It felt as if he had divided into two – as if someone had stuck an aerial into his head and it was picking up the feelings of the immense crowd of Orks. He had to experience them, like it or not, and the most terrible thing of all was that he couldn’t always distinguish himself from the crowd. The Orks burst into his brain exactly as they burst through the gates of the Circus, and he had to conceal himself in a tiny free corner of his own consciousness.

  He still didn’t understand what he was seeing, but his heart was already aching sweetly: the door into an ancient tale of heroes dissolved away … (Grim couldn’t give a rotten damn about heroic tales, but only the very margin of his mind knew that.) The green, the expansive, the level, the glorious, the dear and the beloved … The heart of Urkaine, the Hill of the Ancestors, watered with Orkish blood … (Why not flatten it completely, and there won’t be any need to water anything with blood anymore?) So this was where his own kind had been fighting the upper people for so many centuries, defending the Orkish Slava … (Right then, you’ve driven in the cattle – now what?)

  The bewilderment gradually passed off and Grim started understanding more clearly where he was and what was going on around him.

  Orkish Slava was a huge round field, perfectly even, with smoothly trimmed grass – and a small hill right at the very centre. The field was surrounded on all sides by a yellowish grey concrete wall that ran so far away in some places that it almost disappeared from view.

  The Orkish heroes in the V-formation that had run on ahead could no longer compete with the barge as it picked up speed, and they hung on its sides, slipping their belt loops over hooks that were dangling there. With its engines droning, the Daimler motorenwagen pulled ahead of the Orkish ranks and hurtled towards the Hill of the Ancestors.

  At that time the most difficult manoeuvre was taking place at the Gates of Victory – the Orkish army and its equipment had to get through the narrow passage without a stampede and occupy the places prescribed by the dispositions, and do it quickly. This required good organisation, but it looked unexciting, and all the cameras were following the Kagan’s barge. Some of them flew on ahead, swung round and came rushing towards it, skidding past dangerously close to the men standing on the deck.

  Grim walked forward. Now he could see the Kagan – Torn Durex was sitting on his campaign throne very close by. The Kagan was watching the coverage of the war on a little flat manitou, hiding it behind his battle fan so that it wouldn’t be caught on film by some chance camera.

  Once they were close to the Hill of the Ancestors, the barge started braking smoothly and stopped in the shade of the first palm trees – so that the unripe coconuts were right above the deck. They were no threat to anyone’s life, but this was also a bad sign, at least for those who knew their history: many recalled Loss Solid.

  From here they had a good view of the preparations being made for war by the upper people. They didn’t look too impressive. Standing on the right flank was something that looked like a short castle wall with battlements. In the central sector they could see a long earthen rampart, with the trailers that had zoomed across above the market standing behind it. And far away on the left little green hummocks could be seen, overgrown with bright flowers and grass. Grim heard two military men discussing them – apparently those were transport containers that simultaneously served as stage sets: two wars earlier the upper people had used something similar.

  The escort of heroes unfastened themselves from the hooks, surrounded the Kagan’s barge in a defensive semi-circle and froze, bristling with sharp metal.

  In fact there wasn’t anyone for them to defend themselves against. The invisible upper people did nothing as they watched the Orkish forces enter the plain and move towards their positions on the advanced flanks, in order to leave the Hill of the Ancestors and commander-in-chief’s barge in the rear. Since Orks running across a field didn’t possess any artistic value, all the cameras were now hovering over the Hill of the Ancestors, where the most solemn moment of the war was beginning – the changing of the flag.

  On the summit of the hill, a steel flagpole towered up among the coconut palms. The flag fluttering on it at the moment was the blue banner of Byzantion, with the twin Bs reflecting each other, looking like two conjoined globes – in perfect keeping with the official doctrine of ‘two cultures – one world’.

  Grim looked up. The axis of Byzantion was directly over his head, and although he couldn’t see the offglobe itself, the shaggy spiral of the cloud unfolded from the precise spot in the sky to which the flagpole pointed.

  Grim had seen the changing of the flag so often in old snuffs that he could forecast the entire sequence of events to within a second.

  Threading their way through the palm trees, the Standard-Bearers of Slava ran up the hill – this season it was Bamboleo and Grub. All the manitous showed close-ups of the two figures, bounding over the tussocky grass towards the flagpole. Soon the yellow figure eight of Byzantion came sliding down and a lingering roar rang out over the field as the red Orkish flag, with its golden spastika, went soaring upwards.

  Grim felt his divided state continuing. The only feeling he had about what was happening was fear, and yet his throat contracted and tears of exaltation sprang to his eyes – as if his homeland had thrust its bony hand into his cranium and forcibly squeezed the required glands.

  The cameras didn’t attack. They remained at altitude, with one or two occasionally diving towards the Urkagan’s barge, and the air whistled alarmingly as they sliced through it – but they always turned aside before the warriors could reach them with their spears. Soon the upper people suffered their first casualties: two cameras collided at high speed and then went flying upwards, sparking, until they disappeared into the cloud.

  As the Orkish banner flew, fluttering, towards the tip of the flagpole, the speakers on the Kagan’s barge started broadcasting solemn music. For some reason, Grim remembered a singing lesson at school.

