And I Alone Have Lived to Tell Thee

Martin would have wanted him to live, which was what compelled Kircheis to stand. His body felt like a thousand tons of lead, every action seeming to lag seconds behind the thought that motivated it. He looked at his own left hand, and his fingers moved in slow motion, tucking the ID card he had been given into his pocket. He picked up his gun. He picked up Martin’s body, carrying him over his back, keeping him in place with his now otherwise useless right arm.

He left by the balcony, swinging his legs over the railing and then dropping the tall single story directly to the ground, not feeling the pain in his ankles and knees when he landed in the flower bed below. He didn’t go out the way he had come in. Instead, he used the keycard on the lower door to get further into the royal family’s suite. He didn’t have time to get the trapdoor open, even if it might have been a safer route.

Luckily, the lower floor of the family suite was deserted, though he could hear shouting and running feet above him— the guards discovering the carnage of the room upstairs. He perhaps should have tried to run, but the best he could do was walk step by plodding step, following a half-remembered map.

In the school building, while he leaned over Martin’s shoulder, Martin had traced paths with his finger across his glowing computer screen. The memory was clear enough— if the only way he could get out was by following a ghost’s directions, he would.

“And turn right at this intersection,” Martin said in his ear, pointing. “That will take you towards the ballroom again. No one will be there— why would they be? And you saw the doors that led outside, to the back gardens.”

When he heard anyone else in the corridors before him, he stopped and ducked into alcoves, waiting for the noises to pass. It seemed that most of the guards had been drawn towards the front of the building, the chaos outside. Perhaps the other revolutionaries had even managed to kill enough to make their numbers thin on the ground, or perhaps Littenheim’s men were so ill-trained at dealing with disasters in the palace that they had no idea where to station themselves, to prevent someone like Kircheis from escaping. Or, perhaps, with Sabine dead— and the word spreading that she was dead— they no longer had reason to care if someone like Kircheis made it out.

He could hear distant shouts, soldiers calling the news to one another across the hallways, which seemed to stop men in their tracks, running feet slowing, then stilling to nothing as they gathered in wary groups. Kircheis ducked away from them, and made his way towards the ballroom, and the back of the building.

The ballroom was almost empty, and the door was open. Someone had propped open the door so that they could drag in the bodies of Littenheim’s men who had died outside, laying them out in neat rows on the dancing-floor. The other dead were left out in the wet grass, though the rain had stopped. No one living was in the ballroom any longer, and the one soldier who ran past on the grass outside on his own inscrutable mission glanced at Kircheis carrying Martin’s body and simply kept going.

Kircheis left through the open door. He walked slowly across the gardens, wet with rainwater. Off in the distance, the chaos continued— he could even hear the whine of engines carried on the misty air, and the sounds of shouting, and even the scream of artillery fire, further off still. He no longer knew who was being shot at, or why. The sounds came from the administrative wing of the palace, far off, and the city itself, even more distant. He walked in the other direction, stepping over bodies on the gravel paths of the gardens. The fighting here was long over, and there was no longer any one left in the family quarters to defend.

The gardens provided cover the further he went, flower beds turning into hedgerows, and then hedgerows turning into copses of trees, and then the orderly trees and paths and pavilions finally giving way to the forest.

These were the Neue Sanssouci hunting grounds. Kircheis had been here so many times before: his four yearly trips with the rest of his class at the IOA, and then the summer he had spent working in the palace, when he had gone out for runs during lunch. The lay of the land was familiar to him, at least on the main trails near the palace. The trees were thin and barren of leaves at this point in the year, rendering the familiar unfamiliar. The slope of the ground remained the same, and that was what oriented him.

He walked for quite some time, long enough that he lost track of the sound of fighting in the distance. It may have been that the fighting had finally stopped, or the trees grew dense enough to muffle the sound. Still later, he heard, off in the distance, the barking of dogs and the trembling rush of horses moving through the trees. Littenheim must have ordered people to search the woods— maybe specifically for Kircheis, maybe for anyone.

He laid down on the wet forest floor, hiding behind any cover that he could find every time the sounds came near: rotted logs, a tangle of briars, any divot in the ground that would take him. He clutched Martin’s cold body close to his chest and waited for the sounds to recede. Sometimes they came close enough that he was sure the dogs had his scent.

During those moments he thought of many things. He remembered chasing Hilde through these trees on horseback, without a single care in the world; and there was the story that Leigh had told him, about being hunted through this same forest, and the vision of him bleeding out on the forest floor alone; and there was the ancient, dream-like memory of stilling Reinhard’s hand when he went to shoot a deer. And he remembered walking through the woods with Martin, the first time they had really spoken, talking about what would become of Hector’s body.

He thought about them more than he thought about the consequences of being caught. The threat of death seemed almost immaterial to him, and the memories superimposing themselves over the present moment were much more vivid. When anyone passed too close by to his hiding spot, he shielded Martin’s body with his own, pressed his mouth into the crook of his elbow to cover his breathing, and kept his finger on the trigger of his gun.

When the hunters passed him by, he picked up Martin and moved again, heading north. Each time he had to pick up the body, it seemed to grow heavier, and Kircheis had to force himself to his feet, rather than laying down in the shallow hole in the ground with Martin forever. The grounds stretched out for kilometers in every direction, and Kircheis estimated that he had eighteen or so to go before he reached the high wall that separated the palace grounds from the surrounding forest.

