Such a luscious green can only come from fresh young grass growing on even and well fertilised soil. And when you fly lower and engage visual magnification, the multicoloured spots of flowers become visible, celebrating their wedding with the bees on this wide expanse. The eternal heraldic design of life. Strange, I never think of the Orks, but every time I feel sorry for this immense flowery lawn, which is transformed from green to blackish-brown by the end of the war. So many butterflies and beetles are killed every time.

  Preparations for filming in the Circus were in their second day already, but the Orks didn’t know anything about that – the technical trailers had flown in ahead of today in invisible mode. The Orks only saw our cameras hovering in the sky. But today they would see our entire assault force.

  The stinking slums of the Orkish capital only run right up to the wall of the circus at one spot – by the market square. And that’s the location of the only gates through which the Orks can pass on their way to the war.

  They were already prepared for battle – their huge army looked like an octopus that had crawled up to the virginally green circle of the Circus. It looked that way because the army was too big to fit into the market square, where the Kagan’s battle barge was standing – half of the soldiers assembled in adjacent streets.

  And then something clicked in my mind.

  I suddenly realised that this sinister octopus could be a great help with the payments for Kaya. Naturally, the high-altitude view wasn’t being shown by just one camera, or even two – but without a bit of special gimmickry, no one could see the octopus, since the Orkish detachments were wearing uniforms of various colours … Ah, but if it was made black … After juggling a bit with light modifiers and filters, I switched on the camera.

  The octopus looked so alarming now; it even made me feel uneasy – as they said in olden times: ‘I was behind the camera and I shed a tear …’ It was astounding that this pattern appears in every war, and so far no one had noticed it or sold it.

  I was shooting simultaneously on temple celluloid and digital, and one of the senior sommeliers had evidently followed my material on his manitou, immediately understood the idea and blown me an instant kiss – the figures in the upper right corner of my field of vision flickered and clicked, and I realised that I’d earned three million manitou.

  That was just for a few seconds of filming. And the shot was certain to feature as the opening screen for today’s newscast. Never mind the opening screen, it was good enough to be the logo for the entire war – a black octopus and a green circle with … I really didn’t know who they’d write into it. But in a ten-fold enlargement, all the interested professionals would be able to see the tiny icon at the bottom:

  DK V-Arts & All

  And there was no doubt at all that the shot would be enlarged many times – it’s a very rare achievement to convey the entire sombre, aggressive essence of the Orkish tribe so correctly and succinctly in a single close-up. Look and learn, you sucklings, while I’m still with you.

  That’s why I like to be the last to descend, in my trademark spiral. While the seagulls thrash about just above the waves, trying to find themselves a juicy morsel, the eagle soars through the clouds … It was great that I’d earned my manitou right at the beginning of the war – like all the aces, I don’t like to hang about over the battlefield unless it’s absolutely necessary. I could simply crash into some novice and damage Hannelore. Or I could easily get winged by a shell, especially when they start dispatching the Orks who have been recorded for eternity off into that same eternity.

  Shooting battle from low-level flight is not for me. Let the youngsters revel in the close-ups of the Orkish guts – the most important thing for them is to make everything juicily appalling. Their cameras belong to their employers, so they’re not afraid of smashing them up. So let them fight their battle for existence. Just as long as it’s not with me, but with each other.

  Yes, I can go down low, of course. I have all the skills for that. But there’s only one job down there that suits me – covering one of the top actors during filming. This used to be the most important area – under the old temple rules, the actor was required to kill at least one Ork himself for the snuff, and I had to fire at precisely the right moment, so that the Ork would still technically be alive when he was overtaken by retribution. But under the new law it’s no longer important exactly who kills him, the actor or the cameraman (the theologians have come to the conclusion that the thread of life is, in any case, snapped by Manitou). The important thing is that the Orks filmed in a snuff really did die. Well now, there’s no problem with that.

  I can also pick off Orks around the Kagan himself, when they go to load him onto a platform, to lift him up to London. The Orks, by the way, still believe that most of their Kagans die at the Hill of the Ancestors.

  But this time no one had hired me, either for the first job or the second. Evidently because my services are expensive. Well okay, today I’ve already put in my time …

  Always remember, pilots – the most important thing in our job is to have plenty of altitude to spare.

  If I was flying low over the ground at the moment when Kaya tugged on my shoulder, I might possibly have crashed Hannelore. But since I was high up, the camera simply made a somersault. I scraped my finger briefly on the control handlebar, switching into autopilot, and took my goggles off my nose.

  Kaya’s face was right there in front of mine.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I asked in astonishment.

  She rubbed her cheek against mine. She’d never done that before.

  ‘Do you want Daddy to crash his camera?’ I asked, trying to speak sternly. But my hand reached out automatically for her back, to that enchanting tiny bit above the buttocks that I had argued about so much with the sommeliers – and won.

  She smacked her moist lips against my nose.

