Chapter 51: Soil and Seedlings V

The goatherd stopped being all smiles.

He looked at his own smokehouse the way a man looks at a boat he is not certain will float. "If everything goes south as you say... More than this," he said. "A great deal more than this."

Then he clapped Hiccup on the arm, and was cheerful again, and went back to his trench.

Of all the things he had missed that moon: Silence, peace, reading... Flying with Toothless had to be the most important, it was not even a contest. It was not close.

He had not flown properly in a full moon.

Well, in truth he had not flown properly in a good deal longer than that.

Ever since Toothless got his independence back, the coastal circuit had become the Night Fury's own business, flown alone most of the time, whether Hiccup was on the island or not.

That, and the extenuating load of work of the last moon, had zeroed their flying time.

It seemed that Hiccup was not the only one who was itching for it.

The dragon had spent the last few days sulking openly on the wall. With most of the field work done, there was really nothing for Toothless to do anymore. So he was bored.

His tail would be thumping the flagstones at one in the morning. There had been the business the other day where he had tugged Hiccup up by the back of the robe in front of everyone and carried him some distance toward the cliff before deciding to put him down.

Then the first crops began breaking the surface of the soil, for one evening there was nothing left that would fall apart if Hiccup walked away from it for one day.

That night he came up the broken stair a little before midnight with his boots in his hand, crossed the flagstones, and crouched down beside him.

"Hey. Bud."

One ear rotated, clearly curious.

"Fly?"

The eye came open. Then the other eye. Blinking.

Toothless came up off that wall like something fired out of a machine, he started to bounce from happiness. Actually bounce.

Then a spin, chasing his own tail, wings half out and flapping, the whole five hundred pounds of him turning circles.

"Shhhh. Shh! Bud-"

Hiccup looked around, nervously.

"There are people asleep down there bud-"

A delighted gargling noise that carried the entire length of the upper street.

"Oh, for the love of-"

Hiccup got both hands on his snout and pulled his head down to eye level, which was further to pull than it used to be, and found Toothless vibrating with such joy that he lost the thread of his thoughts.

"All right," he chuckled. "All right. Let's get you out of here before you awaken everyone in a dozen mile radius."

Then they jumped off the cliffs.

There is a sound a Night Fury makes going off a thousand-foot drop from standing. A double crack of the air snapping as the wings open, then a third, deeper, that you can feel rattling through your bones as lift acts on the wings.

Then they were out over the sea and veering to follow the shoreline.

They started with a quick round of scouting.

Night was better for it, besides. It hid them going out, it opened the world up in a way daylight never did, including just how enormous the island was, it only really landed on you with nothing under you but miles of it at a stretch.

They went east first, skimming low and fast over the cliff coast, then round the great headland, then west along a shore of sand beaches that ran without a break for further than the whole of some half day's walk.

They wheeled past the beach and into the sea again.

Hiccup looked back as they carved across, the sea seemed to part and form behind them, the column of ocean spray lying in their wake.

Before them the sea reached miles inland up long arms with cliffs standing on both sides, so deep and so straight that flying up one of them is like flying down a corridor.

Then the grasslands. Then another wall of mountains, a line of grey peaks running north to south with snow still on the tops of them.

Then down and dangerous into the water again, with the sea peeling away white on both sides and the wind roaring past, cold and fierce against his face.

The circuit took most of the night, they were not flying it the way Toothless flew it alone. They would stop at things. Took breaks to check the scenery. They also flew faster and harder than they had before, which made all of it that much more thrilling.

The night was almost gone by the time they closed the circle.

Nothing on the water.

No sails, no smoke, no boat drawn up in any of the hundred coves that could have hidden a boat.

Good.

They went and coasted the shores again instead, working those cliffs when, from high up, they spotted it.

Their sea-cave tunnel, mouth gaping in the cliff face below, barely wide enough for the both of them.

Toothless turned one eye on him. Hiccup grinned before he had decided to.

