The car was close, but they had to cross several metres of open space to get to it. Grim closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was still on Orkish Slava. But the soldier’s indifference to life and death refused to return to his heart. If he had been alone, he would have got stuck like that in the bushes.

  But Chloe was with him. She pushed him in the back.

  ‘Forward!’

  Grim ran to the jeep, opened the door and climbed into the seat behind the wheel. A second later Chloe was in the passenger seat.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The right pedal’s for getting speed on. The left one’s for braking. And this black handle’s for changing direction. Got it?’

  ‘Got it,’ Grim answered. ‘But how do I switch the engine on?’

  Chloe pressed a button on the instrument panel and the engine started growling quietly.

  Immediately, as if that press of the button had summoned them, four Ganjaberserks in urban camouflage appeared in front of the car. In their hands they were holding short iron truncheons.

  ‘A-a-a-ah!’ Chloe screamed through the open window. ‘Wha-a-a-a-a-a-ah!’

  Her scream pulsated so piercingly that one of the warriors even dropped his weapon in surprise.

  The Berserks started squinting strangely at each other, and Grim noticed that their hands and their heads were trembling, and the trembling was getting stronger and stronger. It looked as if they were nodding to each other very, very fast, reminding each other about some important arrangement – and agreeing not to forget about it no matter what, putting more feeling into their agreement with every second.

  The spasms seemed to be impossible to control – one of the Ganjaberserks sat down on the ground right there, putting his hands over his ear. The other three shuffled off, staggering, towards the bushes from which they had emerged.

  But Chloe kept on screaming, and her scream was so unbearably ear-splitting that a shiver ran down Grim’s back.

  Chloe nodded at the gates without closing her mouth and he slammed the pedal down to the floor.

  The gates flew off their hinges and the motorenwagen was out in the street. Chloe finally stopped screeching. At first Grim was delighted – and then he saw the horsemen with spears in the street.

  He looked round.

  In one direction the dirt road was blocked off by an immense Daimler Motorenwagen dump truck – the kind that were assembled in the Yellow Zone for the northern mines. Lying in a ribbed furrow from the broad tread of a tyre, right in front of the truck’s blunt nose, was a pig, following the action very closely – as if it had known about the performance in advance and had taken its seat in the front row of the stalls early in the morning. It occurred to Grim that the dump truck was unnecessary – there was a dead-end behind it, and the jeep couldn’t have got through anyway. And there were soldiers standing there as well.

  Grim turned in the other direction.

  But there were the horsemen.

  The mounted Ganjaberserks were the spitting image of the warriors who had escorted Torn Durex – they were wearing camouflage fatigues and black armour. There was a second line of horsemen behind the first, and another dump truck was standing further back. Foot soldiers with truncheons were waiting beside it.

  ‘Can you screech again?’ asked Grim.

  ‘No, I’ve strained my voice.’

  ‘Then it’s the end.’

  ‘What end?’

  ‘Death,’ Grim gasped out.

  And the moment he uttered the word, Death actually appeared – as if it had been hiding somewhere close by, waiting to be called.

  Death looked exactly the same as the last time.

  It wove itself out of emptiness right in front of the jeep’s windscreen and peered at Grim with the multicoloured wall-eyes of its lenses.

  The camera had the same strained, attentive look as the pig lying in front of the dump truck, and it occurred to Grim that, like him, life sometimes tried its hand at writing poems – and rhymed them painstakingly. He laughed. Chloe looked at him in amazement, and then she saw the camera too.

  With a flash of its red-tattooed flank, the camera swung round and soared upwards. Now they could see its matt-black belly with the air trembling under a host of different-sized nozzles. Then two plates swung out from the belly and in the cavity revealed between them Grim saw beautiful red and white rockets.

  The camera was shrouded in smoke and three freakishly curving white streaks detached themselves from it. The rockets followed a very strange trajectory – first they zoomed up steeply into the sky, then they swung round and came hurtling downwards. Grim had time to realise that each rocket was homing in on its own target – and straight after that three huge fiery black trees sprang up on the road ahead. Grim’s seat lurched under him. Then a stone clattered against the windscreen.

  When the fine debris thrown up by the explosion settled, Grim saw that the dump truck wasn’t in front of them anymore. It was lying at the side of the road, pointing its ribbed wheels up at the sky. There were no more Ganjaberserks on the road either. Now there were only two dead horses lying there – everything else had been scattered all around and it no longer resembled either horses or men. The power of the explosions was so great that the wall of one of the nearby houses collapsed, exposing the interiors of the rooms – a red carpet with a portrait of Loss Liquid in profile hanging on a wall, a green sofa, a nightstand with a shabby-looking manitou, and other Orkish household details.

  The camera swung round towards the car and performed an intricate movement – but the meaning of it was as clear as if it had been a human gesture: they should move forward.

  Grim did as he was told.

  After negotiating, with some difficulty, the section of road smashed by the explosions, he stopped. If any Ganjaberserk was still combat-capable, he was in no hurry to boast about it.

  The camera turned towards the car and rose up above the road, keeping its chalky wall-eyes fixed on Grim.

  ‘Looks like it’s our turn …’ Chloe began.

