The Beast thought for a moment. ‘There’s an unresolved plot strand that comes up slap bang in the middle of the deserted east wing of the castle,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’

‘It’ll have to, I suppose,’ the queen replied dubiously. ‘But I know those UPSs. You can always tell them by the way they have these big neon signs saying TRAP THIS WAY!!! just above the entrances. Still, there’s no bucking the story. Just a minute,’ she added. ‘What the hell would you know about narrative threads and unresolved plot strands? You’re just a civilian.’

The Beast shrugged helplessly. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘I just do, that’s all. Feels like I’ve known it all my life, except…’

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:

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…’