Snow White and the Seven Samurai

by Tom Holt

  The queen nodded sympathetically. ‘You don’t have to explain to me,’ she said. ‘Let’s just say there’s a lot of it about. You feel as if you can’t remember a time when you didn’t know about whatever it is you now suddenly realise you know. Which,’ she said with a sour grin, ‘is fairly close to the truth, I reckon. Lead the way, then, and let’s get this horrid chore over and done with.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Beast, rearranging the mess on his face into something smile-shaped and horrible. ‘You’ve no idea how much this means to…’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I should have thought before I opened my mouth. Sometimes I know I can be dreadfully inconsiderate and I’m trying not to, but sometimes it can be a bit…’

  The queen sighed. ‘Now can you see why I hate him so much?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Slowly,’ observed Mr Hiroshige, ‘the falling snowflake—’

  ‘Sorry, I missed that,’ said young Mr Akira, catching up. ‘Could you start again, please?’

  If the senior samurai was put out by the interruption, he didn’t show it. ‘Of course,’ he replied; then he cleared his throat and declaimed:

  ‘Slowly, the falling snowflake

  Mingles with the cherry-blossom, falling;

  Where the hell are we?’

  Young Mr Akira, who was learning to appreciate the essentially transitory nature of all material objects by carrying everybody else’s equipment, scratched his head and looked round for a landmark. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got a clue. And besides,’ he went on, ‘didn’t you say just now that all roads are in essence the same road, and that to travel is by its very nature to arrive at all destinations simultaneously?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Hiroshige, ‘but that was before my feet started to hurt. I think we should have turned left back there by the old abandoned mill.’

  ‘We could ask somebody, I suppose,’ suggested a small samurai at the rear of the column. ‘Although since all directions are simply facets of the same universal jewel, we might do just as well if we sit down here for a cup of tea and a smoke.’

  Mr Hiroshige sighed. ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘It so happens I have a flask in my kitbag.’

  (And, since all kitbags are one universal kitbag and young Mr Akira was carrying it, he knelt down and started undoing straps and peeling back Velcro until he found it. It held just enough for six cups.)

  ‘This is getting boring,’ said Mr Nikko, taking off his left boot and evicting something small and energetic from it. ‘Surely it can’t be all that difficult to find a wicked queen in her own forest.’

  ‘Ah,’ said young Mr Akira, pouring tea, ‘but since all people are merely segments of the great orange of mankind, doesn’t it follow that to find any one person is to find all humanity, looked at from a perspective uncluttered by the foliage of sensory perception?’

  ‘No,’ answered Mr Miroku. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat, is there? Some of us didn’t have any breakfast.’

  Young Mr Akira looked up. ‘There’s sandwiches,’ he said. ‘There’s raw fish and seaweed, fungus and bean curd, mixed raw fish or mixed seaweed.’

  ‘Oh. No sashimi?’

  Young Mr Akira looked in the packet. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mr Miroku mimicked. ‘I don’t think that’s quite good enough. When I was your age, if I’d forgotten the sashimi sandwiches, I’d have been expected to disembowel myself on the spot, and no excuses.’

  Mr Akira’s eyes opened wide. ‘Gosh,’ he said. ‘And did you, ever?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mr Hiroshige said quickly, before Mr Miroku had a chance to reply, ‘he’s just a bit young still. And stupid too, of course. But young he’ll grow out of.’

  They sat for a while in silence (unless you count the sound of sandwiches being eaten. There were six rounds of sandwiches). Finally, young Mr Akira cleared his throat. ‘I heard a good joke the other day,’ he said. ‘How many fifth-level wizards does it take to change a light bulb?’

  The samurai considered this for a moment. Two of them took off their steel gauntlets and counted on their fingers.

  ‘One,’ said Mr Nikko.

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ young Mr Akira said. ‘You’re not doing it properly.’

  ‘Oh. How should it be done, then?’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Akira replied, ‘I say how many fifth-level wizards does it take to change a light bulb, and you say, I don’t know, how many fifth-level wizards does it take to change a light bulb, and then I say it depends on what he wants to change it into. Get it?’

