by Tom Holt
‘Quite possibly,’ the queen said thoughtfully. ‘Once they’d got him hooked, they’d have wanted to keep it all as quiet as possible, and they’ve probably gone back into his system and erased them all now. It’s like that old saying about the e-mail of the specious being deadlier than their mail. And no prizes for guessing,’ she added darkly, ‘who they are.’
‘Really? Who did you have in mind, then? You think it’s all the CIA, or is this just another of those the-Milk-Marketing-Board-murdered-Elvis theories?’
‘Really?’ The queen looked shocked. ‘I never knew that.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake—’
‘And anyway,’ the queen went on, ‘that can’t be true, because if you’d read last week’s edition of the Dependent On Sunday, you’d know that it’s been incontrovertibly proved that Elvis is the face on the Turin Shroud.’ She hesitated, and frowned. ‘Now how in hell’s name do I know that?’ she asked. ‘Dear God, it must be something that’s leaked through from your dimension.’
Sis’s eyes lit up. ‘Carl!’ she said.
‘It’s possible,’ the queen replied. ‘Though I’d have thought he was a bit young to have heard of Elvis.’
‘I think they did him in History at school,’ Sis replied. ‘Look, is there any way of proving all this, or is it just a theory?’
The queen looked round. ‘There’s always that confounded unicorn,’ she said. ‘Go and see if it’s still there while I check these settings.’
Not long afterwards, Sis returned. The unicorn was with her.
‘Ah,’ said the queen, looking up. ‘You decided to let him go, then?’
The unicorn growled. ‘Let him go, my arse,’ it said. ‘No, this fleet of helicopter gunships flew over and pulled him out. After they’d bombed the whole glade flat and sprinkled napalm all over everything, of course. You ever been strafed from the air by Santa’s little helpers? Not recommended. It’s not so much the cluster-bombs that get to you, it’s the fact that they’re all tastefully wrapped in coloured paper and tied up with silver ribbon.’
Sis and the queen exchanged glances. ‘That sounds like Carl,’ Sis whispered. ‘He loves watching action videos.’
‘You amaze me,’ the queen replied, grinning. ‘Also of interest is the fact that while all this was going on about a hundred yards away, we didn’t see or hear a thing. I think we can safely say your brother’s on the case.’
Sis took a deep breath and let it go again. ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘How very reassuring.’
Julian stopped what he was doing, stared up at the sky and pulled a face. It was hot, he was sweating (appropriately enough) like a pig, and by his calculations it had now been midday for four and a half hours.
Shouldn’t be like this, he said to himself, as he stooped down to pick up another bundle of sticks. Midday should be at twelve o’clock precisely, not for as long as it takes. He didn’t know where any of these strange thoughts came from; why midday should be twelve o’clock, for example. All he knew was that he had them, and they made his head ache.
Still, it was coming along nicely. Once he’d decided to build his new fortified sty out of sticks (why sticks? Dunno. Seemed like a good idea…), he’d taken the time to sit down with a pointed twig and a flat patch of mud and sketch it all out in detail. A nearby blackcurrant bush had provided the makings of an ersatz abacus, and he’d calculated the various factors — co-efficients of stress against tensile strengths of various woods (elm 68 Newtons per square millimetre, ash 116, oak 97, Scots pine 89, making ash the obvious choice) — before drawing up a final 1/100th scale blueprint with material specs, quantities and a first draft of a schedule of works. Then it had been a long, hard slog in the woods cutting the sticks and bundling them up into sheaves, all to a standard size and weight to allow completely modular construction; and now he was on the longest and hardest stage of the job, actually fitting it all together.
He’d started off with the south-west African kraal house as his basic design concept, with heavy influence from clinker-built ships, the Eskimo igloo and the classical Roman arch. A high-stacked D-section dome constructed out of overlapping bundles of sticks tied and pinned in an upwards spiral keyed off with a single massive osier knot at the top would, he calculated, give the optimum level of structural integrity (by virtue of the counterbalancing of forces under external compression) without sacrificing the unique insulating properties of thatch. All in all, it was a very impressive piece of work; and although he still couldn’t quite see what had possessed him to build a house out of sticks when he could have strolled down to the nearest builders’ merchants and ordered a big load of breezeblocks, at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that as stick-built realty went, this was the state of the art.
