Chapter Text
October 479 I.C., Odin
Although they had the option of a funeral, out in one of the military cemeteries that dotted the countryside, Martin’s mother elected not to have one. His father yelled about it— just a little— the kind of yelling a man does when he doesn’t know how to cry.
“You can’t bury your son?”
“Bury?” she asked. “What body? If you want to go look at an empty grave, you do it. I can’t. I can’t make myself.”
Martin had not been given a choice in the matter, even though he was old enough to have an opinion. He was dispossessed to agree with his mother on most things, as a matter of course, but the nagging thought in the back of his mind was that Christopher would have wanted a funeral— a big one, as big as they could manage, where everyone was forced to look at his smiling uniform photo and cry about how handsome he had been.
He wasn’t supposed to smile when that picture was taken, he said. They told everyone to look serious. But just before the photographer finished his countdown, before he could take his finger off the shutter button, Christopher had cracked his biggest grin, showing off the gap tooth and dimples that gave him a boyish handsomeness.
When Martin grew older, he would understand that the boyish face was not just due to Christopher’s features: he still was a boy, not even twenty. This was not apparent to Martin at age fourteen. His brother, five years the elder, had always seemed impossibly adult, and impossibly unique. As an adult, too, Martin wondered how many boys had managed to break rank— that one tiny act of defiance— and smile for the camera in the face of death. Hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.
Although they didn’t have a funeral, when the local paper published the usual note of which boys from the district had died, Martin’s mother held unofficial visiting hours at their house. Everyone in town who had known Christopher, or knew the Bufholtz family, came by. It was a veritable procession of high school teachers and athletic coaches, former classmates dragged in by their mothers, three of Christopher’s old girlfriends, his mother’s friends, one or two of his father’s coworkers.
It was a well known ritual. Martin had been on the other end of it at least twice that he could remember, but had never imagined what it would be like to sit there himself all day and listen to people murmur how sorry they were. But how could he have imagined it? If anyone tried to think of what it would be like beforehand, if they really succeeded at it, they would do anything it took to stop their son or brother from going away. Or they should have.
Martin sat stiffly in the armchair in the corner of the living room, wearing his best suit and positioning himself like a doll. He tried to move as little as possible, because he thought if he moved, if someone noticed him, he might be forced to say something. And what was there to say?
His parents sat together on the loveseat, though his father often got up and left the room, leaving his mother alone to face the somber women who came in. The young children who were brought along pulled faces at Martin, peeking out from behind their mothers’ legs, and stole the cookies from the coffee table. The women never accepted his mother’s half-frantic offer of tea and something to eat, but Christopher’s former classmates took the food, with a guilty look in their eyes as they said their condolences between bites, and then left as soon as their own mothers would allow. The food didn’t run out: people brought covered dishes as offerings, and the Bufholtzes ended up with more than they started with. A feast of crudites which would inevitably end up in the trash.
Perhaps that was a kind of libation , Martin thought. His junior high school class had been going through a myths and legends unit for the past several months, and he allowed this to occupy his mind as he sat there in silence. Although the boys who came through the living room shook his father’s hand and murmured something about Valhalla, Martin found it very hard to picture the ancient halls of gods and warriors filled with men in his brother’s uniform, and he found it even harder to picture his brother at the table with them, feasting all night and going out to fight the next day. Perhaps he just found it hard to picture because he was too familiar with the Empire’s religion— there was no escaping the sense of falseness that came with being told the divine coexisted with the mundane. But perhaps it was because he couldn’t picture his brother as a soldier very well at all. The only image they had of him in uniform was his smiling one, and he made it look more like a costume than anything else.
It was hard to think about him being dead. Martin was like Orpheus coming up from Hades with Eurydice behind him: so long as he imagined Christopher somewhere off in the next room, silent and just out of sight behind his shoulder, he still might be alive there. If he turned to look, tried to search for him, that was when he would be dead. He might be able to keep up this mental deception for some time, he thought. The reality had not yet sunk in, despite the house filling with mourners. He was numb with it completely.
Only Christopher’s girlfriends, who had sometimes found Martin cute enough to acknowledge his existence when they visited the house in happier days, were in danger of saying something more to him than a rote phrase or two. Martin had memorized an answer to the simple condolences, repeating what his mother said like a parrot. “Thank you. Christopher would have been glad you came.”