  The silence that followed was so stony, you could have built bridges out of it.

  ‘Oh I see,’ said Mr Hiroshige at last. ‘You mean how many wizards does it take to change a light bulb into something else. You know, that question was rather ambiguous. You didn’t make it clear whether you meant change as in turning things into things or change in the sense of replace or renew. Now if you’d said how many wizards does it take to transform a light bulb…’

  ‘Better still,’ said Mr Nikko, ‘what about, If a collection of fifth-level wizards wanted to turn a light bulb into something, for instance a thousand paper cranes, how many of them would it take? Then there’d be no risk of being misunderstood.’

  ‘Although on a more fundamental level,’ argued Mr Hiroshige, ‘the light bulb and the paper cranes are all part of the same great nexus of concrete existence, so where’s the point? In fact, wouldn’t you say it was presumptuous to change it into something else? You’d be usurping the prerogative of the continuum. Whereas if you meditated long enough and in the proper manner, you’d pretty soon be able to see the light bulb as whatever it is you wanted it to be, which is surely every bit as good as far as you’re concerned.’

  Mr Wakisashi, the smallest of the samurai, nodded eagerly.

  ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got a light bulb,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we could experiment.’

  ‘You’d need two, though, surely,’ said Mr Nikko. ‘One to be the broken one and one to be the one you replace the broken one with —’ He stopped to count on his fingers. ‘And a cauliflower,’ he added, ‘to be the thing the light bulb eventually gets changed into.’

  Mr Akira looked glum. ‘If I’d known it was this complicated,’ he said, ‘I’d never have started it in the first place. It was only meant as a joke.’

  ‘Raises an interesting point, though,’ said Mr Wakisashi, who was one of those silent, mystic types who don’t say a word for years and then suddenly burst out with a whole lot of gibberish. ‘We could meditate until the next person we see is the wicked queen. And then, of course, we kill her.’

  Mr Miroku looked down at the crusts of his sandwich.

  ‘I’ve tried meditating that into sashimi,’ he said, ‘but all I seem to get is tomato and onion quiche. And of the two, I definitely prefer the mixed raw fish sandwich.’

  After that, the debate hotted up a little, and the samurai were so engrossed in it that they almost didn’t notice the witch as she ran past. If it hadn’t been for young Mr Akira calling out ‘Coo! A witch,’ she’d have got clean away.

  As it was, Mr Miroku was the first to spin round, flip a five-sided throwing star out of the top of his boot, hurl it through the air and pin the witch to a tree by her ear. ‘…Substantially the same as the raw fish sarny,’ he continued, ‘except for the sensory perception, or should I say deception, that it’s a plate of sashimi. Whereas looked at from a totally different perspective…’

  ‘Eeeek,’ growled the witch; and then, ‘Woof!’ as the shock and associated adrenaline rush kicked in and triggered the transformation protocols in her DNA — (which, given that in this dimension all living creatures are constructs of the stories they inhabit, stands for Does Not Apply…) — and turned her into a wolf.

  ‘Stone me,’ breathed Mr Hiroshige. ‘Now if that isn’t a case in point, I don’t know what is. Pretty nifty meditation there, s
omebody.’

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ muttered Mr Nikko. ‘Wish it had been, but I didn’t even see her till you chucked the star.’

  ‘Wasn’t me either,’ said Mr Miroku. ‘Anybody?’

  One by one the other samurai disclaimed responsibility, until only young Mr Akira was left. ‘So it must have been you,’ said Mr Hiroshige, with a slight tone of awe in his voice. ‘Well, well, well. You must be a natural.’

  Mr Akira looked stunned, shocked, guilty and pleased, all at once. ‘Well it’s true,’ he said, ‘I did think to myself as she was running by, dear God, what an evil-looking bitch. And bitches are dogs, and dogs are sort of wolves. In a sense.’

  ‘Did it without even knowing he was doing it,’ said Mr Nikko respectfully. ‘That’s quite remarkable. And also,’ he added, ‘potentially awkward. Just as well the kid’s got a nice sunny disposition.’