  ‘I’ll do something really, really nice for Daddy,’ she said softly. ‘Only afterwards. But right now I want to take a look at Grim. Go down lower, you flying backside. And quick. Or he’ll be killed.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The dark birds of death hung in the sky above Slava, with their round, glittering eyes making them look like dragonflies.

  The superstitious country Orks believed that those eyes were made of glass cursed by Manitou, and they were used for drawing the souls out of fallen warriors. The sophisticated urban Orks, of course, laughed at this nonsense. But in their hearts they believed it in exactly the same way.

  Occasionally one camera or another swung over freely in the sky and hurtled towards the ground in a howling crescendo, only to pull out of its dive just above the square and go zooming over the Orks’ heads, shooting in close up.

  There were so many cameras that every now and then one’s eyes were pricked by a sharp ray of light from the morning sun, reflected in their optics – as if, although the battle hadn’t started yet, the upper people were already firing their baleful smart arrows at the Orks. Then the sun went behind the camouflage cloud, making things a bit easier.

  The Urkagan’s battle barge was an intricate structure of wood on a stout frame of deripasium, mounted on an eight-axle Daimler motorenwagen platform. As always, the barge had been manufactured exclusively in the workshops of the Yellow Zone, and the production process had been covered extensively in special editions of ‘Yf da Wør Cømer Morn’ – everybody knew what was inside it, what speed it was capable of and how much each wheel weighed. Now it was aimed directly at the Gates of Victory, and the barriers in front of its upward-curving bow had already been removed. Everybody realised what that meant. But the soldiers filling the square were in high spirits.

  The din above the square was gradually getting louder. Grim was infected by the general excitement – and he was astonished to realise that there was a fair dose of vanity mingled in with it. After all, he was one of the Kagan’s orderlies. A responsible and honourable post, introduced in the aftermath of War No. 214 – when the upper people suddenly turned off the Orks’ mobile phones at the height of the battle.

  Grim could feel how many Orkish gazes there were slipping over his brand-new white sailor suit – the uniform of the right flank. The other two orderlies, attached to the left flank and the central sector, were dressed differently – one as a savage and the other as a retiarius. Their combat vehicles were fastened to the side of the barge – the same ‘Urkaine’ mopeds made at the factory where Uncle Shug worked. When he saw his machine, Grim recalled the conversation at the wake. It looked as if nowadays they shagged the material to death without even trying to cheat it first, knowing that it wouldn’t work anyway.

  Grim had the feeling that some of the men standing in the square were waving to him in person. And Chloe could certainly see him now on her manitou in the Green Zone. He had seen himself several times on the immense screen hanging on the wall of the Museum of the Ancestors instead of the sheet of canvas with the word ‘ASSTILUDE’ on it.

  Grim was standing quite a long way from the bow of the barge, where Torn Durex was seated on his campaign throne. The Urkagan was hidden by a crowd of dignitaries and military commanders – Grim could only see their bowed backs. But from time to time the sovereign’s face appeared on the wall of the museum. He looked perfectly calm. This was already his eighth war, after all.

  The leaders conferred.

  On the screen it all looked pretty good, but Grim didn’t feel any particular reverence for the leadership. He had seen the Kagan facing the guns of a battle camera, and hadn’t been particularly impressed. In addition, early that morning, before forming-up, he had decided to do a bit of fortune-telling with the book that the priest had given him. He had hit on a passage about power.

  Now he was feeling rather gloomy.

  The passage was this:

  Seventy-One. On Power.

  The Custodian of the War Music has said: the essence of power lies not in the Urkagan’s ability to start a war. Quite the opposite. Urkagan can remain the Urkagan if he issues such an order at precisely the right moment – when the dudes will turn to him. And there is no other dominion, there is only death by the knife or flushing into the band of queerasts.

  The ancients understood this, the men of modern times do not.

  In truth, the art of the ruler comes down to no more than pretending for as long as possible that you control the whirlwind that is rushing you along, replying with a derisive smile to the reproaches of your subjects that the whirlwind is rushing in the wrong direction.

  The same applies, also, to many other things.

  This looked like the truth. For several hours now Grim had been observing the whirlwind as it coalesced in front of the Gates of Victory.

  More and more troops kept arriving – the square couldn’t fit them all in any more. Officers ran between the divisions, setting the distance to be maintained so that no one would be killed in the crush. The men were lined up by types of uniform. There were a lot of them in this war – although, of course, not twenty, as the stoned public prosecutor had claimed.

  The greater part of the infantry was wearing white sailor suits with wide, blue turn-down collars. They were still being issued with their weapons: halberds, battleaxes, spears and swords, whatever each one of them happened to get. Somehow all of them already knew that the sailors would be fighting on the right flank and in the central sector. They had least reason of all for feeling jolly. It was clear to any fool that the men were dressed in white to provide a stronger contrast with blood.

  The heavily armed storm troopers were distinguished by their black armour and identical toothed pikes. They were standing in a perfect infantry square, absolute immobile, so that they seemed to be carved out of wood.