Nevertheless…
He put the bundle down again and turned to face the forest; what there was left of it now that he’d cut and slashed a substantial hole. Was he imagining things, or had something flitted stealthily past just inside the curtain of leaves and brushwood? Eugene and Desmond? He hoped not. It wasn’t likely, either. His brothers had the same aptitude for stealthy flitting as a dinosaur has for brain surgery. If Gene and Des were headed this way, he’d have heard the crashing sounds hours ago.
There it was again; a flicker of movement, the flash of sunlight on some dark metal, the faintest snap! as a foot landed on a wisp of twig. Definitely someone there; and Julian, who had come to regard paranoia as his only true friend in all the world, abandoned his bundle of sticks and ran for home.
It’s not perfect, he told himself as he rolled the door-stone into place behind him (note the cunningly contrived system of balances and counterweights that makes it possible for a three-ton boulder to be effortlessly manipulated from within the house). But it’ll probably do. He peeked out through the tiny loophole in the front elevation and saw a shadowy figure looming in a gap in the trees. Right now he wanted nothing at all to do with shadowy figures, not even if they came surrounded by beautiful young sows bearing golden platters of swill to tell him he’d just won the lottery. He growled and turned up the propane burner under the big cauldron of molten lead that was simmering cheerfully away on the ledge of his lookout post.
He’d just finished adjusting the regulator of the propane bottle and was testing the tension in the ropes of the giant siege catapult when the shadowy figure stepped out of the forest into the clearing. Not an encouraging sight for a nervous pig; whoever he was, he felt the need to dress from head to toe in shiny black armour, wear a helmet with a mask visor and a huge neckpiece and carry a whacking great two-handed sword. Either the Jehovah’s Witnesses in this neighbourhood had abandoned the Mr-Nice-Guy tactic, or here came trouble.
Six more followed him, which made Julian feel a whole lot worse. They didn’t seem to be in any great hurry, and they weren’t being particularly furtive about their movements; maybe what he’d taken for stealthy flitting was just the natural demeanour of heavily armed men trying to move through dense undergrowth without tripping over and being unable to get up again. Quite possibly; and maybe the swords were just for clearing a path through the briars. But that still didn’t explain what they wanted.
‘You in the tinfoil,’ he shouted. ‘This is private property. Clear off, or I’ll set the dragon on you.’
The nearest intruder looked up and pushed back his visor. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Oh, there you are, I didn’t see you in all that firewood. What are you, a charcoal-burner or something?’
So that was it, Julian muttered to himself; they’re planning on burning me out. Little do they know that every single twig in this lot has been treated with the latest in asbestos-free fire-retardant. ‘You deaf or something?’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll count to ten and then I’ll turn Sparky loose. One. Two.’
They didn’t seem particularly worried, which was a pity, since the nearest thing he had to a dragon was a small beetle that had crawled down the back of his neck a couple of hours ago and was apparently building a house of its
own somewhere between his shoulder-blades. He got as far as nine, then stopped.
‘I’m warning you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do this.’
‘Oh,’ the intruder replied. He sounded disappointed. ‘Pity. I’ve always wanted to see a dragon.’
Julian winced. ‘You reckon?’ he replied; and the sneer he’d intended to accompany the words somehow got turned into a sad little simper.
‘Oh yes,’ the intruder replied, planting his sword in the ground and leaning on it. ‘Dragons are a traditional symbol of hope and spiritual rebirth. Have you really got one we can look at?’
Some pigs, Julian reflected bitterly, have it easy. Nice quiet life, regular meals, no predators, nothing to worry about except the prospect of ending up between two slices of bread. Try to make something of yourself, and the world’s suddenly your enemy. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I was just trying to get rid of you without having to resort to overwhelming force. Now bugger off before I lose my temper.’
