Chapter 7

The knight introduced himself as Sir Agravaunt.

He explained that he’d been going about his business in a quiet, inoffensive way, hanging out his washing between two convenient trees in a shady, peaceful part of the forest.

‘Washing?’ Sis queried.

‘That’s right,’ said Sir Agravaunt. ‘And then this horrid great big dragon—’

‘Doesn’t it rust?’

Sir Agravaunt looked at her oddly. ‘How do you mean?’ he said.

‘Your, um, washing,’ Sis replied, trying not to stare at the knight’s shining armour. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off with a can of oil or metal polish?’

The knight’s forehead corrugated, then relaxed. ‘Not that sort of washing, silly,’ he said. ‘Sheets and pillowcases and table napkins and things. Anyway, along comes this tiresome dragon—’

‘You do your own laundry?’ Sis interrupted.

‘Well, of course I do. Doesn’t everyone?’

Sis, who had the same degree of passive understanding of how a washing machine worked as she had of the operation of the solar system, shrugged and said, ‘I suppose so. But I thought you people had — well, servants and things.’

The knight shook his head. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘Domestic service is a barbaric and outmoded institution, equally degrading for both servant and master. And besides,’ he added ruefully, ‘they’d want to be paid.’

Sis caught sight of a patch crudely spot-welded onto the left elbow of his armour and a run in a chain-mail stocking loosely botched up with fusewire, and nodded tactfully. ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘You’re very, um, enlightened. For a knight, I mean.’

Once again the knight shot her a curious look. ‘You haven’t met many knights, have you?’ he said.

‘Well, no, actually,’ Sis admitted. ‘Not actually met them, face to face. Er, face to visor. Whatever. I’ve read about them, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘You know, the knights of the round table, that sort of thing.’

‘Round table,’ Sir Agravaunt repeated, obviously mystified. ‘Can’t say that rings a bell. Are you thinking of Sir Mordevain, by any chance? He’s got a circular Swedish pine table in his kitchen-dinette. And,’ he added with a hint of venom, ‘a bead curtain over the doorway, and a fur-fabric toilet-roll holder shaped like a cat in his downstairs loo. It only goes to show, there’s absolutely no accounting for taste.’

The wicked queen coughed meaningfully. ‘I don’t want to hurry you,’ she said, ‘but there are a few things we ought to be doing. You know, setting the world to rights, darning the fabric of the space/time continuum.’

The knight, whose eyes had momentarily lit up at the words darning and fabric, sniffed disdainfully. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Girl talk. I’ll leave you to it. Thanks anyway, for saving me from the dragon and so forth.’

As he clanked away into the shadows of the greenwood, Sis scratched her head. ‘That knight,’ she said.

‘Hm?’

‘Are they — well, all like that?’

‘Not really,’ the queen replied. ‘Or at least, they weren’t. Knights were bold, fearless, courteous, a little bit on the psychotic side but nothing that hiding from them in a deep cellar under a pile of old sacks couldn’t cope with. I think the word I’m looking for is manly.’

‘Ah.’

‘On the other hand,’ the queen went on, ‘ever since I can remember, knights have been exactly like that one we just met, if not more so. You want your living room redesigned or your wardrobe co-ordinated, you send for a knight. I wouldn’t mind,’ she went on bitterly, ‘if it was one followed by the other, but it isn’t. It’s simultaneous, and that’s what really makes me want to spit.’

Sis tried to make sense of it, but it was like trying to make one picture out of pieces from four different jigsaw puzzles. ‘Please explain,’ she said.

‘I’ll try. You see, there’s the way it ought to be, which is how it was before you crashed — sorry, before the system went down. All right, so far?’

‘I think so.’

‘Good. There’s also the way it is now, as a direct result of the system going down. If you care to think of it geometrically, let’s say everything’s at an angle of roughly sixty degrees to how it should be. Hence, for example, all that business with the three little pigs. I take it you know the orthodox version.’

Sis considered. ‘Let’s see. Pigs build house, wolf blows house down, pigs start again, build another one. Is that the one you mean?’

The queen nodded. ‘And sure enough,’ she said, ‘the three little pigs built a house, and it did get blown down. Or rather up. The difference is that it didn’t get blown up by the wolf, they did it themselves. Same approximate net result, different chain of events leading up to it; that’s what I meant by an angle of sixty degrees. It’s confusing and a horrid mess, but at least it ends up the same way. The narrative patterns are bent but not broken. It’s the third one that’s worrying me.’

‘Well?’

‘The third way is where things actually get swapped round with their opposite numbers, like the knight being saved from the dragon by the damsel. Now that’s not just a phase modulation shift in the epic sine-curve, that’s somebody deliberately mucking things about. And that’s why I’m worried.’

‘Oh,’ Sis said. ‘Have you any idea who it might be?’

‘Oh yes. In fact, I’m morally certain I know exactly who it is. You see, I have this bad feeling that you and I together are in grave danger of becoming Snow White.’

Sis didn’t know how to react to that. Her first reaction was to make a face and feign nausea; then it struck her that — ‘If we’re Snow White,’ she said, ‘who’s the wick— I mean, who’s being you?’

The queen grinned painfully. ‘Go figure,’ she said.

‘Snow White? Snow White’s turning into you?’

‘Logical, to the point of dreary inevitability. And the problem is, if she’s me, and she can somehow get the system working again—’

Sis swallowed hard. ‘You mean she’ll be out to get us?’

‘Of course. It’s what I’d be doing. What I probably am doing,’ she added, clenching her fists in frustration, ‘assuming I’m right, of course, and we are changing places. The nasty bit is that she’d be in complete control of the Mirrors core, which means she’d be able to change the rules. Like,’ she added, shaking her head sadly, ‘turning everything upside down.’

‘You mean she’s already started? Like with the knight and the dragon stuff.’

‘You’ve got it,’ sighed the queen. ‘And that’s where everything happening at once comes into the picture. That’s what’s complicating it so horribly, you see. It’d be bad enough if the three versions happened one after the other, but the wretched truth is that they’re all happening at the same time.’ Sis was really at a loss to know how to deal with that.

Nobody could accuse her of panicking, of falling to bits as soon as the going got weird; so far, she reckoned she’d coped admirably, largely by telling herself it was all one of those strange dreams soap-opera writers fall back on when they need to bring back to life someone who’s been dead for the last hundred episodes. But even they’d never gone this far.

‘Explain,’ she said.

The wicked queen looked at her, then giggled. ‘You should have seen your face when you said that,’ she said. ‘It was as if that bloke in Alien had had a bunch of primroses jump out of his tummy instead of the little wriggly treen. I know it sounds goofy,’ she went on, with a sigh. ‘Unfortunately, that’s how things work around here. Your friend Sir Whatsisface, the knight; somewhere or other there’s a story with him in it, right? Otherwise he wouldn’t be here, he’d be somewhere else, probably working in a library or a fabric shop. In that story, you can bet your life that he’s the one who kills the dragon, and the damsel in distress is the one who gets saved. Seem reasonable to you?’

Sis nodded. ‘That’s the way I’d expect it to be,’ she said. ‘Otherwise,’ she added, ‘why’d he be a knight in the first place?’