  The camera was wreathed in smoke again. Grim squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his head against the driving wheel. A second went by and he heard three explosions that merged into each other – but the sound came from behind him. Several lumps of earth thudded onto the roof and silence descended. Grim opened his eyes.

  The house they had just left no longer existed. There weren’t even any bushes or fence – only a cloud of dust and smoke billowing outwards. The second dump truck was heaped over with mud and the pig lying in front of it had disappeared. It had probably engaged its camouflage, thought Grim.

  ‘Oh,’ Chloe whispered. ‘We got out just in time … You know what … I think he wants us to follow him again.’

  ‘I’ve already realised that,’ Grim replied. ‘Close your window.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘So everyone will think it’s the discoursemonger driving along. With a camera escort. No one will bother us again.’

  As soon as Chloe did what he’d said, he pressed down on the pedal and the motorenwagen set off up the slope of the street.

  The surviving Orkish soldiers huddled back against the fences. No one tried to stop the car any more. A Ganjaberserk black with mud, wearing the skulls of an ensign, saluted as the tinted windows glided past. Grim thought it must be because he was concussed, but when they reached the next patrol, all the soldiers saluted.

  ‘Just imagine it,’ said Chloe, ‘riding about like this every day.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The Yellow Zone, at the least. Or even the Green one.’

  ‘I’d soon get sick of it,’ Grim replied.

  ‘But I could do it all my life.’

  Grim looked at her with a mixture of disbelief and fear.

  His fingers were still trembling and he had to squeeze the steering wheel hard to drive the motorenwagen. But Chloe seemed to have managed to calm down already – she was looking out curiously through the window, drinking in the Orkish glances that were slipping over it. Grim could have sworn that what she wanted to do more than anything else in the world was lower the tinted pane of glass to show the public who was sitting behind it.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Chloe. ‘To the Green Zone?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Grim replied, squinting at the camera. ‘Listen, what happened to the Berserks when you started screeching? Did you deafen them somehow?’

  ‘No,’ said Chloe. ‘They just started to get the worries.’

  ‘And what’s the worries?’

  ‘They also call it the horrors, or the frights. It’s this horrible fear that shrill sounds give them when they’re smoked up. Before battle they plug their ears with a special resin, because in war they can hang you for cowardice. But the war’s over now. And they didn’t have any plugs in their ears.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘My father’s a butt, isn’t he?’ said Chloe. ‘Or did you forget that? And my granddad was a Berserk too – he fought in three wars in blocking detachments. The first time was back under Losses. And he lost one eye and two fingers.’

  ‘He was wounded in a blocking detachment?’ Grim asked incredulously.

  ‘They do get hit sometimes.’

  ‘And did your father ever fight a war?’

  ‘My father’s a civilian Ganjaberserk. He got hooked in his job. He started in the tax department, and they smoke five times a day there. He used to flog me with his belt, but then I learned how to screech to make him get the worries, and sometimes even the whities. Nowadays when he has a smoke he hides from me in the happiness room.’

  Grim thought dully that the upper people might be interested in a military secret like this. After all, the Ganjaberserks were the main bulwark of the regime, and if they knew their weak point … But for some reason this idea failed to interest even him and departed uncompleted into the mists of forgetfulness.

  He slowed down at a crossroads, waiting for a sign from the camera. The camera ordered him to go straight on.

  ‘No, we’re not going to the Green Zone,’ said Grim. ‘If that was where we’re going, we’d have turned right.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘To the market. Or … to Orkish Slava. That would be good, by the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because no one will stick their noses in there after us. It’s a demilitarized zone. There’s nothing there but corpse wagons. Just as long as we can get in through the gates. There’s a security detail and a barrier there now.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Here, put this on,’ said Chloe.

  Grim saw a baseball cap with the word ‘CINEWS’ on it in her hand.

  ‘Is that the discoursemonger’s?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘Maybe you’ll get a bit smarter,’ she said.

  Grim didn’t believe it was very likely, but the checkpoint was coming up, and he put the cap on his head.

  When the car drove into the market square, Grim started feeling afraid again.

  Stretchers with wounded men on them had been set out everywhere, and he thought the Orks might overturn the discoursemonger’s car, or at least pelt it with stones. However the exact opposite happened – the sullen men from the row of butchers’ stalls, mobilised to maintain order, quickly cleared the road for him, pulling aside the men lying in his way. No one as much as raised their eyes to the motorenwagen’s tinted windows.

  The Gates of Victory were still standing open. The Ganjaberserk on sentry duty spoke with someone on his mobile phone and raised the boom.

  It cost Grim a great effort to drive slowly under its red jib. But as soon as the wall of the Circus was behind him he performed a nervous zigzag, as if he was trying to cover his tracks – first driving to the right, and then to the left.

  Fortunately there was no one around to whom this could have appeared suspicious. After driving well away from the gates, he stopped the car and lowered his window.

  The camera was nowhere to be seen – it had either activated its camouflage or flown away.

  Grim looked round the boundless field.

  Far away to the right, at the site of the battle with the metal giants, a crowd of Orks was levelling out the ground – he could see barrows of turf and little figures with spades and rakes. The work was being supervised by several mounted Berserks – they were unarmed, with white armbands on their sleeves.