  ‘Music can be queerastic or warrior. When queerastic music is playing, the soul is closed to the Light of Manitou. But warrior music is itself the Light of Manitou. The Orks have abolished queerastic music. And now the wide expanses of Urkaine resound only with warrior music …’

  The teacher was deluded, thought Grim, the Orks hadn’t abolished what he called ‘queerastic music’ at all. It had simply adapted to mimic warrior music – and the proof of that was pouring out of the manitous relaying the start of the war.

  Grim had seen close-ups of the Orkish military leaders during the raising of the flag many times – they were in one snuff out of every three, and as a rule they weren’t cut. Usually the generals were talking about something or other. Watching their faces, it was possible to suppose that the subject was the latest modifications to the plan of battle or the principles of the post-war world order. Grim was on the Kagan’s barge now, and he was lucky – he heard one of those epoch-making conversations with his own ears.

  Standing in front of him were Marshal Spur and one of the Kagan’s aging lovers, a mezzanine-adjutant, sporting the same kind of sailor suit as Grim was wearing, but with stars on the wide turndown collar. The mezzanine-adjutant said to Spur:

  ‘Listen here, old man! Do you know the Kagan’s prayer?’

  Spur raised one eyebrow.

  ‘You mean about the rubber woman and the fag ends?’

  The mezzanine-adjutant shook his head.

  ‘What prayer is that then?’

  ‘The one with a secret name of Manitou. The holy ascetics say it solves all material problems.’

  Marshal Spur scratched his chin, pondering.

  ‘Well then, teach me it,’ he said.

  ‘Repeat: Manitou pay Ali!’

  Spur repeated the phrase rapidly several times until the words ‘alimony to pay’ emerged. ‘Alimony’ was not a particularly popular term among the Global Orks with one foot already up in London.

  ‘Shit, who the fuck needs that crap before a battle?’

  ‘Who are you calling shit?’ the mezzanine-adjutant asked with a polite smile. ‘Have you totally fucking lost it, you old blockhead?’

  Right, Grim thought, now the muzak will end. Then they’ll lower the flying walls. Then they’ll announce that the flanks and the centre have been deployed. And then … And then it will start. That’s when they’ll turn on the censor. I wonder what the logo will be? They’ll probably make it a spastika with our fallen warriors coming back to life under the Light of Manitou … And everyone will wonder again how much they pocketed from it …

  If reality did make corrections to this sequence of events, they were only minor.

  First the message came that the flanks and the centre were deployed. In fact, Grim had realised that for himself – everywhere he could see the lines of Orks striding towards the upper people’s fortifications. Several units had already reached their prescribed positions and halted – there hadn’t been any order to attack.

  Then the upper people started deploying the flying walls.

  Grim had never seen the process in full – the news and the snuffs only gave brief extracts from it.

  First, a host of identical cylindrical machines appeared out of the clouds – they were grey and looked like sections of a thick water main; the only difference between them was the numbers on their sides. Descending towards the plain, they formed intricate chains and semicircles, which hovered over the earth. Soon there were so many of them that Grim got the impression that a complex network of streets had been set out up above him.

  Then swathes of grey fabric started creeping down out of these cylinders. Grim recalled the suspended screen on which they used to show slides in school – it was stored in a battered tin tube and simply pulled out before a class. A batten with a weight on it was attached to the screen’s bottom. Everything here looked the same, only on a much bigger scale. The thick fabric, covered in holes, swayed in the air and soon Grim saw a labyrinth, trembling slightly in the wind in front of him – unstable and obscenely huge.

  Now there was no more direct line of sight between the headquarters of the commander-in-chief, the centre and the flanks. The Kagan’s barge was cut off from his soldiers by an immense grey wall – although numerous corridors had been left in it. Grim knew that this fabric could show pictures, just like a manitou, but so far there weren’t any images on it.

  ‘Orderly Grim!’

  Grim started.

  Marshal Spur was standing right in front of him.

  ‘Yes sir!’ Grim bellowed, saluting.

  Buried in his own thoughts, he had completely forgotten that he wasn’t on board the Kagan’s barge as an honoured guest.

  ‘Take your moped,’ said Spur, ‘and go over to General Hrol on the right flank. The attack’s just about to begin, and the mobile phones are already acting up. If they cut off our communications, you’ll stand in for them. Stay beside the general. Have you got all of that?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Grim, saluting smartly again.

  The Marshal turned away and went back to the Kagan’s seat.

  Grim unhooked one of the mopeds off the side of the barge, lugged it to the stern and rolled it down to the ground along the sloping planks that had been set up.

  So far it was all very simple.

  The right flank lay to starboard – where the upper people had set up a section of fortress wall. Grim flung his leg over the saddle, pressed the red button on the handlebars, and the moped’s engine sprang to life.

  Grim reached the grey fluttering wall, drove into one of the gaps and saw another wall made of exactly the same kind of grey fabric in front of him. Gaps had been left in it too, but in such a way that nothing could be seen through them except the next grey barrier. However, for the time being getting his bearings in these corridors was easy. A few minutes later Grim rode out into open space and saw a multitude of soldiers, some kind of long wagons under covers, and the wall.

