Snow White and the Seven Samurai

by Tom Holt

  ‘Drive Nevgrimm is not ready,’ the accountant droned. ‘Please try again or restart Mirrors.’

  Oh Gawd. You can tell we designed this crap, can’t you? All right, transmitting as text—only files for later retrieval. Don’t lose it, okay? Here goes. I’m sending through the update, that’s Mirrors 2000 1.1, with this message. We’ve fixed it so it’ll overwrite all existing files, repeat, all existing files, which means we’ll be able to control the whole box of tricks from back here. Your priority one is to make sure that the Crazy Old Bastard, the woman Tracy Docherty, the girl Sis and the boy Carl do not, I say again do not, leave the Mirrors domain. That way, we can seal the whole thing up tight as an actuary’s bum, throw away the key and get on with running this company the way it ought to be run. And before you start panicking, there’s two outshots reserved for both of you under filename THREEPIGS.EXE, so you’ll be able to get out before we close the domain up for good. Just make sure you get the right one, or you’ll find yourself buried under a load of useless fonts before you can say Clive Sinclair. You got all that? Why am I asking, when you can’t bloody well hear me? Oh…

  The accountant’s hand shot out and knocked the cup over, spilling the water on to his desk, where a thick pile of papers quickly absorbed it. The accountant opened his eyes.

  ‘Bugger,’ he muttered, ‘now look what I’ve done.’ He scooped up the papers, tried to mop up the water with his tie, then hit the intercom button.

  ‘Nicky,’ he barked, ‘bring me a J-Cloth, quick as you like. And another coffee.’

  ‘Right you are,’ crackled the voice at the other end.

  Presumably she didn’t mean it.

  ‘Tracy?’ said the little doddery old man.

  The wicked queen looked round, did a double-take and stared at him. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh my God. I thought you were…’

  Mr Dawes shook his head. ‘Well, I’m not,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’

  Neatly sidestepping a pair of samurai, the wicked queen vaulted over a bench on to a table and down the other side, patted Fang absently on the head, ignored Julian and gave Mr Dawes a hug that would have squashed a grizzly bear. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she repeated. ‘Oh boy, am I glad to see you!’

  ‘Are you? That’s nice.’ Mr Dawes disentangled himself from the wicked queen with the ease of a bullet passing though a sheet of wet blotting paper. ‘Is there a mirror anywhere in this tiresome place? There’s some things I think I ought to sort out.’

  ‘Hey!’ Carl’s voice, loud and piercing with all the abrasive clarity of youth. ‘You’re Ben Dawes! You run Softcore! Wow!’

  Mr Dawes gave him a sweet, sad look, the sort that’s worth a million of the sort of words that are usually immediately followed by off. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell me, you want to be a software engineer when you grow up. My advice is don’t. Either of them. And now, if you don’t mind…’

  It occurred to Sis, as Carl stopped dead in his tracks and went red in the face, that if this was really the celebrated Ben Dawes, then of course he’d have had plenty of practice in making bumptious young computer freaks shut up; still, it was quite an awesome exhibition. It would be nice, she reflected, if he could make the same technique work on armed guards and Japanese warriors. Assuming it really was the great Ben Dawes. She remembered something.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  Mr Dawes turned to look at her. For a moment she was afraid he’d loose that awful stare on her; but for some reason he didn’t. He looked even more like a kindly old uncle than ever. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, ‘but are you sure you’re Ben Dawes?’

  The old man smiled; it was a very sad smile. ‘Last time I looked,’ he said.

  ‘Ah. It’s just — you’re rather older than I expected.’

  Mr Dawes nodded. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Mr Dawes nodded. ‘It’s the climate in these parts,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure it agrees with me. Now then, where was I? Oh yes. A mirror. Any mirror will do,’ he went on, and he was speaking to — yes, confound it, it was the wicked queen, although a moment ago Mr Dawes had called her Tracy, which seemed improbable. ‘Polished metal’d do at a pinch,’ he added. ‘Or even a bit of wood with a good beeswax shine on it. Surely that’s not too much to ask, is it?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Dawes,’ the wicked queen replied awkwardly, as if she’d negligently brought him a cup of warm blood instead of his morning coffee. ‘Usually there’s any number of mirrors around the place, but just now we seem to be right out of them.’

