Sometimes it is not until the Final Chapter that you realize what a quest has REALLY been about all along.
Stoick's face turned from red anger to pure white terror.
"The Doomfang." whispered Stoick the Vast in agony, rushing to hold his stiff son in his arms. "By Woden and Freya and Hairy Knuckled Thor, he did get touched by the frozen flames of the Doomfang ... and all for a stupid useless quest for NOTHING ..."
Enormous, hairy Stoick the Vast burst into tears.
"Oh for Thor's sake, Stoick," cried Old Wrinkly, bossily pushing Stoick out of the way. "Will you just SHUT UP and listen to me? I'm really not that bad a soothsayer. This has nothing to do with the Doomfang." He took Hiccup's pulse, and looked under his eyelids, and tapped his chest, which had turned as wooden as a tree trunk. "This is VORPENTITIS."
Stoick reeled back. "And what does that mean?" he whispered through white lips.
"It means," said Old Wrinkly, "that one little weirdo looks very like another when you're soothsaying 234 in a fire, and it was HICCUP who was bitten by the Vorpent, and not Fishlegs. So HICCUP has Vorpentitis. And that means that since it is now ..."
(At this point Old Wrinkly reached into Hiccup's breast pocket, hoping to draw out the potato, and in fact drew out the ticking metal thingamajig. He looked at the numbers on it and nodded his head.) "... oooh exactly five to ten in the morning on Freya'sday Friday!"
continued Old Wrinkly, laying the metal thingamajig carefully on the bed beside Hiccup, "your son, Hiccup, who has Vorpentitis, has five minutes to live."
Old Wrinkly chuckled. This didn't seem to be worrying him much.
"Which wouldn't give a great deal of time for us to find an antidote. But luckily," said Old Wrinkly, in the spirit of a conjuror, "luckily, on your son's so-called stupid useless quest for NOTHING, he has brought back the antidote with him ALREADY. Camicazi, where is the potato? It doesn't seem to be here in Hiccup's pocket.... Have you got it?"
Camicazi was as white as One Eye's back. She shook her head numbly.
"No ... potato," she gasped.
Old Wrinkly's mouth fell open, appalled.
235 "NO POTATO?" shrieked Old Wrinkly. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO POTATO? YOU MUST HAYE THE POTATO!!!"
Camicazi shook her head again. "No potato," she whispered.
[Image: A dragon.] "But I was so sure," whispered Old Wrinkly. "I was so sure you would bring back the potato.... This is the last time I believe a single word those beastly fires say.... They told me DEFINITELY that you 236 "Oh, we got it all right," mumbled Camicazi miserably. "It was just that the Doomfang ATE it." "Oh, my goodness," gulped Old Wrinkly.
NO potato.
Suddenly Old Wrinkly looked every second of his ninety-three years. His whole body crumpled up like an old brown leaf.
Little did Hiccup know, when he was crying on the boat for his friend Fishlegs, that he should have been crying for himself.
For it was indeed HICCUP who had been stung all those many months ago, escaping from the Fortress of Sinister. And it was Hiccup who was now moments away from the death he feared for his friend Fishlegs.
237 "WHAT CAN I DO?" roared Stoick the Vast. "There must be other cures? Other medicines?"
Old Wrinkly shook his head. "The potato is the only cure for Vorpentitis."
"I'LL BRING BACK THE POTATO!" cried Stoick the Vast, drawing his sword, a Man of Action to the last. "JUST TELL ME WHERE TO GO AND HOW LONG I'VE GOT!"
"Well," said Old Wrinkly sadly, "the nearest potato is now roughly three and a half thousand miles away on the distant shores of the country known as America to those who may believe in it. And you have ..." -- Old Wrinkly checked the clock sitting next to Hiccup's bed -- "... exactly THREE minutes to find it."
Even Stoick seemed to feel that perhaps this might be a problem.
He strode around the room, tearing at his beard.
Old Wrinkly, Camicazi, and One Eye sat at Hiccup's bedside.
One Eye didn't seem as happy as he might have been two days ago at the thought of one less Human in the world.
A big tear rolled out of his one eye and down his Saber-Tooth and plopped onto the ground.
238 Hiccup was stiff as a board, and his body was now red, and boiling hot.
Toothless licked his poor red face, to try to cool it down.
"THE DOOMFANG!" cried Stoick the Vast. "I COULD TRACK DOWN THE DOOMFANG AND WRESTLE THE POTATO FROM HIM.!"
"You're going to find the Doomfang in the vast and trackless wastes of an immense and fathomless Ocean," said Old Wrinkly wearily, checking the time again on the clock, "in TWO minutes?"
"Face it, Stoick," whispered Old Wrinkly. "What you're talking about is not just im-PROBABLE ... it's im-POSSIBLE..."
Fishlegs had drawn back into the shadows, and he was watching his friend's face.
Hiccup was trying to say something, but his frozen, burning mouth made it difficult for him to say the words.
In fact he looked very like the Doomfang, when he was trying to speak to Hiccup out on the Sullen Sea.
"Ooot me ... ," mumbled Hiccup desperately. "OOOOOT ME!" and he tried to point, but his arms were as stiff as if they were made out of wood.
Old Wrinkly patted his hand, and bathed his forehead with water.
Stoick's shoulders heaved with sobs.
239 "OOOOT ME!" cried poor Hiccup again.
Fishlegs tried to follow where his friend's eyes were looking, and it seemed like they were staring at the table by the door.
On that table lay Hiccup's furry coat and his helmet, bow, and arrows that he had thrown there when he first came in the room.