One of these girlfriends, Emmeline, the last of the three, who had broken up with Christopher at the end of his last year of schooling, clutched a bouquet of roses in her arms. It was bigger than her head, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with it. The whole room was already filled with flowers from the other visitors, sitting in vases on every available surface: above the fireplace, on the windowsills, strewn across the kitchen table, set on the bookshelves, and finally placed on the floor when they ran out of other places for them to go. Most of these flowers were lilies and other white blossoms— appropriate for a funeral, even if there wasn’t one— and when Martin let his eyes unfocus, they made the room look like it was covered in a dusting of snow. Emmeline’s red eyes fell on Martin, and she handed the bouquet to him. Martin took it, though it dwarfed his lap.
The roses thus handed off, Emmeline no longer looked at him, and Martin ran his finger down the stem of one of the flowers, finding a thorn and pressing his fingertip into it, like a diabetic’s needle looking for the right signs of life. When he felt it break the skin, a bubble of blood emerged, and he wiped his hand on his pants.
“He would have been happy you came,” his mother said to Emmeline in the painful silence.
“Did he ever mention me in his letters?”
“You had broken up with him, hadn’t you?” his father asked.
“It was stupid,” she said. “I didn’t really want to—” She rubbed at her face. “We just—”
“I’m sure he understood in the end,” his mother said.
“Did he say anything to you when he left?” Emmeline asked. “Did he know this was going to happen?”
“How could he have known?” Martin’s father asked.
“No, I know, I’m being stupid,” she said.
Martin’s father got up from the couch again and left the room, heading outside to smoke another cigarette. His mother remained.
“What did he say when we saw him off, Martin?” his mother asked.
“I don’t remember,” Martin said. This wasn’t true. He remembered it perfectly clearly.
On the day he left, Christopher had shaken their father’s hand, then hugged their mother, and then turned to Martin. They were all in the parking lot of the big military spaceport just outside the capital city, and occasionally they saw a ship lift up into the sky overhead, rising like a rock would fall. It was a beautiful summer day, and Christopher was already sweating in his black uniform, though he tried not to show it. He constantly readjusted it, pulling it into place— he was shorter and sturdier than the uniform had been designed for, so the shirt kept riding up. He looked at Martin with a goofy smile. The two boys could not have been more different in appearance: where Christopher was broad shouldered, Martin was slender; where Christopher was handsome and funny, Martin was odd and quiet.
Christopher looked down at him and punched his shoulder. “Guess you’ll have to be the man around here when I’m gone, won’t you?”
Even Martin knew that he was only saying it just because it was a thing boys ought to say to their younger brothers, and he was joking— laughing silently, round cheeks crinkling up over his eyes. It was a funny joke, perhaps, considering how little like a man Martin was. He should have played along, but he hadn’t yet discovered the skill to differentiate between being laughed with and laughed at, so instead he shoved his fists in his pockets and scuffed the ground with his toe.
“You’ll be back,” he said.
“I’m sure you’ll be taller than me when I get home,” Christopher said. He bumped his shoulder up against Martin’s. “Look— you’re almost there already.” If this was true, it didn’t feel true.
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Christopher said. “Don’t miss me too bad, I guess.” There wasn’t anything more that could be said so he gave a wave to his family and headed off towards the big glass doors of the spaceport. He glanced over his shoulder every few steps as he left, and just before he pulled open the big double doors, he turned one last time. Martin managed a wave; his parents were already getting back in the car. Christopher smiled, and then headed inside, and that was the last Martin saw of him.
They weren’t told how he had died, and they weren’t given a body to bury.
Martin’s father insisted that life go on as normal, so he didn’t take any time off from work, and Martin was to go to school. His mother shook him awake, as she had every morning for years, and he didn’t speak a word of complaint as he got dressed. The bouquet of roses was on the hall table, and as his mother forced him out the door to walk to school, he grabbed one and stuck it in the lapel of his grey uniform.
He entertained the thought of skipping class, if only briefly, but he didn’t know where he would go. It was a blustery period in October, the temperature unseasonably cold and hovering just above freezing, so he couldn’t stay outside even if he wanted to. The haunts in walking distance that he could imagine (the grocery store, the library, the pub) were all accustomed to calling the school to report wandering truant children. There wouldn’t have been any point in skipping school, except for that it would have been what Christopher would have done, if he had been the one who had lived, and Martin the one who had died.
