Snow White and the Seven Samurai

by Tom Holt

  ‘We’re flying!’ Eugene shrieked above the scream of the wind all around them.

  ‘In a sense,’ Julian yelled back.

  Fortunately, and at odds somewhere in the region of seventy million to one, they touched down on the moat, bounced like Barnes Wallis’ celebrated bomb, and skimmed along the lush grass of the castle foregate before coming to a gentle, civilised stop in the middle of a cesspit. Almost immediately after stopping, the table submerged with a loud and flatulent glop! leaving Julian and his brothers struggling out of the smelly mire, happy as pigs in muck (which is to say, not very).

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ Julian warned, as they scrambled out of the pit and collapsed on the grass. ‘I’ll just mention this. If the Wright boys had made a nice soft landing like that at their first attempt, they’d have been hugging themselves with glee.’

  ‘Yes,’ Desmond muttered, after spitting out a mouthful of cesspit. ‘Well. I think the basic idea was bad and getting that bloody wolf to blow in the sail was about as daft an idea as anybody’s ever had in the history of the world. On both counts…’

  ‘What’s he’s trying to say,’ Eugene interrupted, ‘is that two wrongs don’t make us Wrights. So what. We’re still in one piece. I say we forget about the whole thing, and…’

  ‘Hang on.’ Julian held up a trotter for silence. ‘Where’s the wolf?’

  The three little pigs looked round. Sure enough, there was no trace of Fang to be seen anywhere. The pigs exchanged glances and stared at the bubbling, glopping surface of the cesspit.

  ‘May he rest in peace,’ said Desmond, after a long while. ‘And whatever else is in there, of course.’

  ‘Maybe we ought to try to fish him out,’ said Eugene reluctantly. Julian shook his head.

  ‘Nice thought,’ he sighed, ‘but he’s been under — what, forty-five seconds? A minute? He’s huffed his last puff and that’s that. What a way to go,’ he added with a shudder. ‘Apt, but nasty. Come on, let’s find a stream or a pond or something, before anybody sees us.’

  Desmond nodded thoughtfully. ‘Forgive and forget, huh? Oh well, why not? It’s no skin off my snout, provided it’s guaranteed he’s not coming back.’

  Julian stared at the billowing mere, then shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he said with a sigh. ‘If the bugger does manage to survive, we’ll never have any trouble about him creeping up on us unawares. Not unless the wind’s in the other direction and we’ve all got really bad colds.’ He shook his head, then pulled himself together. ‘Move it, you two,’ he said. ‘First a bath, then we’ve got a house to build. It so happens I was reading the other day in Scientific Gloucester Old Spot about a way to make high-tensile breezeblocks from straw. Game, anybody?’

  ‘At last,’ muttered Tom Thumb. ‘Now I understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Why it’s such an unfair advantage being small.’

  The elf grunted. ‘Good for you,’ she replied. ‘Now it’s your turn to bail.’

  As well as being magical and containing a simultaneous translator/amplifier unit that’d have most terrestrial electronics manufacturers sobbing themselves to sleep from envy, Tom Thumb’s hat was watertight and therefore suitable for bailing soapsuds out of an up-ended floating contact lens. It had been Thumb’s suggestion that they name the lens the Nelson; something to do with being temporarily blind in one eye was the reason he gave, and the elf was too busy sloshing suds over the side in a soggy hat to object.

  ‘Anything to report?’ he asked, as he took the hat and stooped to dip it in the suddy bilges of the lens.

  ‘Just listen to yourself, will you?’ the elf snarled back. ‘Ye gods, it’ll be splice the mainbrace and make it so, Number One in a minute. No, there’s nothing to report, just a lot of damn great big soapy bubbles as far as the eye can.

  The lens lurched alarmingly, and if the elf hadn’t had reactions like a caffeine-addicted rattlesnake, Thumb would have been lost over the side for sure. As it was, the lens was only a degree or so of tilt away from capsizing.

  ‘What the hell…?‘Thumb spluttered, through a mouthful of soap.

  The elf craned her neck to see. ‘Styrofoam cup ahoy,’ she replied. ‘What careless maniac left that there, right in the middle of a shipping lane? And why are you talking in that funny voice?’