  General Hrol’s detachment was there in front of him.

  The fortress wall looked rather ludicrous. It was more like a narrow house without any windows, with decorative battlements on the roof. It was too thick for a wall and too thin for a building. It was probably a ‘fragment of fortifications’ or an ‘element of a castle’, if Grim remembered correctly the names of ‘locations of valour’ from his military schooling – those were the places where the Orks demonstrated their fury to the enemy.

  A multitude of different-coloured little figures were darting about in the open field in front of the wall. Their movements looked absolutely chaotic and Grim suddenly couldn’t understand how all these people were controlled at all.

  Hrol, surrounded by his officers, was standing on a freshly cobbled-together wooden platform, in front of a large drum, on which a map of the local terrain was spread out. At first Grim couldn’t figure out why the general was standing with his back to the soldiers, but then he realised that this way his busy staff and the fragment of wall fitted into the frame together perfectly.

  Grim braked to a stop at the platform and looked up – he was right, there were at least ten cameras hovering in the sky, and so, before walking up the steps, he took out the comb that had been issued with his uniform and tidied up his hair.

  Hrol listened to his report sullenly.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Stand by for orders.’

  Mobile communications were still functioning and Grim was forgotten.

  From the height of the platform, what had looked like a confused crowd when Grim rode past it on his moped immediately divided itself into black and white detachments of men engaged in complicated movement.

  The little black figures were stormtroopers – they were just finishing forming up in battle-order, evening out the line of their shields, with their heavy pikes protruding over the top. Behind them, Orks in sailor suits were preparing the siege ladders, checking the mechanisms.

  Some lightly armed retiarii were sitting on the ground, having dropped their nets and tridents – but they were already being urged to their feet in order to form up: their small unit had wandered over this way by mistake, and now the commanding officer was getting a dressing-down. The gladiators’ place was on the left flank. Each arm of service had their own task in the fighting, and getting jumbled up together was prohibited under pain of court martial and anathematisation.

  Hrol started talking on his mobile phone.

  ‘Yes! The equipment covers have been removed. Yes sir. We’re getting started.’

  Grim realised that the order to storm the wall had been received.

  Hrol turned to the soldiers.

  ‘Ladders into action!’

  The black line of stormtroopers parted. Two brand new siege ladders on wheels drove forward out of the Orkish ranks, with their feeble petrol engines sputtering – they were some of those that had been shown in the last parade. From all sides soldiers in sailor suits pushed along, forcing them to move faster. Once they had rolled the ladders up to the wall, they extended them by engaging the hydraulic cable system. The height was exactly right to reach the battlements on top of the wall – evidently the intelligence information from ‘our upper sources’, which was hinted at in the pre-war propaganda, had proved accurate.

  But not a single defender of the upper people’s stronghold appeared up at the top.

  General Hrol frowned. Something strange was going on here – according to all the rules of war, this was the most dreadful moment of the action, when the most soldiers were killed. But the enemy had not only allowed them to raise the siege ladders, he didn’t seem to have any objections to the Orks scaling the topmost point of the element of fortifications and thereby winning the victory.

  The stormtroopers waited for the command with their pikes thrust out ahead of them, and the commander’s protracted silence seemed more and more alarming with every instant that passed. At last Hrol made up his mind.

  ‘Attack!’

  The Orks’ battle formation started moving. Soldiers with slings ran out into the empty space in front of the wall and lined up in a long chain, preparing to shoot down any enemy with a hail of stones. At the same moment the stormtroopers who had to climb up moved out from behind the front line, with the shields attached to their backs making them look like black tortoises. They started clambering up the ladders.

  Grim suddenly got the feeling that what was happening was unreal. The feeling grew stronger and stronger, until he realised that he could hear a strange sound that was growing louder with every second.

  The sound was like the buzzing of a grinding wheel, but a huge one, one so heavy that it takes a long time to pick up speed. Grim realised that everyone else could hear the buzz too – a wave of uncertainty seemed to surge through the Orkish ranks. And then Grim noticed that the stormtroopers weren’t climbing up the wall any more, but running away from it, and the wall itself was shuddering, and even the soldiers who had already got high up the ladders were dropping their weapons and jumping down.

  A ragged crack ran along the wall – as if a jagged bolt of lightning had embedded itself in it. In a single moment the crack widened, plaster and rubble went flying downwards and a yawning, black void was exposed. Grim recalled the Visage of Manitou from The Word on the Word, but he didn’t have any time for pious contemplation.

  A blow struck the wall from within and a large lump of plaster fell off. There wasn’t simply a void inside. Something that growled was glittering and moving in the opening.

  ‘Bravely now! Bravely now!’ Hrol screamed. ‘Hold the line, soldiers! Slingmen, fire!’

  The slingmen whirled their leather propellers over their head and stones went hurtling into the widening gap. Grim heard several resounding thwacks and then a large section of the wall collapsed at the very centre and he could see what was hiding inside.

  It was an immense metal warrior that looked a bit like those knights encased in armour who were often filmed in the Loss Liquid’s era snuffs.