As he went further and further, the forest grew completely silent— the hunters left far behind. He occasionally glimpsed a deer through the trees, but he fixed his eyes straight ahead of himself and trudged onward. He kept walking as the sun began to set, and when it became too dark to move at all, he sat on a fallen log, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and waited for the sun to rise. He took the soldier’s jacket that Martin was wearing— Martin wouldn’t have minded. It was early spring, and the temperature was well above freezing, so he wasn’t at risk of dying of exposure.

The night trapped him. The grief was so cold that it emptied out his entire chest, replaced it with a void that contained nothing but an awareness of the slowness of time. There had been nights in Kircheis’s life that he wished would last forever, and that had nevertheless passed by so quickly despite his best attempts to hold on. This night felt eternal— not just for the slow passage of minutes, but for knowing that whenever he closed his eyes at night in the future, no matter if he was side by side with someone warm and alive, he would always— always— find himself holding the memory of Martin’s cold body instead.

When the sky began to lighten, he trudged onwards. He had walked further than he thought the day before, and made it to the wall surrounding the palace grounds by midmorning. He tossed a stick against the electric fence wire lining the top of the stone wall, and discovered that the fence lacked power. He walked along the wall until he found a place where a tree provided a way up and over, and he dragged himself up, and Martin with him.

The edge of the palace grounds abutted a road. He walked along it until he found a house with a shed, tucked back from the road on a long and winding driveway. He could see someone watching him from the windows of the house, but he walked straight past it to the little outbuilding. The door of the shed was locked with a padlock, but he jammed his knife beneath the padlock’s clip, and pulled the whole thing straight out of the wood, letting him in. He found a shovel, and a wheelbarrow.

It was strange how much he hated putting Martin’s body in the wheelbarrow. His weight had begun to feel like a part of him, and it was awful to have it removed from his shoulders. He arranged Martin as comfortably as he could, covering him with the soldier’s jacket like a blanket.

He returned to the road, walking until he found a place where the road lifted over a little creek, and he turned along that creek and walked that way, bumping the wheelbarrow over the stones embedded in the dirt, until he found a small enough clearing for one grave. Some big tree had once carved out this space, but had fallen long enough ago that even its stump had disappeared, though recently enough that no other saplings had managed to thrive in its place.

It was difficult to dig a grave without being able to hold the shovel in his right hand. The dirt was soft, so he stomped the shovel into the ground with his foot, and then braced it on his arm to get the dirt out. Even so, he could only manage a shallow hole, just long enough and deep enough for him to lay down in. He did lay down in it, looking up at the unclouded sky for a long time.

Birds wheeled across his vision, as did popping black spots of dizziness floating in the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, and the effort of digging the grave had taken most of his remaining strength.

He didn’t know what made him get back up— he might have laid in the grave forever— but a shadow of a waving tree branch crossed the sun, or a bird called that sounded a little too much like a human voice, or a fish leaping in the creek sounded too much like an approaching footstep. He got out of the grave, and he picked up Martin for the last time to lay him down in it.

He sat on the crumbling edge of the hole for a moment, the body in his arms. He pressed his nose into Martin’s feathery hair, kissed his forehead, and smoothed his hand across his cheek, memorizing it again.

The crown was still around Martin’s arm. When Kircheis laid him in the grave, he took it off and put it down at his feet, the gold somehow resisting the dullness of mud and rusting blood. He wanted to give Martin something of his, but he had nothing except his gun, and Martin wouldn’t have wanted it.

He looked peaceful enough in the grave, laid in the way he had always liked to sleep: with his arm tucked beneath his head, his other hand curled beneath his chin, his feet twisted together. There was nothing for Kircheis to say: you should have run — I love you — goodbye.

So, he began shoveling the dirt back in. It was easier once he was covered. He laid rocks from the river, crumbling slate that cleaved off from the bank, over the top. On the flattest stone, he scratched Anactoria with the tip of his knife, and left it at the top of the low cairn.

When he was done, he knelt in the snow-melt creek, let the ice water numb the pain of his right hand until he could barely feel it, and let it sting the open cuts on his face as he scrubbed off the dirt and blood the best he could. He stuck his face in the water and drank like a dog, until his stomach couldn’t hold any more, and he thought he might vomit.

He left the wheelbarrow and shovel in a ditch by the side of the road.

He trudged back to the city, going slowly around the grounds of Neue Sanssouci, walking for hours after the sun had set.

There were soldiers on the streets; he avoided their patrolling tanks when he entered the city limits, and then whenever he saw a squad of soldiers clustered around a barrel-fire, he turned the other direction. The streets were familiar to him now— he could find his way in the blind darkness. He walked by instinct, smelling burnt things on the spring wind, until he made it to his apartment building.

He had left the key in the mailbox; it was still there. He climbed the steps slowly, leaning most of his weight on his hand against the wood paneled wall. At the top, he couldn’t get the key in the lock— his fingers couldn’t make the mechanism work. He fumbled with it, tried for a second time, and when he dropped it in his clumsiness he couldn’t find it in the darkness, with just the light coming into the stairwell from the crack underneath the door. Hilde was there. He should have called out to her to open the door, but he couldn’t make his voice work, couldn’t open his mouth.

Instead, he slumped against the wall heavily, sitting down on the stairs and leaning his head against the door.

When the creaking of the top step got Hilde’s attention, she pulled open the door, and he fell inside like a corpse.