Then they dropped, folded tight, and dove straight for it.

The cliff came up fast, the mouth of the tunnel swallowing moonlight, the walls became a blur an arm's length off on either side, sound thundering back doubled and tripled off wet walls with not a room in it for a wrong inch.

Then the far end tore open, they burst out over open water in one boom of speed, spray kicking white off the sea below them and wingbeats cracking and popping.

By the time either of them noticed, the sky in the east had gone grey, and then pink, and it was a new day.

Of course, it wasn't a flight if they didn't show up when coming home. They came over the eastern shoulder with the whole plateau of ruins laid out ahead.

Down there the island had been waking up. Smoke starting out of a dozen chimneys, people coming out onto the terraces with tools over their shoulders, walking down to the strips in the cold half-light and talking about nothing.

They climbed up the flank of the high peak in a long tightening spiral over the face of the rock, up through the cloud layer that sat around its shoulders most mornings, and out of the top of it.

Into flat gold sunlight some thousand feet above a floor of white that ran to the horizon in every direction, with the bone-white palace standing out of it like an island of its own.

They hung there a moment.

Then Toothless folded and dropped, straight down, back through the cloud into the grey and out the bottom of it, and the whole plateau came up at them at once.

"NOW!"

Hiccup pressed tight against Toothless, the growing scream of wind coalescing ahead.

The wingtips twitched in opposite directions, centrifugal force dragging sideways through them, heaven sliding down to earth and earth climbing up to take its place.

BOOM.

The air itself cracked with a violent distortion racing outward. The sound hit like a physical force, a wall that tore at him, followed by the boom catching up after them.

They came down the length of the main terrace at roof height.

Every child jumped screaming and pointing.

Women gasped with their hands clamped over their mouths and their eyes locked upward, heads bolting in unison as they followed their passage the whole span of the plateau crossed in just a few breaths. Grown men in the barley strips were howling and jabbing their fingers at the sky, swearing at the top of their lungs.

Then they were out over the western cliff, rolled level and climbing hard.

Yes, yes!! That is how you do it!

His heart going like a hammer.

That is exactly how you do it. That was so fucking cool-

Then sound whipped past them. It came in behind them across the plateau in one long tearing crack that rolled off the old halls and off the cliff face and back again.

They flew on high before they called it a day.

They leveled off where the air went thin and the sound dropped away to nothing but the howl of wind and from up there, the whole of it lay under them.

The plateau, its broken grid of streets, its secrets, the great glassy wounds still in it.

The palace standing clear above the sea of cloud.

The ruins going on and on and on to the north and the east. Hall after hall after empty hall. A city built for at least a hundred thousand people.

He laughed, alone, where nobody could hear him.

His eyes flickered to the one corner of it that was theirs. Just one street with a few roofs on and morning smoke coming out the chimneys.

Merely a tenth of a hundredth of it.

He thought it over.

That is what just a few hundred people fill.

Then he looked south, down the shoulder of the hill, at the fields.

Seven strips.

They looked absurd from up here. It was seven thin lines of pale green scratched onto the flank of a mountain, with whole layers of terraces and fields sitting untouched, ground running away east of them. Room for fifty- room for five hundred strips.

Next year we will be many, many more, he had told the old farmer.

If the winter goes the way I mean it to.

He kept the fields in sight as they flew round, because on them hinged their future. That was when he noticed it, it took him a moment to work out what was wrong.

The seven strips that had cost them a moon of the hardest work any of them had ever done. The strips that had to carry them through the whole of next winter.

The ground between the crops was... why was it the wrong colour.

The soil around them was not the rich, wet black he remembered anymore. It was just slightly off, a little bit more grey, pale and dusty, with smaller cracks showing on its surface.

He pulled back to see the whole hillside and the answer was there waiting for him.

Above them, instead of below them.

The sky had no cloud anywhere from one end to the other, the sky was clear, and it struck him then that it had been close to a week since the last rains had hit the island.