  The other samurai suddenly noticed that young Mr Akira had been carrying all the luggage, and that didn’t strike them as a particularly fair division of labour. Mr Miroku realised that young Mr Akira hadn’t had anything to eat and politely offered him the ruins of a raw fish sandwich, while Mr Wakisashi wondered aloud whether this highly developed innate ability of his might be harnessed into, for example, predicting the results of greyhound races.

  ‘Talking of greyhounds,’ said Mr Akira, ‘what about the witch? Or the wolf, or whatever. Are we just going to leave her there?’ He hesitated. He’d thought of a joke; and although his last effort hadn’t been greeted with the acclaim he’d hoped for, there was a chance that his sudden new access of popularity might change all that. He decided to risk it. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard of keeping your ear to the ground, but this is ridiculous.’

  The samurai exchanged furtive glances. Mr Nikko mimed helpless laughter, and once the others had worked out that he wasn’t having a stroke, they took the hint. Mr Akira blushed. Meanwhile, the witch had started making whimpering noises.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to let her go,’ Mr Akira suggested.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Mr Hiroshige, thoughtfully. ‘I mean, that’s an excellent suggestion and one to which we should give serious attention.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ added Mr Miroku. ‘But if I could just pick you up on a small detail of interpretation, I think that what our colleague here was really saying was, we should let her go after we’ve found out if she can be useful to us.’ He turned to face Mr Akira and smiled ingratiatingly. ‘That was what you were getting at, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Was it?’ Mr Akira thought about it for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ he said.

  ‘I thought so,’ Mr Miroku replied. ‘Just thought I’d check, though, just in case I’d missed the point.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Akira. ‘So what do we want to do with her?’

  The other samurai looked at each other. ‘Archery practice?’ suggested Mr Wakisashi hopefully.

  ‘We could ask her where the wicked queen is,’ Mr Nikko said. ‘After all, it’s about the right place in the narrative for somebody to tell us something. What do you think?’ he asked Mr Akira. ‘I really would value your input at this stage.’

  Mr Akira shrugged. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to ask her, then?’

  ‘I think you should,’ said Mr Nikko.

  ‘You’d do it awfully well,’ agreed Mr Hiroshige.

  ‘You really think so?’ Mr Akira enquired. ‘Gosh.’

  ‘Oh definitely,’ Mr Wakisashi said, with a smile so warm you could have toasted muffins over it. ‘No question about that. You’ve got the knack, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Innate gift,’ confirmed Mr Suzuki, his head bobbing up and down like something in the window of an elderly Cortina. ‘Born with it. Something you’ve either got or you haven’t, and he has.’

  ‘All right,’ Mr Akira said, ‘I’ll give it a shot if you like. Hey, you.’

  ‘Wonderfully authoritative tone,’ Mr Nikko muttered under his breath.

  ‘Authoritative without being unfeeling,’ Mr Hiroshige amended. ‘I mean, it’s not as if he’s some kind of neo-fascist security chief. Here’s someone who really knows how to communicate, don’t you think?’

  The witch tried to move her head, then winced. ‘You talking to me?’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes.’

  (‘Good answer. Good answer.’

  ‘Always said he’s got a marvellous way with words.’)

  ‘Oh,’ said the witch. ‘All right then. If you want the wicked queen, you’ll find her up at the—’

  She got no further; because at that precise moment (and it couldn’t have been more precise if they’d had all the scientists in NASA doing the calibrations) a tall, fair-haired, extremely handsome young man jumped out of the bushes just behind her with a mop-handle in one hand and a dustbin lid in the other and yelled, ‘Gerroutavit, yer ugly bastards!’

  Immediately, six of the seven samurai drew their swords. The handsome prince took one step backwards, with the air of a man reassessing the situation, and raised the dustbin lid.

  ‘Hands off,’ he said. ‘She’s my witch. Go find your own.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Hiroshige, his sword-tip held unwavering in a perfect exhibition of the classical guard. ‘Why are you waving a mop and a dustbin lid?’

  It was at times like this, Fang reflected wretchedly, that being a handsome prince really irritated him. It was bad enough being outnumbered seven to one by heavily armed professional warriors when all he had to defend himself with was the mop he’d grabbed from the witch’s cupboard under the stairs and the lid off her dustbin. The bemused and blank expressions on his assailants’ faces, and the embarrassment they caused him, served to twist the knife in the wound by some forty-five degrees.

