And for bringing me so expertly, through two diversionary spirals, to the point of return to the basic algorithm, I was willing to forgive her not only for Grim, but even for my Russian roots. Not because this software-enabled itinerary had made such a great impression on me, but because it had included that table. That absolutely unexpected table. So rough, coarse and ruthlessly swift.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ninety-Two. On the Heart of a Woman.

  The sap rises upwards from the cunt and worldly vanity flies in through the eyes, moving downwards. They meet at the centre of the chest and come to the boil, combining into a black substance which is the root of a woman’s being. From this spring all the world’s spite and bitchiness, heartache, blackness of soul and anguish. And from this there is no deliverance, for a woman attracts through untruth, and if one dispels the deception, then it is apparent immediately that there is no need for her at all, and without her things are much better. This clarity is fatal to her and she will not let a man perceive the truth, since she cannot hunt for herself. Therefore she constantly lies and plays the bitch and realises herself how tangled she is in her lies, but she is helpless to do anything about this and the anguish and fear show in her eyes. But if she is shoved up against the wall and beaten at length about the kisser, then she will confess everything, but say that without this cunning life itself will wither.

  Verily it is so. Therefore do the wise say that life is a swindle and black deception.

  Below the text a note had been added by hand – evidently for the soldiers’ divination.

  If battle awaits tomorrow, know that the heart of a queerast is the same as the heart of a woman.

  ‘It’s all true,’ whispered Grim and closed The Book of Orkasms.

  It was hard to express any better than this what he thought about Chloe, who hadn’t even taken the trouble to find out if he had survived or not …

  And as for the swindle and the black deception, all that was true as well – and he constantly received confirmations of that.

  Firstly, the public prosecutor was no longer inviting him to London. The authorities were busy with their own complicated state business and had completely forgotten about Grim. But that was exactly what Grim had been expecting, so he wasn’t upset.

  Secondly, although he had scrupulously bloodied all the family documents in Upper Mid-Siberian at the exact spot that was required – the lower right corner of the final page – it hadn’t done any good. Under the new rules you had to have the blood of battle certified by a notary, after collecting corroborating testimony from three of your regimental comrades. Almost everybody’s regimental comrades had been killed, but even so there was a queue to see the notary for a month ahead. They said that witnesses could be hired right there in the street – they were loitering about close to a translation bureau, with two Right Protectors strolling around close by, keeping them from harm and collecting money.

  In money terms it was all the same to Grim’s family – whether they paid the turds or paid the usual bribe. But it was quicker with the bribe. And so they just forgot about the bloodied documents and nobody even gave Grim a proper thank you. They didn’t have time for that – the family had suffered a great misfortune. Uncle Shug from the moped factory had been arrested and his kin had been left without any high-level contacts.

  Somehow Grim didn’t feel like staying at home. Watching snuffs or the news made him feel sick. He decided to take a walk to the market square – to find out what was happening in the world outside the bounds of the information universe.

  Once he reached the market he immediately regretted that he had come. The square had been transformed into a field hospital saturated in suffering. Clerks walked about between the wounded, who were lying on straw and rags, registering those who recovered consciousness in order to send for their nearest and dearest. Those who lived within easy reach were being collected by their relatives – for some, a shoulder to lean on was enough; others were trundled off into the future on a handcart. And the army medical orderlies kept bringing more and more half-dead, limbless stumps of men from Orkish Slava. Business as usual.

  However, this victory had an especially bitter taste. Hanging above the market square were thirty-six corpses in sailor suits smeared with earth and blood – they were Private Blut, who had given the Orks the idea of taking their trousers off in front of a camera, and his accomplices, some of whom had been hanged after they were already dead. There was a sign hanging on Blut’s own chest with a cryptic inscription:

  NO HANGING PARTS, OR HANG!

  An explanation in Siberian had been nailed to the other gallows – saying that these men were traitors who had brought dishonour on the Orkish Colours, and Manitou had cursed them. People walking by spat on the hanged men and Grim, who knew the truth, found all this painful to watch. But he didn’t really feel like arguing or trying to explain anything – one man who had tried to do that had already been hanged alongside the others. It was the turds and the butts who did the hanging, uniting temporarily for a job like this, but no one in the crowd really knew who was in charge.

  Those who had returned from the war uninjured were regarded with slight contempt, but there weren’t many of them. The only reason no one looked askance at Grim was that the entire left half of his face was covered with a massive graze – half bruise and half burn. In actual fact there was more soot than blood, and it should all be gone in about three days, but Grim looked heroic, and just to be on the safe side he didn’t wash his face.

  In the market they were talking about the war that had just finished, saying all sorts of different things – and most of them in a whisper.