"One minute left," whispered Old Wrinkly.
"OOOOOOOOOOT ME!" repeated Hiccup desperately.
Sometimes it is only a True Friend who knows what we mean when we try to speak.
Somebody who has spent a lot of time with us, and listens carefully to what we are trying to say, and tries to understand.
Fishlegs understood.
He didn't know why he was supposed to do what he was about to do, but he trusted Hiccup, who always seemed to know the right thing to do.
Fishlegs picked up Hiccup's bow.
Out of the arrow case he drew an arrow, a singularly beautiful arrow, decorated with feathers from birds Fishlegs had never seen before.
240 Fishlegs fitted the arrow to the bow, and pointed the bow toward Hiccup.
Stoick looked up from his sobbing, in amazement. Here was his son, moments away from dying, and that weird fish-faced friend of his appeared to be about to SHOOT him. TYPICAL. What a nutcase.
[Image: A man.] 241 242 cried Stoick. "DON'T SHOOT!" Stoick threw his vast bulk across the room in an attempt to shield his son from the arrow.
243 Of course, he was trying to protect Hiccup's heart and chest. He didn't realize what an appalling shot Fishlegs was, so he jumped far too high.
Fishlegs let the arrow go, and it soared in a wobbly unsteady arc, finally landing in Hiccup's right big toe, piercing through his wet boots, and into the skin.
[Image: An arrow.] It was a bit of a miracle it hit Hiccup at all. In fact, it may just be the only time Fishlegs has EVER hit something he was actually aiming at the arrow that pierced the skin of Hiccup's big toe at ten o'clock on the morning of Freya'sday Friday was the same arrow that had been soaking for the last fifteen years in the magical juices of THE POTATO.
Over the past decade and a half, those juices had concentrated on the surface of the metal, and the antidote now made its way into Hiccup's bloodstream, taking its cooling, healing work up every little vein, 244 down every little artery, into every little corner of Hiccup's poor, rigid, boiling little body.
In front of their eyes, Hiccup's stiff arms softened. His chest rose and fell. The breath blew out of his nostrils, and his eyes opened.
"Hello, Father," said Hiccup.
This was just too much for Stoick. He fainted dead away, on the spot, all six foot seven and three-feet round of him, and it took a great deal more trouble to revive HIM.
He was out cold, and Old Wrinkly slapped him, and Hiccup shook him, and Camicazi tickled his feet, and eventually it was Fishlegs who ran out and filled an enormous bucket full of snow, and threw it right in Stoick's face. That brought him to his senses, and Stoick sat bolt upright, spluttering and spitting snow out of his beard.
"You're ALIVE!" he shouted joyfully, and he hugged his son so hard Hiccup thought his ribs might crack. "By the Bristly Beard and Thunderous Thighs of Great Goddess Freya, you're ALIVE!"
"He is alive," said Old Wrinkly pointedly, "and I think some apologies are in order."
Stoick's brows lowered. However relieved and 245 happy he is, a Great Chieftain used to absolute power does not like to apologize, but after a short struggle, Stoick swallowed his pride.
[Image: Men.] "You are right," said Stoick. "I have been thoroughly wrong, and I am sorry. Old Wrinkly, you are not the most pathetic soothsayer in the uncivilized world, and I am sorry I ever said you were. Hiccup, you were right to go on the quest for the Frozen Potato to try and save the life of your odd little friend."
246 Stoick turned to Fishlegs.
'And most of all, FISHEGGS," he boomed solemnly, "I have misjudged YOU."
Fishlegs blushed. "No, no," he stammered.
"Yes," said Stoick, holding up a hairy hand. "I have. A Chief has to be big enough to admit it when he is wrong. You are a little weirdo, it is true, but you are a LOYAL little weirdo, and one day when my son is Chief I have a feeling he will need some loyal people about him."
Meanwhile, Toothless, who really couldn't stand all this soppy hugging and apologizing, flapped away to find a nice warm spot by the fire.
"Hiccup," Toothless called out sleepily, when he had found himself a particularly cozy position, "issa anyone else gonna d-d-die innanext f-f-five minutes?"
Hiccup laughed, and he asked Old Wrinkly.
"No," said Old Wrinkly solemnly. "I have examined the fire very carefully, and I can say, absolutely DEFINITELY, that NOBODY is going to die in the next five minutes. However, Gobber the Belch, I'm afraid, will catch Fishlegs's cold, and it's a nasty one."
247 "OK, then," yawned Toothless. "Iffa no one need T-t-toothless, Toothless go back to sleep."
So just when the Inner Isles were waking up from the coldest, longest winter in a hundred years, when the snow was melting, when all the other hunting dragons were opening their eyes underground preparing to burrow upward, and spring was eventually deciding it was time to arrive, just at this moment, Toothless FINALLY relaxed and went back into Hibernation Sleep.
One Eye settled down next to him, snoring like a dinosaur with sinus problems.
Old Wrinkly began to explain to Stoick some of the finer points of soothsaying.
And Hiccup and his good friends Fishlegs and Camicazi wandered outside to spend the rest of the day not doing very much at all -- my favorite kind of day.
As for Gobber the Belch, why Gobber the Belch woke up with a throbbing head and a sore throat and a nose that ran like a great green river.
So it appears that Vikings DO catch colds after all....
[Image: A dragon.] 248 [Image: A man.] Vikings don't get sick...flu is for softies...plagues are for girlies...
249 [Image: A ship is in the middle of the sea.] 250