The Bargaining Path
***
After commencing another meeting in which we discussed extensively a counterstrike on the Bachums, I approached Adam. Closing the door to his office behind me, I opened my mouth to speak, only to be interrupted by him before I could get out a single word.
“I can sense that something is troubling you. If Maxwell is giving you a hard time, I would be more than happy to sort him out in a most violent manner. My sources tell me that you two have reconciled.”
“That will not be necessary, and tell your sources that if I ever catch them in the act of spying on me, they will cease to be.” I told him without even a smile. “Everything is finally beginning to shape up quite nicely for us.”
I heard him laugh softly to himself but chose to ignore it.
“I have to talk to you about something else.”
He said something under his breath, and even though he was not looking at me, I crossed my arms over my chest, raised one eyebrow, and pursed my lips in my typical show of dangerous irritation. He turned around to face me, and his smile faltered for a moment, but not because he was afraid that at any moment, I might begin to wring him dry with a scathingly vitriolic tirade. Instead, his eyes glazed over for a second, and he breathed out deeply. Quickly, he diverted his eyes, trying to cover whatever it was that needed covering.
“I have to stop standing like that.” I said, shaking my head in incredulous irritation. “All of you men, you are all the same. For some strange reason, my angry battle stance is arousing.”
For a moment, I swore that he looked slightly chagrined, maybe because I had caught him at all or maybe because I had called him on it. But then, he smiled slightly.
“‘Arousing’ does not even begin to describe it, my dear. Now please, we are both taking the high road when it comes to our unfaithful partners, so let us keep talking. Otherwise, I will be unable to resist the feeling that took hold of me when you stood so aggressively, and I might just throw you over this desk.”
“Adam!” I exclaimed, looking at him with widened eyes but struggling to fight a small smile. “I have never heard such untoward talk from you!”
“I know. I do apologize.” He leaned back against the desk and grasped my hand. “You look utterly perfect today, and I am allowing that to get the better of me. I do not know why you have not called me on my hypocrisy yet; I am the one who told you we must keep our relationship strictly platonic.”
“Well, I have just about had it with calling out the hypocrisy of those around me. I wanted to talk to you about the war.”
“Oh, you did not get enough of that gloomy talk today during debates? I notice that you have taken a more peaceful stance today. You seem to be grasping a new philosophy of peaceful resolution, which I find most interesting. Please, tell me from where and for what reason this new stance has arisen.”
“It has arisen because I think that this war needs to end. We need to put an end to it.”
He looked at me with the most charming look of confusion. He was genuinely puzzled as to whether or not I was joking.
“Let me clarify that I am being very serious. We should go to the north, tell the Old Spirits that we are willing to live in peace with them if they are able to do the same with us, and then get on with our lives.”
For a long moment, he looked at me. Then, he chuckled softly to himself before saying simply:
“No.”
“Why not?” I demanded, immediately going on the defensive. “What purpose does this war serve at this point? Originally, you wanted only one of our groups living here because then there would be less humans breathing your pure, clean air and stomping on your untarnished, perfect land. Plus, hundreds, if not thousands, of your enemies would be killed by us, and several of our number would be killed by them.”
“Yes.”
“Well now, I like to think that you are a little more comfortable with the idea of us being here.”
“Yes.”
“So, what is the point of this now? Why can we not all coexist? Why do we have to lose countless numbers of people in a war that was started by you and can easily be ended by you?”
“You think the Old Spirits will leave this war willingly? Honestly, Brynna, you believe they share your desire for a quick, peaceful end? You think they do not enjoy the allowance to inflict pain and take lives that this conflict affords them?”
“I think that they will be hesitant, but that if we make a strong argument, they will agree to end this conflict. Honestly, I believe that. If we tell them that we will stay away from them as long as they promise to do the same…”
“And those people up there who followed Rich and Mary Bachum because they did not know what else to do? My people who were taken in by Tyre’s skillful manipulations, what of them? Do we leave them to be so terribly abused by their leadership? Do we leave them to suffer what their leaders believe is righteous punishment?”
Frankly, he trumped me with that question. Of course we could not leave them all up there, the women and their children who were so abused, the families that wanted to leave. But then, on Earth, our problem was that we had pried so aggressively into business that was not ours. For over thirty years, we had been involved in a war that had started over our inability to stay out of foreign conflicts. If we had just left those several sparring countries alone, we might have avoided the inevitable final catastrophe. If we had not dragged other countries into the conflict, we might have never seen an Earth-encompassing nuclear holocaust. Perhaps if everyone had just left everyone alone…
Women were second-class citizens in the Old Spirit camp. They were abused and tormented by males. They were traded like cattle. A two-part caste system was enforced, and it was simple as pie, as they say: Men on top, women on the bottom. Could I, the self-proclaimed mad feminist, who believed in basic human rights being guaranteed to every human and human-like creature, turn the other cheek, as they say? Could I deny and subsequently ignore their suffering? Could I do nothing to help those in need?
I could not decide definitively an answer to that terrible, heavy question, so I diverted the negative attention from me to him.
“Is that really why you are fighting this war, Adam?” I asked, and my skepticism was plain, “For them?”
“You do not believe that I could fight a war such as this for something charitable? You believe that I must be motivated by say, natural resources, diamonds I can use as currency, drugs I can peddle to my people to keep them docile, or food that has been rendered extinct by my own stupid mistakes? Perhaps I might even fight a war to steal soil from other countries, because my own will no longer support life?”
“You are taking what I suggested and using it as a means to apply the crimes of my mother to me.”