  ‘Marvellous. Well, there must be something—’ Just then Mr Hiroshige, who’d got his sleeve snagged on the corner of the table, managed to free himself and advanced on the wicked queen, brandishing his sword in the approved, highly ceremonial and utterly symbolic manner. He’d just, in fact, accidentally sliced through a bowl of wax fruit and a table lamp; and as he swung the shining katana around his head, the light flashed on the immaculately burnished steel of its three-foot blade.

  ‘You there,’ Mr Dawes barked, and at once the samurai stopped brandishing and stood on one leg looking extremely self-conscious. ‘Stop fooling about with that thing and give it to me. Hurry up,’ he added, snapping his arthritic fingers, ‘that’s the way. Now then,’ he added, as he took the sword from Mr Hiroshige’s unresisting hand, ‘let’s see what we can see. Tracy, I’d be ever so grateful if you could stop those buffoons with guns clumping up and down. This is rather delicate work, you know, especially under these conditions.’ As he spoke, an oppressive weight of guilt and shame seemed to encompass the Baron’s halberdiers, as if they’d been called up to the front at morning prayers and told off in front of the whole school. They shuffled back out of the way, holding their assault rifles behind their backs and trying to look inconspicuous. For beginners, it was a creditable attempt.

  Mr Dawes held the sword blade up to the light; then he laid it down again, took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve, put them back on his nose, breathed on the sword, rubbed that with his sleeve and held it up again, squinting at it. ‘Not used to bright light, you see,’ he explained. ‘Now then. Mirror!’

  For a heart-twistingly anxious moment, nothing; then the face of a very old and venerable Japanese monk appeared in the steel.

  ‘Mirror,’ Mr Dawes repeated.

  The monk stared at him impassively for about three-quarters of a second; then he bowed slightly from the neck and opened his lips.

  ‘Fleeting, like the snowflake, Fragile as the cherry blossom, DOS is now running.’

  ‘What?’ Mr Dawes frowned. ‘Oh, right. Never mind all that now. Select Setup, quick as you can.’

  The Japanese gentleman bowed again and vanished. Mr Dawes made an exasperated noise with his teeth and upper lip and sat down on a bench, tapping the fingers of his free hand on the table. Everybody else seemed to be watching, and also (Sis realised) trying to avoid being noticed by Mr Dawes; even Fang had curled up under the table with his tail between his legs. She wondered why this was; after all, he seemed a nice enough old man, not to mention being the rich and famous Mr Dawes; then she remembered the effect that a very slight brush with his displeasure had on Carl (he was under the table too, and the only reason his tail wasn’t between his legs was that he didn’t have a tail). A nice enough old man, she decided, but also formidable; kindly old Uncle Darth.

  And then she noticed someone who wasn’t respectfully cowering: a cute, fresh-faced blonde girl, a year or so older than herself, with pigtails that came down to her waist and cheeks as rosy-red as the bruises on the face of someone who’s just been done over by a Glasgow dope gang. Snow White, she deduced, and she looks ready to commit mayhem. As yet, though, she didn’t look as if she was about to do anything more aggressive than mere savage pouting (she’s got the lips for it, God knows; she’s what you’d expect to see if Frankenstein had gone to work for the Disney corporation), but it crossed
Sis’ mind that she ought perhaps to warn Mr Dawes; and then she thought of what might happen if she interrupted Mr Dawes when he was busy, and decided that he was probably old enough and avuncular enough to look after himself. She looked away — At precisely the same moment that Snow White made her move; which is why the first Sis knew about it was the ear-splitting shriek as Snow White snatched Mr Miroku’s sword out of his fist, leapt up on to the table and aimed a ferocious slash at Mr Dawes’ head. Fortunately, she missed; but the blow knocked his sword clean out of his hand and sent it flying across the hall. It hit a wall, rebounded and fell with quite remarkable precision on to the rope that still attached Dumpy, Tom Thumb and the Brothers Grimm to the battering ram, cutting it in two.