‘You sound a bit hostile,’ said the intruder, ‘if you’ll pardon me for saying so. My guess is that this comes from not being at peace with the Elements. Have you ever considered a properly structured course of meditation?’
Oink, thought Julian. ‘Go away. This is your last warning. After that, on your own heads be it.’
Maybe the phrase wasn’t familiar to the intruders; they made a big performance out of looking up, taking off their helmets and inspecting them, patting the tops of their heads and so on. Julian could only take so much of that; in a sudden spurt of rage he grabbed a handy billhook and slashed through the rope that restrained the arm of the catapult.
It was a big catapult; frame made out of the trunks of four mature oak trees, with wrought-iron fittings and the finest horsehair ropes to provide the torsion. In theory it could have shot a six-hundredweight rock over two hundred yards. Since there was no way Julian could pighandle a rock that size up on to the lookout point all on his own, however, he’d decided to use a little initiative and an alternative projectile. To be precise, three hundred kilos of well-rotted horse manure, all neatly packed in 25-kilo sacks and piled up in the throwing arm of the catapult.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t quite thought it through.
Later, he worked it out as a simple matter of relative sectional density, surface area and wind resistance; a set of equations so simple that any six-week-old piglet could have done them in its head. In the rush and bother of building the house, however, Julian simply hadn’t had the time or the patience. Accordingly, as soon as he cut the rope, the catapult’s payload rose straight up in the air until, after a stern word and a shake of the finger from gravity, it came down again, giving it plenty of that old thirty-two-feet-per-second-per-second and landing directly — On their own heads be it, he’d said. If only.
‘There’s a passage in the scriptures,’ one of the intruders said, once the last sack had landed and split wide, and the last tottering remains of the house of sticks had fallen in (Julian had known about that particular weak spot from the outset, but he hadn’t been expecting an attack from directly overhead) ‘about the man who spits at heaven. Later on, perhaps, when you’re more in the mood—’
‘A bath wouldn’t hurt, either,’ added a colleague. ‘Being one with the basics of nature is all very well, but wearing ‘em’s a different matter entirely.’
Sitting among the ruins of his house, the tattered remnants of a dung-sack festooned around his neck like a Jacobean collar, Julian groaned. ‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘I quit. You win. I’ve had enough. Ham and eggs, bacon sandwich, gammon Hawaii, sweet and sour pork balls; you name it, I’m your pig. Just get it over with, will you?’
There was a brief silence; then the first intruder cleared his throat. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we’re vegetarians. All we wanted to know was, are we on the right road for the Hundred Acre Wood?’
Julian nodded. ‘Follow your nose as far as the next clearing but one and wait for a dramatic plot reversal,’ he sighed. ‘There’s usually one along every ten minutes or so.’
‘Many thanks,’ the intruder said. ‘If it’s any consolation, the river of predestination has many bends but few bridges.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Julian assured him. ‘And now, if you don’t mind—’
‘Carry on,’ replied the intruder. ‘Be seeing you. Strive to be at peace.’
‘Same to you with knobs on. Look,’ he added irritably, ‘it’s probably none of my business, and really I can’t be bothered with anything much right now, but who are you guys? My brothers didn’t send you here, by any chance?’
The intruder regarded him inquisitively. ‘Your brothers?’
‘Eugene and Desmond.’
‘And they’d be, um, pigs? Like you?’
‘That’s right. Unless my mum had a really adventurous time before she met my dad, all my brothers are pigs.’
‘And the sages teach us that all pigs are our brothers,’ the intruder replied politely. ‘But no, can’t say they did. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met a talking pig before. Actually, we’re samurai.’
‘Samurai.’ Julian thought hard. ‘That’s a kind of Italian sausage.’
The intruder conferred briefly with his colleagues. ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘except insofar as all things are, at the most fundamental level, one and the same. Mostly, though, we’re warrior-philosophers, and we’re off to kill a wicked queen.’
‘Really?’ Julian, who’d never cared much for politics, backed away a little. ‘Gosh,’ he added.
‘It’s our calling,’ explained the first intruder. ‘To defend the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, the humble and meek against the overbearing — sorry, am I boring you?’