  ‘I lost the hat over the side,’ Thumb wailed. ‘it’s no good. We’re shipping too much soap, and without the hat I can’t bale out. We’re going to sink. All we need is a string quartet in full evening dress, and we could do an utterly authentic Titanic re-enactment.

  ‘You’re the captain,’ the elf snarled back, one leg over the side. ‘If you insist on going down with your lens, that’s your business. I’m going to jump for it.

  ‘Wait for me!’

  There was a tiny plop, followed shortly afterwards by another, similar. Not long after that, a wee small voice cried out, ‘heeelblgblgblggbgbgggbbbllgb!’

  ‘Hang on, I’m coming!’ the elf yelled, kicking frantically. ‘Don’t you dare drown on me, you big sissy, not after all I’ve… Just a minute,’ she added, standing up. ‘You clown, it’s only knee—deep.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Stand up and try it for yourself, idiot.’ The elf grunted, and wiped suds off herself. ‘Marvellous,’ she added, ‘we’re standing on top of the gallery rail. Here, give me your hand, I’ll pull you out.’

  ‘Just a minute, I think I can see the hat. That’s better,’ Thumb went on, scrambling on to the rail with the hat pulled lopsidedly over the back of his head. ‘You know, I really thought we’d had our chips that time. You know how you’re supposed to have your whole life flash before you when you’re about to drown? Well, it’s true. I saw it, the whole thing; us getting married, the reception, with your Uncle Terry getting drunk and falling down the back of the chair, little Tom junior’s first day at medical school…

  ‘Just a second,’ the elf interrupted. ‘That’s your future life, you idiot.’

  ‘Oh? Oh,’ Thumb repeated, as the implications hit him. ‘Oh, right,’ he added pinkly. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t notice how we get off this rail, then.’

  ‘I could push you back over so you could have another look,’ the elf suggested.

  ‘That’d be cheating,’ Thumb said firmly, ‘which would tend to corrupt the validity of the data. How’d it be if we just walked along the rail and climbed out through that window over there?’

  The elf looked where Thumb was pointing. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘You’re sure it’s safe?’

  ‘Well, the alternative is staying here and drowning. You choose; I’m biased.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, for sure,’ the elf said, as they tightrope-walked towards the open window. ‘If we do get out of this alive, I’ve had it with fairytales. No more fooling about with big bad wolves and homicidal woodcutters and wicked witches with machine guns and psychotic pigs for me. No more Miss Nice Girl. We’re going to move right out on to the outskirts of the forest and open a video library.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Thumb replied, in a rather wobbly voice. ‘Happily ever after, and all that jazz.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ the elf replied severely. ‘Miserably and fighting all the time, like real people. That way,’ she added, ‘ever after might get to mean longer than a week.’

  He was a single star in an infinite blackness, a tiny speck on an endless ocean, one solitary spectator in an otherwise deserted Wembley Stadium. On all sides there was nothing but an eerie expanse of white bubbles, like some bizarre Antarctic seascape shrouded in low fog.

  ‘Go on,’ Dumpy growled. ‘Git.’

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ replied the mop plaintively. ‘Properly speaking, I’m not obliged to carry passengers at all. I’d be well within my rights…’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Witches, now,’ the mop continued, taking no notice, ‘we’ve got to stop for witches, ‘cos they’re entitled, provided t
hey’ve got a current brush pass and all. But it doesn’t say anything in Regulations about giving lifts to passing dwarves. I could probably get in serious trouble for this, you realise.’

  ‘Keep swimmin’.’

  ‘It’d be different,’ sighed the mop, ‘if you appeared to have the faintest idea about where it is you actually want to go. But we’ve been cruising round in circles for hours now, and my handle’s starting to hurt something awful. I’m going to have to insist that you either specify a valid destination, or—’

  ‘Over there,’ Dumpy broke in urgently. ‘Quick.’

  ‘Now you’re sure about this, aren’t you?’ said the mop. ‘Because if you suddenly decide to change your mind…’

  ‘Quit complaining,’ Dumpy said. ‘That’s my partner over there.’

  Sure enough, on the bubble-thronged horizon, a bedraggled figure was clinging desperately to a floating baguette. ‘Hang on, ‘Stiltskin,’ Dumpy roared. ‘I’m a-comin’ to get you.’

