Free Peacetime by Robert Edric

said.
    â€˜Resent? I envy them it. I envy them it, but I know how deluded they all are by it. I know how easily, when the time comes, you will take everything away from them and destroy it.’
    â€˜Me? Not me.’
    â€˜You, men like you, it is the same thing. As far asthey are concerned, you are the instrument of that change.’
    â€˜Then they’re wrong,’ Mercer said. ‘ You’re wrong.’ He poured himself a second drink. He had rarely participated in conversations like this, where such grand and intangible concepts were passed so easily back and forth, and which gained some new and human shape in the hands of the men who dealt with them.
    â€˜He has offended you,’ Mathias said. ‘I shall apologize on his behalf. The stupid Jew with his own history smashed to the ground and destroyed. The stupid Jew who still does not see that it is the actions of individuals that count and not these great plans, these uncaring hands swept blindly across charts and maps.’
    â€˜You’re wrong,’ Jacob said to him. ‘But I, too, apologize.’
    Mercer was uncertain whether this apology was meant for him or for Mathias.
    They ate, and afterwards, as darkness fell, Mathias said they should leave. He told Mercer that the long walk home would weaken Jacob considerably.
    Mercer invited them both to stay, but they refused the offer and left soon afterwards.
    â€˜If I find out anything more that might be of use to you, I’ll let you know,’ Mathias told Mercer.
    Jacob was the first to walk into the darkness, and Mathias went to catch up with him. The two men were quickly out of sight. It was a cloudless, moonlit night, and Mercer imagined the route they would follow back to the town. At Jacob’s pace, it would take them well over an hour.
    He stood for a moment to let the night air clear his head.

9
    He did not see Mary again until the start of the following week. She approached him where he waited beside the water.
    He saw her first in the dunes, with the other children, and then shortly afterwards, when she came to him alone. It was a thing he remembered long afterwards, these arrivals and departures of hers, the small dramas she made of her otherwise uneventful comings and goings.
    She was carrying something, and it was only as she reached him that he saw that what she held was a dead tern.
    â€˜We found it up there,’ she said, indicating the grass-topped ridge. The voices of the other children could occasionally still be heard. He said nothing about having seen her with them earlier.
    She held the tern out for him to inspect. It was a young adult, smaller than most of the birds that constantly hovered and dived, though its first full and vividly white plumage was already formed. Its headswung limply between her fingers. He pulled out one of its wings and felt the delicate bones and tendons tense at its full span. It appeared to have lost none of its feathers.
    â€˜What killed it, I wonder?’ he said. He touched the tip of the bird’s beak.
    â€˜One of the boys,’ she said.
    â€˜One of the boys? Why?’
    â€˜Why not?’ she said. ‘There’s thousands of them. It’s what boys do. Are you saying they shouldn’t?’
    â€˜It just seems pointless, that’s all. They’re such beautiful things.’
    â€˜If you say so,’ she said.
    â€˜How did they do it?’
    â€˜They –’ she made a wringing motion with her hands. ‘It doesn’t take anything.’
    â€˜Here.’ He handed it back to her.
    She took it, folded its wings flat to its weightless body and pushed it head-first into her pocket.
    â€˜Will you bury it?’ he asked her.
    â€˜Is that what you’d do?’
    â€˜I’ve never killed one,’ he said.
    â€˜You’re a soldier,’ she said. ‘It’s not birds that you kill.’
    â€˜ Was a soldier,’ he said. ‘I was an engineer in the