“I am not charging you with those crimes. I am merely lashing out at you after you asked in such a tone of icy disbelief if I was fighting a war for the oppressed. Let me tell you a very quick, very sad tale that might stay rooted at the forefront of your consciousness for many days: I once knew a man, a very powerful man, who had a younger sister. She was…” He smiled and shook his head slightly, as he lit a candle in his office, “She was the most beautiful young girl most had ever seen. She was also very bright, possessing a perfect balance of wisdom and intelligence. Many were in awe of her mind as well as her beauty, her brother amongst them. From the time they were small children, he protected her fiercely, ready to kill on her behalf, but only on her behalf. So, the sister fell in love with an older man, and this older man happened to be the powerful man’s greatest friend. ‘Great,’ thought the powerful man, ‘He will care deeply for her. He is a good man.’ So the powerful man toiled about, doing things that he hoped would change his world for the better. Over that time, he noticed little, but one thing stood out: his friend was beginning to adhere more and more to the brutal old ways of God. He began to quote directly from the Sacred Word, and it merely annoyed the powerful man but did not concern him deeply. The one thing he did not notice, but he
should have, was that his sister, normally so outspoken, so energetic and unyielding in her views, so brilliant, was becoming quiet, reserved, distant. Later, a row ensued between the powerful man and the older man, and the sister, now married to the older man, left with him. Why? ‘Because he is my husband, and my husband is my Love and my Law.’ Old-world God’s words. An old-world God in whom this powerful man and his sister were not raised to believe. In fact, they were raised to scoff at that God’s words, to pity those who followed it. The sister, especially, had always been adamant about keeping the farthest distance from that God as was possible, and yet her husband broke her of those opinions. Of all opinions, actually. So, they left, and the powerful man was so furious that he did not go after his sister. Word came that she was being abused by her husband. That all women were. And later, when she came begging for help…” He lit another candle, and in the light that burned from it, I could have sworn that I saw a single tear in each of his eyes, “…he turned her away. Because of his pride, he sent her back to her husband, and her husband, the devout man that he is, punished her for betraying him to his enemy and for breaking their codes of feminine obedience in a three day public spectacle of pain and degradation, and all throughout it, it is said…” He stopped for a very long time, and I walked around the desk, wanting to take his hand and tell him it was alright to stop, but he pulled his hand away before I could grasp it and moved around the desk away from me. “It is said that she cried for her brother. After she died, her husband left her body hanging in his village for two weeks. As an example, he said, of what will occur when wives disobey their husbands and turn from the noble cause their husbands have taken up in the name of the old-world One God.”
“Adam…” I said softly.
“I do not need to tell you that this story is true, or that it was my sister who was murdered, displayed as a traitor, and denied a proper burial or burning. I went to retrieve her body from him. I ordered him to hand her over so she could be buried or burned properly. Otherwise, I feared, her soul would never cross over. Her pure, untainted, perfect soul would never join the true One God. He would not give her to me. My sister was never buried, but I know that her soul is safe.
It is just her body.
I remembered him saying those words to me about Maura. Before he could move away again, I rested both of my hands on one of his shoulders and then laid my head on them. To even do that, I had to stand on my tiptoes because he was so tall. When I turned my head up so that my chin was rested on my hands, I was gripped by the strong urge to kiss his cheek over and over again, and in between each kiss, to whisper to him that I was so sorry, that I knew no words could absolve his pain, that I understood it perfectly… Instead, I opted only to offer useless condolences, with none of the other aforementioned showings of emotional support and concern that were bred from my still-alive romantic attachment to him.
“I am very sorry about your sister.”
“I thank you for that.” He looked at me, and I did not break my gaze away from his stunning eyes, even though the sadness I saw there truly broke my heart. “Do you not see now why this must be done? She made the decision herself to go with him, but he would not allow her to leave when she was afraid and wanted to return to me so I could protect her. Do you see now, also, why I am so distrustful of Maxwell?” His finger ran along my jawline, and my eyes raised to meet his when only a moment before, they had dropped at his mention of James. “Do you see why I am so protective of you? I could not bear to see it happen twice to two people I hold so very dearly to me.”
“James is not like Tyre, Adam.” I told him softly, “He is not. I know that you do not trust him, but you must trust me when I say that he is a good man.”
“Perhaps. But I know, because I have seen, that he possesses qualities very similar to Tyre: envy, wrath, a tongue that can easily lie and manipulate…”
“But he is not evil. He could never do to me what Tyre did to your sister.”
Adam grasped my face for a moment.
“I pray he could not, for both of your sakes. Now hurry home, my beauty. The hour is growing late, and I am sure your dear Penny is anxiously awaiting your return.”
I nodded and began to turn away. But before I left, an outburst of affection and sympathy for him made me throw my arms around his strong upper body and squeeze. A soft, quick chuckle escaped him, and I smiled slightly in response to it, knowing that he was returning to his normal state of cool, collected calm already. His arms tightened around me quickly for a moment.
“Do not pity me, Brynna. My dear Clara passed many, many years ago. Before you or your parents had been created by the One God. I have grieved for her and will for all of my years. But the pain is dull now. So do not worry yourself on my account.”
That affection and sympathy welled inside of me even more intensely; for a quick, fleeting second, I pressed my lips to his, and if I had wanted to stop myself before I did it, I would not have been able to. It happened so quickly, and with no thoughts warning me of the impending action. If James had seen it, he would have more than likely called off our reconciliation. Adam seemed bemused by it, and I cannot deny that I saw in his eyes a desire to kiss me back, hard and passionately, and that is why I let go of him and left with a hurried, slightly embarrassed goodnight.