  ‘Aha,’ he replied. ‘Stick around long enough, my friend, and you might just find out.’

  ‘I know,’ suggested young Mr Akira, who had tried to draw his sword too, but had succeeded only in cutting through his own sash. ‘It’s another of those philosophy things, isn’t it? It’s to show that, in the hands of the true master of the Way, a mop-handle is every bit as effective as a twenty-six-inch razor-sharp katana and a pouch full of poison-smeared throwing stars.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘The dustbin lid’s a bit too deep for me, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly good…

  ‘Balls,’ Mr Nikko interrupted. ‘He’s just an idiot, that’s all. Come on, you guys, let’s slice the sucker!’

  Before Fang could say a word, Mr Nikko chopped off the first six inches of the mop-handle and was swinging the sword back over his shoulder for a full-welly head-splitting slash when he caught sight of something that made him check his swing and gradually lower the sword.

  ‘That’s right,’ Dumpy said approvingly, as he ducked under the branches of a small gorse bush and strode into the clearing. ‘Nice and easy, keep the sword where I can see it. Same goes for the rest of you,’ he added sternly.

  ‘Dwarves!’ breathed Mr Hiroshige under his breath. ‘We’ve been ambushed by dwarves.’

  The rest of the rescue party was out in the open now; besides Fang and Dumpy there were Rumpelstiltskin and Tom Thumb, the Brothers Grimm and the elf. Making a total of— ‘Seven,’ muttered Mr Wakisashi, who’d been counting.

  ‘Well, I guess we walked straight into that. I suppose a straightforward surrender would be out of the question?’

  ‘That’s right,’ added Mr Akira, who’d at last managed to get his sword free of the scabbard and was twirling it with enthusiasm, though not much else. ‘Throw down your weapons immediately and we might just—’

  ‘Not them,’ Mr Hiroshige hissed. ‘Us. And for pity’s sake stop playing with that thing, before you put someone’s eye out.’

  Mr Akira’s jaw dropped. ‘But that’s silly,’ he protested. ‘There’s just as many of us as there are of them, and they’re only little—’

  ‘The word you’re looking for,’ Mr Nikko interrupted quietly, ‘is dwarves. Now put it down before you
get us all killed.’

  Mr Akira shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said stubbornly. ‘They’re little short people, and we’re samurai. We’ve got swords and they’re unarmed. We could take them out like that.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Mr Nikko hesitated. Inside his brain, the hard disk was crinkling furiously, trying to access some deeply buried path where the explanation — the perfectly simple and logical, patently and painfully obvious explanation — lay buried. He knew that there was a perfectly good reason why big, strong trained fighting men ought to be terrified of little cute people with long white beards and brightly coloured jackets with big round brass buttons. He could remember distinctly — He could remember remembering — He could remember having remembered — ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘We could, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Akira was saying, ‘that’s always supposing that we wanted to. And that’s a big supposing, because after all, they’ve done us no harm, can’t actually see how they could possibly ever do us harm, what with them being so small and weedy, so the chances of our ever wanting to take them out just like that are pretty damn small. All I’m saying is, in the unlikely event…’

  He realised that nobody was listening. Instead his six colleagues were advancing on the seven newcomers, brandishing their swords and uttering strange guttural cries, while the newcomers — call them the seven dwarves, it’s easier — were backing away with that worried, sheepish look of people whose bluff has just been definitively called. He had the feeling that somehow, this shouldn’t be happening. It was a strong feeling, bordering on a conviction. Unfortunately, he hadn’t a clue how to stop it.

  ‘Here, you,’ he snapped at the witch, who was grinning like a thirsty dog. ‘Do something.’

  ‘What d’you mean, something?’ she replied.

  ‘Stop them, before they do something they’ll regret later.’

  The witch’s eyes sparkled. ‘Not a lot I can do with this thing pinning my ear to this tree,’ she replied, reasonably enough. ‘Now if you were to pull it out—’