  ‘Now just you hold on a moment,’ the mop objected. ‘One of you’s bad enough, but if you’re suggesting I stop and take on another one of you freeloaders—’

  ‘Do it or I’m gonna stick your head down a toilet full o’ Harpic so fast you won’t know you’re born. And that’s a promise.’

  ‘Vulgar beast. All right then, if you absolutely insist. But you’re taking full responsibility.’

  ‘So sue me. Hey, you sure you can’t go no faster’n this?’

  The mop drew up directly alongside Rumpelstiltskin’s baguette, and Dumpy quickly pulled him aboard. For some time he could do nothing except spit out water and swear, with the outraged mop keeping up a running commentary of protests while he did so. When at last he’d finished with all that, he heaved a sigh that seemed to come from deep down inside his socks.

  ‘Serves me right,’ he groaned, ‘for turning my back on a perfectly good scam to go trailing and paddling about playing Heroes. What I wouldn’t give for a nice cool dry cellar with a spinning wheel and a big heap of straw.’

  The mop shuddered under them like a nervous horse. Frantically, Dumpy grabbed a handful of mop-strings and pulled. ‘Whoa there,’ he commanded. ‘Ain’t no call to be in such a gosh-danged hurry. You just bide there quiet and let me think.’

  ‘Honestly,’ muttered the mop darkly, ‘is this the time to go trying entirely new experiences?’

  ‘Shuttup.’ Dumpy looked round, but there was nothing to see except the billows of white, eye-stinging foam, and he had to admit that he didn’t know what to do. That troubled him; a dwarf, surely, ought to know exactly what to do at any given moment. He should be in command, in charge of every situation, proud, self-reliant and brimming with self-confidence. A dwarf should walk tall.

  ‘Looks like this is it, then,’ mumbled his colleague beside him. ‘The end of the chapter. For you, the story is over.’ He sighed. ‘Well, there’s probably worse ways to go, though I’d be surprised if there’s many that are more bizarre.’

  ‘That ain’t no way to talk,’ Dumpy replied, shocked. ‘Dwarves don’t quit, boy. That jes’ ain’t the way.’

  ‘Oh, put a sock in it, please!’ Rumpelstiltskin exploded. ‘God, you should listen to yourself for a minute, you really should. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.’

  Dumpy narrowed his eyes. ‘What you sayin’?’ he demanded.

  ‘Quite simple,’ Rumpelstiltskin replied, turning his back. ‘So simple, in fact, that even you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting your head around it. Ready? Then I’ll begin. You — do — not — talk — like — that. Nobody — does. Got that? Or would you prefer to wait for the novelisation?’

  A surge of fury set out to cross Dumpy’s face, but it was overtaken by a flood of bewilderment. ‘What kind o’ nonsense you talkin’ now, partner?’ he groaned. ‘You done bin out in the sun with no hat on, and that’s fo’ sho’.’

  ‘You see?’ Rumpelstiltskin cried, whirling round so fast he nearly upset the mop. ‘You can’t even do it properly. It’s just what Thumb was saying a while back, only we didn’t listen to him. You’re not you, get it? I can remember now, you see. For some reason, when the water came up to my chin and I thought I was just about to drown, all the memories that’d somehow been locked up in a cupboard in the back of my mind came busting out, and I remembered! I used to know you.’

  Dumpy blinked at him. Somewhere at the back of his own mind was a tiny voice yelling Help! Let me out! ‘You did?’ he queried.

  ‘We used to work together,’ Rumpelstiltskin replied. ‘That’s if you can call it work, of course. There were seven of us, and we lived in a real dive of a place out the west edge of the forest. All the neighbours used to refer to us as Dwarves Behaving Badly.’

  ‘I…’ Dumpy raised his voice to yell a rebuttal, but somehow didn’t. ‘I remember,’ he said.

  ‘Thought you would. We used to go off to work every morning down the sewage plant, then troop back of an evening, send out for pizzas, open a couple of cases of beer, put a dirty film on the video…’

  ‘We used to dry our socks in the microwave,’ Dumpy interrupted suddenly. ‘Once a month, regular as clockwork, we’d take ‘em off, sloosh them down with the garden hose, then bung ‘em in at Defrost for ten minutes. Very good way of doing them, too. Efficient.’