  The Grimms had been fidgeting nervously for some time; now that they were suddenly and unexpectedly set free, they didn’t hang about. Grimm #2 hurled himself under the table, but #1 lowered his head and charged at Mr Dawes, yelling something inarticulate and managing to head-butt the poor old man without actually having to look him in the eye. At this point Fang sprang up from his crouch under the table. Perhaps it was because he’d been human for so long he’d forgotten what size his true shape was, or maybe it was just a freak outbreak of clumsiness. Whatever the reason, he stood up too fast and too tall, nutted himself on the underside of the table and flopped back to the floor with his eyes shut.

  With Mr Dawes’s restraining influence temporarily removed, the gathering became a trifle disorderly. Desmond and Eugene (who’d been utterly paralysed by the sight of Mr Dawes, though they had no idea why) caught sight of Julian and went for him like a pack of hunt saboteurs in pursuit of a Range Rover. Julian didn’t hang around; he scrambled up on to the table in a flurry of clattering trotters and galloped along it at a speed you’d normally expect to be far beyond the ability of even a souped-up Formula One pig, until he had the misfortune to cannon into Dumpy, who’d wanted to hit one of the halberdiers in the eye (because he was there, presumably) and had climbed on to the table so as to be able to reach. At this point Fang came out of his table-induced swoon, caught sight of two little pigs, and instinctively took a deep breath. The pigs saw him, recognised him and stopped dead.

  ‘Hey, you!’ Eugene yelled to Dumpy. ‘Leave that and get this bastard wolf off us. That’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?’

  Dumpy blinked; his head was still full of breathtaking indoor fireworks after his collision with Julian, but a remark that finally makes some sort of sense after you’ve been living in a world with severe continuity problems has power to penetrate even the wooziest skull.

  ‘Darned right you are,’ he whooped with all the satisfaction of a short but fierce warrior who finally knows what he’s supposed to be doing; at once he threw himself at Fang and would undoubtedly have knocked the stuffing out of him if only he hadn’t missed and gone rolling across the floor like an out-of-control snowball. ‘Dammit!’ he yelled, as he trundled towards the door, “Stiltskin, Thumb, do something!’

  Rumpelstiltskin, of course, was still up in the gallery. He’d been hoping very earnestly that whatever it was that was going on could manage to carry on going on without him, and he was just about to plead a bad cold or a severe attack of conscience or a grandmother’s funeral when he observed that Fang was now more or less directly below him, and that on the parapet of the gallery, just nicely handy and conveniently balanced, was a large potted fern. He nudged it and it fell.

  ‘Wugh!’ said Fang as the pot hit him; then he closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

  Dumpy, who’d pitched up against the doorframe and rolled back on to his feet, punched the air with his fist. ‘Yeehah!’ he shrieked. ‘We done it! We done nailed that old big bad wolf!’

  Snow White and the wicked queen, who’d been having a little private wrestling-match to decide who was to have Mr Miroku’s sword, both looked round simultaneously. Then they looked at each other.

  ‘Something went right,’ said the queen.

  Snow White growled like an angry dog, let go of the sword and belted her with a cut-glass fruit bowl, causing her to lose interest; then she picked up the sword and advanced along the top of the table towards Mr Dawes, who did a fine impression of a crab in reverse gear backing round a tight corner.

  ‘It won’t work, you know,’ he said.

  ‘You reckon?’ Snow White lunged, missing Mr Dawes by the thickness of a cigarette paper. ‘We’ll see.’ She feinted to his left then, as he dodged, brought the blade whistling down, snipping a button off his jacket cuff with a degree of precision that’d have been the envy of half the surgeons at Guy’s Hospital. ‘I’m the fairest, and that’s how it’s going to stay,’ she snarled. ‘Now keep still while I kill you.’

  She swung again; but this time the blade bit an inch and a half deep into the oak of the table-top, and while she was struggling to twist it free, Mr Dawes ducked under her arms and made a Warp Two dodder for it. He got up quite a respectable turn of speed, but it didn’t get him very far, because Grimm #2 reached out from under the table and tripped him up. ‘Get him,’ he yelled to his brother; and to be fair, Grimm #1 wasn’t far behind; the only reason he didn’t get there earlier was because he’d stopped to pull a bell-rope clear from the wall. He pounced on Mr Dawes and started tying him up.

  ‘Bugger that,’ Grimm #2 shouted. ‘Kill the old sod.’