Christopher had never really liked studying, which was how he had ended up in the fleet so early. If he had gotten an admission to any school around— not even an important one, like Odin National University, but even just a vocational school— he would have been able to defer his service for another few years, if not avoid it completely. But he had been uninterested in that, so had entered the fleet directly out of high school.
“It’ll give me a few more years to decide what I want to do with myself, anyway,” he said to their mother, which had made her very annoyed.
“So would a higher education,” she said. “You’re wasting your potential, you know.”
“My potential will still be there in three years,” he said. “It’s not like it’s going anywhere.”
It was easy to look up to Christopher’s dislike of school as an unattainable aspiration— yet another area in which Martin fell short. He liked academics, or wasn’t interesting enough to dislike them.
When Martin discarded the thought of skipping school, he tried to equally push Christopher out of his mind. He managed, for a while, by constructing vast corridors of emptiness where all his thoughts should have been.
No one spoke to him at school, not for days, aside from calling his name for roll. His teachers didn’t protest at all when he put his head down on his arms and ignored the lessons completely. Even when he kept his head up, the words of his teachers were a meaningless ring and buzz. He didn’t retain anything that was said to him, if he heard it in the first place. He had somehow become a ghost inside his own life. A week passed like this, though he hardly was aware of the time going by.
He wouldn’t have even noticed it was Friday afternoon, if not for the fact that on the last Friday of every month, the last two hours of the day were allotted to their grade being ushered into the school’s auditorium. It was different every month what they were subjected to during this time. Sometimes it was testing, sometimes it was a guest lecturer, sometimes it was a special lesson on health, but today the mood of the class was jubilant: one student had overheard that they were going to get to watch a movie.
It appeared to be true. Martin took a seat near the very back of the auditorium, in the dark shadowy place covered by the overhead room with the projector equipment. Even with the lights on, it was dark enough back there to sleep. When all the rest of the three hundred or so boys had filed their way in to the auditorium’s narrow seats, one of the literature teachers stepped up on stage and yelled (no one had given him a microphone) that to cap off their unit, they would be watching an adaptation of one of the stories they had read. Some of the boys cheered before being shushed by teachers standing by the edges of the rows.
Martin slumped down in his seat, pressing his knees up against the back of the chair of the boy in front of him, as the lights in the auditorium flicked off, and the projector blinked to life. Although he tried to gather enthusiasm for watching a movie (at the very least, it would be something to take him out of himself for two hours), all he could muster was a vague sense of disappointment that their literature unit was ending. He had enjoyed it, up until this last week.
He could tell right away what kind of film this was going to be: the very first image that appeared on screen was the imprimateur’s mark, the golden seal with the crowned eagle. This was a government film, and even at fourteen, Martin knew that films from Phezzan were more entertaining to watch. It was an older movie, too. The date beneath the signature of the official who had signed off on the film’s release was from more than a hundred years ago. It must be a classic. He glanced around in the dark and located his teachers. Usually during these things, if the boys were under control, the teachers left en masse to go grade papers or smoke outside, but today most of them had taken up residence in the emptier back rows near where he was sitting and were watching the projection.
“You couldn’t make a movie like this these days,” Martin’s algebra teacher said.
“Why not?” one of the other math teachers asked.
“After building Iserlohn? You couldn’t make a movie about a walled city falling. It’d look like rebel propaganda.”
The other teacher laughed, but was shushed as the pounding drumbeat music of the movie’s opening sequence swelled.
The film was called The Fall of Troy , and was based on one of the myths they had studied. In class, they had read a short adaptation of the Trojan war story. It seemed like that might have only been included in the curriculum as an excuse for the teachers to watch this movie on school time.
It was a spectacle from its first moments, clearly a high-budget film compared to what they were usually shown in these assemblies— cheap productions with untalented actors reciting hamfisted scripts about the dangers of drugs or the benefits of various careers. The actors here were all perfect specimens— the one playing Achilles was particularly beautiful: tall and broad shouldered, with curly blond hair. It was actually a little funny, a part of Martin’s dazed brain managed to comment, whoever had made this film had chosen actors according to such a strict standard of appearance that the woman Briseis could have been Achilles’s sister rather than his captive.