  ‘That’s it, you’re right,’ Rumpelstiltskin said. He’d noticed that Dumpy’s accent and vocabulary were completely different as well, but he didn’t mention that. ‘I remember that. And then she came along and said we mustn’t do it any more.’

  Dumpy winced. ‘Snow White,’ he said.

  ‘Yup. Dear God, how could I ever forget her?’

  ‘Takes some doing, I agree,’ Dumpy concurred with feeling. ‘You remember the newspaper she used to put down all over the furniture?’

  ‘The pink velvet curtains with brocaded tiebacks.’

  ‘Having to iron the dishcloths.’

  ‘That godawful picture of happy kittens playing with a ball of wool she made us hang in the bog. Where the peanut calendar used to be.’

  ‘The little frilly lavatory brush holder in the shape of a cutely grinning pig.’

  ‘And none of us daring to say a thing. Which was fair enough, because you had to be as brave as two short planks to say anything when she was in one of her moods…’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Dumpy said quietly. ‘And to think, I actually managed to forget all that. I’d have thought it’d have taken three hours with a chainsaw and a jemmy to get all that stuff out of my head.’

  Rumpelstiltskin nodded. ‘It’s all been very…’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And…’ Rumpelstiltskin sat up as if someone had just jabbed a needle up through his trousers. ‘Dammit, we were Japanese.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘We were, straight up.’ Rumpelstiltskin frowned, as if he was trying to grip elusive memories in the folds of his brow. ‘At least, part of us was. About the time the rest of us was playing cowboys. Something suddenly went wrong, and we were…’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘forget that. Must’ve been imagining it. For a moment there, though, I could have sworn — OH, JESUS, LOOK OUT!’

  ‘Look out!’ is, of course, a particularly useless form of warning, because it’s so vague. It can even be counterproductive, since your immediate reaction on hearing it is to look round. If the source of danger is in front of you and closing in very fast, it can be absolutely disastrous.

  ‘NOOooo!’

  In retrospect it was all Mr Nikko’s fault. At a time when young Mr Akira should have been concentrating a hundred per cent on steering the long wooden bench they were using as a makeshift canoe, Mr Nikko had been telling him all about the hypothesis that so long as you’re truly as one with the boat, the direction you actually point the rudder in is irrelevant, since in the higher reality all places are one and the same anyway, and what really counts is not arriving but being in a state of harmonious travel towards (or away from; makes no odd
s) one of the infinite aspects of the place you’d wanted to go to. In consequence the bench hit the mop and nine people (seven samurai, two dwarves; calculation based on a simple head-count rather than being by weight or by volume) were catapulted into the foam.

  Far away, something went Clickcrinklecrinklewhirrrr.

  CHARACTERMERGE.EXE was doing its stuff; reintegrating that which had been delaminated, slotting back together the thin strips of what had been blown in all directions. It was like watching one of those shown-backwards sequences of a mill chimney falling down, where the long heap of scattered bricks suddenly seems to pull itself together and stand up as a solid tower once again.

  So that was all right; except that where there had been seven samurai and two short plains drifters who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water there were now seven dwarves who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water and, not to put too fine a point on it, drowning.

  ‘Igor!’

  Oh Jesus, now what? ‘Yes, boss?’

  Treading suds like an up-ended paddle-steamer, the Baron raised his arms above his head and pointed in the direction of the laboratory. ‘Igor, did you remember to switch the power off?’

  ‘Me? No, I thought you…’

  Zap.

  At this point, with half the protagonists drowning and all of them, drowning or not, suffering the effects of a million volts getting loose in a hallful of soapy water, Mr Dawes decided that enough was enough.

  When he’d set up the domain, he’d guessed that something like this might happen: a combination of a systems meltdown and a virus infection, quite possibly deliberately introduced by his enemies in the company, very likely exacerbated by further mutations from within the domain itself. It can be rough in virtual fantasy. In cyberspace, nobody can understand you when you scream.

  So he’d built in a last-ditch save-all defence mechanism, a digital equivalent of the system that floods a ruptured compartment in a submarine or an airliner with instantly drying foam. That’s where the suds motif had come from, in fact; at the time it had struck him as a piquant little play on themes.