  There were corpse-wagons with yellow Spirals of Resurrection and grey canvas covers creeping across the field. The corpse-wagons were quite numerous – if he just screwed up his eyes, they started looking like ships with markings on their sails, sailing over a green sea.

  There were still corpses lying in the grass. They were already badly swollen – over and over Grim was catching the repulsive smell of decomposition.

  ‘Killed like pigs,’ Chloe whispered in disgust.

  Grim suddenly recalled the pig lying by the wheels of the dump truck that had blocked off the road. He pulled the notepad out of his pocket and wrote a couple of lines in it.

  ‘Writing poems again?’

  Grim nodded.

  He waited a few seconds for Chloe to ask him to read out at least a little bit, but she didn’t say anything. Then he put the notepad away and slowly drove to the centre of the field, trying to steer round the Orkish remains as carefully as possible. Sometimes it was difficult. Chloe looked around and whistled some song or other.

  The closer the car drove to the Hill of the Ancestors, the more black craters there were on all sides – left from strikes by the people’s weapons. There weren’t any dead Orks here, because those had already been cleared away from the centre of the field, but they often came across fragments of bodies – hands, clumps of red and blue entrails, mutilated heads, shoes filled with rotting flesh. And there were a lot of Orkish weapons too.

  They also came across traces of events that were hard to understand, which must have taken place in secluded corners and dead ends behind the flying walls.

  Little stakes drifted past the jeep, with black and yellow off-limits ribbons stretched between them, bearing a message in small letters: ‘s.n.u.f.f. line – please don’t cross’. Lying in the fenced-off square was a white-silk sheet, coloured cushions and champagne bottles, one of them with a pink condom stretched onto it. The bottles were unopened and the gold labels suggested that they were quite expensive. Grim realised that the Ganjaberserks supervising the clean-up hadn’t dared to pick them up because they didn’t know if the prohibition on crossing beyond the striped ribbon was still in force.

  Near the Hill of the Ancestors stood a car and a machine that belonged to the upper people – a motorenwagen, exactly the same as Grim and Chloe’s, and a yellow excavator with glittering scoops on a long boom. To be on the safe side Grim gave them as wide a berth as possible, but did take the risk of driving close by the deep and narrow pit that the excavator had already dug out beside the Hill. Inside, a team of Orks was at work, throwing earth over a long trench filled with corpses: there weren’t enough spademen, and grey wagons had formed up in a queue for the quarry. They were burying the fallen in several layers – saving space.

  Grim let Chloe glance down, then stepped on the gas and didn’t stop until the Hill of the Ancestors had been left far behind.

  ‘That was where the Kagan’s barge had been moored,’ he said. ‘I was on it too.’

  He was expecting questions, but all Chloe said, casually, was:

  ‘So it’s not a lie then.’

  ‘What’s not a lie?’

  ‘About the bones of our ancestors under the Hill. There must be a lot – look how close they’re laying them … Oh, what’s that?’

  Grim saw a brown mound. At first he thought it was earth, flung up by a powerful explosion. But the outline of the hill was way too strange and there was some kind of yellow pipe sticking out of it.

  ‘Let’s take a look!’ Chloe said to him.

  There were no Orks or people anywhere near. Grim swung the car round.

  ‘It’s an elephant!’ Chloe whispered when they got closer. ‘A brown elephant!’

  ‘Not an elephant, a mammoth,’ Grim corrected her. ‘They sent them in against us from the left flank. Many brave lads laid down their lives here.’

  The mammoth was lying on its side. The grass around it was covered with black, baked mud – Orkish blood, mingled with soil. The crushed bodies had already been cleared away. Judging from the size of the dark patch, the mammoth had trampled on the infantry entirely at will. Grim drove round the patch slowly, trying not to ride onto it.

  The mammoth’s belly was slashed open. Evidently it had slipped in the bloody slurry and fallen on its side, and then the Orkish heroes had managed to reach its guts.

  The guts, though, had proved too robust. Some scraps of red biofabric, corrugated tubes and wires were protruding from the long hole in the shaggy belly, and visible behind them was a dark metallic underpan, on which the Orks’ weapons had only been able to leave a few scratches.

  Then the mammoth’s head came into sight, with its lifeless trunk and rakishly curved tusks. Its eyes were open and somehow they looked so alive that it was frightening to peer into them.

  And then Grim saw the battle platform attached to the mammoth’s back.

  The warriors were still there, in their little gondola decorated with shields. They were dressed in leather armour faced with iron plates, and iron helmets. Their faces and arms were covered with wounds from Orkish steel and congealed blood that looked very much like the real thing, but to call them dead would have been an exaggeration.

  Instead of tumbling out of their cabin onto the ground, the warriors were protruding from it shamelessly, like huge nails hammered into the back of the electrical beast. Clearly they and the mammoth were a single whole. One of the warriors was still preparing to throw a spear and another was reloading a crossbow, while the head of the third one had been torn off, and some kind of plastic tubular ribbons – with metal inserts and red strands – were dangling out of his neck.