  A rumour was going round that Torn Durex had been killed along with his staff because he hadn’t warned the people about the gas bombs. There were only two suicide-bomb gas trolleys, but the people didn’t know how many the Orks had in reserve. When the Orks detonated the second one and killed the Canadian Wild Man – hot on the heels of Batman – the upper people had dropped a smart bomb on the Urkagan’s barge and killed everyone, including Marshal Spur. But according to what others said, the Kagan had not been killed on the actual barge, but on the Hill of the Ancestors, when he was carried up the slope by two orderlies – and what’s more, he had carried on singing until the final moment, displaying the heart of a hero. The explosion was so powerful that no bodies had been found.

  What kind of ‘smart bomb’ is that, Grim thought, looking at the contorted, clamouring faces. If it’s so smart, then why does it fall and explode? Looks like someone conned it after all. The same way they conned us … You’re the smartest of all, they told it, fly, everything will be fine … Rejoice in the sun and the wind, they said … And it was fool enough to believe it …

  They were also saying it wasn’t the gas explosions that had made the people wind up the war so quickly, but the fact that in many places the Orks had started taking off their trousers and waving their private parts about in front of the battle cameras. The upper people had seemed to lose all their fighting spirit as a result. But they whispered about that very, very quietly, squinting sideways at the hanged men.

  One thing was clear. After Durex’s death, the Orkish regime had changed. As always, this had happened swiftly and obscurely.

  The new reality announced itself with a portrait hanging on the wall of the Museum of the Ancestors: a rather stout young man with a black ringlet on a bald forehead and limpet eyes. Above his broad face, impregnated with villainy like a hamburger with fat, the following words blazed forth in gold:

  WHENCER DA STRENGSER CØMER, BRÜ?

  It was the new Urkagan, by the name of Torn Trojan, and the slogan must have been thought up by the upper people, unless they had simply taken it from the Ancient Films. Several turds were standing under the portrait, selling syringes with durian – the new regime promised to be moderately liberative.

  No one could understand where this Torn Trojan had sprung from and why he was now in power, but they didn’t discuss it, seemingly resigned to the fact that such things were not for Orks to know. But they did argue about whether he really was the illegitimate son of the deceased Durex and whether he had really studied advising and consulting up there, or whether he had a degree in stock economics.

  There were rumours that Trojan wanted more democraship, civilisation and tolerance – and the first proposed step in this direction was to replace the word ‘queerast’ in all Orkish books with the word ‘sodomate’. Intelligent Orks approved of this, saying that apart from a major cultural shift it meant a serious boost for the stock indices and the economy in general, as every copy of both The Word on the Word and The Book of Orkasms now had to be reprinted. Others argued that the commission would go to the Yellow Zone anyway. This was obviously true, but the very possibility of an open discussion seemed to many a huge step upwards.

  One Orkish woman who knew Church English claimed that two months ago she had already seen a report about Trojan on the Byzantine news, when he had already come back to Orkland, where ‘he keeps a low profile’, as the presenter had said. Another Ork recalled that under Torn Durex the young Trojan was the head of the storage barns, where he had demonstrated great organisational talent and stolen honestly – only enough to live on. Grim could have sworn that he had already heard these voices in the market square just before the war – they were the same ones that had called for Alejandro and Bamboleo.

  So far no one had seen the real, live Trojan – there was only this poster. But on the other hand three duplicated copies of his speech were hanging up at Marshal Stug’s statue.

  Grim walked over to read it.

  It was a perfectly ordinary speech – the sickening gobbledygook of a regime trying to talk heart-to-heart with its people in their own language. Trojan spoke of the national catastrophe that the previous clique had led Urkaine into, of the disastrous demographic situation, of the urgent necessity to set the Urk at the very centre of Urkaine, and not vice versa, and some such stuff. There were off-colour Orkish jokes in the article too – so many of them that when Grim finished reading he felt as if he had swallowed a rotten fish. Basically, everything indicated that Trojan was here to stay – and in a big way.

  But nevertheless, despite all this hocus-pocus, the scent of a special, bitter, post-war freshness still hung in the air …

  ‘Hi there, Grim. Well, look at the face on you.’

  Grim turned round.

  Chloe was standing there in front of him.

  Her face was decorated with the dark yellow Spirals of Resurrection, like the faces of the young widows scurrying about – and her head was covered by the hood of a striped windcheater. And in addition, she had dyed her hair and had it cut in a fringe. She was evidently not planning to bask in the glow of her pre-war fame.

  If she understood what Grim was feeling, she didn’t give any sign of it.

  ‘You’re looking pretty good yourself,’ said Grim. ‘Like a crocodile from the Swamp of Memory.’

  Chloe didn’t take offence.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘We need to hurry.’

  Grim frowned contemptuously.

  ‘Where to?’

  He realised already that he’d expended all his moral capital – it was too late now to torment Chloe for her crime with silent disdain. Grim hadn’t particularly been intending to do that, but he still felt a certain annoyance at the loss of his assets.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Chloe. ‘It’ll be interesting, I promise.’

  She turned round and walked out of the market square.

  Something in her voice made Grim immediately set off after her. For a brief instant he even got the feeling that she was the one who had returned from a war, not him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Chloe said when they had left the market behind and dived into the crooked, dirty streets of Slava. ‘I realise you’re angry. But I knew you were all right. It’s just the way things turned out … Anyway, you’ll see for yourself.’

