Tom Holt: Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Once upon a time there was a little house in a big wood.

Not all little houses in big woods are quaint or charming, or even safe. Some of them are piled to the rafters with stolen car radios, others house illegal stills used for making moonshine (so called, they say, because one carelessly dropped match could lead to a fireball that’d be visible from the Moon). Some of them are the lairs of big bad wolves dressed as Victorian grandmothers, not that that’s anybody’s business but their own.

But this particular house is quaint. Roses scramble up the door-frame like young executives up a corporate hierarchy. Flowers bloom radiantly in its small but neat garden, and for once they aren’t opium poppies or coca plants or commercially exploitable varieties of the mescal cactus. Just in case there’s any doubt left in the onlooker’s mind, it has shiny red front door with a big round brass knocker, which in these parts is a sort of coded message. It means that if you go inside this house, the chances are that you won’t be strangled, stabbed, smothered with a pillow or eaten, although you may easily die of terminal cuteness poisoning. If you’re particularly observant, you can probably deduce more about the people who live there from the seven brightly coloured coats and hats hanging just inside the porch, and the fact that the lintel of the door-frame is only four feet off the ground.

The conclusive evidence is round the back, where the occupants of the little house put out the trash. No need to get mucky rummaging about in the dustbin bags; shy, timid, razor-clawed forest-dwellers have ripped the bags open, and the rubbish is scattered about like confetti on a windy day. There are approximately three hundred and twenty empty beer cans, forty-nine squashed styrofoam pizza trays, roughly half a pound of cigarette butts and ash, some slabs of cheese with green fur growing on them, several undergarments that were obviously worn too long to be cleanable and were then slung out, some crumpled balls of newspaper still smelling strongly of vinegar, and a thick wodge of the kind of newspapers that have small pages, big pictures and not much news inside them.

In this little house in the big wood, therefore, seven small men live on their own, with nobody to look after them. Nobody to clean and tidy; nobody to make them lovely home-cooked, low-fat, low-cholesterol meals with plenty of fresh green vegetables and no chips or brown sauce; nobody to remind them to take their muddy boots off before coming inside; nobody to throw away their favourite comfy old pullovers when they aren’t looking. How sad. How terribly, terribly sad.

Don’t worry, though. All that’s just about to change; because any minute now, a poor bedraggled girl will come stumbling out of the bramble thicket twenty-five yards due east of the front door. She’ll see the friendly-looking cottage with its cheerfully red front door and she’ll make straight for it, like a piranha scenting fresh blood. And in a week or so, you won’t recognise the place. It’s inevitable; it has to happen. No power on Earth can stop it.

Surely…?

Beautiful.

Stunning. Breathtaking. Fabulous. Gorgeous. Out of this world.

Satisfied that there had been no change since the last time she looked, the wicked queen turned away from her reflection in the mirror, slid back a hidden panel in the wall and switched on the power. The surface of the glass began to glow blue.

She frowned and tapped her fingers on the arms of her chair. For some time now she’d been trying to summon up the courage to upgrade her entire system, which was virtually obsolete; lousy response time, entirely inadequate memory, all of that and more. All that could be said for it was that she was used to it and it worked. Just about.

Somewhere behind the glass, mist started to swirl. She watched as it slowly coagulated into a spinning, fluffy ball, which in turn resolved itself into a shape that gradually became less like a portion of albino candyfloss and more human. The queen yawned. In theory she should be used to the delay by now, but in practice it irritated her more and more each day. She fidgeted.

The ball of mist had become a head; an elderly man, white-haired and deeply lined, with cold blue eyes and a cruel mouth, but with an air of such dreadful loneliness and despair that even the queen, who had put him there in the first place, never liked looking at him for too long. At first he appeared in profile; then his face moved round until his eyes met hers.

‘Running DOS,’ he said. ‘Please wait.’

He vanished, and his place was taken by a brightly coloured cartoon image of a spider spinning a web. Originally she’d meant it to signify cheerful patience, but now it was getting on her nerves. At least she’d had the good sense to disable the jolly little tune it used to hum when she first set it up. If she insisted on driving herself mad, there were far more dignified and interesting ways of going about it.

Just when she was beginning to think there must be something wrong with the mirror, the spider abruptly vanished and the old man was back. He gave her a barely perceptible nod. Good. At last.

The queen cleared her throat. With a system as painfully inflexible as this one, it was essential to speak clearly; otherwise there was no knowing what she’d get.

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ she enunciated, in a voice that would have secured her a job as a newsreader on any station in the universe, ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’

The old man sneered. ‘Bad command or file name,’ he said. ‘Please retry.’

What? Oh yes. Damn. She’d said who’s instead of who is. She scowled and tried again, and this time the old man looked at her steadily and replied:

‘Snow White, O Queen, is the fairest of them all.’

The wicked queen lifted her head sharply. ‘Repeat,’ she snapped. Instantly the head shifted a few fractions of an inch, back to the position it had been in just before it made its previous statement.

‘Snow White, O Queen, is the fairest of them all.’

The queen sighed. ‘Diary,’ she commanded, and the head turned seamlessly into a cute graphic of an old-fashioned appointments book, with a two-dimensional pencil hovering over its pages. She snapped her fingers twice and the pages began to turn.

‘Stop,’ she commanded. Next Tuesday, she saw, was almost completely free, apart from lunch with Jim Hook and an entirely expendable hairdresser’s appointment. ‘Insert new diary entry for Tuesday the fifteenth,’ she said. ‘Ten-fifteen to twelve noon; murder Snow White, end entry.’

The moving pencil wrote and, having writ, dissolved into a scatter of random pixels. She snapped her fingers, and the old man reappeared.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘that’ll do. Dismissed.’

The old man nodded. ‘This will end your Mirrors session,’ he said. ‘Okay or Cancel?’

‘Okay.’

There was a soft crinkling noise and the mirror seemed to blink; then all the wicked queen could see there was her own flawless, immaculate face. She studied it for a moment as she reached for her powder compact; then, having dabbed away a patch of incipient pinkness, she stood up, snuffed out the candle and stalked melodramatically out of the room.

Although it was dark now, the mirror continued to glow softly; a common occurrence with such an outdated model. In the far corner of the room, something scuttled.

‘We’re in,’ whispered a tiny voice.

Three white mice dashed across the floor, in that characteristic mouse way that makes them look as if they haven’t got any legs, and are being dragged along on a piece of string. They scampered up the curtain, abseiled down the tieback cord, swung Tarzan-fashion and landed on the mantelpiece, directly under the mirror.