Every shot, from the thrashing sea and the boats leashed to the shore, to the sweeping plains and the churning river near Troy, to the walls of the city itself, was framed to make the viewer feel small. When looking at the actors, the camera always positioned them to look not-quite human— taking up too much space in the frame and too much air in the auditorium when they spoke.
It seemed to Martin that this was a loose adaptation, even compared to what was written in the short version of the story they had read in class. The way the fight for Troy was described by the attacking Greeks was as a matter of national unification— even a well made film couldn’t escape the heavy-handed influence of the government program that had funded it. But whoever had been the creative brain behind this movie hadn’t cared much about that; those lines stuck out because they were incongruous with the tone of the rest of the movie, which was wholly concerned with the spectacle of war. Even the ostensible central plot of Achilles’s rage, and the way the scriptwriter twisted his refusal to fight into a narrative of unpatriotic desertion for which he had to be duly punished, was merely a frame on which to hang the action.
The battles were lovingly rendered, spears and swords glittering in the sun. Horses gleamed with sweat, and so did men. When the Trojans fell, the picture took delight in their deaths, panning up from the gore and lingering on the victor standing over them; when the Greeks were toppled, the camera closed in on their suffering faces and tried to find meaning there.
There weren’t many named Trojans in the film— it was their battle to lose after all— but there couldn’t be a story without them. To distinguish them from the Greeks, they were given darker hair and coarser features, though clearly the producer had cast for beauty here too.
Although at the start of the film, after realizing what kind of movie it was going to be, Martin had tried to close his eyes to it and take a nap, sinking further and further down into his seat, he found himself unable to look away whenever Hector and his brother Paris were on screen. The two were brothers, though they were different as night and day: Hector was broad shouldered and smiling, always dashing forwards to meet the Greeks with his spear, while Paris was small and crafty, and picked them off with arrows from afar. The actors who played the two brothers had an undeniable chemistry, even when their characters were at odds. Martin couldn’t avoid making the mental comparison, but he tried to avoid thinking it consciously, letting it float just out of reach as he stared up at the screen, unblinking.
It was hard to watch the film when he knew what was coming. Troy had to fall to the Greeks— this was the only way the story could end.
The climax of the film was the fated fight between Hector and Achilles. It seemed to stretch on forever. Martin felt trapped by it, his fingernails digging into his palms as he mentally begged for Hector to escape into the walls of Troy when Achilles chased him. When Hector didn’t hide inside the city, Martin silently pled for some one of his countrymen to come out and help him when he stood against Achilles, face to face. And then, only then, did Martin beg for Hector to win the fight that he could not win— spear and sword both falling uselessly against Achilles’ armor.
He didn’t cry when Achilles stabbed Hector through the throat, but he found himself unable to breathe when Hector begged for Achilles to return his body to his family, somehow able to speak even as the blood gushed out and spilled down onto the dirt. When Achilles refused, and stripped Hector’s body bare to drag behind his chariot around the city, Martin got up from his seat and fled the auditorium, pushing past his classmates in the fumbling darkness. No one cared that he left.
Once the auditorium doors shut behind him, freeing him from the relentless pounding of the movie’s soundtrack, the halls of the school were eerily silent. It was the last hour of the school day, and the nearby hallways were empty, since all of his class was in the auditorium. Martin wasn’t sure where he was going, but he found himself at the back doors of the upper grade hallway, the ones that led out to the teachers’ parking lot and the big dumpsters behind the cafeteria. There were no windows on this side of the building, which was why the teachers all came out this way to smoke, but none of them were there now. It was deserted, and no one would find Martin there.
He wasn’t thinking about evading detection when he slipped outside. He was just grateful to the bitterly cold air for reminding him that he could breathe still, though being reminded that he could breathe let him know that he could cry. He crouched down next to the dumpster, amid all the flicked away cigarette butts, and covered his head with his arms. The rumpled rose that had been tucked into the lapel of his jacket worked its way free and fell to the ground, and a gust of wind sent it skittering across the parking lot, though Martin didn’t notice. He was too engaged with trying to choke down and swallow his sobs, a losing battle if there ever was one.