  Grimm #1 swivelled round, his hands tight on the rope. ‘I can’t do that,’ he shouted back. ‘That’d be murder.’

  ‘Nah. Aggravated pesticide, top whack.’

  Grimm #1 scowled. ‘Look, we tie him up and get out of here, and that’ll have to do.’

  Then both of them were shoved out of the way as Snow White charged through, still gripping the sword. ‘This is between him and me,’ she warned, carelessly letting the tip of the blade pass no further than a thirty-second of an inch from the tip of #2’s nose. ‘Stay out of this, unless you fancy going home salami.’

  #1 opened his mouth to object, but #2 got in before him. ‘Fair enough,’ #2 said. ‘You do it, we don’t mind. Equality of opportunity is one of the things Softcore takes most seriously.’

  Sis looked round in desperation; but the samurai didn’t seem as if they were interested in intervening, while the halberdiers were standing there like book-ends. The pigs and the dwarves just seemed out of it all, somehow, as if their storyline was over and someone had switched them off to save electricity. She looked away.

  And saw the doors that led up to the gatehouse tower fly open, and a great torrent of what looked very much like thick soap-suddy water come flooding into the hall, with three or four frantically struggling mops riding the crest of the tidal wave like surfers as depicted by L.S. Lowry. A fraction of a second before the flood caught her up and swept her away, she thought she might just have seen a tiny elfin female and an equally diminutive male clinging on to the bolts that had held the doors shut; though whether that meant they’d deliberately opened them or were just clinging to something to keep from being drowned in the suddy deluge, she neither knew nor (Help! I can’t SWIM!.’) particularly cared.

  It’s a terrible way to go, drowning in a sea of soapsuds. The assurance that, once the flood has subsided and your sodden, swollen body pitches up somewhere among the driftwood and other assorted flotsam, your clothes will be whiter than white and free of those hard-to-shift stains is little real consolation.

  Most of the hapless victims trapped inside the great hall when the deluge broke through coped remarkably well, all things considered. Fang, for instance, swam round in circles until his strength was just about to fail, whereupon he was rescued by the three little pigs, who had improvised a raft out of an upturned table (complete with a tablecloth sail and serving spoon oars) and were arguing among themselves as to which of the three chandeliers pointed north when Fang floated by.

  ‘Let him drown,’ said Desmond. ‘For pity’s sake, he’s the big bad wolf.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Julian argued, reasonably enough. ‘A
nd help me get him on board.’

  ‘On table, surely.’

  ‘You can shut up as well. Come on, jump to it. Or do you want to spend the rest of your lives on this contraption?’

  It was remarkable how quickly their differences had been put aside, once it became apparent that Julian was the only one with a clue as to what to do.

  ‘All right,’ Desmond grunted. ‘Eugene, get his ears. Now then; one, two, and heave!’

  Fang landed in the well of the table with a bump, too exhausted to do more than wag his tail feebly. Julian, however, was in a hurry.

  ‘Now listen,’ he said, grabbing Fang by the scruff of his neck and lifting his head. ‘You see that archway over there? Good. Now that’s the way out on to the battlements — we’re floating level with them right now. If we can get this raft over there before the sud level rises much more, we can get out on to the ramparts and shin down the drawbridge ropes. Piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is blow in the sail, right? I said right?’

  ‘I don’t care. You used to be bloody good at huffing and puffing and blowing things down when it was a real pain in the bum. If you need an added incentive, how about if you don’t get huffing and puffing before I count to three, you’re going to be breakfast, lunch and dinner until further notice? You like that idea? Okay then. Get huffing.’

  Quickly, with his ears right back against his skull, Fang huffed. Then, more from force of habit than anything else, he puffed. And then the raft skimmed across the surface of the great hall like a speedboat, cutting a huge wake of froth and bubbles as it went and spewing out a tidal wave that turned the great hall into a jacuzzi.

  ‘Too fast!’ Julian screamed, as the raft shot towards the archway like a torpedo. ‘Too fast…!‘

  His words dopplered away into nothing as the raft shot through the arch, bump-bump-bumped down a flight of steps and slid off through another archway and over the parapet like the crew of the Enterprise doing warp nine back to the nearest starbase in time for Happy Hour.