  The gladiator regiment was dressed as retiarii. The great hulking guys holding sharp tridents in their hands had been left practically naked – they had nothing on but shorts, with rags sewn over them to make them look like loincloths. The bronze shoulder plates that retiarii were supposed to wear hadn’t been issued this year – rumour had it that the army command had sold them off as non-ferrous metal scrap. The guys were shuddering in the morning breeze. Some unfolded their battle nets and threw them over their shoulders. The officers whistled at the ones who did that.

  The men behaving in the jolliest fashion of all were the savages, in their pelts of brown synthetic fur – there were two entire regiments of them, assigned to the left flank. For some reason it was believed that the savages would have it easier than the others. And they had been issued with the most futile weapons – wooden clubs and flint hand-axes.

  The bowmen, slingmen and fire-throwers were standing apart from the others. The barrels of fuel oil, the ballistas and the heavy equipment were not in the square yet – there were always brought up at the last moment, in order not to give the upper people an excuse to start bombing.

  Grim had already counted seven types of uniforms, and that was not taking into account the soldiers drawn up in the streets adjacent to the square. There could well be someone else there. Usually it was the reserve that was left in the streets – the line-up was carved straight into the walls of the houses, because they were drawn up for every war in exactly the same way.

  Grim thought how great it would be to make do with this jolly, exciting masquerade and not go into the Circus to die. That could happen at least once in the whole of history, couldn’t it? A childish imitation of a prayer circled round and round in his mind:

  ‘Manitou, I know that it’s because I’ve been bad. But now I will always be good, I swear … Only don’t, please don’t …’

  And then the landing began.

  Bright-coloured cubes, tetrahedrons, spheres and other geometrical forms, the names of which Grim didn’t know, came showering down out of the spiral cloud above the Circus. As they approached the ground, they expanded in size and braked – and before they disappeared behind the wall of the Circus, they described a circle above the square, zooming over the Kagan’s barge with a rustling sound. The Orks froze on the spot and had a second or two to get a look at the enemy from close up.

  The trailers were covered with bright frescoes – mostly scenes from snuffs. Naked, buxom women, frozen in poses of shameless copulation with tanned, elderly men; the upper people’s fighting machines advancing on a formation of Orks; the shame of defeated Kagans of the past – all these pictures on the sides of the transports were moving and alive. It was as if forbidden fragments of familiar snuffs were falling from the sky – the same fragments that had been blotted by the censor. The hostile world on the other side of the leaden cloud couldn’t give a damn for all the Orkish prohibitions. It tore its way into the Orks’ life crudely and brazenly, in total mockery of its order and conventions. This assault by an alien culture was undoubtedly an act of war in its own right – everybody felt that.

  The square started murmuring resentfully – quietly at first, then louder and louder, and the murmur started spilling over into movement. The square was seething. The officers could no longer regulate the distance between the detachments, it became harder and harder for the columns to maintain formation, and everybody felt that if the gates weren’t opened right now, there would be a stampede. It was as elementary as a school textbook problem about a pipe with water flowing into it and out of it.

  On the big manitou, Grim saw an officer of the retinue lean down to the Kagan and whisper something. Torn Durex nodded and got to his feet. The square froze.

  The Kagan waited for a brief moment, raised his flanged mace, spat on it with relish and flung it at the gates. The blow of metal on metal rang out in the silence – the mace had hit one of the spastikas covering the wood.

  That’s it then, Grim thought.

  It was as if he glanced through a crack behind which the uncomplicated wheels of history were turning, and it happened while the mace was still falling to the ground after bouncing off the gates. So this was how great events happened … The secret of power was described in The Book of Orkasms with exceptional precision.

  When the mace fell, the great heroes of combat rushed towards the gates. Bamboleo got there first – and with a single blow of his tram axle he smashed the lock, which jangled pitifully.

  The manitou on the wall of the Museum of the Ancestors showed a close-up of the lock’s burst shackle, and the men in the square threw their heads up to see a camera creeping towards the gates – but it was concealed by camouflage.

  The soldiers gathered in the square started howling an ancient battle cry:

  ‘Urkrule! Urkrule!’

  Other knights came to Bamboleo’s aid, and the gates swung open. Grim couldn’t yet see the open field behind them – but the electric tremor of rapture and horror that rushed through the square ran down his back too.

  The engines hidden under the boards started growling and the barge began to move – the Kagan had to be one of the first to enter Orkish Slava. The battle bridge was always made in the form of a huge boat, because a platform like that could squeeze in through the gates – it was long and narrow.

  There you have the entire Norman Theory, thought Grim, recalling something he had crammed at school – the noble Ript Kondom with his band of Vikings and something else of the sort … And if we crawled under the wall, our forefathers would be gnomes …

  Scraping one side lightly against the wall of the gap (that was a bad sign, but everyone pretended not to have noticed anything), the Kagan’s platform drove into Orkish Slava.

  And then something strange started happening to Grim.