He hadn’t really cried yet. It hadn’t felt real enough yet— without a body how could it feel real? But maybe that had been a lie he had told himself, to stay wrapped in the protective shroud of numbness for as long as possible. None of his thoughts now were clearer at all, but the pain was, all of a sudden.
Hector’s body would be fed to the dogs, Martin thought, over and over, unable to think of anything else.
He fell backwards from his crouch out onto the asphalt, laying on his back, arms spread. The sky was grey, and the few tree limbs he could see reaching over the dumpsters were bare and skeletal. What did it feel like, he wondered, to be dragged behind Achilles’ chariot? He stared up at the sky and let the cold ground steal the heat from his body. He lay there, with the tears drying on his face, for some time.
He didn’t even notice someone approaching until a shadow fell across him. Martin was sure it was one of his teachers, and almost would have been relieved to be scolded and hauled back inside, but then the tall shadow sat down on the dirty asphalt next to him, and Martin could just barely see his shock of red hair from his position on the ground.
It was one of his classmates: Kircheis. The two boys only shared one class together this year, algebra, but since they had been attending the same schools together for about nine years, they both were passingly familiar with the other.
Kircheis was tall, very tall, and his school uniforms no longer fit— his wrists poked out of the sleeves, and a few too many centimeters of black sock showed at his ankles, even after someone had let down the hems of his pants. Despite his rapid growth, he didn’t look gangly and awkward like a few of the other boys did: he wore his height like it fitted him better than his clothes, and he had a very careful, measured way of moving that made it seem like he had always been this tall, and didn’t need to get used to it. He and Martin shared the top of the class academics-wise: they often found themselves standing together on stage at the end-of-year awards for best students, though Martin knew he fared better in language and history, and Kircheis did better in math.
Despite that, they had never spoken more than a few words to each other, having never had much of an occasion to. Martin was quiet and unassuming, and Kircheis always had a following— not exactly one of popularity, but because he never turned away anyone who wanted something from him. He was universally generous, which might have made him an object of scorn for some of the crueler boys, but Kircheis had also never seen a fight that he couldn’t end. The other students tended to either look up to him or ignore him, which had always struck Martin as a very lonely kind of existence. If he had been forced to choose a side of that dichotomy, he would have also looked up to Kircheis (it was hard not to), but he felt a distinct discomfort in admitting that he did. If he wanted any acknowledgement from Kircheis, it was not whatever he gave to the cadre of boys who wanted his quiet words of approval and help with their algebra work. And if Kircheis thought he wanted that now, Martin was faintly disgusted by the idea. But that didn’t seem likely.
It was very strange that Kircheis was sitting beside him out behind the dumpsters— the two best students skipping school together. The strangeness of it, and the the long silence that stretched on between them, finally made Martin turn his head to look at Kircheis properly.
“Did someone send you out here to get me?” he asked. His voice cracked, his throat still full of the remnants of tears, which made him feel even more embarrassed and pathetic.
“No,” Kircheis said. “I was just taking a walk. I’ve been out here for a while.”
“Why did you leave?” Martin asked.
“I didn’t like the movie very much.”
“Oh. Me neither.”
“Do you want to see what I found?” Kircheis asked. It might have been an attempt at cheering Martin, though it wasn’t likely to work.
“Sure.”
Kircheis reached beside himself and held up a fragile little bird’s nest, the former inhabitants long since flown off to warmer climes. Nestled inside it was the rose that had previously adorned Martin’s jacket.
Martin put his hand to his chest, noticing for the first time that it had gone missing. Kircheis smiled, though it was a somber expression, and picked the rose back out of the bird’s nest. Tentatively, asking permission with his slowness, he reached over and tucked it back into the buttonhole of Martin’s jacket. Martin touched the soft petals with his fingertip, then let his hand flop back down to the ground. He closed his eyes.
“I saw it in the parking lot,” he said. “I thought it was yours.”
“Thanks.”
“I think my dad grows that kind of rose,” Kircheis said. “But it’s a summer flower.”
“Florists get them shipped in,” Martin said. It was a silly thing to say, and he regretted his abrasive tone immediately— there was no way Kircheis didn’t already know that. But he didn’t seem offended to have the obvious pointed out to him, or at least he didn’t get up and leave.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Kircheis said.
Martin didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. They were both silent once more. “You don’t have to sit out here with me,” Martin said. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t want to go back in,” Kircheis said.