  It seemed like Chloe wanted to eliminate his advantage on the moral high ground as quickly as possible. That made Grim even more furious than her previous swinish behaviour.

  ‘But just the same, where are we going?’ he asked

  Chloe wrinkled up her face, as if the words she was speaking were pricking her mouth, but answered:

  ‘I have a confession to make. I was dating the discoursemonger. And he turned out to be a very bad person.’

  ‘So you noticed that, did you?’ Grim asked sarcastically.

  Or rather, he tried to ask sarcastically, but it didn’t come out too well – his voice simply sounded hoarse.

  He said nothing all the rest of the way, wondering how he ought to behave and what Chloe could possibly show him in order to atone for her sin (or rather, all her multitudinous sins). If any such object existed in the universe, Grim had absolutely no notion of what it was. This was really getting interesting.

  They walked for a long time. Chloe moved deeper and deeper into a slum district of the city, where the poor army families lived. Many of the houses here were standing empty and walking through the streets was quite dangerous – but fortunately the hour was still quite early.

  Chloe reached a modest, but decent-looking wooden house with a small garden. A petty bureaucrat’s relatives could have lived in a house like that – some daughter-in-law of a junior translator or first cousin of a chauffeur who drove an important Global Ork. The house was separated off from the street by a stout wooden fence and thick bushes. It was flanked at the sides by little concrete-box houses from the time of Loss Liquid, which now were inhabited only by geckos, bats and ancestral spirits.

  Chloe looked around, opened the gates and walked into the yard. Grim followed her.

  Standing in the yard under an oilskin canopy was a swanky green motorenwagen, a classic jeep – with a pass for the Yellow and Green Zones inside the windscreen. A car like this was clearly out of place in this yard and in general in this district, where at best the houses had shabby mopeds with trailers and sidecars standing outside. But the jeep couldn’t be seen from the street – it was concealed by the oilcloth, stretched between its posts, and the bushes.

  Chloe went into the house.

  Grim caught a whiff of a bad smell from the hallway – on the floor were some dried-up vomit and empty bottles.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone clean this place up, then?’ Grim asked.

  Chloe shook her head.

  ‘I used to clean it. But no one does now.’

  Grim suddenly guessed.

  ‘Did you used to meet him here … That discoursemonger?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘This is one place. It’s his secret little nest.’

  ‘And where’s he?’

  ‘In the basement,’ Chloe replied.

  ‘Alive?’

  Chloe shrugged.

  ‘Let’s go and take a look.’

  They walked through scantily furnished rooms and came to an open metal hatch. At their feet was a stairway leading into the basement. The hatch looked unnecessarily strong and secure for a house like this.

  Chloe beckoned Grim with one finger and went down.

  Grim saw an underground chamber lit by a dull light bulb. The light slanted down onto a floor with all sorts of household odds and ends on it. There were tools, pieces of wood, rags, pots of nails, pieces of wire, old plastic bags, petrol cans – basically everything that any modest but thrifty Ork keeps about the house.

  And then Grim saw the discoursemonger.

  The discoursemonger was not looking good.

  And he smelled even worse.

  He was sitting on a straw mattress, leaning back against the wall. His hands and feet were tied to iron rings set into the wall and the floor. His nightshirt was covered with patches of dried blood. The silver curls were dirty and matted, and many days’ worth of stubble made the poor wretch look ten years older. To judge from his closed eyes, he was either sleeping or unconscious.

  On the floor, Grim noticed a brazier with dead coals in it. And then the reddish-brown rag that was wrapped round one of the man’s legs.

  ‘What did you do, torture him?’ he asked.

  He tried to speak indifferently, so that Chloe wouldn’t suspect him of weakness, although in actual fact he was feeling disgusted and even afraid. Not as afraid as in the war. The battlefield fear had been buoyant and thrilling, but this was a joyless, civilian feeling, as grey as a boiled cow’s tongue.

  ‘I haven’t tortured him yet,’ said Chloe. ‘Only baited him a bit. I was afraid he’d croak too soon.’

  Grim remembered that he was talking to the daughter of a Ganjaberserk.

  The man heard her voice and opened his eyes.

  When he saw Grim, he shuddered and his face contorted in fear. Grim looked at him without saying anything, without any expression on his face, and the discoursemonger realised they weren’t going to kill him – at least, not immediately. He spoke.

  ‘I am being held here against my will. I demand a meeting with a representative of the government of national salvation. Inform Torn Trojan in person.’

  ‘How long have you been in here?’ Grim asked.

  ‘Four days,’ said the man.

  ‘And how do you know we have a government of national salvation? Four days ago there wasn’t any Torn Trojan.’

  The man smiled sadly – as if he’d realised that he was talking to a hopeless idiot.

  ‘If you love your own people, even just a little bit,’ he said, ‘you must understand that seizing a hostage will seriously damage the nation’s image, and all the post-war efforts …’