who had any, and when the traders worked out why the northern tribes had all suddenly developed an appetite for iron, the price doubled, and they still paid it.

Every winter, everybody ate a little less on purpose.

There were bad stretches. The harvest came in short on three of the four islands one year, and for a month the whole alliance sat a hand's breadth from coming apart over their grain stores.

It was Fishlegs Ingerman, of all the people on this earth, who worked out a redistribution that every tribe could live with and none of them actively disliked.

The crisis was avoided.

So the days went on, and the forge soon because the busiest of all.

Gobber and the other smiths spent the better part of a year answering the Chief's calls for these southern designed siege engines

Apparently, the brief was simple to say and miserable to build.

The requirements, Gobber frantically explained, were a weapon that a crew could work, shoot, and reload off a sailing ship, that could reach a Nightmare at least five hundred paces off and still put it in the water.

In other words, it required several mental breakdowns and long months of group-crying sessions for the ragtag band of smiths to develop a semi-working prototype.

First they built a bunch of them that solved different problems each and did not work at all, and one that tore itself off its own mounting, before finally getting the seventh right. By the time the design was nailed down they were turning out a pair of them a moon.

Ship mounted, on iron swivels, capable of throwing a bolt the size of a man, with a hammered steel head meant to punch clean through the hide of anything that flies.

Astrid was on the cliff the day they tested the first good one.

They cranked it back with a windlass that took some of the strongest men in the village, everyone had stopped their duties to came up to watch, and Gobber lined it on an oak beam as thick through as a man's waist, salvaged out of an old hull and propped up at fifty paces.

The sound it made going off could only be described as an anvil striking inside your chest.

The bolt went through the beam and buried itself in the turf so deep they had to dig it out with a spade.

The whole cliff top cheered.

Astrid cheered too. She remembered that afterward. Gobber going red to the ears with pleasure, and Stoick gripping the old smith's shoulder hard enough to bruise.

By the last winter everyone knew who was going and who was staying, and the volunteering was done properly anyway. Name by name, in the hall.

Stoick was the first name.

The chief meant to be in the first ship through the mist and had said so from the beginning, he had made clear he would be fighting on the front lines, nobody had argued it.

His name was engraved on the slate for history to remember.

Gobber's was next. The smith had been busy, busiest than anyone save Stoick. He had done his part, everyone expected the old smith to stay back and avoid the fight.

Yet he refused.

He chuckled and said somebody had to make sure Stoick ate properly, and somebody had to be there to repair the half hundred siege engines. His name was engraved second.

Astrid had volunteered three years earlier, on the first night of the moot, before the chiefs were done shouting at each other. She had made up her mind from the beginning, today she would just make it official.

I am the best axe on Berk. It would be absurd for me to stay home.

She was filled with pride when her name was engraved third.

An honor unlike any other, that her name would be remembered for generations, plastered on their great hall for all to see.

Still, she was not the only one of her generation to go.

Snotlout sailed because he had worked out on his own that a Chief in waiting who stays at home does not stay a chief in waiting for long.

Plus all the earning eternal glory stuff he was constantly reassuring people about.

Fishlegs sailed because he had read every word written about every one of those creatures and was quietly and entirely certain that he was going to die out there. Yet he refused to be the only one to stay back, he wanted to go anyway.

She could admire that, at least.

The twins sailed because it sounded enormous and bloody.

She tried recounting, everybody she knew, apart from the elders and the ones younger than sixteen, would be on the water. Their names engraved on that slate.

Everybody's life on the same throw.

On that last evening, Astrid walked down to the harbour on her own.

In a mere few years the whole fleet would lay at anchor along the quays and out into the bay beyond.

More ships than she had ever seen gathered in the water.

Four tribes' worth. Three years' worth.

Hulls black with fresh tar.

New sails furled tight. On the decks, rank after rank of them, those siege engines, the deadly coiled strength under their oiled covers, every one of them pointing at nothing yet.

The wind came in off the sea and smelled of pitch and cut wood and salt.

In a few years, she would be twenty years old, with an axe across her back and a crew of her own, and the whole armed weight of the Viking tribes would lying in the water in front of her with its bows turned south.

She stood there a long while.

The flat certainty that whatever the gods had planed for them, it would all be finished soon.

One way or the other.