“I think the movie’s almost over.”
“Probably,” Kircheis agreed.
“You’ll get in trouble if they catch you out here.”
“Do you want me to go?”
Martin fell silent, which was enough of an answer for Kircheis, and he stayed sitting there next to Martin.
Kircheis was the one to break the silence next, which surprised Martin. “I don’t know why they made us watch that movie,” he said.
“It’s a patriotic film,” Martin said, opening his eyes and turning to look at Kircheis.
“There are a million of those.”
“The teachers like it.”
“I know,” Kircheis said. “I just don’t know why.”
Martin felt a sudden flash of anger— the first truly new feeling that had broken through the haze of his thoughts in a while. He clung to it like a lifeline. “Some people just enjoy cruelty,” he said.
Kircheis flinched. “I hope not,” he said.
“You don’t think so?”
Kircheis was quiet for a moment. “I—” He seemed to be considering his words very carefully. “An old friend of mine tried to explain something like that to me, once,” he said. “I don’t think people like cruelty— I think they just try to find ways to see beauty in it.”
“Who said that?”
“Reinhard von Musel.”
“Oh, that transfer student.” Martin looked back up at the sky. “It’s a stupid thing to say.”
“Maybe.” Kircheis looked down at his hands, at the bird’s nest in them.
“Why would anybody want to find something beautiful in it?” Martin asked. “There’s nothing beautiful about it.”
“Maybe they don’t see another way to live with it.”
“Then there’s your answer,” Martin said. “That’s why they showed it to us. As a lesson in how to live with it.”
Martin was almost immediately sorry for his anger— there was no reason for him to be angry at Kircheis, of all people, but Kircheis was the one who was there, and he just nodded.
“It was a stupid movie, anyway,” Martin said after a minute, trying to calm himself down, trying to offer something to Kircheis, rather than push him away. “I think they would just take any story and twist it to be whatever they wanted. It was like the movie didn’t even matter except for being a way to carry the fighting. It’s stupid.”
“Yeah. It’s nothing like the original.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Yeah,” Kircheis said. “My teacher gave me a copy.”
“Who do you have for lit?”
“Herr Steiner.”
“Oh. So do I.”
“He probably would have told you, too, if—”
“Yeah.” Martin looked away. “Maybe he did. I haven’t been paying attention.”
“It’s in my locker,” Kircheis said. “You can have it, if you want. I’m done with it. Herr Steiner wouldn’t mind.”
Martin nodded, but it was an apathetic nod.
“It really is different,” Kircheis said again.
Their conversation was interrupted by the shrill scream of the school bell signaling the end of the day. Martin, still laying flat on the ground, knew that he had to get up, but felt detached from his limbs, like he didn’t know how to work them anymore.
“We should go,” Kircheis said. “The teachers will all be coming out here in a minute.”
“I know,” Martin said. He didn’t move until Kircheis stood and offered him his hand to haul him to his feet. Martin took it, and he felt unexpectedly dizzy as he stood. Vainly, Kircheis walked behind Martin and brushed the dirt and grime off his back. It made Martin shiver.
Kircheis held open the door, and he and Martin slipped back inside. As usual, the ringing of the bell had caused a flood of students towards the front of the building, and so there weren’t many around in the back hallway to see them enter. They grabbed their bags from their lockers and walked out to the front. Students were fanning out from the courtyard in every direction, running or walking down the streets to their houses, alone or in groups.
Kircheis stopped when they reached the sidewalk. “Can I walk you home?” he asked.
Martin frowned at him. “Don’t you live in the other direction?”
Kircheis shrugged.
“You don’t have to,” Martin said. “I don’t need an escort.” He was feeling abrasive once more, maybe just because the privacy of the strange shared moment near the dumpsters had been lost.
“I want to.”
“Why?”
Kircheis met Martin’s eyes. It was very strange to suddenly realize that Kircheis wasn’t lying— he did want something from Martin, something his crowd of hangers-on couldn’t give him.
“Neither of us wanted to learn how to live with it,” Kircheis said, very quietly. They looked at each other for a moment, then Martin nodded.
Kircheis followed him down the street, and then into the woods when Martin dipped into his usual shortcut. It was very quiet there, as soon as the shouts of departing students and the noise of cars faded away. It wasn’t a very long way to Martin’s house, but he didn’t walk quickly. There was nothing good waiting for him at home.