‘No, no,’ Julian assured him. ‘I was just, er, counting you. I make it seven.’
‘Congratulations. Well done.’
Julian frowned hopelessly. ‘Yes, but seven,’ he said. ‘Seven samurai. Seven samurai defending the weak and oppressed and all that. No offence, lads, but are you sure you aren’t dwarves?’
The intruders looked at each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ said one of them. ‘We’d have noticed something like that.’
Julian shrugged. ‘Oh well, never mind, it was just a thought. Best of luck with the, um, wicked queen.’
The intruders bowed politely and strolled away back into the forest, leaving Julian alone with his scattered bundles of sticks and his aromatic artillery. Seven, he thought. Seven samurai. Seven dwarves. The Secret Seven. The Secret Magnificent Seven Dwarf Samurai Against Thebes.
Whatever.
He pulled the sack off his neck, brushed himself down and Went off to look for some bricks.
Chapter 9
‘My God,’ muttered Grimm #2. ‘It’s a gnome.’
Dumpy growled like a hungry tiger who’s just received a tax demand. ‘You just say something, friend?’ he hissed. ‘Or was that just my imagination?’
‘It’s all right,’ Fang said, standing in front of Grimm #2. ‘I’ll deal with this.’ He leaned forward, until he and the dwarf were almost touching noses. ‘You,’ he said. ‘No trouble, understood. You want trouble, go pick on someone your own size.’
‘He jes’ done called me a—’
‘Yes,’ Fang interrupted quickly, ‘I know. But he’s thick as a brick and foreign. Make allowances.’
Dumpy stared back. ‘Do that all the time,’ he replied. ‘Especially when they’re running, otherwise you miss ‘em behind. Nobody calls me a gnome and gets away with it, understood?’
Fang straightened his back and turned to stare at Grimm #2. ‘You,’ he snapped. ‘Did you just call this gentleman a gnome?’
‘Ye— no,’ Grimm #2 said, ‘certainly not. Wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.’
‘See?’ Fang said. ‘And you there, in the doorway, the other short gentleman. Did you hear anybody call anybody a gnome?’
Rumpelstiltskin shook his head. ‘I wasn’t listening,�
� he said diplomatically. ‘In fact, I’m morally certain I wasn’t even here at the time. I was probably somewhere else entirely. Look, can we shelve the posturing just for now and get on with the business in hand? I hate to break up a good confrontation, but we’re on a schedule.’
Fang growled a bit more. Wolfpack didn’t hold with dwarves, and a Wolfpack officer is afraid of no one; even if they’re four foot nothing and mostly made up of nose, beard and shoes — (Huh? demanded Fang’s logic centres. You know, replied the provisional wing of his memory. Dwarves. Little punk tough guys who’re always starting fights and throwing their weight around. At least, we think they’re always starting fights. We seem to remember it that way.)
‘All right,’ Fang said. ‘Say what you want and then get out.’
Dumpy made an aggressive noise at the back of his throat; but before he could turn it into words, Rumpelstiltskin interrupted. Born diplomat, that little guy. That would explain, Fang rationalised, why I don’t like him.
‘Dead simple,’ Rumpelstiltskin said smoothly. ‘We were looking for the witch, that’s all.’
‘You too?’ Grimm #2 broke in. ‘My God, she’s popular today. Sorry, but you’ll have to join the queue, because we saw her first.’
‘Since when’ve folk been standing in line for witches?’ Dumpy said, frowning. ‘Always thought the trick was stayin’ out of their way, not findin’ them. ‘Cept when there’s a new witch in town, of course, an’ everybody’s tryin’ to find out if she’s good. Like they say, a new broomstick sweeps clean.’
‘Fair enough. So what do you want her for, then?’
Dumpy muttered something and looked away. ‘We’re stuck,’ said a voice from Rumpelstiltskin’s hat. ‘He’s supposed to be rounding up seven dwarves, but we’ve only been able to find four.’
Fang blinked. ‘Four dwarves?’ he queried. ‘You can’t have looked properly.’