Kircheis was silent as they walked, but it was a companionable silence.
“In the book,” Martin began when they were not far from his house.
“Yeah?”
“Does anyone in Troy get Hector’s body back? After Achilles feeds it to the dogs?”
“The dogs don’t eat it,” Kircheis said. “The gods protect it.”
“Oh.”
Kircheis could tell this answer was unsatisfying. “I’m sorry.”
Martin shrugged. He plucked at the rose tucked into his jacket, pulled it out, and twirled it between his fingers. The petals were looking worse for wear, the flower wilted now, but it still retained its color, a twirl of red in his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to you.”
“And what can anybody do about it?” he asked. He had raised his voice again.
Kircheis just nodded, and looked down at his feet as they walked.
“I’m sorry, Kircheis— I’m just—” Martin said finally. His street was coming into view through the last brush of trees.
“Siegfried,” he said.
“What?”
“Please— just call me Siegfried.”
Martin stopped walking to look at him. “Siegfried,” he said. The name felt very funny on his tongue, even though it was a common name, one he had heard in hundreds of different places. He found he had to look away. “Can I borrow that book?”
“Of course. Here,” Siegfried said. He swung his backpack off his back, and held out the bird’s nest he was still carrying to Martin, who took it, holding it gently in his hands. Martin placed the rose inside. He watched Siegfried fish around in the backpack for a moment, and he came out with a tattered paperback, a drawing of soldiers in shining helmets on the cover. He held it out to Martin. They traded again, passing the bird’s nest back.
Martin flipped through the book, looking at the lines of poetry and illustrations. He paged right through to the end. “And so they held a funeral for Hector, tamer of horses,” he said, reading the last line. He was surprised that the book ended this way, not with a line about the Greek victory. It was a very melancholy way to end the poem.
“Yeah.”
“My mother didn’t want to have a funeral at an empty grave,” Martin said. “I suppose she was right— it wouldn’t have done him any good, since he wasn’t there.”
“It’s good to have a grave to remember someone with.”
“There probably is a headstone in a fleet cemetery somewhere.”
“Will you ever go to it?”
The thought disgusted Martin, and his lip curled involuntarily. “No.”
Siegfried nodded. He seemed about to say something, offer advice, but he stopped himself. Maybe that was for the best. He looked through the woods, at the street they were approaching. “Is that your house?” he asked.
“Just a little further,” Martin said. “It’s on that street.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to come all the way,” Martin said, and this time, Siegfried took the offer to let him go for what it was.
“Alright. Will you be in school on Monday?”
“Probably.”
“Then I’ll see you then.” He looked at the bird’s nest in his hand, and saw that it still had Martin’s flower in it. “Here,” he said, holding it out.
Martin reached for the flower, but Siegfried gestured for him to take the whole bird’s nest.
“You take it. I have too many of these,” he said. “I’m always finding them.”
For the first time, Martin smiled. “It’s because you’re so tall— all the nests are at eye level for you.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he was smiling too. “I just put them in a tree near my house. Sometimes other birds will find them and live there— makes it easy for them if they don’t have to build their own nest, I guess. Here— take it.”
Martin did, though he wasn’t sure why Siegfried was so insistent. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
Siegfried’s smile brightened like the sun— it was almost difficult to look at, and it made Martin feel very strange.
“Alright,” Siegfried said. He picked up his bookbag from the leaf litter on the ground, swung it over his shoulders, and gave a little wave— for the first time seeming quite awkward and funny— he wasn’t sure how to leave. “Bye, then.”
“Bye, Siegfried,” Martin said. He watched him head off back through the woods.
When Martin arrived at his house, the quiet surrounding it like a tomb, he slipped into his room without his mother hearing him. He sat on his bed with the borrowed book on his knees and the bird’s nest cupped gently in his hands. It seemed like the kind of thing his mother would yell at him for if she found it on his dresser— when Christopher had found a small animal’s skeleton and displayed it in his room, his mother had yelled loud enough to wake the dead— so Martin instead opened his window and put the bird’s nest outside, in the corner of his windowsill, where it was protected from the wind. Maybe birds would come by in the spring, though that season was still many months away.